The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  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

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  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

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  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

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  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,

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  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-