treatises which focus on picture diagrams, including ‘‘The Wheels of True
and False Religious’’ and ‘‘Concerning Shepherds and Their Sheep.’’ Carlo
de Clercq, the modern historian who has worked most extensively on
Hugh de Fouilloy and his picture treatises, has concluded that while he
did not probably execute any of the existing manuscript drawings himself,
Hugh did supply the design for them and intended them to be an integral
part of his texts. Indeed, in his two wheel treatises, the wheel diagrams are
identified as ‘‘capitulum 1,’’ the explication forming the succeeding chap-
ters of the works. In other words, the picture is not an illustration of the text
or even a diagram accompanying it, but as much a part of it as the words
themselves. Modern editors who do not pay attention to this are violating
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what Hugh composed, for they are in essence arbitrarily deleting chapters
from his work.53
Hugh’s treatise on the dove and hawk and other birds was soon attached
to another treatise, on animals, and so became part of one of the chief
versions of the Bestiary. An independent section of anonymous authorship
was also added, which lists the voces animantium in alphabetical order (and
chapter 11 of Hugh’s own treatise on the dove and hawk also lists the dove’s
voces in summary form). Hugh’s drawings for his own treatise were often
partially and poorly copied by later scribes and illuminators, but several
manuscripts preserve the whole cycle. 54 For our purposes here, the most
interesting of these pictures are the first two, each containing a good bit of
text in addition to drawing. Both are summary picturae of, respectively, the
first prologue and the first eleven chapters of the treatise.
The first summary picture is a simple imago rerum of the first preface,
which Hugh addresses to a fellow monk, Hugo Rainerus, who is known
only from this text. He describes how this Hugo has begged him to write
what follows concerning the dove and the hawk, and how, while he, Hugh
de Fouilloy, has come to the contemplative life from a clerk’s vocation, his
fellow monk came from the military life – thus in his own life, Hugo
Rainerus has combined the features of the hawk and the dove, which flies
far away into solitude. Both the hawk and the dove share the same perch,
and so ‘‘I am from the clergy and you from the military. We come to
conversion that we might sit in the life of the Rule as though on a perch.’’55
The imago which Hugh devised for this text (figure 15) shows a cleric and a
knight in two locations within a frame of dual arches separated by a column
through which runs a single pole or perch. Over the knight is perched a
hawk, over the clerk a dove. On the archway is written ‘ Ecce in eadem
pertica sedent accipiter et columba,’’ ‘ Behold on the same perch sit the hawk
and the dove.’ On the perch is written ‘ Hoc pertica est regularis vita,’’ ‘ this
perch is the life of the Rule.’ Above the knight is written ‘‘miles,’’ above the
clerk ‘ et clericus,’ and on the column which separates the two is written
‘ activa’’ (next to the knight) ‘‘et contemplativa vita,’’ next to the clerk. On the
external wall of the knight’s location is written ‘‘paries bonorum operum,’’
‘ the wall of good deeds,’ and on the other external wall, ‘‘paries sanctorum
cogitationum,’ ‘‘the wall of holy thoughts.’’56 The motto about good deeds
on the knight’s wall refers to a sentence in which Hugo characterizes his
fellow as one who was ‘‘accustomed to seizing domestic fowl, [but] now with
the hand of good deeds may bring to conversion the wild ones, that is,
[seculars].’ 57 So the first of Hugh de Fouilloy’s imagines presents in straight-
forward fashion the res or sententia of this first prologue. The images are set in
Memory and the book
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15. University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Lyell 71, fo. 3v (Italian, c. 1310). Hugh of
Fouilloy’s picture of his Preface to Concerning the Dove and the Hawk.
two locations, architecturally characterized, and they speak the chief points
of the text which they represent. They are paintures with paroles in the
manner which Richard de Fournival describes, for the parole of the painting
is taken from the accompanying text, and the painting derives directly from
the painture in the text’s metaphoric, picturing language.
The next picture of the treatise (figure 16) is more complex, as the text it
summarizes is longer, but the composition follows these same principles.
The treatise on the dove is an exegesis of Psalm 67:14: ‘ Si dormiatis
intermedios cleros [terminos in the Hebrew version], pennae columbae
deargentatae, et posteriora dorsi ejus in pallore auri,’ ‘ If you sleep among
the midst of lots, you shall be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and
the hinder parts of her back with the paleness of gold.’ This dove, which
occurs in a Psalm recalling the Exodus, is collated with two other doves – the
one which Noah sent out from the Ark, and the dove of the Holy Spirit. The
peculiar word cleros in this verse in the Septuagint Psalms is understood by
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16. University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Lyell 71, fo. 4r. Hugh of Fouilloy’s
picture of the chief themes of Concerning the Dove and the Hawk.
Hugh to be a Greek word meaning, in de Clercq’s phrase, ‘‘attitudes . . .
selon les circonstances de la vie.’’58 Cleros is translated into Latin by Hugh as
sors, sortis, usually translated in modern Latin dictionaries as ‘ fate,’ but better
translated in this context as ‘‘outlook on life,’ or ‘ mentality.’
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307
Several features of this picture show some affinity with Hugh of St. Victor’s
Ark picture. First, there is a large central image of the dove, which relates all
the various res of this treatise as the Lamb draws together those in Hugh of
St. Victor’s work. Though this diagram is circular rather than rectangular,
it is a circle imposed upon a rectangle that is enclosed in a colored frame –
the basic shape of the tablet of memory. The organization of this diagram,
with the dove at its center and the topics of the work radiating out from it,
is an accurate guide to the method of the work itself, in which a number of
Biblical texts using the word columba radiate out from the central concept.
The chief themes of the treatise are written in summary phrases or tituli
in locations within this framed rectangular space. It would be too tedious
for this chapter to show exactly the correlation of these phrases with the full
text; briefly, those written immediately about the wheel-like circle sur-
rounding the dove are taken from chapters 2–4, which have to do with
defining relationships among the alloted ends (sortes) of the Old and New
Testaments, and the contemplative life. The two rectangular locations just
outside the wheel and the four smaller circles in the corners summarize the
color symbolism of the dove, which Hugh discusses i
n chapters 5–10
(chapter 11, as I said earlier, is a summary listing of the traditional attribu-
tions of the dove). Around three sides of the margin just inside the outer
frame is written the fourteenth verse of Psalm 67; across the bottom of this
margin is a title for the picture: ‘‘Exprimit hanc mundam sine felle
columbam,’’ ‘‘it portrays this pure dove without bitter taint.’’ The words
in this picture are all written in red, at least in the Lyell manuscript,
confirming their status as mnemonic rubrics for the text which the diagram
accompanies.
Hugh de Fouilloy says that his treatise is directed to an audience of
‘‘illiterati.’’ But the context in which he uses this word affords one of the
better chances we have to understand its meaning for a learned, monastic
writer like Hugh de Fouilloy. Obviously, as de Clercq has astutely
remarked, given the amount of written Latin in Hugh’s pictures, most of
it employing abbreviated forms, they cannot have been intended for
illiterates in our present understanding of that word. Nor can his audience
have been laity who knew no Latin, or who could only mouth the syllables
and sound the words, without being able to comprehend them. Hugh says
that he summarized these matters in order to satisfy the wish of Hugo
Rainerus ‘‘to paint the dove whose ‘wings are silvered and whose back is
pale gold,’ and to build [novice minds] through a picture [per picturam
simplicium mentes aedificare] . . . so that what the mind [animus] of [the less
learned] could scarcely comprehend with the mind’s eye, it might at least
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discern with the physical eye, and what their hearing can scarcely perceive
their sight might do so.’’59 In a second preface, Hugh de Fouilloy restates
this point: ‘‘What writing signals to the teachers, a picture does to those less
educated . . . I therefore labor more that I may please the unlearned than
that I might speak to the learned and, so to speak, pour juices into a vessel
already full.’’60 Hugh de Fouilloy restates the old idea that picturing and
writing are the same thing intellectually but in different media. To this, he
adds the observation, also very traditional, that the memory (that is, the
whole process which takes place in the animus) more readily retains some-
thing seen than something only heard – an observation which seems to me
clearly derived from the experience of an education which was mostly
presented in an aural form. It is worth emphasizing his concern for those
beginning students who have not yet learned how to do this, how to see
mentally the painture in the textual parole which they receive. This concern,
in turn, reflects a fundamental belief that all input to the mind had to be
imagined (see figure 3).
But the term illiteratus involves yet one more, related, assumption, basic
to the medieval epistemology of signs.61 It is a common medieval humility
trope that we are all, in varying stages, illiteratus in respect to the perfect
knowing of God. It derives immediately, in its choice of words, from the
belief that litterae are a category of signs; this being so, like all signs, they are
necessary to mediate truth to the limited and incomplete minds of human
beings. Hugh de Fouilloy defends himself for making a treatise on such a
mundane subject as the dove by noting that he is not being silly or merely
entertaining, for both David and Job left divinely truthful lessons for us
through metaphor when they wrote of birds. Isidore noted, in a basic
definition, that ‘‘figures are extremely useful in gathering. For subjects [res]
which by themselves are least comprehensible, are easily grasped by a
comparison of things [comparatio rerum].’’ This comment occurs in his
chapter ‘‘De conlatione’’ (to which I have referred before) in which he
discusses various aids to memory, including reading a text frequently,
breaking a long piece into short bits, and reading sub silentio, in a
murmur. 62
The comparative terms in which Hugh de Fouilloy defines his audience
(simplicior as against doctior) makes it clear that his audience is the beginning
students of the monastery, postulants for whom the treatise with its pictures
will serve both as a way of organizing for mnemonic effectiveness some basic
exegetical material on the dove and the hawk, and also as an exemplary
model of how to make imagines for remembering other exegetical collations.
The picture reduces the words to their res, the outline of topics and principal
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309
words, which, in speaking, one would amplify and elaborate. The verb Hugh
uses for his pictures, in addition to pingere, ‘‘paint,’ is decrescere, ‘ reduce in
size,’ that is reducing prolixity to memorable brevitas, according to the
principle of storing mnemonically rich units. Hugh de Fouilloy’s remarks
point to an elementary pedagogy of making such compositional images as a
technique for remembering.
‘ D I S T I N G U I S H I N G ’ T H E B O O K
Marginal notes
I would like now to suggest a few additional ways in which the require-
ments of mnemonic technique may have specifically influenced the deco-
ration of medieval books. Book decoration was thought to provide sources
of mnemonically valuable images, and examples to encourage the making
of other such images. But influence sometimes also went the other way, as
we have seen in the case of pictures, where mnemonic principles such as
making imagines rerum directly influence the making of a graphic image.
The symbiotic relationship between memorial effectiveness and the lay-out
of books throughout the Middle Ages is apparent at the level of principle
and general rules; the more difficult problem is know to what extent the
selection of images and decorative elements reflected particular mnemonic
techniques and themes.
I have grouped my observations into three general categories: margin-
alia, classroom diagrams, and compositional imagines rerum, though it
should be kept in mind that the three kinds do not always neatly sort out
from one another. Perhaps it could be said that marginal images serve the
function of textual heuristics and mnemonic storage – the need for divisio –
while the diagrams invite further ‘‘gathering’’ and meditational recollec-
tion. Yet, having said this, one must instantly qualify the statement by
noting that inventio and the mnemonic task it serves, compositio, are tasks
equally of finding and gathering material into one place from a number of
previously stored places. Indeed, these twin tasks are no better distin-
guished from one another than memory is from recollection. Still, one
must start somewhere (a fundamental mnemonic principle); and having
said that, I have acknowledged that my definitional structures (like a great
many others) are more useful as inventive devices than as stating fact.
In his general advice on memory training (Inst. orat., XI. ii. 27–49),
Quintilian emphasizes three basic mnemonic principles: first, the utility
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memory-for-things; second, the necessity of proper divisio and compositio
both for memorizing and for composing, for one ‘‘who has got his Division
right will never be able to make mistakes in the order of his ideas’’ (Inst.
orat., XI. ii. 37); and third, always to copy and memorize from the same wax
tablets when one first commits something to memory, because the appear-
ance of the writing, its visual image including any notae that may accom-
pany it, is especially key to success.
A book made some fifty years after Hugh of St. Victor wrote indicates, as
clearly as any medieval book I know of, a conscious effort by its makers to use
images solely because they are mnemonically valuable. It is a copy of
Augustine’s Enchiridion, which was made and decorated in England at the
end of the twelfth century for the Cistercian abbey of St. Mary’s in
Holmecultram, Cumbria. It is now Huntington Library MS. HM 19915. 63
There are several other texts in this book, but it is the Enchiridion, an
elementary primer of Christian faith, that I want to consider here.
In most respects, HM 19915 is an ordinary medieval book of its period.
It has summarizing tituli in the margins, which seem to be written in the
same hand as the main text. Each chapter is numbered, and has a descrip-
tive heading. Two- and three-line initial letters are colored alternately in
red, green, and light blue, the colors used in other Holmecultram books of
this same period.64 Most of these initials have some simple filigree pen-
work either in or surrounding them, of a sort compatible with the generally
sober style which art historians have associated with the Cistercians. The
text is divided into cola and commata, and is rubricated appropriately. And
highly stylized forms of the word nota, written in black ink, each distinct,
appear in several of the margins opposite important text; these seem to be
contemporary with the text itself, and indeed it is most likely that the same
scribe, most likely a monk of the house in whose library the manuscript was
housed, wrote, punctuated, and decorated it.
The unusual feature of this manuscript is that its marginal notations and
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