mentalized, thoroughly filed, labelled, and addressed mental storage-chest
described by Cassiodorus, which every scholar could carry to a library, store
with a summa of commentary and texts, and take away with him.
At the very end of Hugh’s treatise, it is clear that the Ark, as an
organizing metaphor for education, has become a book itself, indeed The
Book, together with the whole program of study undertaken to compre-
hend its wisdom and mysteries:
This ark is like to an apothecary’s shop, filled with a variety of all delights. You will
seek nothing in it which you will not find, and when you find one thing, you will
see many more disclosed to you. Here are bountifully contained the universal
works of our salvation from the beginning of the world until the end, and here is
contained the condition of the universal Church. Here the narrative of historical
events is woven together, here the mysteries of the sacraments are found, here are
Models for the memory
55
laid out the successive stages of responses, judgments, meditations, contempla-
tions, of good works, virtues, and rewards. 128
The triple-tiered ark is the triple mnemonic of medieval Scriptural study:
historia, allegoria, moralia. Within its compartments are placed in orderly
fashion all the gloss and commentary, the many interpretationes, together
with the literal texts upon which they build, so that as one pulls forth one
thing, a great many others are disclosed, in a systematic concordance and
index. This book/ark, constructed by each student, is an apothecary of
diverse, yet orderly, material. The word apotheca means ‘‘store-house,’’
originally for wine, but extended, by Hugh’s time, to mean something
like a ‘‘shop,’’ a store full of precious things laid away in order, any of which
the apothecarius can bring forth immediately in response to a request, and,
indeed, bring forth a host of related things too. 129 Hugh’s arca is both a
memory and a book, the common metaphor of store-house collapsing the
two objects to which it simultaneously refers, as so many other ancient and
medieval metaphors of this type also do.
C H A P T E R 2
Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory
All accounts of the workings of memory written after Aristotle separate its
activities into two processes: that of storage (in a strict definition, the
activity to which the words memoria and mnesis are applied); and that of
recollection (reminiscentia and anamnesis). In broader and more common
contexts, memoria refers to both storage and reminiscence. Indeed, when
described as an aspect of rhetoric, it refers to training and discipline in a
whole craft of memory, ars memorativa, comprising techniques for storing
a memorial inventory that are designed to facilitate more productive
recollection. Though the two activities are closely related, the one being
dependent upon the other, for clarity’s sake it is best to follow ancient
example and discuss memoria, at least initially, separately from reminis-
centia. Thus, this chapter is concerned first with the nature of memory-
storage, of what is stored and how, and then with the question of what
recollection is and how it was thought to proceed.
A caveat to this method of proceeding is in order. The monastic
traditions of the early medieval centuries in the West are not primarily
concerned with those definitional problems that later occupied the scho-
lastic philosophers, but are directed towards the practice of meditational
prayer. G. R. Evans has noted that ‘‘[t]he notion of memory poses a variety
of problems which seem to have held few attractions’’ for pre-scholastic
scholars. 1 This is not because they neglected their memories, but rather
because memoria was thought of as the praxis of liturgical and devotional
prayer, as I demonstrated in The Craft of Thought. Thus, while there are
virtually no medieval treatises de memoria much before the twelfth century,
there are a number of writings on prayer, meditation, and the study of
Scripture, which employ some basic features of practical memory-work
that we find also in antiquity, without evidencing much (if any) interest in
memory and recollection as philosophical concepts. Yet the psychological
descriptions of memory and recollection, most fully articulated by Aristotle
and his heirs, account for certain basic themes in medieval practice and for
56
Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory
57
some of the terms used in rhetoric to discuss memoria, such as the notion of
places, the importance of images, and the somatic–aesthetic emphasis
given to the workings of memorial storage and recollective procedure.
So, without wishing to label these general practices as Aristotelian in any
ideological sense (they appear in un-Aristotelian and pre-Aristotelian
works too), I will discuss the Aristotelian analysis of memoria at some
length in this chapter, despite the fact that it was not known directly in the
medieval West until the twelfth century, because it most adequately
explains how and why practical mnemotechnique was supposed to work,
and glosses some of its basic terminology.
T H E M E M O R Y - I M A G E
Systematic philosophical and medical discussions of what we would now
call the neuropsychology of memory are solidly based, both in late anti-
quity and in the later Middle Ages, on the familiar descriptions by
Aristotle, found chiefly in De anima and the short treatises on recollection,
sleep, and dreaming known collectively as the Parva naturalia. During the
Middle Ages, the Arabic and Hebrew commentaries on Aristotle, chiefly of
Avicenna and Averroe¨s, were used extensively as well. What is said about
memory in the fourth-century AD medical compendia based on Galen
reflects these same traditions, and was the basis for medical knowledge of
the workings of memory. Memory is treated in these related traditions as
the final process in sensory perception, which begins with the stimulation
of the five senses and becomes the material of knowledge through the
activities of a series of internal functions, known to the Middle Ages as the
inward sense(s).
The development of conceptions of inward senses has been ably traced
by several scholars, notably H. A. Wolfson in a 1935 essay in the Harvard
Theological Review. 2 One difficulty shared by many of these accounts,
however, is that in so carefully delineating the subtle variations among
the accounts in Aristotle and his commentators, they inevitably leave the
impression that the distinctions among the various aspects of the interior
sense were more precise and absolute than in fact they are in the texts.
Avicenna, in some ways the most careful of the Arab commentators, varies
in his own use of several terms, for example whether he refers to ‘‘interior
senses’’ or ‘‘interior sense.’’
Wolfson’s essay does an admirable job of showing the complexity and
variability of medieval descriptions of the interior senses, but even he does not
quite convey the dimension of the
problem. His table of correspondences
58
The Book of Memory
among Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin texts of the various terms for the internal
senses demonstrates his apt observation of the ‘ remarkable care and compa-
rative uniformity with which the technical Arabic terms are rendered into
Latin.’’3 But the confusing inconsistencies that do indeed exist are found not
primarily in translation or the specific enumeration and definition of the parts
of the internal senses, but in the varying perception of the describer concern-
ing the function of his definitions – as physician, as a philosopher, as
theologian, as rhetorician, as curer of souls. In addition to the philosophical
and medical traditions, there is a largely independent doctrine of interior
senses within Christian spiritual traditions, deriving from Origen and other
early Church teachers like Augustine, who addressed their concerns to the
Biblical problem of how directly human beings can experience God in vision
and prayer: when Moses is said to see God, what exactly is happening?4 These
were not concerns for Aristotle.
The explanation given by the ancient and medieval academic writers for
how the mind knows and what kinds of knowledge it is capable of must be
understood in the context within which the various works on the soul were
written. Even philosophical works are products of their time, and it is
important to acknowledge their cultural matrix. Students of history have
long recognized that philosophical answers are specific to time and place,
but one needs also to keep in mind that philosophers have not, in fact,
asked eternal questions. 5 The questions themselves proceed from assump-
tions embedded deeply within a culture’s habits of mind, those presuppo-
sitions about human and cosmic nature that are absorbed in earliest
education and often survive to color in some degree all subsequent expe-
rience, even of the rarest individuals.
One fundamental assumption that lay behind the psychological ques-
tions framed by Aristotle’s medieval heirs was that human beings have two
distinct kinds of knowledge – of ‘‘singulars’’ or particular material things,
and of abstract principles or concepts. Discussions of the internal senses
address the problem of how people know their own experience(s) in terms
of how we can come to understand abstract concepts when the input to our
brains is in the form of individual sensory impressions. A second assump-
tion within which psychological explorations were framed was that the
whole sensing process, from initial reception by a sense-organ to awareness
of, response to, and memory of it, is somatic or bodily in nature.6 Finally,
Aristotelians, in particular, assumed that everything created, even knowl-
edge, has an immediate, proximate material cause. Aristotle says that acts of
recollection occur ‘‘because one change is of a nature to happen after
another,’’ either of necessity or by habit. 7 Such a statement makes sense
Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory
59
only when read in the context of his belief that things are caused by and
cause other things, one after another, contiguously or proximately.
The medical interest in the improvement and maintenance of memory is
a continuing theme in ancient and medieval writings on the subject. One of
the more influential late medieval ‘‘arts of memory’’ was written by
Matheolus, a physician of Perugia. That memory and recollection could
best be understood as a physical process involving physical organs is both
fundamental to the whole idea of memory training, and quite foreign to
much post-Cartesian epistemology: it will be helpful, therefore, to begin
with the anatomy of memory. All the different interior faculties, wits, or
senses described in ancient philosophical and medical literature after Galen
(that is, after 212 AD) are operations of one organ, the brain. Aristotle,
however, and the medical tradition in which he wrote, supposed that two
organs were involved in the production of memories: the heart, which
received all externally derived impressions, and the brain, to which this
information was relayed and where it was stored. 8 The controversy over
whether the brain or heart was primary was resolved medically in the
Alexandrine schools. Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Ceos
described (perhaps after human dissection) two parallel systems in the
body, one of blood vessels that centered in the heart, and the other of
spinal marrow and nerves that centered in the brain. To the brain was
attributed sensitivity, motion, and neurological functioning, and to the
heart warmth and ‘‘vital spirit.’’ This model of human physiology prevailed
for nearly 2,000 years.9
But, even though the physiology of consciousness was known to occur
entirely in the brain, the metaphoric use of heart for memory persisted.
Memory as a function of the heart was encoded in the common Latin verb
recordari, meaning ‘‘to recollect.’’ Varro, the second-century BC grammar-
ian, says that the etymology of the verb is from revocare ‘‘to call back’’ and
cor ‘‘heart.’’10 The Latin verb evolved into the Italian ricordarsi, and clearly
influenced the early use in English of ‘‘heart’’ for ‘‘memory.’’ Chaucer often
uses the phrase ‘‘by heart’’ as we still use it, and while he was perhaps
echoing the medieval French phrase ‘‘par coeur,’’ there are also much earlier
uses of the metaphor in English. The Middle English Dictionary records an
early twelfth-century example of herte to mean ‘‘memory’’; there is an Old
English use of heorte to mean ‘‘the place where thoughts occur,’’ cogita-
tiones.11 Since the common Old English verb meaning ‘‘to remember’’ was
made from the noun mynde, ‘‘mind,’’ it seems probable that the metaphor-
ical extension to memory of the English word heorte was made on the direct
analogy of the Latin metaphor in recordari and its derivatives. Certainly,
60
The Book of Memory
the existence of recordari in Latin is the justification for Jerome’s assertion
that, in the appropriate Biblical contexts, cor is a common metaphor for
memory. 12
Neither Aristotle nor Augustine nor Thomas Aquinas had a conception
of mind or mental activity like ours.13 Soul is not the same thing as mind, as
most moderns who are not philosophers are inclined to think. In an essay
on the development of the ‘‘mind–body problem,’’ Wallace Matson calls
attention to Aristotle’s comment in De anima, ‘‘If the eye were a living
creature, its soul would be its vision [or its ability to see].’’14 Aristotle’s
fundamental understanding of soul, which was preserved to a degree by his
medieval descendants, was that it is not a ‘‘thing’’ (ghostly or not) but ‘‘a
kind of organization and functioning that certain pieces of matter have.’’
Prior to Aristotle, even the soul was thought to be a thing, ‘‘an interior
double, which both pushes and orders the body around.’’15 Soul is the
whole
complex of organization and function of a human being; mind is
invoked to explain that aspect of its function relating to its ability to
understand and to acquire wisdom.
Brain physiology and the formation of memories
For Aristotle, emotions and even judgments are in some sense physiolog-
ical processes, though they are more than just that. Memory-images,
produced in the emotional (sensitive) part of the soul are ‘‘physiological
affections [meaning both ‘‘a change’’ and ‘‘a disposition to change in a
certain way’’], in some sense of ‘is’ analogous to that in which a house is
bricks. But it is not ‘simply’ this.’’16 These images impress the material of
the receiving organ – that is a chief implication of the seal-in-wax arche-
type. Aristotle goes on to explain that young and old have poor memories
because in each group the body is in flux and therefore does not retain
images well (De memoria 450a 32). Later he remarks that people whose
humors are out of balance are sometimes better at recollecting than
remembering, or the reverse. Those who are melancholic are too fluid to
retain images well and so recollect uncontrollably: ‘‘The reason for recol-
lecting not being under their control is that just as it is no longer in people’s
power to stop something when they throw it, so also he who is recollecting
and hunting moves a bodily thing in which the affection resides’’ (453a 14).
Dry people on the contrary form images more slowly but are better at
retaining them, while dwarfs and people ‘‘whose upper parts are especially
large’’ have poor memories because they have more weight resting on their
perceptual organs (453a 31), and the images fail to persist.17
Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory
61
This conception of the essentially somatic nature of the memory’s
images continued through the Middle Ages. Medical recipes and dietary
advice devoted to memory’s maintenance and improvement are common.
Many of these go back to ancient or Arabic sources, and all reflect the basic
Galenic anatomical description that placed memory in the posterior por-
tion of the brain. They follow ancient physiological theory in believing that
the health of all organisms is best maintained through dietary manipula-
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