There has long been agreement in Western culture that memory is an indispensable faculty. Writing in the first century of the common era (ce), Pliny the Elder called it “the boon most necessary for life” (Pliny 1938–63: vol. 2, 563; Small 1995: 159). Stories about the memory feats of certain individuals are perennial. In the early modern period, the English preacher, Thomas Fuller, was renowned for his ability to recite, backwards and forwards, the names of the shop signs between Ludgate and Charing Cross in London, thus emulating the famous performances of the ancient Greeks and Romans, such as Simonides and Seneca the Elder (Aubrey 2016: vol. 1, 555; Yates 1966: 17–18, 31). Yet the very celebration of these people underscores the more usual weaknesses of memory, both in terms of loss of content over time and slowness in retrieval of what is stored