questions address either insufficient definition in Tullius (e.g. objection 10)
or apparent contradictions between what is found in Ad Herennium and
in Aristotle (e.g. objections 3 and 7) or in Aristotelian psychology, as
already commented upon by Albertus in his own treatise on the soul
(e.g. objections 2 and 13). He also addresses those hostile to the whole
scheme as being altogether too curious and elaborate. Such hostility did in
fact exist among previous generations of Parisian masters, as we will see.
Albertus is much interested in the ancient system’s use of vivid visual
images against precisely visualized backgrounds set in order; it is this
feature that makes Tullius’ system the best. He is obviously working with
Tullius’ text, trying to adapt it to thirteenth-century circumstances and the
memory training with which he is familiar; the results are instructive. He
considers, for example, what the phrase ‘‘aut natura aut manu’’ means (Ad
Her. III.16.29), since Tullius doesn’t clearly define it, and suggests (prob-
ably correctly) that it refers to kinds of loci, the cloister-garth (pratum)
being an example of a natural place, a house or an intercolumnar space of
an artificial one (‘‘made by hand,’’ manu; see resp. 10).
Judging by his comments on the five principal characteristics given
for desirable background images, Albertus clearly understands that they
are designed for ease in perception as one walks through one’s places
in memory, seeing images on backgrounds. ‘‘Confusion,’’ he writes, ‘‘is
engendered either in respect to the background-place or the matters located
in it or to that which by its action makes visible the background and what is
in it.’’26 If one crowds too much into one location, one will confound one’s
images: ‘‘it heaps up a great many images, and so these images break up in
the soul and do not remain, just as a great number of waves break up in
water.’’27 This effect, however, is not what the Ad Herennium gives as the
reason to avoid crowds; the concern there was with the initial making of
backgrounds, and to avoid imprinting crowded places because of their
adverse effect on the clarity of the backgrounds.
One can also be confused if one’s places are too much alike, too close
together or far apart, or improperly lit. Images must be seen clearly, for
‘‘something glaring confounds sight’’ whereas obscurity impedes it; in
either case the images are not properly imprinted and therefore cannot
be seen with the inner eye. Following these general guidelines, each person
can form his own places from diverse sources. A comparison of the sources
enumerated by Albertus with those in the Ad Herennium again indicates
that Albertus had adapted his source. Tullius mentions these specific
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examples: aedis (a house), intercolumnium (the space between columns, a
colonnade), angulus (a recess), fornix (an arch), all clearly Roman archi-
tectural items. Albertus’s examples are equally clearly medieval: templum
(a church), intercolumnium, pratum (cloister-garth), hospitalis (hospice or
hospital). The only shared word is intercolumnium, though Albertus surely
had a different sort of columned space in mind (perhaps a cloister or a
columned church interior) than did the author of Ad Herennium. In fact,
intercolumnium is the only specific kind of location in the architectural
mnemonic that has an unbroken history – perhaps this is due to the
continuing use of columns to mark off memory groups in the various tabular
formats, such as the Canon Tables. These columnar formats feature images
of architectural columns, often joined by arches, to frame the textual material.
Albertus’s account of the Ad Herennium’s advice concerning image-
making shows his fascination with the procedural details of this system.
He gives first a complete account of the technique for creating images-
for-things. He uses the examples given in the Ad Herennium, but it is clear
that not all of its details are familiar to him:
we place in our memory ‘‘a sick man in bed, who is a figure of the deceased, and
we place the defendant standing by the bed, holding in his right hand a cup, in
his left hand tablets, and a physician standing upright holding the testicles of
a ram,’’ so that certainly in the cup should be the memory-cue of the poison
which he drank, and in the tablets should be the memory-cue of the will which he
signed, and in the physician may be figured the accusor and by the testicles the
witnesses and accessories, and by the ram the defense against matter being
adjudicated.28
Albertus’s attempts to comprehend this scene show his editorial efforts to
understand the Latin of a culture far outside his experience. Most notable is
his change of the original ‘‘medico testiculos arietinos tenentem’’ to ‘‘med-
icum astantem tenentem testiculos arietinos.’’ In the original text, the
defendant and the sick man are the only two human figures in this scene,
the defendant holding cup, tablets, and on his fourth finger (medicum, used
in the ablative singular, is an abbreviated noun-form of the phrase digitus
medicinalis) the ram’s testicles (in ancient Rome money bags could be
made from the skin of ram’s testicles). 29 Albertus adds a third figure to this
scene, a physician (medicus, used in the accusative singular) who is standing
also by the bed, and he holds the ram’s testicles. And why a ram? Since they
are noted for their territorial defensiveness, the ram can signify the pro-
ceeding against the defendant. What is clear from this ingenious adaptation
is Albertus’s effort to visualize a similitudo rerum. His particular misunder-
standing here proves precisely his understanding of the general method.
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175
But a more taxing passage awaited him, the description of the technique
of similitudines verborum for memory of words, using as its example the
line, apparently cited from a popular Roman play, ‘‘Iam domum itionem
reges Atridae parant,’’ ‘‘Now for their journey home the kings, sons of
Atreus, prepare.’’ Every commentator on the Ad Herennium has floundered
about here. A major portion of the difficulty is attributable to the fact that
the images which the Ad Herennium suggests one use to remember these
Latin words are visual puns which depend entirely on contemporary
allusions – a reference to two celebrated Roman families, in one instance,
and to two well-known contemporary actors in the other. To remember
the first half-line one thinks of Domitius ‘‘raising hands to heaven while he
is whipped with thongs by the Marcii Reges’’ (‘‘iam domum itionem
reges’’), both Domitius and Rex being names of distinguished Roman
families. Caplan, the Loeb translator, comments that the scene ‘‘is doubt-
less our author’s own creation,’’ and it is difficult to understand why it
involves whipping, except as an instance of the general principle of forming
images related to one another through violent activity. The second half-line
&n
bsp; is recalled by a scene of the two famous actors, Aesop and Cimber, making
ready for their roles as Agamemnon and Menelaus in a play about the trials
of Iphigenia (‘‘Atridae parant’’).
Albertus’s attempt to deal with this passage was complicated by an
incorrect manuscript reading, one he apparently selected over the more
correct one, for both versions were known to him. For domum itionem,
‘‘journey home,’’ his version read domi ultionem, ‘‘revenge at home.’’ So in
Albertus’s account (see Appendix B) somebody named Domitius is being
whipped (in revenge for something) by martial (that is, ‘‘warlike’’) kings.
Then, having made a certain sense of the scene in the first memory
location, he makes a hash of the one in the second. The original text
advises that to remember the phrase ‘‘Atridae parant,’’ one should imagine
two well-known actors, Aesop and Cimber, preparing for their roles as
Menelaus and Agamemnon (‘‘the sons of Atreus’’) in a play about
Iphigenia. Here again Albertus was not helped by his chosen manuscript
(one of the so-called ‘‘E recension’’), which left out the explanation in the
original text (see Ad Her. III.21.34) that the two named figures were actors
preparing for their roles in a play.30 Besides leaving this information out,
Albertus’s version had also added the adjective vagantem, ‘‘wandering,’’ as
an adjective modifying the name, Iphigenia. So what Albertus found in his
manuscript was a reference to two people named Aesop and Cimber who
either prepared Iphigenia for wandering, or incited her to wander. Albertus
tried to make a mnemonic association by linking the notion of ‘‘preparing’’
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with that of ‘‘wandering,’’ for, as he observes, one who prepares (parat se)
for something wanders about.
Those who have also struggled with obscurities in ancient texts cannot
help admiring Albertus for plunging into this crux instead of silently
reporting it, though in this case discretion might have served him better.
The nature of his effort indicates again his grasp of the essential features of
the method and purpose of image-making, if not of this particular example
of it. He raises these two specific instances of image-making from Ad
Herennium as the basis for others’ objection to the whole method (objec-
tion 10), on the grounds that it is is metaphorical and obscure, and there-
fore a hindrance rather than a help to memory. Better to remember the
things themselves (the actual words of a text) than to adopt this cumber-
some, confusing method.
Albertus defends the method with vigor precisely because it is meta-
phorical, grounds that must be of interest to students of medieval fictional
literature. He quotes almost in full the advice of Ad Herennium on the
making of striking and unusual images, and replies at length to possible
objections (objs. and resps. 16–21). The images one composes must be
striking and vivid, rare and unusual, ‘‘quae quasi mirabiles sunt, imagines
nobis constituamus’’ (obj. 20). What is unusual and marvelous strikes us
and is retained in the memory more than what is ordinary (‘‘mirabile plus
movet quam consuetum’’); moreover, what is marvellous, by its forceful
impression on us, causes us to remark it, and that engenders both inquiry
and reminiscence. For this purpose, fabulous metaphorical images, com-
posed from marvels (‘‘compositae ex miris’’) are best: ‘‘metaphorica plus
movent animam et ideo plus conferunt memoriae.’’ For as Aristotle says (in
Metaphysics, I.1, where he also says that experience is made of many
memories), this was why the earliest philosophers wrote their ideas down
in poetry, because fables composed of marvels were more moving to the
memory and to inquiry (‘‘fabula, cum sit composita ex miris, plus movet’’).
All inquiry begins in wonder (‘‘ex admirari’’), he continues, quoting the
Metaphysics again (I.2), for the start of philosophical thought is in wonder-
ing about causes, about befores and afters and whys. Though he does not
explicitly invoke it, Albertus clearly makes an etymological connection
between miris and admirari, and thus a relationship of some compatibility
between fabula and philosophari – the link between them being through the
requirements of inventive memory.
Some of his work shows Albertus’s use of a technique of composing vivid
visual images, which incorporate the principle of being marvellous and
active. Familiarity from memory training with the technique of vigorous
The arts of memory
177
image-making, even in the context of theological debate (where it becomes
a useful tool for keeping any sort of discourse in mind), provided a
scholarly audience with a habit of encountering such imagery even in the
context of commentary and treatise, without finding it inappropriate. And
Albertus’s stress upon the mnemonic usefulness of what is marvellous and
unusual gives a crucial ethical justification for using even fantastical or
salacious or violent images. Albertus makes it clear that the criterion for
creating mnemonic images is not decorum but utility. Because the memory
is physiologically constituted in such a way that it better retains what is
unusual and emotionally charged rather than what is expected or routine,
material must be marked with those sorts of images. Students of literature
have always remarked the penchant for strikingly peculiar allegory in many
of the pre-modern arts. But it may well be that some of what we suppose to
be allegory, and thus to have a specifically iconographic meaning (if only
we knew what it was), is simply a mnemonic heuristic. 31
Albertus’s Postilla in Isaiam (commentary on Isaiah), of which a reliable
modern edition exists, affords several interesting examples of Albertine
imagination. First, as is also true of Aquinas’s work, quotations from pagan
authors, including the poets, are much in evidence. In this commentary, he
quotes from Cicero twenty-three times, most frequently from De inven-
tione; he also quotes ‘‘Homer,’’ Horace (five times), Ovid (seven times),
Martial, Vitruvius, and Virgil, among several others. Moralized stories of
the pagan gods, including Jupiter, Priapus, Venus, and the jackal-god
Anubis, also find their way into his commentary. Frequently these tales
are used to point the Augustinian moral that the pagan gods were no better
than devils, corrupt; indeed one of Albertus’s richest sources is The City of
God. Another is evidently from some sort of early version of Ovide moral-
iseé, so popular later in the century and into the following one.
Commenting on the phrase ‘‘in auribus meis’’ (Is. 5:9), Albertus says:
Wherefore in the fables of the poets in Ovid [Met. II, v, 47ff.] great Jupiter, who
represents the god of gods, when he needed to strike down Phaeton, who was
burning up the sky and earth and all therein, took up his javelin beside his ear, that
he might clearly teach that it is judicious first carefully to listen and weigh the
merits of t
he persons and their causes, and then to smite the killers. 32
But not all of Albertus’s vivid visual images are so self-evidently literary in
character. For example, commenting on Is. 35:6, ‘‘Then shall the lame man
leap as an hart,’’ Albertus moralizes the verse with an unusual image rather
like the ‘‘curious, emblem-like ‘pictures’’’ found by Beryl Smalley in
Holcot’s Moralitas.33 ‘‘The soul,’’ Albertus says, ‘‘has two feet, that is
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intellect and emotions. When they are equal, and emotion is made equal in
truth to the intellect, then a man walks well. If however one or the other is
bent, the intellect through error or emotion through desire, a man is
lame.’’34
Two other examples are also curious. In commentary on Is. 47:2,
Albertus writes of the phrase revela crura, ‘‘make bare the thigh,’’ that it
is a custom of prostitutes to reveal their legs in order to incite desire.
‘‘Wherefore Venus was painted with her skirt raised to reveal her leg that
she might provoke lust.’’35 Smalley discovered this passage, and comments
on it that its source is not in any pictorial tradition for ‘‘the mythographers
all represent Venus as naked . . . Curious and of an observant turn of mind,
[Albertus] may have seen or read some study of her wearing a dress. Maybe
he simply invented her as a personification of harlotry.’’
Then there is the ram which runs amok in the middle of Albertus’s
commentary on Aristotle’s De memoria, composed between 1254 and 1257,
when Albertus had left his teaching career in Paris for an administrative
one in Cologne. Invoking the Ad Herennium on the making of memory-
images as a practical instance of Aristotle’s understanding of how memory
works by association, he comments on the phrase ‘‘testiculos arietinos’’
(Ad Her. III.20.34). Frances Yates translates the passage as follows:
For example, if we wish to record what is brought against us in a law-suit, we
should imagine some ram, with huge horns and testicles, coming towards us in the
darkness. The horns will bring to memory our adversaries and testicles the
dispositions of the witnesses. 36
Yates wonders wittily whence such a vigorous beast could appear: ‘‘How has it
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