in dicta littera A,’’ ‘‘about provisions, about foreign property, about
absence, about judges, about appeals, and about similar matters in our
law which begin with the letter A.’’131 Or, if a sacred context is wanted, out
come texts on Antichrist, on worship (adulatio), and other subjects. Or on
natural history, texts from Ovid, Valerius, and Cicero can be produced on
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A-beginning animals. And when he gets all the way through, he can
immediately go back and begin his lists over again. Even allowing for
boasting, this is impressive and Peter clearly intended it to be so to his
contemporaries.
But as interesting as the quantity of information held is the way it is
organized. A letter of the alphabet acts as the primary key or locus or file.
Then texts are placed in the file by a secondary key, a word beginning with
the primary letter. In Peter’s scheme, the key-words are themselves
arranged also by general topic: natural history, sacred subjects, vices and
virtues, etc. And the confirmation of his orderly arrangement lies in his
ability to replicate his lists. In other words, the memory in this scheme is
organized like a subject index of texts.
Peter of Ravenna says that though he stored his materials alphabetically,
he pulled in from his memory both glosses and concordances according to
their position with respect to the text. A much earlier instance from which,
I think, we can infer that an alphabetically sorted set of glosses is intended
to be used in this same way, keyed to words as they occur in their textual
order, is Jerome’s index and gloss of the Hebrew names in the Bible. This,
together with Eusebius’s canonical tables, was one of the most familiar of
scholars’ tools. It was incorporated into a larger alphabetical glossary of the
whole Bible from at least the thirteenth century (as part of the ‘‘Paris’’
format). But Jerome’s original construction of the index applies the prin-
ciples of the memorial heuristics I have described. 132In its written form,
Jerome’s index is first catalogued by a particular book of the Bible, begin-
ning with Genesis and proceeding in canonical order. The Hebrew words
occurring within each book are then grouped alphabetically. But they are
not fully alphabetized, that is, not beyond the initial letter. Instead they are
given in the order in which they occur in the actual text. So the first word
glossed in Genesis, under A, is ‘‘Aethiopiae’’ (1:13), followed by
‘‘Assyriorum’’ (1:14), ‘‘Adam’’ (1:19), ‘‘Abel’’ (4:2), ‘‘Ada’’ (4:19), and so on.
The first word under G is ‘‘Geon,’’ the name of one of the rivers flowing
from Eden in 1:13, followed by ‘‘Gomer,’’ a son of Japheth mentioned in
10:2, ‘‘Gergesaeus’’ at 10:16, and the place-names ‘‘Gerara,’’ ‘‘Gaza,’’ and
‘‘Gomorrha,’’ given in the order in which they occur in 10:19.
In a preface, Jerome describes how he came to make this index, and what
his intention was. He says he was urged by two of his conventual brothers,
who considered him to be notably proficient in Hebrew, to bring together
and expand glosses and explanations of Hebrew names in the Old
Testament that had been made by Origen and Philo; ‘‘and, excited by
the usefulness of this suggestion, I reviewed each book according to the
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145
order of the Scriptures, renewing the old edifice with new attentiveness.’’133
Each book at a time, following the order of the written text, is exactly what
the extant index shows. But notice that Jerome considers this scheme to be
especially useful, particularly user-friendly in contrast to the work of his
predecessors. Other sorts of glossaries are known from early periods. For
example, the Old Latin glosses of the Gospels, which were copied into the
late seventh-century Book of Durrow, represent traditions independent of
Jerome but even older. But these glosses in the Book of Durrow are
alphabetized out to the second or third letter, not geared to their occur-
rence in the text as Jerome’s are. 134
The order followed in Jerome’s compilation responds to principles of
mental concording, and the mnemonic principles which he assumed that
its users would also have. Absolute alphabetical ordering is a scheme best
adapted to the needs of readers working from a written codex physically
open in front of them, the way readers now work. In such a circumstance, it
is much easier to find words listed in completely alphabetical order, the
way a modern dictionary is, than to find them in a partially or initially
alphabetized list. 135 But for someone who is speaking (or preparing to
speak) from a text either written in a very large pandect volume of the
sort kept at the altar, or mentally held in discretely numbered and mem-
orized divisiones, Jerome’s system is actually much quicker and easier than a
modern list would be, for one discovers the glosses in the order of their
occurrences in the text. To find any of the glosses one needed for further
exposition, one can simply follow the order of the text itself, as Peter of
Ravenna centuries later described himself doing when he lectured from his
law books.
That this method, useful only to someone working primarily from
memory, continued in use is indicated as well by a small continuous
gloss on the whole Bible, including Jerome’s prefaces, that is written out,
after the fully alphabetized dictionary of Hebrew words, at the very end of a
French Bible of c. 1325 (Huntington Library MS. HM 1073). It is some-
times supposed that full alphabetization constituted progress so apparent
that it inevitably replaced such methods as Jerome’s (and is a sure indica-
tion of literacy driving out memory), yet in this manuscript of the late
Middle Ages both sorts of organization appear, the one for a large amount
of encyclopedic material, the other for a much shorter, more selective
amount, keyed to long-familiar texts. The individual glosses are very
brief (about one colon apiece) and each is marked by a red or blue paraph,
colored alternately, and they follow exactly the order of the text from
Genesis on. It would be a simple task to slip these glosses into one’s
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memorial places, and bring them out at the proper locations (loci) in the
text, as Peter of Ravenna did.
All of these schemes bespeak the assumption that a good memory is a
library of texts, and a thoroughly catalogued and indexed one at that. And
in this intimate relation between memory and page, the memory performs
the greater part of indexing and organization. The structure of the various
schemes is geared to the requirements of the memory. One might well
wonder why Jerome bothered to classify the Hebrew names alphabetically
at all; why not just give them in the order in which they appear in each
book? If Jerome had composed with the understanding that his index
would always be physically open before his readers, as they recited their
way all the
way through Genesis each time they used his list, he might have
done such a thing. But since he expected his list to be used to compose a
mental gloss that would be available to someone speaking on a memorized
text, he knew practically that such a scheme would not work, for it would
overwhelm the active memory. ‘‘Memory rejoices in brevity’’: one conse-
quence of this is that individual items must be grouped and clustered into
classifications and sub-classifications in order to provide recollection with
the means of finding them surely and quickly. This fundamental psycho-
logical principle underlies all indexing systems. As Quintilian says con-
cerning partitio, the orderly arrangement of all our propositions, ‘‘it follows
nature as its guide’’ and is the greatest of aids to memory.136
Another interesting example of a subject concordance is the famous
indexed Tabula, compiled by the English Franciscans Robert Grosseteste
and Adam Marsh, around 1235–1243. 137 The marginal notes Grosseteste
habitually made in the books he owned are a striking feature of his work;
his library, left to the Franciscan convent at Oxford, was valued for these
annotations as well as for the books themselves. As R. W. Hunt has written,
‘‘More books containing autograph notes by him have perhaps survived
than of any other medieval writer of comparable eminence.’’138 Most of
these marginalia are subject-headings or corrections to the manuscript.
Often they simply identify the source of a quotation in the text. But there
are also extensive cross-references; for instance, in a copy of Boethius’s De
consolatione philosophiae Grosseteste added ‘‘a dozen references . . . to
various works of Augustine,’’139 citing, as was the custom, by title and
book number, no more. He also added punctuation divisions to this
particular Boethius, which had been copied without them.
A typical page of one of his books, known to be annotated in his hand, is
reproduced (from Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 198) as the frontispiece to
D. A. Callus’s Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop. The writing is a highly
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147
abbreviated cursive akin to the littera inintelligibilis used by Thomas
Aquinas for his dictation draft of a portion of the Summa contra Gentiles.
Such notation, in similarly abbreviated writing, is sometimes found in
other scholars’ manuscripts. But Grosseteste’s books are also filled with
marks (notae), each of which is keyed to a particular topic, that serve as a
subject index to the book’s contents. The key to these notae was found by
Professor Harrison Thomson, bound with a Bible now in the Municipal
Library of Lyons (Lyons MS. 414). Fifteen folios preceding the Bible
contain a topical concordance of texts from Scripture and the Fathers,
each topic being marked by a sign or nota. The first four pages of this
concordance give an index of the signs; there are just over 400 of these, and
Thomson comments that it would be ‘‘no inconsiderable task’’ just to
remember them (though no harder than remembering the thousand-plus
signs taught to Roman notaries). ‘‘All the letters of the Roman and Greek
alphabets, mathematical figures, conjoined conventional signs, modifica-
tions of zodiacal signs, and additional dots and strokes and curves are
pressed into service. There seems to be no recognizable system behind the
choice of a sign for a given subject.’’140 This last observation suggests
strongly the nature of these notae as purely heuristic, deriving from a
privately devised scheme for finding discrete bits of information, of exactly
the sort commonly advised for memory design.
The concordance of texts itself follows this directory in the Lyons
manuscript. Nine major classifications were used, called distinctiones, but
the copyist has written only ‘‘ad dist. vi et parum plus,’’ ‘ . . . and a little
more.’’141 The main headings are divided into sub-topics, and the notae are
keyed to these. Professor Hunt has transcribed a typical entry: ‘‘[ ]
Quomodo philosophia accipienda sit a nobis,’’ ‘‘How philosophy may be
understood by us.’’142 There follow the citations, first those to the Bible,
and then, in a separate paragraph, those to the works of the Fathers and
more recent theological writings. Citations to pagan authors are given off
to the right, in a separate column. Thomson and Hunt both conclude that
the purpose of the compilation was to serve as a subject index to
Grosseteste’s books. Hunt observes that the system continued to be used
among the Franciscans in the second half of the thirteenth century, for
other books so marked have been found. 143
But how, for whom, and why was the compilation written out? The
possible answers to these questions remain somewhat mysterious.
Thomson suggests that Grosseteste used the signs so that as he rapidly
thumbed his books he could find appropriate passages on a given subject,
without the bother of re-reading. ‘‘For an ecclesiastic as busy as Grosseteste
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was, the gain was considerable, but it entailed an initial reading and
indexing that must have demanded extremely close attention.’’144 To this
observation of Thomson’s, we should join the remark of the Franciscan
regent-master at Oxford in 1316–1317, William of Alnwick, who, in a
disputation, challenged his opponent’s reference to one of Grosseteste’s
marginal notes made in his copy of Aristotle’s Physics. Alnwick says that
Grosseteste wrote in the margins of his books ‘‘when some noteworthy
thought occurred to him . . . so that it should not escape his memory, just as
he also wrote many ‘cedulae’ which are not all [authoritative]. What he
wrote disconnectedly in the margin of his copy of the Physics is of no greater
authority than the other cedulae he wrote, which are all kept in the library
of the Friars Minor at Oxford, as I have seen with my own eyes.’’145
It seems to me most likely that Grosseteste’s indexing system was
devised by him originally for his own use as a tool both for his own
books, and crucially, for his memory. The notae are both formed and used
according to the familiar pedagogical principles, placed against passages of
a text that one particularly wishes to remember, or that are especially
important or difficult to recall. Grosseteste is unusual only in having
drawn his notae so systematically with pen and ink, instead of mentally
projecting them as he memorized his passages. Perhaps the fact that these
were his own books rather than belonging to a whole community freed
him to do this.
But we should be as grateful to Grosseteste’s penwork as we are to
Hugh of St. Victor’s elementary Preface, for it gives us an instance of just
how the sort of memorial subject concordance which a medieval student
was expected to devise for himself was put together. Given the composi-
tional habits of the time, it is unlikely that Grosseteste expected to thumb
constantly through his manuscripts to find material for his voluminous
; work. We may usefully remember Hugh of St. Victor’s admonition:
‘‘Too great would be the labor in such a task.’’ Thomson rightly observes
that the initial effort to read and index the books was clearly immense;
indeed that is so, but it is exactly the sort of concentrated, thoughtful
meditatio required in medieval study to memorize, ruminate, and make
one’s reading one’s own. At the end of it, Grosseteste had a mental
concordance of considerable scope and power; his ability to cross-
reference and ‘‘quote’’ (in the medieval sense) his Boethius, to compile
his tabula, and indeed to compose all those tracts and commentaries and
letters, scientific and pastoral works, in addition to his duties both at
Oxford (a place with very few books in his day)146 and as bishop of
Lincoln, attests to a memory supremely and securely designed, a
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149
remarkable, though by no means rare, realization of the ideal and goal of
a medieval education.
Other evidence of the memorial function of the Grosseteste–Marsh
tabulation, besides what is obvious from its method of creating loci by
classification and sub-headings, lies in the fact that each entry follows a
design that is almost, but significantly not quite, identical. First come the
Biblical citations, in canonical order; then, in a separate group, the Fathers,
beginning with the Latin Fathers (in the order Ambrose, Jerome,
Augustine, Gregory), the Greek, and finally any recent theologians. Off
to the side on the right are the references to pagan writers – Latin, then
Greek, then Arabic.
But the individual works of authors such as Augustine (whom
Grosseteste cites far more often and variously than anyone else) are not
always given in the same order. If the index were being made de novo, solely
from a physical book, one would expect the compiler to index all the
citations to it at the same time, each citation under its appropriate heading
in Grosseteste’s scheme. This should have the effect of causing citations
from a particular work to appear always in the same order relative to other
works by that author. But this is not the case. Similarly, were the work
being compiled from individual slips marked with a citation (an unlikely
possibility), one would expect a constant order among the works cited,
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