Dialogus, the long dialogue on the limits of papal power between a master
and his pupil, which contains a few pieces (chiefly Part II) written earlier,
and much new material. 2 The work was in circulation by 1343; it appears to
have been unfinished, because, while Ockham names the matters he
intended to include in Part III, the manuscripts all break off in that part,
each at different places and none complete.
Ockham’s situation as a scholar is a dramatically extreme case that
demonstrates quite clearly the necessary role that memorial training and
transmission continued to play in both education and scholarly dialogue
throughout the Middle Ages, even as the number of books increased.3
In the first part of Dialogus, Magister or Master, Ockham’s persona, tells
his pupil that, in order to conduct his arguments properly, he needs various
books and materials he cannot get, a theme sounded frequently throughout
the work, ‘‘but you know I do not have any of [various writings he has just
spoken of] and those [men] absolutely refuse to communicate to me [the
materials I spoke of] concerning governance.’’4 He complains again in the
prologue to the third part of not having the books he wants: ‘‘I can in no
way introduce [my subject] beyond the preface since I am unable to come
by precisely the books I consider necessary.’’ To which the pupil responds
that he is sure this fear will not restrain his master. And it did not. 5
The Master counsels his disciple whenever he can to extract and mem-
orize material from a wide variety of sources; indeed, if the Master had not
done so when he had the opportunity, he would now have no hope of
access to even the most fundamental texts, the Bible and the collections of
canon law. The pupil asks how one gets knowledge of subjects like imperial
rights and papal powers? ‘‘Complete knowledge about them – which you
recall is to be drawn out of books of sacred theology, and of both kinds of
law, that is canon and civil, of moral philosophy, and from the histories of
Memory and the ethics of reading
197
the Romans, and especially of the emperors, and of the greatest pontiffs,
and of other peoples – should be most patiently extracted and solidly built
up. By which means alone I have hope of obtaining the Bible and the books
of church law.’’ And he again apologizes if, under the circumstances, he
seems to make an imperfect or awkward book. His pupil responds by
saying that even though in these days circumstances prevent the making of
a perfectly complete work, ‘‘it is still useful not to remain wholly silent,
because we may provoke those with a good supply of books into perfecting
and completing the work.’’6
Professor Miethke has observed that polemical writing, a genre that
requires the utmost currency for its effectiveness, was often composed, even
in the fourteenth century, on the basis of a scholar’s memory of the work to
which he was responding, or even on hearsay accounts of texts, rather than
on written copies. Written copies of new work, treatises, disputations, and
the like, were difficult to obtain, even if one lived close to their origin in
both place and time. There are very few fourteenth-century manuscripts of
Dialogus, yet it is clear that Ockham’s ideas had tremendous currency and
occasioned bitter controversy throughout Europe, even in his own lifetime.
In 1343, Duke Albert of Austria is said to have supported the position of the
emperor, Ludvig of Bavaria, against the papacy, because he was persuaded
by the emperor’s report of the ideas in a ‘‘dialogus’’ produced by Master
William of Ockham. Obviously papal interdict did not in fact prevent even
Ockham’s current work from circulating out of Munich, and, given the
conditions, the chief method of such circulation, Miethke thinks, would
have been oral, well in advance of written copies.7
It is important to recognize that Ockham’s memorial training occurred
as a part of his ordinary education, and that he expects his students to fill
their memories as a part of their ordinary education. (The Magister in
Dialogus has no reason to suppose his student will be exiled as he was, yet he
urges him to fill his memory just the same.) Ockham did not educate
himself with the idea that he might go to Munich, nor was he, as a student,
the captive of provincial schools having, in consequence, infrequent access
to libraries. His whole scholarly life until 1330 was spent in the greatest of
European universities, his circle the most bookish of the time. And still it is
clear that he read to memorize, that in composing he was able at will to
draw extensive resources from his memorial library. He does indeed ask
those with access to a supply of books to perfect his work, but what
Ockham meant by ‘‘perfect’’ is not ‘‘to correct’’ in our sense (as a modern
scholar, forced into similar circumstances, might beg indulgence for inex-
act citations, pleading a faulty memory). Ockham means to complete or fill
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in and add more; he apologizes for only skimming the surface of his
analyses and expositions of the subject (‘‘de prefatis . . . nullatenus intro-
mittam’’), for if he had the latest material he would be able to fill out the
contents he had earlier stored in his memory. This incomplete and prefa-
tory work composed largely from memory fills 551 folio pages with material
that is certainly not of an elementary nature.
Evidently Ockham’s memory did not contain dim recollections of a few
commonplaces learned in grammar school, and evidently too he did not
pause frequently during composition to find references in his books, for he
had none. Nor could he consult extensive indices in the library of the
Munich Franciscans, or thumb through his own books for marginal notae
marking passages pertinent to imperial power in order to do his research.
And the thought of Ockham and his companions escaping down the
Rhoˆne from Avignon to Italy with a trunkful of parchment slips (to say
nothing of persuading his papal jailors, who were suspicious precisely
about his opinions, to let him keep such a heap of slips during four years
of imprisonment) is simply silly. Yet exactly these activities – frequent
consultation of indices, thumbing books to pick up previously marked
passages, writing citations onto parchment slips, even ‘‘scissors-and-paste’’
composition – have all been presumed by many medievalists to have been
the methods by which scholarship was conducted during this period. We
are even solemnly told that Hugh of St. Victor was the last teacher to
recommend a good memory as a scholarly necessity.8
It has been known for a long time that the publication of information
during the medieval period often occurred by means of sermons and such
oral forms. So Bernard of Clairvaux’s preaching of the Crusades was
disseminated quickly through Western Europe both by direct preaching
on his part and by others preaching what he had said.9 This was also an
early Church custom; Cyril of Alexand
ria composed many sermons which
he sent to all the bishops of Greece, who, in turn, memorized them and
preached them to their own congregations.10 All sorts of material was
disseminated in this way; a famous example is the invention of eyeglasses,
first disclosed in a sermon preached in February of 1306 by the Dominican
friar Giordano (who belonged, incidentally, to the same convent at Pisa as
did Bartolomeo da San Concordio).11
Observations by modern scholars that many full commentaries, such as
that on Cicero’s Ad Herennium, sprang up virtually fully formed in the late
eleventh and early twelfth centuries (as did so many other written scholarly
tools) are best explained by their compilators having been able to draw
upon a stock of glosses and comments, developed and disseminated orally
Memory and the ethics of reading
199
over a long time from one generation of masters to the next in monastery
classrooms, and from one monastery to another via travelling scholars.
John Ward aptly describes this as a ‘‘gloss potpourri . . . the accumulating
mass of rhetorical wisdom [which] came to form a kind of anonymous
pool, from which pitchers were drawn almost at random.’’ The school-
room, as he says, was a very conservative place, in which particular glosses
might have a life of a millennium or more. It was also one of the most
important locations for the preservation and dissemination of eclectic oral
lore, for in it students learned to lay down pieces of text and commentary
together in memory, via the sorts of heuristics I discussed earlier. Indeed,
the piece-by-piece nature of memory storage may help to account for the
line-by-line nature which most of the earliest commentaries took.12 In an
important sense, every ordinary gloss was essentially a florilegium of
Important Things To Remember, at least in the judgment of its compila-
tor, arranged in an order for easy storage and recollection.
The astonishing precision with which the Rouses have been able to date
the emergence of complex glossating apparatus within a couple of decades
in the twelfth century suggests strongly that the written versions express an
existing oral tradition.13 They were written down then rather than at an
earlier time because a large, new public of university scholars needed to be
accommodated. University activity heavily depended on oral forms, from
the lecture itself, to the oral (and orational) nature of examinations,
disputationes, and sermones. In lecture, students studied from books open
before them, but it is significant, I think, that the manuscript illuminations
typically show them without pens. 14 They would have mentally marked the
important passages, as Hugh counsels, by memorizing them from the same
codex each time (a problem solved when students owned their own copies
of major texts), noting the shapes of the letters, the position of the text on
the page, and then filing segments of it appropriately away, with the
teacher’s comments ‘‘attached’’ to the textual image. By contrast, a modern
student in class or the library without a pen is a lost soul.
But in the minds of modern scholars oral transmission raises the ques-
tion of accuracy; we tend to dismiss memory as a reliable disseminator and
instead look solely to writing (manuscript copies or letters) as the agent for
all varieties of accurate transmission. Yet, as I have observed before and will
again here, medieval scholars simply did not share our distrust of memory’s
accuracy. Remembering Ockham’s desire for ‘‘perfection’’ (and his com-
ment can be multiplied endlessly in scholarly works throughout the Middle
Ages), what was valued was completeness, copiousness, rather than objec-
tive accuracy, as we understand and value it now. In this as in much else,
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medieval assumptions about the occasionalness (temporality) and the
plenitude or ‘‘copiousness’’ of literature are at odds with modern textual
fundamentalism.
Richard de Bury’s love for books was not that of a mere bibliophile, but a
scholar’s love (as Petrarch recognized).15 Yet it is not at all clear in
Philobiblon that every volume he saved from dust and dirt was saved
physically. Some – how many we cannot know – he collected in memory
and later had his secretaries write out from dictation. He tells us this
directly, but it is also clear from the way he talks about books, what they
are, and of what use, that trained memory and the book are closely linked –
even for him, in the mid fourteenth century, the avid collector of one of
Europe’s greatest private libraries.
Bury closes his first chapter with a catalogue of metaphors for books,
many of which we have already encountered as metaphors primarily for
memory: thesaurus, scrinium, favus (‘‘honey-comb’’), and a couple that
suggest he had encountered Hugh of St. Victor in some form (or at least
shared some of his commonplaces): arca Noe, lignum vitae, and scala
Jacob. 16 Most of these reappear elsewhere in his treatise as motifs for both
books and the memorial activities of scholarship. For in Bury’s prose, as in
that of so many other writers, the two are practically interchangeable.
Having a good memory is virtually as good as having the book itself, and
better than having an untrustworthy written copy of it. Such play, it seems
to me, can be found in a passage such as the following, when Bury describes
his collecting habits in Paris, ‘‘the paradise of the world.’’17 There, he says,
are to be found delightful libraries above little rooms redolent of sweet
aromas, ‘‘super cellas aromatum redolentes’’ (p. 70, line 2), which include
the cloisters (‘‘prata’’) of the Academy, the by-ways (‘‘diverticula’’) of
Athens, the walks of the Peripatetics, the promontories of Parnassus, and
the porches (‘‘porticus’’) of the Stoics. And then follows a catalogue of
classical and Christian authors, after which Bury says that ‘‘having
unbound the strings of our treasuries and our sacculi, we distributed coin-
age with a joyful heart, and we recovered by this ransom priceless books
from mud and grit.’’18 I do not wish to argue that Richard de Bury bought
no books, for it is evident both from Philobiblon and contemporary
accounts that he bought and transported for his personal library a great
many, though whether there were really five cartloads, as the Durham
chronicler has it, may be wondered at.19 But I do wish to point out that the
language in this passage plays heavily with common metaphors for mem-
ory training as well as with the literal action of buying books. Thesaurus,
sacculus, and the actions of redeeming the words of authors with a payment
Memory and the ethics of reading
201
and of dispensing coins from one’s sacculus, joyous heart (memory) and
all, are all metaphors we commonly encounter in works about memory,
and it seems to me that Bury may well be engaging in a playful scholarly
conceit here, meaning perhaps that where poorer scholars depended upon
the saccul
i of their memories to redeem books, he had tangible coin to pay.
Or perhaps he means (for I don’t think he was mean-spirited) that he
depended on both the thesaurus of his purse and that of his memory to
ransom wisdom from dirt and neglect; he uses the plural forms of both
thesaurus and sacculus, after all.
Twice Bury comments directly on how he depended on the industry of
others to collect books, especially the most recent of works. In chapter 4,
the neglected books are made to complain of how shabbily they have been
treated, but comment favorably on virtuous clerks who use them properly,
that is, memorize them:
First of all it behooves you to eat the book with Ezekiel, that the belly of your
memory may be sweetened within . . . Thus our nature secretly working in our
familiars, the listeners hasten up gladly as the magnet draws the willing iron. What
an infinite power of books lies down in Paris or Athens, and yet sounds at the same
time in Britain and Rome! In truth while they lie quietly they are moved, while
holding their own places they are borne everywhere in the minds of their
listeners.20
Later Bury describes his network of clerical searchers, who reported to him
orally every new discourse and argument, no matter how half-baked and
unfinished, from every part of Christendom, exactly the correspondents
denied by edict to Ockham. They are like keen hunters after rabbits, like
men setting nets and hooks for every little fish (‘‘pisciculus’’):
From the body of Sacred Law to the notebook of yesterday’s bits of sophomoric
discourse, nothing could escape these searchers. If a devout sermon sounded in the
fountain of the Christian faith, the holy court of Rome, or if a new question was
aired with novel arguments, if the solidity of Paris . . . or English perspicuity . . .
had set forth anything concerning the advancement of knowledge or the explan-
ation of faith, this immediately was poured into our ears still fresh, unerased by
any word-scatterer and uncorrupted by any idiot, but from the purest pressing of
the wine-press it passed directly into the vats of our memory for clarifying.21
These two passages demonstrate clearly that oral transmission from one
memory to another was still an important and respected aspect of the
dissemination of learning in academic and administrative circles during
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