Bury’s time. Books can stay physically on their shelves in Paris and yet
move to the centers of England and Rome, if they have been transmitted by
one who imitates the prophet Ezekiel and first consumes (memorizes) their
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contents. Everything from authoritative canons to the latest controversy is
reported directly to him orally, memory to memory – not having to go
through the unreliable medium of scribal copying. It is worth pausing over
this last statement, for it is so foreign to modern assumptions that one
may slide over it. The ignorant, word-scattering, cloudy-headed idiots who
would erase (‘‘denigratum’’) or otherwise spoil the texts in transmitting
them are the professional copyists and secretaries into whose charge the
copying of books for university scholars had now passed. Bury is saying
that he regards the memorial transmission of a trained cleric as more
reliable than the written copy produced by one of these scribes.
M E M O R Y , D I G E S T I O N , A N D R U M I N A T I O N I N M O N A S T I C
R E A D I N G
When one’s first relationship with a text is not to encounter another mind
(or subdue it, as one suspects sometimes) or to understand it on its own
terms, but to use it as a source of communally experienced wisdom for
one’s own life, gained by memorizing from it however much and in
whatever fashion one is able or willing to do; when one’s head is constantly
filled with a chorus of voices available promptly and on any subject, how
does such a relationship to the works of other writers differently define
the meanings of such literary concepts as ‘‘reader,’’ ‘‘text,’’ ‘‘author?’’ In the
next part of this chapter I would like to examine in some detail just what a
medieval scholar meant when he said that he had read a book. I am not
focusing here on the activity called lectio, ‘‘study,’’ though that is the word
actually derived from legere, 22 but rather the activity which, in each
individual reader, must succeed lectio in order to make it profitable, that
is, meditatio.
Hugh of St. Victor well defines the difference between lectio and med-
itatio in his Didascalicon. Lectio, ‘‘reading’’ or ‘‘study,’’ trains one’s natural
ingenium by the order and method (‘‘ordo et modus’’) of exposition and
analysis, including the disciplines of grammar and dialectic. Meditation
begins in study (‘‘principium sumit a lectione’’) but ‘‘is bound by none of
study’s rules or precepts. For it delights to range along open ground, where
it fixes its free gaze upon the contemplation of truth, drawing together now
these, now those ideas, or now penetrating into profundities, leaving
nothing doubtful, nothing obscure. The start of learning, thus, lies in lectio,
but its consummation lies in meditation.’’23
In Hugh of St. Victor’s De archa Noe, the ark of studies which one builds
board by board in one’s memory, the entire process of learning centers in
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meditation. The Ark of Wisdom/Prudence (‘‘arca sapientiae’’) has three
storeys, which represent three stages of moral judgment: correct, useful,
and habitual (rectus, utilis, necessarius). I am in the first storey of the ark
when I begin to love to meditate on (that is, memorize) Scripture, and my
thoughts freely (libenter) and often consider thereby the virtues of the
saints, the works of God, and all things pertaining to moral life or to the
exercise of the mind. I can then say that my knowledge is correct, but it is
not yet useful, for of what use is knowledge hidden away and inactive? But
if I not only know but act in a way that is good and useful, so that the
virtues I have learned to admire in others I make my own (‘‘meas faciam’’)
by disciplining myself to conform at least outwardly to right living, then I
can say that the understanding of my heart is useful, and I will then ascend
to the second storey. When the virtue I display in works is mine internally
as well, when my goodness is completely habitual (that is, a state of being)
and necessary to me, then I ascend to the third storey, where knowledge
and virtue become essential parts of me (become ‘‘familiar’’ or ‘‘domesti-
cated,’’ to use another common metaphor).24 What Hugh describes here is
a process of completely internalizing what one has read (and one must
remember that habitus is used like Greek hexis in all these discussions), and
the agency by which this is accomplished is meditatio, the process of
memory-training, storage, and retrieval.
Petrarch supplies one of the most revealing analyses of reading in the late
Middle Ages. Like Ockham, Petrarch was clearly no backward provincial,
clinging to outmoded ways of study. Yet Petrarch’s name is linked with
those of Cicero and Thomas Aquinas in many Renaissance memory texts as
one of the chief proponents of an artificial memory system, a reputation
that seems to be based not on his having written a book of memorial
technique but on his copious florilegial collection of commonplaces,
Rerum memorandarum libri. 25
Petrarch was greatly devoted to the writing of St. Augustine. He carried
a pocket-sized copy of the Confessions everywhere with him, and used it
on at least one occasion for sortes Augustinianae exactly on the model of
Augustine’s own sortes Biblicae in the garden, recounted in Confessions
V I I I .26 The very custom of using books for sortes is an interesting example
of regarding books as personal sources whose function is to provide
memorial cues to oneself, divine influences being able to prophesy through
the images of letters on the page just as they can during sleep through the
images written in the memory.
Petrarch composed three dialogues with Augustine which he called his
Secretum, not designed for publication until after his death.27 In these he
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confesses his doubts and sins to the saint through the mouth of his persona,
Francesco. Francesco bewails the frailty of his body, the disgust he feels for
Milan, ‘‘the most melancholy and disorderly of towns’’ which assails his
soul daily with its clamor and dirt. Augustine reminds him of many literary
works addressing this problem, including one of his own; do these not help
him? Well, yes, says Francesco,
at the time of reading, much help; but no sooner is the book from my hands than
all my feeling for it vanishes.
A U G : This way of reading is become common now; there is such a mob of lettered
men . . . But if you would imprint in their own places secure notes [suis locis
certas notas impresseris] you would then gather the fruit of your reading.
F R A N : What notes?
A U G : Whenever you read a book and meet with any wholesome maxims by which
you feel your soul stirred or enthralled, do not trust merely to the powers of
your native abilities [viribus ingenii fidere], but make a point of learning them
by heart and making them quite familiar by meditating on them . . . so that
whenever or where some urgent case of illness arises, you have the remedy as
though written in your mind . . . When you come to any passages that seem
to you useful, impress secure marks against them, which may serve as hooks
in your memory [uncis memoria], lest otherwise they might fly away.28
The margins of Petrarch’s books are full of such marks. 29 This passage
makes quite clear that Petrarch used them, at least in part as did Grosseteste,
to construct his mental concordance of texts, each hooked into its own
place in his memory by a key. There they provide the matter for prudence,
the experience upon which Francesco can draw in need, a remedy for
distress written in the mind (‘‘velut in animo conscripta’’). The process
whereby what he takes from his texts is imprinted (‘‘impressere’’) is
meditation.
And it is clear from what he says that such memorizing is done according
to a learned and practiced technique. One does not rely upon ingenium,
‘‘aptitude,’’ one hides the fruits of reading in the recesses of memory (‘‘in
memorie penetralibus’’)30 and through practice makes one’s reading fami-
liar to oneself, domesticates it (to use Albertus Magnus’s word), makes it
one’s own. Perhaps no advice is as common in medieval writing on the
subject, and yet so foreign, when one thinks about it, to the habits of
modern scholarship as this notion of making one’s own what one reads in
someone else’s work. ‘‘Efficere tibi illas familiares’’, Augustine’s admon-
ition to Francesco, does not mean ‘‘familiar’’ in quite the modern sense.
Familiaris is rather a synonym of domesticus, that is, to make something
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205
familiar by making it a part of your own experience. This adaptation
process allows for a tampering with the original text that a modern scholar
would (and does) find quite intolerable, for it violates most of our notions
concerning accuracy, objective scholarship, and the integrity of the text.
Modern scholars learn all they can about a text, making sure they know the
meaning of every word in it. So did medieval scholars; that was what lectio
was for. But a modern scholar is concerned primarily with getting the text
objectively right, treating it as an ultimate and sole authority. We are
taught to legitimate our reading (by which we mean our interpretation
or understanding) solely by the text; we see ourselves as its servants, and
although both the possibility and the utility of such absolute objectivity
have been called into question many times over the last century, this
attitude remains a potent assumption in scholarly debate, even for those
most wedded to reader-response theories.
But the medieval scholar’s relationship to his texts is quite different from
modern objectivity. Reading is to be digested, to be ruminated, like a cow
chewing her cud, or like a bee making honey from the nectar of flowers.
Reading is memorized with the aid of murmur, mouthing the words
subvocally as one turns the text over in one’s memory; both Quintilian
and Martianus Capella stress how murmur accompanies meditation. It is
this movement of the mouth that established rumination as a basic meta-
phor for memorial activities. 31 The process familiarizes a text to a medieval
scholar, in a way like that by which human beings may be said to familiarize
their food. It is both physiological and psychological, and it changes both
the food and its consumer. Gregory the Great writes, ‘‘We ought to trans-
form what we read within our very selves, so that when our mind is stirred
by what it hears, our life may concur by practicing what has been heard.’’32
Hugh of St. Victor writes of walking through the forest (silva) of Scripture,
‘‘whose ideas [sententias] like so many sweetest fruits, we pick as we read
and chew [ruminamus] as we consider them.’’33
The various stages of the reading process are succinctly described at the
end of Hugh of St. Victor’s Chronicle Preface (Appendix A). All exegesis
emphasized that understanding was grounded in a thorough knowledge of
the littera, and for this one had to know grammar, rhetoric, history, and all
the other disciplines that give information, the work of lectio. But one takes
all of that and builds upon it during meditation; this phase of reading is
ethical in its nature, or ‘‘tropological’’ (turning the text onto and into one’s
self) as Hugh defines it. I think one might best begin to understand the
concept of levels in exegesis as stages (gradus, ‘‘stairs’’) of a continuous
action, and the four-fold way (or three-fold, as the case may be) as a useful
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mnemonic for readers, reminding them of how to complete the entire
reading process. Littera and allegoria (grammar and typological history) are
the work of lectio and are essentially informative about a text; tropology
and anagogy are the activities of digestive meditation and constitute the
ethical activity of making one’s reading one’s own.
The ruminant image is basic to understanding what was involved in
memoria as well as meditatio, the two being understood as the agent and its
activity. Though monastic theology developed the idea of meditation in
terms of prayer and psalmody, its basis in the functions of memory
continued to be emphasized. Ruminatio is an image of regurgitation,
quite literally intended; the memory is a stomach, the stored texts are the
sweet-smelling cud originally drawn from the gardens of books (or lecture),
they are chewed on the palate. Gregory the Great says that in Scripture
‘‘uenter mens dicitur,’’ thereby adding uenter to cor as a synonym for
memory in Scripture.34 Six centuries later, Hugh of St. Victor, discussing
memoria in Didascalicon, says that it is imperative to replicate frequently
the matter one has memorized and placed in the little chest, arcula, of one’s
memory, and ‘‘to recall it from the stomach of memory to the palate.’’35
Composition is also spoken of as ruminatio. In one of his sermons,
Augustine says that he has been caught unexpectedly by a mistake in the
day’s reading – the lector read the wrong text. ‘‘Since I hadn’t prepared a
sermon for your graces on this subject, I acknowledge that it is a comm-
mand from the Lord [through the lector’s error] that I should deal with it.
What I intended today, you see, was to leave you all chewing the cud [vos
in ruminatione permittere] . . . So may the Lord our God himself grant
me sufficient capacity and you some useful listening.’’36 Nothing in the
sermon text we now have distinguishes this sermon from Augustine’s pre-
meditated ones. Even assuming editorial revision, convention evidently
required that an orator’s improvisations be as artfully composed as any
other work. To speak ex tempore requires a well-provided, well-practiced,
and accessible inventory, as Augustine compellingly demonstrates in this
sermon.
Another example, the most famous of all, is in Bede’s account of the
English poet, Caedmon, who ch
anged what he learned by hearing in lectio,
or sermons, into sweetest poetry by recollecting it within himself (‘‘reme-
morandum rerum’’) and ruminating like a clean animal (‘‘quasi mundum
animal ruminendo’’).37 Caedmon’s rumination occurs at night, the opti-
mal time for such activity; the fact that he was a cowherd may be coin-
cidental to the story, but Bede emphasizes it so much that one suspects he
thought the detail significant in the context. Philip West has suggested that
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207
his profession suits his ruminative activities; perhaps the ancient link
between poets and ruminative animals, found in many cultures, has
some connection with the rumination of composition.
Metaphors which use digestive activities are so powerful and tenacious
that digestion should be considered another basic functional model for the
complementary activities of reading and composition, collection and rec-
ollection. Unlike the heart, no medical tradition seems to have placed any
of the sensory-processing functions in the stomach, but ‘‘the stomach of
memory’’ as a metaphoric model had a long run. Milton, his biographers
agree, mentally composed a store of verses each day, which he then dictated
to a secretary. John Aubrey comments that while Milton had a good
natural memory, ‘‘I believe that his excellent method of thinking and
disposing did much to help his memory,’’ a clear reference to the kind of
training, disciplined practice, and deliberate design (‘‘disposing’’) that had
always been features of classical memory-training. And Milton’s anony-
mous biographer, speaking also of his mental composition, remarks that if
the poet’s secretary were late, ‘‘he would complain, saying he wanted to be
milked.’’38
Likening the products of mental rumination to those of digestion led to
some excellent comedy; one thinks at once of Rabelais and of Chaucer’s
Summoner’s Tale. But the metaphor was also realized seriously. There is a
remarkably graphic statement of it in the Regula monachorum ascribed to
Jerome, though composed probably in the twelfth century. The writer
speaks of the various stomach rumblings, belchings, and fartings that
accompany the nightly gathering of the monks in prayer. But, he contin-
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