The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  course, not all of their wisdom can be contained in a little book, and so, he

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  says, he has taken pains to gather or pluck (like flowers) [raccogliere] their

  wisdom, as he best can. Bartolomeo then describes the basic order he has

  followed in his compilation; clearly, however, Bono’s translation of the

  Herennian precepts was soon also considered to be an appropriate addition

  to it. Memory technique was attached to such florilegia not as an after-

  thought but as an integral part. It provided the method whereby the flowers

  of study could be made not only recti, but utiles and necessarii too. Bono’s

  translation was well adapted for such collections, as is apparent from his

  prefatory remarks, which address the ethical nature of learned discourse,

  regarding mnemotechnique as an essential means to that greater end.

  I would like to close this chapter by examining for a moment the

  reading-seduction of Paolo and Francesca in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno.

  This scene brings together in a particularly compressed and fruitful manner

  several of the aspects of reading that I have discussed, and I would like to

  meditate on it in terms of three of its key words: memory, desire, and

  reading. Francesca begins with memory, re-presenting her past, ‘‘the time

  of your sweet sighing,’’ in response to Dante’s request. ‘‘There is no greater

  pain than to recall the happy time in misery [ricordarsi del tempo felice /

  nella miseria].’’ Her recollection is of reading, itself a memorative, recol-

  lective activity:

  We read one day for pastime [diletto, ‘‘delight’’] of Lancelot . . . Many times that

  reading drew our eyes together and changed the colour in our faces, but one point

  alone it was that mastered us; when we read that the longed-for smile [of

  Guinevere] was kissed by so great a lover, he who never shall be parted from

  me, all trembling, kissed my mouth. A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it;

  that day we read in it no farther.106

  Modern readers, concentrating on the failings of the lovers’ judgment, tend

  to see in this story only an example of passion overmastering reason, and to

  blame Francesca for her self-serving words that put the onus for her actions

  on the book and its author. Or, if they are keener moralists, they blame the

  lovers for wasting their time on such trash in the first place when they

  should have been reading sterner stuff. Or the story is read as a caution

  against leaving a young man and woman alone together at all. In any case,

  the consensus seems to run, Paolo and Francesca are to be blamed for

  improperly reading the book by allowing it to arouse their emotions.

  This interpretation accords well with modern notions (usually attrib-

  uted to ‘‘Augustine’’) that medieval people thought texts to be authoritative

  maps for their actions, readers being totally passive in the face of what they

  read.107 But as I hope my study has helped demonstrate, this scholarly

  fiction is manifestly untrue. Medieval reading was highly active, what I

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  have called a ‘‘hermeneutical dialogue’’ between the mind of the reader and

  the absent voices which the written letters called forth, at times literally in

  the murmur of ruminative meditation. In this scene, it is not an idle detail

  that Paolo and Francesca read together, and thus aloud. If such activity

  does not occur, reading has not truly taken place for the memory has not

  been engaged. Thus, reading is first a sensory activity (‘‘diletto,’’ delight);

  when the senses and emotions are engaged, when imagination forms its

  images and cogitation responds affectively to them, memory and recollec-

  tion can occur. And only when memory is active does reading become an

  ethical and properly intellectual activity. What therefore activates Paolo

  and Francesca’s desire? The activity of reading itself, just as Francesca says.

  Recall for a moment Hugh of St. Victor’s description of the three-stage

  process of reading–meditation. First, one focuses on the example, next one

  acts in imitation of it, and then one internalizes the imitation so that one’s

  own vital power (virtus) is permanently changed. The moment such a

  change occurs is the moment of desire, and, with it, of will. It is also the

  moment during which the full process of meditative study is completed;

  when, in Gregory the Great’s words, what we read is transformed into our

  very selves, a mirror of our own beauty or ugliness, for we have, like Ezekiel,

  eaten the book. The end of Francesca’s remembering to Dante, and the end

  of the lovers’ desire, is also the end of their reading (‘‘that day we read no

  farther’’).

  This understanding of what medieval reading was supposed to be

  complicates the pathos of this tale as no mere moralism can. No wonder

  that Dante swoons ‘‘like a stone,’’ emotionless and thus memoryless, from

  the effort of his remembering (both at the time, listening to Francesca, and

  later writing it down) of her remembering of their remembering of the

  story memorialized in the book. Ricordare and leggiare and amare are

  simultaneous activities, necessarily accompanying each other. Paolo and

  Francesca are reading properly here, recreating the exemplary scene, rewrit-

  ing it in their own memories. But having eaten the book with Ezekiel and

  St. John, they find in the experience a fitting echo of the Apocalypse

  account, as its sweetness turns bitter. Their fault is not in having read the

  Lancelot in the first place, nor is it simply in allowing their reading to create

  desire; it is in reading ‘‘no farther,’’ imperfectly in the medieval sense of

  ‘‘incompletely.’’

  In the ongoing hermeneutical dialogue that the process of reading was

  understood to be, the question of when and how to divide looms rather

  large. This is another aspect to the irony and pathos of Francesca’s last

  words, to their reading ‘‘no farther.’’ Comments like this are fairly common

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  in medieval literature. One instructive parallel occurs in Piers Plowman,

  when Lady Meed boasts to Conscience that she has read the Bible and lives

  by the text ‘‘Omnia autem probate,’’ ‘‘try out all things’’ (I Thes. 5:21). To

  which Conscience replies that she should have read the rest of the sentence,

  ‘‘quod bonum est tenete,’’ ‘‘hold fast to that which is good.’’108 Similarly

  here, Paolo and Francesca are not wrong to utilize Lancelot and Guinevere

  as instructive examples, nor to re-write their story in their own memories,

  but they didn’t finish the sentence. This presents their fault as one of poor

  divisio and incomplete reading, rather than of wrong interpretation accord-

  ing to some transcendental norm. One clause alone is the problem – ‘‘solo

  un punto.’’

  In the Inferno, the pair read the scene from the French prose Lancelot to

  the moment when Guinevere kisses her lover. Also present with the two

  main characters in Lancelot is Galehot (Galeotto), Lancelot’s faithful com-

 
; panion, who has arranged the meeting and actually suggested the kiss. To

  one side, out of earshot, are Guinevere’s lady-companions, including the

  Lady of Malehaut, and Galehot’s seneschal. The kiss is described in a

  paratactic sentence, made up of several clauses or cola marked in the

  manuscripts with a point, punto in Italian. Each punto marks out a

  memory-sized piece, in the traditional manner of textual punctuation.

  The sentence begins thus: ‘‘Et la roine voit li cheualiers nen ose plus faire.

  si le prent par le menton & le baise deuant galahot asses longement.’’ That

  is presumably where Paolo and Francesca stopped reading. Had they read

  the next clause of the sentence after the point, they would have read that

  Lancelot and Guinevere’s illicit love-making was instantly discovered: ‘‘si

  que la dame de malohaut seit quele le baise.’’109 Now the Lady of Malehaut

  is in love with Lancelot herself, has just imprisoned him and tried to seduce

  him (unsuccessfully), and she is Big Trouble. Guinevere, immediately after

  the kiss, swears Lancelot and Galehot to secrecy (of course), but it is by then

  too late – for the Lady of Malehaut has already seen and comprehended,

  and cannot be trusted. Indeed (to learn from this example) every illicit love

  affair has its ‘‘Lady of Malehaut,’’ and it is only a matter of time (often not

  long) before she shows up; thus their fear of her watchful and dangerous

  eyes, to those who have read far enough in their book to be concerned

  about her, should be enough to check passion. But Paolo and Francesca

  failed to get to the crucial ‘‘point.’’

  I am not suggesting that the lovers’ only fault was one of punctuation –

  yet they did not punctuate wisely. ‘‘Solo un punto’’ did them in, says

  Francesca, one little mark of punctuation. But modus legendi in dividendo

  constat. And since divisio produced the building-blocks of memory, and

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  hence of education and character, punctuation was not an altogether

  trifling affair. It was crucial, as it still is, to the intelligibility of a text, but

  it was also crucial ethically, given the role that reading and memorizing

  played in the formation of moral judgments. We recall that Stephen

  Langton spent over thirty years ‘‘coting’’ the Bible, and that Robert of

  Basevorn reserves the practice of quotation (or ‘‘cotation’’) only to the most

  learned and skilled of doctors. Scholastic quotation is a form of punctuat-

  ing, as all textual division is. In a letter describing his own habits of study,

  Ambrose writes of working long into the night to punctuate perfectly the

  ancient teaching of the Fathers, and to fix it firmly in his memory by

  continual, familiar practice and in slow increments – as an aid to which he

  writes down his studies with his own stylus. Ad unguem distinguere is the

  idiomatic phrase he uses, meaning to ‘‘mark off, divide up’’ or ‘‘punctuate’’

  or ‘‘decorate,’’ ‘‘to a hair’’ (literally ‘‘to a finger-nail’’) or ‘‘exactingly.’’ Since

  what he says of the nature and circumstances of his studies rules out the

  possibility that he was decorating the ‘‘senilem sermonem’’ that occupied

  him, he seems to have been doing what the scholastics called quoting his

  texts, and making them familiar and habitual to himself at the same time in

  leisurely stages (‘‘lento quodam figere gradu’’), using his own hand and

  stylus, in the best school fashion, to fix the impression in his memory. In

  that way he is sure not to just blow the words about (‘‘deflare’’) to an

  attendant scribe taking dictation, but to hide them away (‘‘abscondere’’), in

  his memory-receptacle where all lectio should be hidden safely. 110 Thus

  Paolo and Francesca’s failure to read further, even one punto more, is one

  that reverberates within the whole tradition of the methods of reading

  developed in the elementary schools of antiquity and the Middle Ages. The

  Lady of Malehaut in the person of Francesca’s husband, Giovanni

  Malatesta, discovers them instantly and fatally, just as the book warned –

  if only they had not divided their reading at the point where they did. It is

  not the least of the many pathetic ironies in Dante’s scene that lovers who

  failed to divide perfectly in life will never be parted in death.

  C H A P T E R 6

  Memory and authority

  T H E I N T E N T I O N O F T H E W O R K

  This chapter explores connections between memory work of the sort I have

  been discussing, and medieval assumptions about the nature of authority

  and authorship. Composition is the activity which links them, and most of

  this chapter discusses in detail the process itself of composing texts designed

  for oral or written delivery, as it was taught and practiced in schools.

  Composition is one of the two activities of meditation, and the complement

  to divisio in designing a memory for inventive recollection. As division is

  the mode of reading, as Hugh of St. Victor says, so composition – the

  placing together of pieces laid away by division and marking – is the mode

  of text-making, what we, imprecisely, call writing. The memorized chunks

  culled from works read and digested are ruminated into a composition –

  that is basically what an author does with authorities.

  It is also important to recognize that there are two distinct stages

  involved in the making of an authority – the first is the individual process

  of authoring or composing, and the second is the matter of authorizing,

  which is a social and communal activity. In the context of memory, the first

  belongs to the domain of an individual’s memory, the second to what we

  might conveniently think of as public memory. Texts are one important

  medium of this social memory-bank, the archival scrinia available to all,

  from which, by the methods already examined in this study, an individual

  could store, by the sense (sententialiter) or word for word (verbatim), the

  chests of his or her own memory.

  The distinction between res and verbum, as we have come to understand

  it in the context of memorial practices, is at the heart of medieval views of

  how one should deal with the texts that, along with other publicly held

  things like buildings, paintings, songs, and melodies, make up the available

  res, materials. For memoria rerum involves an adaptation of the original

  language for mnemonic and compositional purposes rather than its

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  complete iteration. Thomas of Waleys, we recall, distinguished between

  reciting and retaining and speaking; recitare is word-for-word repetition of a

  text verbaliter, whereas retinere et dicere is recollection sententialiter (accord-

  ing to the sense of its principal words) in order to facilitate composition.

  Reciting is what children do when first learning to read, but recollection is

  associated, as we have already seen, with the investigative activities of

  invention and new composition, the tasks of rhetoric and poetry.

  We will consider in some detail what the res was taught to be in the


  compositional process; this will make its role somewhat clearer. The res or

  matter of a literary text was considered as something extra- or pre-linguistic,

  for which words are to be discovered from one’s memorial store as one

  transforms it into present speaking. These words mediate the public appear-

  ance of the res, rather as clothes may be said to mediate the public appearance

  of a person (to use a favorite metaphor) – they suggest and conceal, they give

  clues and cues, they reveal but never completely. The notion that a text has

  both res and verba posits the idea or meaning that lies within speech as some

  sort of construct partly independent of and greater than the words from

  which it is constructed, and to which these words can serve as a route or

  guide. There is, as it were, an intention of the text which can, and indeed

  must, be translated from one mind to another and adapted to suit occasions

  and circumstances. This adaptation was not believed substantively to alter

  the enduring res (or sentence, as it was called in medieval English), which is in

  a continual process of being understood, its plenitude of meaning being

  perfected and completed. The adaptation process, which is the work of

  interpretive commentary and meditative reading is crucially what makes

  the public, the authorized text. 1

  In considering medieval views of textual authority, one needs always to

  keep in mind that auctores were, first of all, texts, not people. When the old

  woman in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s tale, in order to win an argument, vows

  that ‘‘auctors can I fynde, as I gesse,’’ she means that she can find in her

  memory store specific quotations from textual sources, not that she can

  find people who write. The intentio auctoris or author’s intention – a

  common category of the scholarly introduction to a text known as the

  accessus ad auctores – was defined by Albertus Magnus in a tautology that

  equates the author’s intention with the words in the text: ‘‘the intention of

  the speaker as expressed in the letter is the literal sense.’’2 Consequently,

  there is no extra-textual authorial intention – whatever intentio there is is

  contained in the words of the text. All meaning develops from them.

  Albertus’s definition invokes the commonplace of Isidore of Seville, that