The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

chapter is numbered, in Roman numerals with alternately red and blue

  colored elements. These numbers also have distinctively drawn colored pen

  lines and circles in them – these, plus the colored initial, for which there are

  two or three different forms for the commonest letters, give each folio

  opening a unique appearance. The running heads at the top of each

  opening are also distinctively colored and drawn with differentiated pen

  ornamentation. Since this Bible is a small one, the differences in the design

  of the running heads from one opening to the next are quite noticeable.

  The Psalms, together with collections of maxims like Cato’s Distichs,

  were the elementary reading text throughout the Middle Ages, from late

  antiquity onward.66 And Hugh of St. Victor evidently regarded their

  mastery as a beginning task, among the puerilia. But in the majority of

  medieval Bibles, the Psalms, unlike the divisions in all the other books, are

  unnumbered. Moreover, whereas in Carolingian Bibles the Psalms are

  written in verses, Bibles of the thirteenth century and later characteristically

  wrote them out as units of prose. The reason for this change undoubtedly is

  that the Bible at this time began to be issued as a single bound volume,

  often quite small, even pocket-sized, whereas in the earlier Middle Ages it

  was usually issued in separate volumes of full folio size.67

  However, in these later Bibles the verse divisions are indicated by

  colored initials, alternately red and blue. Each psalm begins with a large

  colored initial, sometimes fully decorated, other times just drawn large, red

  or blue alternately. It is interesting that the Huntington Library’s manu-

  script of Richard Rolle’s fourteenth-century English Psalter (HM 148)

  preserves this format for the Latin text of the Psalms written above

  Rolle’s translation of it and of Peter Lombard’s commentary. Each

  Psalm’s verse division has its initial letter colored alternately red or blue,

  the first initial of each Psalm is a large blue letter with distinctive red pen

  decoration surrounding it, and the color scheme is repeated, like a color-

  code, for the English translation, and the commentary which follows.

  These markers alternate between red and blue. An effort is made in the

  writing of the book to distinguish each memory-sized chunk as a unique

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  The Book of Memory

  visual image. Since in fixing one’s images for storage (which required time,

  and at least two or three separate passes over the written text), one made

  sure to use the same codex – as all memory advice stressed – the mnemonic

  usefulness of such decorative elements is apparent.

  Even what we hear must be attached to a visual image. To help recall

  something we have heard rather than seen, we should attach to their words

  the appearance, facial expression, and gestures of the person speaking as

  well as the appearance of the room. The speaker should therefore create

  strong visual images, through expression and gesture, which will fix the

  impression of his words. All the rhetorical handbooks contain detailed

  advice on declamatory gesture and expression; this underscores the insist-

  ence of Aristotle, Avicenna, and the other philosophers, on the primacy

  and security for memory of the visual over all other sensory modes,

  auditory, tactile, and the rest. Hugh as well insists that acoustically received

  material must be translated to visual terms and so fixed in memory. We

  recall that for the memory-artist, S., it made no difference whether material

  to be retained was presented to him orally or in writing – his visualization

  technique was the same.

  Though the psychological principles are identical, such image schemes

  are far more sophisticated, complex, and learned. The commonness of the

  number-grid is indicated by its use to format the Bible, and by its traces in

  other scholarly contexts, such as the style used to cite the Decretals and

  other non-Scriptural texts.

  Orality, literacy, memory, and citation of texts

  The numerical grid imposed on Scripture by its division into numbered

  chapters and verses was first printed in the Geneva Bible of 1560. But

  Scripture had been divided into brief segments before Jerome, and indeed

  dividing by chapter goes back to the scholars of the Masoretic text. (We

  should remember that ancient texts were commonly copied without any

  divisions except for the fixed number of syllables that constituted a line of

  writing – students learning to read were taught how to divide up the text on

  their own. This was the practice for writing texts through about the third

  century AD.) Jerome divided in the classical fashion of cola and commata; so

  did Cassiodorus, who used not only these divisions of the text but chapter

  divisions and headings as well.68 The late medieval Bible is divided into

  numbered chapters, using the scheme of Stephen Langton, together with

  the Cassiodorian division of the book of Psalms into cola and commata,

  which Alcuin had made standard. The essential utility of such division for

  Elementary memory design

  123

  memorizing the Biblical text was obvious to Langton, who glosses as

  follows Jerome’s warning, made in his prologue to the Vulgate text of

  Joshua, that both reader and copyist should diligently preserve the divi-

  sions of the text: ‘‘by divisions, that is by chapters . . . which truly are most

  valuable for discovering what you want and holding it in your memory.’’69

  Dividing was not a casual task: Langton took thirty years to work out his

  chapter divisional scheme, perfecting it through classroom testing.70

  Langton’s chapter divisions superseded various earlier divisional

  schemes. This whole matter of the relationship between how scholars

  laid out a text in their memories, cited it when they made reference to it,

  and how scribes composed it on a manuscript page is well illuminated by a

  study of these habits prior to about 1200 AD. The problem is important

  because some anthropologists and historians of technology seem to assume

  that there is a direct and simple correlation between the form something

  takes in writing and the way a person is able to think of it, in the same way

  that a washing-machine’s design determines how clothes washed in it will

  be washed. The fashion for defining writing as a technological innovation

  of the same sort as television and the automobile, or the heavy plow and

  moveable type, seems to me fraught with difficulties. Why I think so will be

  apparent from the following study of citational habits, page lay-out cus-

  toms, and the use of the mental numerical grid for remembering Scripture

  during the early Christian and Carolingian periods.

  It is apparent from remarks of St. Augustine, who used the pre-Vulgate,

  Old Latin text of the Bible, that the Psalms at least were taught to him and

  his audience in an order that was numerically designated. In his commen-

  taries on the Psalms, which began as sermons, he prefaces his comments on

  Psalm 118 (119), with an observation about his compositional habits. He

  apologizes for delaying so long, though he has expounded
all the others,

  partly in sermons, partly by dictating additional material, but Psalm 118 is

  long and extremely difficult.71 He refers to this Psalm by number (‘‘psal-

  mum centesimum octauum decimum’’). Of another Psalm, 125, he says,

  ‘‘Now you remember, according to the order taught to us, this Psalm is one

  hundred twenty-five, which is among those Psalms whose title is ‘A song of

  degrees’’’ (my emphasis). 72 From the manner of address, it would appear

  that this commentary began as a sermon, as many did, and Augustine

  clearly assumes that everyone in his audience will know which is Psalm 125,

  ‘‘according to the order taught to us.’’ Similarly, in commenting on Psalms

  100, 104, and 105, he refers to them by number, though his usual habit is

  simply to begin by referring to ‘‘this Psalm’’ (iste Psalmus) without further

  identification. He does not find mystical significance in these numbers;

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  The Book of Memory

  indeed, his attitude towards their numbering seems quite purely practical.

  Yet, commenting on Psalm 150, Augustine engages in a memorable tour de

  force of associations, expounding several possible numerical divisions of the

  Psalms; clearly their numbers were known also to Augustine’s lay audien-

  ces. Such compositional dilation upon the secretum of numbers, is a trope,

  and it remained so in medieval preaching. No doubt the preachers believed

  that a numerological mysterium was divinely concealed in the texts (inter-

  preters usually believe that what they find is ‘‘in’’ the text). Yet it is also true

  that the technique is a most effective inventory tool, open to use by mortal

  authors – witness Dante’s Commedia and, in the English tradition, the

  work of the Pearl poet. It is worth remarking that any heuristic instrument,

  such as a number, can be treated as a reified sign. A mathematician once

  explained to me the difference between numerology and number-theory

  this way: the one (numerology) wants to explain everything, the other

  explains nothing but itself.

  Referring to Psalms by number is not, however, Augustine’s style of

  citation when marking a quotation. It was the universal custom in early

  medieval scholarly composition not to use numbers at all when citing

  sources. Passages from Scripture especially are often quoted without any

  attribution; the audience was expected to recognize the source from mem-

  ory. New Testament texts may be introduced by a phrase such as ‘‘the Lord

  said’’ or ‘‘So the Apostle says,’’ without naming the particular gospel or

  epistle being quoted; prophetic books of the Old Testament are cited by

  name (‘‘Isaiah says’’) sometimes, but the historical books often are quite

  unattributed. And the Psalms, perhaps the most frequently quoted of all, are

  almost always completely unattributed; even the phrase ut ait in psalmis, ‘‘as

  it says in the Psalms,’ is unusual. Augustine was being quite untypical of

  himself when, in the Enarrationes, he cites a text as being ‘‘in Regnorum

  secundo libro,’’ ‘‘in II Kings.’’73 Occasionally he will introduce a quotation

  from a Psalm by in alio psalmo, ‘‘in another Psalm,’’ but usually he simply

  quotes a verse in complete confidence that his audience will know it.

  Jerome often refers to the Psalms by number, even in order to introduce

  a quotation from one. He also uses the less exact (from our point of view)

  citational style of Augustine, but, for example, he introduces a quotation

  from Psalm 44 by writing, ‘‘Legimus in quadragesimo quarto psalmo,’ ‘‘We

  read in Psalm 44,’’74 and one from Psalm 9 by ‘‘de quo in nono psalmo . . .

  dicitur,’’ ‘‘concerning which [the devil] it says in the ninth Psalm.’’75 Books

  of the Bible, including the Pauline epistles and historical books of the Old

  Testament are often cited by name, unlike Augustine’s practice. Jerome

  does this not only in his commentaries, but also in his letters. For

  Elementary memory design

  125

  instance, in his letter (no. 53) to Paulinus of Nola on the study of Scripture,

  he introduces a quotation of Psalm 118 by its number.76 Jerome also

  numbered and referred by number to the book-divisions of his own

  works; thus in the introduction to Book 8 (octavus liber) of his

  Commentary on Isaiah, he refers to ‘‘books six and seven above.’’77 Such

  variations in citational style continue through the early Middle Ages; Bede,

  for example, in his treatise on the figures and tropes of Scripture refers to

  the Psalms by number. But Carolingian manuscripts are the first written

  books to indicate occasionally in the margin the name of the book from

  which a quotation is cited, although such information was frequently not

  copied by later scribes.78

  It would seem from early references to Psalms by number, so at odds

  with the citational conventions then prevalent, that one should not pre-

  sume that the form of a citational style limits the abilities of scholars and

  their audiences to conceive of and designate texts in other ways. It is

  obvious from the works of these fourth-century Christians that the

  Psalms not only had a fixed order, but that they were taught and memo-

  rized by their number in that order. The earliest monastic rules, including

  Benedict’s, discuss the order of the Psalms for divine office by referring to

  their numbers (see chapters 9 and 18 of the Benedictine Rule). Indeed, the

  method described by Quintilian of dividing a long text into short sections,

  memorized seriatim or per ordine, lends itself to just such a method of

  memorial storage, and suggests that the numerical grid principle is very

  ancient indeed. Quintilian’s advice itself implies numbering the segments

  produced by divisio of a long text, so that one can join the second piece to

  the first, and so on (Inst. orat., XI. ii. 37).

  There is also clear evidence that the verse divisions of each Psalm were

  numerically designated as early as the time of Augustine. The word versus is

  used by Augustine to refer to the divisions within the Old Latin text

  (though it was Cassiodorus who established the divisional scheme used

  in the medieval text of the Psalms)79 and these verses have numbers. So, in

  his commentary on Psalm 6 (referred to as ‘‘sextus psalmus’’ in his com-

  ments on Psalm 11’s titulus), 80 he speaks of the first verse and second verse

  of the Psalm. These verses are somewhat different from those similarly

  designated in the Vulgate text. Though the divisions themselves differ,

  clearly the principle of dividing by verses was known. These divisions were

  imposed on the text only in memory. They are not marked in the early

  Christian codices we possess – indeed even word divisions are not indi-

  cated.81 It thus appears that versions of the numerical grid system described

  by Hugh of St. Victor for memorizing and mentally concording the

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  The Book of Memory

  Scriptural text were taught commonly at least by the fourth century, and

  probably were applied to texts well before then.

  Alcuin regards the numerical order of the Psalms as
so ancient and fixed

  that he indulges in some exegesis regarding the symbolism of a particular

  Psalm’s place in that order. In his commentary on Psalm 118, he says that he

  has reckoned the patterns worthy of comment (‘‘eruendas rationes’’) for all

  the numbers in the Psalms, ‘‘that is, why are all the penitential Psalms

  consecrated in a number containing sevens? and why is Psalm 118 divided

  into twenty-two sections, of which each one has eight verses? or what is the

  reason for there being fifteen Psalms designated in their titles ‘a song of

  degrees’?’’82 Invoking the text from Wisdom (11:21) that God created the

  universe (including Scripture) by number, order, and measure, he proceeds

  to analyze the significance of the numbers in the format of Psalm 118. For

  our purposes, however, what is significant is the simple but profound fact

  that Alcuin thought of the text as formatted in terms of a numerical grid,

  twenty-two sections of eight verses each, and that he also thought that the

  Psalm, which itself had a number in the order of the whole book (118),

  incorporated subsets of numbered divisions in sections and verses. This is

  the mnemonic format which Hugh of St. Victor taught in 1130, and is in

  the tradition of numerically designated divisions which we find in the

  fourth century.

  But the first Bibles to write out the complete format of chapter and verse

  are mid-sixteenth-century, and virtually no medieval scribes wrote in the

  numbers of the verses in any Scriptural book; chapter numbers were copied

  in routinely only beginning in the thirteenth century.83

  There is, in other words, a lag of well over a millennium between the

  time the numerical grid was certainly in common use for dividing

  Scripture, and its first complete appearance on a physical page. It is clear

  in this instance that people had laid out the Bible on a grid in their

  memories for over 1,000 years before they bothered to express that grid

  in writing, and for at least 400 years before they thought it important even

  to suggest it in their scholarly citational habits.

  In his treatise on sermon composition, Thomas of Waleys makes a

  comment that is illuminating of this whole matter. Advising preachers

  how to cite the Bible and patristic authorities during their sermons,