Abstract
In the history of Western civilisation, the spread of writing, followed by the book, obviously did not entirely replace oral culture and communication, but led to the development of a dialectic relationship, especially in the sense that memory underwent a gradual shift away from the human mind, where it tended to limit itself to recalling necessary notions and facts stored in documents, books, and, more recently, in audiovisual recordings and electronic databases. The article foregrounds the most important aspects of this process by means of a series of especially significant examples in the relationship between words and other means of expression and communication by the human body.
