Memory has a paradoxical role in today's thinking:
I am the best witness to a personally experienced event.
But a historian may find an objective account more reliable than what I remember.
Recent historical research has been active in microhistory and the gathering and analysis of e.g. wartime testimonies. But we still have not answwered the question of the cognitive value of personal experience.
The Middle Ages answered the question by a kind of double projection (as we scientific people would probably call it):
First projection: the world picture was homocentric, and truth therefore defined as viewed from the centre of things as defined by man.
Second projection: Man is created in God's image, and God may therefore be viewed as the ideal man (or the je-ideal)
Therefore, God's book (Bible), God's book nr. 2 (Creation) and my truth are the same. The objectivity that the Enlightenment - boosted by the authority of the printed book's impersonal and transpersonal ideality - is not a medieval problem.
Today, we are once more getting restless about that problem.
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