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seven images in a single group but not many more, because one tends to
lose track over seven. And within each image the order of precedence is
rigid: central front, then right, then left, and foreground over background
figures. It is clear from Bradwardine’s description of these groupings that
the locations have some depth to them; the figures do not occupy just a flat
plane, but are impressed memorially in the manner of a carved relief.
Bradwardine’s chief example for grouping images in locations is the
twelve signs of the Zodiac. It is an odd group for him to pick in a sense,
because these signs are examples neither of memory for content nor of
memory for words; it is tempting to find a reason in the persistent use of
memorial systems based on the signs of the Calendar. 23 If this were the case,
the twelve signs themselves would be intended only as markers for yet other
material. Bradwardine does not in fact use them here for anything other
than as examples to illustrate the basic principles he has already given for
the characteristics and arrangements of images in a location. He could,
most likely, expect all his students to be familiar with them already, not as
concepts (they are hardly that) but as images of the purely fictive, asso-
ciational kind that is basic for memorative discovery.
He groups the twelve images in two mental locations. Aries, the ram, is
figured in the center of the first location, with the second sign, Taurus, to
its right. In front of Taurus is Gemini, the Twins, born either from a
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woman or from the Bull (in order to avoid having an extraneous image).
One of the twins plays with a Crab. To the left of Aries is Leo, who attacks
Virgo. Virgo holds Libra in her right hand, while with her left she tries to
balance Scorpio in the scales. These eight images, whose order and linkage
in the scene cues their actual order, in the manner which Bradwardine
earlier defined, are all in the first location. The remaining four form a scene
in a second location: Sagittarius is placed in the center, shooting arrows at
Capricorn, who holds Aquarius in his right foot and Pisces in his left, while
pouring forth water for the fish from the water-vessel. The images are
brilliantly colored, especially with red, white, and gold, and every color is
described as the superlative of its type in hue and intensity.
But what is most surprising, to our more priggish sensibilities and
expectations, is the emphasis on violence and sexuality which runs through
all the interaction of the figures in each scene. A super-white ram is kicked
by a super-red bull with super-swollen testicles (so one will be sure one isn’t
looking at a cow or a heifer), which the ram in turn kicks so hard that blood
flows copiously. To its left, the ram is also kicking a rampant lion in the
head, causing another wound. The lion is attacking a beautiful maiden,
whose whole left arm is dreadfully swollen from the wound inflicted by a
scorpion, which she is trying to balance in her scales. The twins are ripped
from the womb of a woman whose parturitional wound extends to her
breast. Or they are being born grotesquely from the bull. The twins are
most beautiful, but one is being pinched dreadfully by a horrible crab, and
is weeping while trying to free his hand, while his twin caresses the monster
‘‘in a childish way.’’ The images of the second location are less violent but
no less grotesque, as a rampant goat, shot with arrows by a bowman (and so
bleeding profusely), carries a water-jug in one front foot and fish in the
other, for which it pours out water from the jug. And the whole account
concludes, matter-of-factly, with Bradwardine’s comment that, having
constructed such scenes, one can recite their contents in whatever order
one wants, forward or backward.
Not all of Bradwardine’s images are violent, though all are vigorously
extreme, in conformity with a basic principle for memory-images –
namely, that what is unusual is more memorable than what is routine.
One remembers abstract concepts by a concrete image: sweetness by an
image of someone happily eating sugar or honey, bitterness by an image
of someone foully vomiting. Wholly abstract ideas like God, angels, or the
Trinity can be attached to an image ‘‘as painters make it’’ or, later in the
treatise, ‘‘as it is usually painted in churches.’’ This is more direct evidence
that every sort of image, whatever its source or placement, was considered
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to have some memorial utility. But we will consider this matter further in a
later chapter.
Images are used for memorizing verbaliter or sententialiter. In accord
with elementary pedagogical practices, Bradwardine’s method for remem-
bering words verbatim is to analyze them as chains of syllables, marking
each syllable with an image. He discusses memory for words as both
memoria sillabarum (‘‘memory-by-syllables’’) and memoria oracionis (by
which Bradwardine does not mean ‘‘oration’’ but the quotation from the
Bible which forms the basis for a sermon); the one is basically an extension
of the other. First one analyzes the whole number of possible syllables, for
each of which one finds an image of something whose name begins with
that same syllable. These syllable-hooks can come either from Latin or
from vernaculars, including dialects.
As an example, Bradwardine takes the sentence (alluding to the English
victory over the Scots in the second battle of Berwick in July, 1333):
‘ Benedictus Dominus qui per rege Anglie Berewicum fortissimum et totam
Scotiam subjugavit,’’ ‘ Blessed be God who through the English king sub-
jugated mightiest Berwick and all of Scotland.’’ To remember the first phrase
of this sentence, he says, one might make a scene composed of a Benedictine
monk (‘‘Benedictus’’) in the center, with a Dominican friar to his right
(‘‘Dominus’’); the monk holds out his left hand to a cow (‘‘qui,’ a bilingual
pun), as though he was dancing with her, for the cow is imagined upright on
her hind feet, displaying very large, red teats. In turn, the cow holds a partridge
(‘‘perdix,’’ for per) in her left front foot. The scene in the second location
comprises a king (‘‘rex’’), holding an eel in one hand (‘‘anglia’’) and a mighty
bear (‘‘Bere-wic’’) in the other. For the last phrase of the sentence, one might
construct a scene of someone named Thomas (‘ totam’’), who is with one hand
subduing a Scot (‘ Scotiam’’), and with the other holds a marvellous yoke
(‘‘sub-juga-vit’ ). These scenes are startling and very funny, in the grotesquely
humorous manner of fourteenth-century English paintings in the margins
of the religious books with which Bradwardine was likely familiar. 24
Many of the puns in Bradwardine’s examples are bilingual, depending
on homophonies from Latin, English, and English dialect words. For
instance, the Latin syllable qui sounded to him like the northern dialect
pronunciation of English ‘‘cow,’’
which was [ki]. Actually northern [ki],
spelled ‘cy’ or ‘ci,’ is the plural form, but Bradwardine was, after all, a
southerner. What is also apparent is that he pronounced Latin like a
Frenchman, so that qui comes out as [ki] instead of [kwi]. This is a fine
instance of using the sounds of every sort of language as a memory aid, the
advice we found in John of Garland.
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The syllable images obey rules of calculation rather than any sort of
naturalism, by which I mean that their function in a particular context
takes precedence over their realistic nature. For example, to remember the
syllable ‘‘ab-,’’ one might picture an abbatus, ‘‘abbot.’’ For the reverse
syllable, ‘‘ba-,’’ one can either remember a separate object, whose name
starts with ‘‘ba-’’ (Bradwardine suggests balistarius, ‘‘crossbowman’’) or one
can simply reverse the position of the abbot, so he appears upside-down.
For a three-letter syllable, such as ‘‘bal-,’’ one adds to the ‘‘ba-’’ image some
feature which stands for the added letter. For example, ‘‘L’’ is readily
associated, for an Englishman, with a bent elbow, which both forms an
‘‘L’’ and sounds like English ‘‘elbow.’’ The position of the elbow-image in
relation to the abbot image establishes whether the syllable is ‘‘bla-’’ or
‘‘bal-’’ or ‘‘lab-.’’ When the ‘‘l’’ comes first, it is shown at the abbot’s head;
‘‘lab-’’ is an abbot with an elbow held over his head. If the ‘‘l’’ is medial, the
elbow is held in the middle of the image; ‘‘bla-’’ might be an upside-down
abbot holding his elbow at his waist (or a rightside-up crossbowman doing
the same). If the ‘‘l’’ is last, as in the syllable ‘‘bal-,’’ it figures at the bottom
of the image. ‘‘Bal-’’ is figured, humorously, as an upside-down abbot
chewing on an elbow. It is interesting that a style of marginal drollery in
use in England at about this time (seen, for example, in the Rutland
Psalter) features several images of dismembered limbs, some being chewed
on by grotesque creatures. I will explore some of the general connections
between manuscript marginalia and memory-images in Chapter 7; there
are a number of specific parallels between the changing styles of the two
that argue for their link, and this is one of them. 25
Such image-making is governed by positional concerns, a kind of
additive calculation in which the position of the elbow (in Bradwardine’s
example) relative to the rest of the image functions algorithmically, as does
the position of a number in the columns of tens in the algorism itself. The
same locational calculative principles are at work in Bradwardine’s advice
to use images for numbers, such as a unicorn for one, or a lamb with seven
horns for seven, or dismembered hands with only nine digits for nine, or –
interestingly from the standpoint of mathematical history – either a zero or
full hands for ten. These images one uses to calculate by the algorism, the
method of calculation based upon tens which we commonly use today, but
which was then relatively new to Europe. This calculational bent is appro-
priate to Bradwardine’s personality, but it is quite different from what the
Ad Herennium has to say about making images for words. And it is
fascinating to contemplate a mathematician like Bradwardine calculating
mentally through the use of such lively pictures; after all, the much simpler
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system of Arabic numbers was then commonly in use. The algorism was
part of this new system; Bradwardine nonetheless counsels the use of these
vigorous calculational pictures. Apparently he thought that their vigor
made them more useful for mental work than the more abstract notational
system. The sources of these number-pictures are interesting too: the
unicorn is from the Bestiary, most of the other images are from the Bible
and/or the common iconography of church painting and sculptures, and
the images involving fingers most likely derive from their common use in
daily calculation.
Bradwardine’s images can be the stuff of Grand Guignol, but they are
also funny. The image of an abbot, already subject to imaginative indig-
nities by being reversed each time one wants to remember ‘‘ba’’ instead of
‘‘ab,’’ is made fully ridiculous when we encounter a saintly Benedictine
dancing to his left with a white cow holding a partridge and standing on her
hind legs, while with his right hand he either mangles or pulls the hair of
St. Dominic (‘‘Benedictus Dominus qui per’’). Or the imperial king hold-
ing a struggling eel in his right hand and a bear by its tail with his left (‘‘rege
Anglie Berewicum’’). The puns move easily between Latin (anguilla, eel
and Anglie) and English (bear and Bere[wic]). It is like a mental game of
charades, or childrens’ rebus games, utilizing several languages and every
source of image. But for Bradwardine and his contemporaries, such games
have serious scholarly utility because their culture was still profoundly
engaged with thoughtful memory work. No opprobrium of childishness
or frivolity or obscenity or inappropriateness attaches to such image-mak-
ing. The disgusting and the silly, the noble and the violent, the grotesque
and the beautiful, the scatalogical and sexual are presented, one after
another, and usually as part of the same scene, just as memory dictates.
The one thing that cannot be tolerated is dullness or quietude or any
failure to rivet the attention. These are shocking images, that make us recoil
or laugh out loud, but their shock value is useful for the specific mental
tasks involved in memory work. And while the very notion of useful sex,
violence, and laughter would be, for our own prurient and priggish age, an
ultimate jadedness, titillation (and it is that) for Bradwardine is a necessary
component of the art of memory, serving pious functions like meditation
and preaching. We could consider the use of such images as a kind of
extreme instance of the Augustinian dictum that the things of this world
are to be enjoyed as they prove useful to the good, rather than as ends in
themselves. But one can certainly also understand, in this context, the
motive for St. Bernard’s admonition to the Benedictines of Cluny that
monks should have no need of grotesque figures to help them meditate,
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and the continuing caution throughout the period against the sin of
curiositas, ‘‘distraction,’’ especially in meditation.
A L B E R T U S M A G N U S , A R I S T O T L E , A N D T H E R H E T O R I C A
A D H E R E N N I U M
Bradwardine’s approval of lively images in memory-work can be paralleled
in other medieval texts. One of the most striking features of Albertus
Magnus’s analysis of memory is his enthusiastic commendation of the
usefulness of vivid metaphor to secure recollection. Albertus treats the
nature of recollection and the Herennian mnemonic specifically in his
treatise De bono, Question II, article 2 (translated in Appendix B). This
work was written during the 1240s, while he was in Paris. Albertus’s
precepts (which we might think of as prefatory explanations of an art of
memory) were thus composed 115 years later than Hugh of St. Victor’s
elementary advice, 20 years later than John of Garland’s unsystematic
account of memoria, and predate by 88 years Bradwardine’s fully fledged
art of memory. He is a pivotal figure in the acceptance of the Ad
Herennium’s art of memory, which came, after him, to dominate medieval
university and then humanist teaching. Albertus is the earliest medieval
philosopher to argue systematically for the Herennian art as the best of
all the arts of memory. He is also about the earliest to speak of an art of
memory (ars memorativa) rather than just to use the general term memoria
for an eclectic collection of empirical advice. Finally, Albertus sets his art of
memory in the context of moral philosophy rather than in a discussion of
rhetoric; this too represents a change from earlier pedagogical treatises.
Albertus’s discussion is set up in the usual scholastic manner, queries
and responses both being drawn in part from the discussion in the Ad
Herennium itself. Albertus is concerned specifically to recommend this art:
‘‘ars memorandi optima est, quam tradit Tullius,’’ ‘‘the best method for
recollecting is that which Tullius taught.’’ His justification is made on
moral grounds as well as practical ones. Tullius’ memorial art especially is
valuable for the ethical life and judgment as well as for an orator (‘‘ad
ethicum et rhetorem’’), since moral judgments are expressed in particular
acts and it is therefore necessary that their basis (i. e. prudence) be
incorporated in the soul in corporal images (Q. II, a.2, solutio). They
cannot be retained in images, however, except by the memory. ‘‘Unde
dicimus, quod inter omnia quae spectant ad prudentiam, summe neces-
saria est memoria,’’ ‘‘Wherefore we say that, among all the matters which
pertain to prudence, the most necessary is memoria.’’
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It is important to recognize that Albertus is defending not memory train-
ing, which he takes for granted, but this particular system. Certain of his