Composition Is Recollection
What we now call "using our imagination," medieval people called "recollection," and they were neither wrong nor foolish to do so.
Ibid.
If asked now to describe how we compose something, we would probably say that we compose by using our "imagination." And so when we read in a medieval description of religious meditation or in a medieval poem that composition begins in "recollection," we tend to assume one of two things: either that medieval people had no concept at all of "creativity" in our sense and were devoted to a more or less slavish reiteration of other people's creations; or that what they call "recollection" is something completely other than anything we would recognize as "memory"—and that they have made a category error by using the wrong term . . .
This . . . assumes that our understanding of the process of composition is the natural one, and that the mental "faculties" we now say it uses, "observation" and "imagination," are the "correct" ones—but not memory. . . .
But if we can get away for a moment from "faculties" analysis, and think instead of human cognition in terms of paths or "ways" (like the via of the ancient liberal arts), and then focus on the cognitive way called "composition," we can see that this process can be presented and analyzed as "recollective" because it was assumed to involve acts of remembering, mnemonic activities which pull in or "draw" (tractare, a medieval Latin word for composing) other memories. The result was what we now call "using our imagination," even to the point of visionary experience. But medieval people called it "recollection," and they were neither wrong nor foolish nor naive to do so.
