The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  Middle Ages, see Cox and Ward, The Rhetoric of Cicero. Though classicists

  refer to the author of Ad Herennium as ‘‘auctor ad Herennium’’ or as ‘‘pseudo-

  Cicero,’’ for the sake of brevity in my discussion I have adopted for him his

  early English name of Tullius. I use Tullius only for this author, however;

  Cicero gets credit for those things that are genuinely his. Calboli has made a

  case for identifying Cornificius as the anonymous author, but this has not

  won wide acceptance, and Tullius was the usual name assigned to the author

  by medieval scholars.

  Notes to pp. 88–91

  395

  119. Albertus Magnus, De bono, I I , art. 2: ‘‘Dicimus ergo cum Tullio, quod

  memoria pertinentium ad vitam et iustitiam duplex est, scilicet naturalis et

  artificialis. Naturalis est, quae ex bonitate ingenii deveniendo in prius scitum

  vel factum facile memoratur. Artificialis autem est, quae fit dispositione

  locorum et imaginum, et sicut in omnibus ars et virtus sunt naturae perfec-

  tionis, ita et hic. Naturalis enim perficitur per artificialem.’’ Translated in

  Appendix B, below.

  120. ST I –I I , Q. 58, art. 1.

  121. Hugh of St. Victor, De institutione novitiorum (PL 176, 933B): ‘‘Figura

  namque quae in sigillo foris eminet, impressione cerae introrsum signata

  apparet, et quae in sigillo intrinsecus sculpta ostenditur, in cera exterius

  figurata demonstratur. Quod ergo aliud in isto nobis innuitur, nisi quia nos

  qui per exemplum bonorum, quasi per quoddam sigillum optime exsculptum

  reformari cupimus, quaedam in eis sublimia et quasi eminentia, quaedam

  vero abjecta et quasi depressa operum vestigia invenimus?’’ (translated by

  Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 97–98). According to his biographer, Anselm of

  Canterbury used this same trope for moral education, alluding as well to the

  ancient belief that the wax of memory is softer and better able to take

  impressions in youth than in age (Southern, Eadmer’s Life of Anselm, 20–21).

  122. Its composition is discussed by Caplan in the Loeb edition, vii–xxxiv, and see

  also the introduction by G. Calboli to his edition of the work (1993), and that

  of G. Achard to his.

  123. A good, if somewhat controversial, treatment of this relationship is Enders,

  Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama; see as well her The Medieval

  Theater of Cruelty.

  124. I have discussed this in some detail, with sources cited, in my chapter on

  ‘‘Memoria’’ in Cox and Ward, The Rhetoric of Cicero.

  125. Cicero says he will not insult his audience by describing the scheme in detail:

  ‘‘ne in re nota et pervulgata multus et insolens sim’ (my emphasis).

  126. This idea was familiar to the early Middle Ages through Boethius, who

  articulates it in his translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge. The relationship

  between mnemonic places or topics, and what came to be known as ‘‘topics’’

  in logic is a vexed one, since there did seem, to many ancient philosophers, to

  be some sort of relation, and yet the mnemonic place has a physiological

  ‘‘location’’ that seems more ontologically real than the logical or even

  rhetorical topics do, both of which seem to be entities only of language

  rather than also of some sort of ‘‘space.’ Ancient and medieval philosophers

  worried the question of the ontological status of the logical topics without

  reaching any consensus; for a review of the problem at several stages in its life,

  see the final chapters of Stump, Boethius’s De differentiis topicis. Though the

  problem is more one of philosophy than of practical pedagogy, uncertainty

  about it seems to be reflected in the way in which Aristotle’s Topica and

  Cicero’s work on the same subject are claimed by some writers on the topics

  of rhetoric and writers on mnemotechnique, as well as thought to be works of

  dialectic. I discuss this somewhat more in Chapter 3.

  396

  Notes to pp. 91–100

  127. Translated by May and Wisse, Cicero On the Ideal Orator, 220–221. The

  translators comment that the passage is difficult, and their sense of it is often

  variant from Rackham’s translation for the LCL. It seems unlikely that

  Cicero was thinking of ‘‘perspective,’’ as Rackham has it: but distinguishing

  one’s various places clearly from one another is a basic requirement of

  memory craft.

  128. Quintilian’s method is discussed in Yates, Art of Memory, chapter 2, to which

  I am much indebted, and also in Harry Caplan’s essay ‘‘Memoria’’ in Of

  Eloquence.

  129. Luria, Mind of a Mnemonist, 33, note. The connection between this case-

  study and the rules of the architectural mnemonic was first made by Sorabji,

  Aristotle On Memory, to which I am indebted. A number of mnemonists’

  techniques are discussed by Baddeley, The Psychology of Memory, 347–369.

  130. Luria, Mind of a Mnemonist, 33–34.

  131. For literary examples of using synaesthesic imagery for memory work, see

  Carruthers, ‘‘Chaucer, Italy, and Fame’s House,’’ and ‘‘The Poet as Master

  Builder.’’

  C H A P T E R 3

  1. Most of these are described at least briefly by Hajdu, Das mnemotechnische

  Schriftum. A digital mnemonic from an early fourteenth-century Anglo-

  Norman manuscript is described in Hasenohr, ‘‘Me´ditation me´thodique et

  mne´monique.’’ The syllogism mnemonic is keyed, by the vowels of its various

  syllables, to the types of proposition that a syllogism can contain. A commonly

  used mnemonic verse for the ecclesiastical calendar, ‘‘Cisiojanus,’’ is discussed

  by Kully. Several of these content-specific mnemonics are discussed in Eco, ‘‘An

  Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!’’

  2. Thompson, The Medieval Library, 613. He describes an interesting verse-

  catalogue from St. Albans abbey of ‘‘all those [books] which are placed in the

  windows,’’ 379.

  3. The characteristics of these influential medieval schemes from late antiquity to

  the sixteenth century, with English translations of some key texts, are demon-

  strated in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, eds., The Medieval Craft of Memory. The

  university-based late medieval dissemination of the specific scheme described

  in the Ad Herennium is analyzed in Carruthers, ‘‘Rhetorical memoria,’’ and see

  Chapter 4 below.

  4. A portion of the Chronicle without the preface was published in the MGH. The

  prologue is discussed as a mnemonic text by Grover Zinn, ‘ Hugh of St. Victor

  and the Art of Memory.’’ A list of contents written on the end-paper of an early

  fourteenth-century manuscript of the text (B.n.F. lat. 14872) calls it an art of

  memory (‘‘Tractatus, vel potius artificium memoriae’’); this characterization of it

  was dismissed as ‘ adventitious’ by R. Baron (Zinn, 211, notes 2 and 3). For

  reasons that will become apparent in my next chapter, it is significant that the

  phrase ‘ artificial memory’’ was used by a post-thirteenth-century reader to

  Notes to pp. 100–104

  397

  describe this text, though it was not called that in the twelfth century, when it

  was first composed. (Goy, 40, ascribes this manuscript t
o the late thirteenth to

  early fourteenth century; it had been ascribed to the twelfth by Delisle.) That

  the number scheme was understood to constitute an ‘‘art of memory’’ by late

  medieval and Renaissance writers is apparent from the title of a manual for

  confessors by the Augustinian friar, Anselmo Faccio: Memoria artificiale di casi

  di conscienza . . . disposto artificiosamente per via di numeri (Messina, 1621).

  5. Hugh’s Chronicle does seem to have been known in England, though it

  remains unclear how long the Preface was studied. See Harrison, ‘‘The

  English Reception of Hugh of St. Victor’s Chronicle.’’

  6. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis, ed. Green, 486.

  7. Goy, Die Uberlieferung der Werke Hugos von St. Viktor, 36–43.

  8. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis: ‘‘In sola enim memoria

  omnis utilitas doctrinae consistit’’; ed. Green, 490, lines 39–40.

  9. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis: ‘‘ut interrogatus sine

  dubitatione respondere possim, sive ordine prolatis, sive uno aut pluribus

  intermissis, sive converso ordine et retrograde nominatis ex notissa locorum

  dispositione, quis primus, quis secundus, quis etiam xxvii, xlviiii, sive quotus-

  libet sit psalmus. Hoc modo scripturas se affirmasse ostendunt qui, auctoritate

  psalmi alicuius usuri, hoc dixerunt in lxiii, hoc in lxxv, sive alio quolibet

  psalmo scriptum est’’; ed. Green, 489, lines 36–41.

  10. Brevity is one of Thomas Bradwardine’s mnemonic principles – see

  Appendix C, and compare what both Hugh of St. Victor and Albertus

  Magnus have to say about brevity (appendices A and B). The fact that Latin

  is a syntactically more compressed language than English is also reflected in

  the greater number of words in the English translation, but is immaterial to

  the basic principle of mnemotechnical ‘‘chunking’ and brevitas (one simply

  needs more divisions in English to accomplish the same task). Yet its greater

  compression may well have helped to make a better, more witty game out of

  mnemonic brevitas. On the important role of play in mnemotechnical art, see

  Chapter 4, below, and The Craft of Thought, esp. chapter 3.

  11. Particular thanks to my colleagues Henrietta Leyser and Michael Clanchy,

  who realized the oddities and significance of this text in the context of

  monastic educational practice in ways I had overlooked.

  12. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis: ‘‘Ego puto ad memoriam

  excitandam etiam illud non nichil prodesse, ut eas quoque quae extrinsecus

  accidere possunt circumstantias rerum non neglegenter attendamus, ut verbia

  gratia, cum faciem et qualitatem sive situm locorum reminiscimur ubi illud vel

  illud audivimus, vultus quoque et habitus personarum a quibus illa vel illa

  didiscimus, et si qua sunt talia quare gestionem cuiuslibet negotii comitantur.

  Ista quidem omnia puerilia sunt, talia tamen quae pueris prodesse possunt’’;

  ed. Green, 490, lines 25–31.

  13. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis: ‘‘Memoria enim semper

  gaudet et brevitate in spatio et paucitate in numero, et propterea necesse est ut,

  ubi series lectionis in longum tenditur, primum in pauca dividatur, ut quod

  398

  Notes to pp. 104–109

  animus spatio comprehendere non potest saltem numero comprehendat’’; ed.

  Green, 490, lines 6–9.

  14. Didascalicon, I I I . iii, translated Taylor, 87. The standard edition of the Latin

  text is that of Buttimer; I cite it only when I think Taylor’s translation needs to

  be modified.

  15. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis: ‘‘An putas eos, quociens

  aliquem psalmorum numero designare volebant, paginas replicasse, ut ibi a

  principio compotum ordientes scire possent quotus esset quisque psalmorum?

  Nimis magnus fuisset labor iste in negotio tali’’; ed. Green, 489, lines 42–44.

  16. Didascalicon, I I I . xi, trans. Taylor, 93. ‘‘Colligere est ea de quibus prolixius vel

  scriptum vel disputatum est ad brevem quandam et compendiosam summam

  redigere’’; ed. Buttimer, 60, lines 16–18.

  17. Didascalicon, I I I . xi; ‘‘Memoria hominis hebes est et brevitate gaudet’’; ed.

  Buttimer, 60, lines 24–25.

  18. Didascalicon, I I I . xi; ‘‘Debemus . . . omni doctrina breve aliquid et certum

  colligere, quod in arcula memoriae recondatur’’; ed. Buttimer, 60, lines 26–27.

  19. Dudai, Memory From A to Z, s.vv. Capacity, Internal representation, Working

  memory.

  20. Miller, ‘‘Information and Memory.’’ The limits of working memory have

  been known and studied for some time experimentally; some of the earliest

  experiments recorded in modern psychological literature are from the eight-

  eenth century; see Miller, and also Norman, Memory and Attention, 98–124,

  and Dudai as in note 19 above.

  21. Miller, ‘‘Information and Memory,’’ 45. On the role of ‘‘gathering’’ in complex

  learning, see also Norman, Learning and Memory, esp. 80–116, and Bower,

  ‘‘Organizational Factors.’’

  22. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis, ed. Green, 489, line 41.

  23. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 65–66, 80, 195–196.

  24. Julius Victor, Ars rhetorica, cap. 23: ‘‘Memoria est firma animi rerum ac

  verborum ad inventionem perceptio’’; ed. Halm, 440, line 11. This and

  subsequent quotations from Julius Victor are from Ziolkowski’s translation

  in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, eds., The Medieval Craft of Memory. The

  twelfth-century gloss on Cicero’s De inventione by Thierry of Chartres echoes

  this paraphrase: ‘‘[Memoria est] firma animo percipere, memoriter retinere

  que sunt apta ad inventione sive verba sive res, i.e. sententie’’ (Ward,

  Artificiosa eloquentia, vol. 2, 226–7, transcribed from Brussels ms. Bibl. Roy.

  10057–10062).

  25. Julius Victor, Ars rhetorica, cap. 23: ‘‘[N]am qui recte conpegerit orationem,

  numquam poterit errare’’ (ed. Halm, 440, lines 25–26). This is an interesting

  modification of Quintilian’s original: ‘‘nam qui diviserit, numquam poterit in

  rerum ordine errare’’ (Inst. orat., XI. ii. 36). Both ‘‘dividing’’ and ‘‘composing’’

  are thought of as specific, definite tasks performed to ensure against error

  (failure of memory) by imposing a numerical order (one, two, three, etc.).

  26. Julius Victor, Ars rhetorica, cap. 23: ‘‘In his autem, quae cogitamus, et in his,

  quae scribimus, retinendis proderit multum divisio et compositio . . . Et si

  Notes to pp. 109–112

  399

  prima et secunda deinceps cohaereant, nihil per oblivionem subtrahi poterit,

  ipso consequentium admonente contextu’’; ed. Halm, 440, lines 24–25,

  27–29. Cf. Quintilian, Inst. orat., X I . ii. 36ff., and notice again the utter

  confidence that if one memorizes properly in order, one cannot err or forget.

  27. The comment is made in Remigius’s commentary on Donatus; see Minnis,

  Theory of Authorship, 19, 226 (notes 75, 77).

  28. Regula Benedicti, cap. 48. 15–16: ‘‘In quibus diebus quadragesimae accipiant

  omnes singulos codices de biblioteca, quos per ordinem ex integro
legant; qui

  codices in caput quadragesimae dandi sunt’’ (‘‘In these Lenten days, they

  should each receive a separate codex from the library [or of the Bible] which

  they are to read straight through to the end. These books are to be given out at

  the beginning of Lent’’). (Translated by Kardong, 383.) Alternative interpre-

  tations of this instruction understand biblioteca as ‘‘Bible’’ or ‘‘library,’’ and

  codices either as ‘‘books’’ or as ‘‘the volumes’’ in which the Bible was bound in

  Benedict’s time. But, as later monastic customaries make clear, medieval

  monks received other sorts of books as well. See Kardong’s comments,

  391–392, citing Mund ò, ‘‘Bibliotheca, bible, et lecture.’’

  29. The foundational connection of memory-work to meditative reading and

  visionary spirituality in monastic life is the subject of Carruthers, The Craft of

  Thought.

  30. Halm’s edition of Fortunatianus has been superseded by a critical edition,

  with extensive notes and introduction, by Lucia Calboli-Montefusco.

  Calboli-Montefusco provides a complete review of the evidence for

  Fortunatianus’s career and works, including definitively correcting his given

  name to Consultus from the erroneous form (often found in older texts)

  Chirius Consultus. All subsequent references to Fortunatianus’s Artis rhetor-

  icae libri III are to this edition.

  31. Fortunatianus, Artis rhetoricae libri, I I I , 13; ‘‘Quid vel maxime memoriam

  adiuvat? Divisio et conpositio: nam memoriam vehementer ordo servat.’’

  I quote from the English translation of Ziolkowski, in Carruthers and

  Ziolkowski, eds., The Medieval Craft of Memory, 295–297.

  32. Fortunatianus, Artis rhetoricae libri, I I I , 13; ‘‘Semper ad verbum ediscendum

  est? si tempus permiserit: sin minus, res ipsas tenebimus solas, dehinc his verba

  de tempore accommodabimus.’’

  33. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, I , 24. 91–92: ‘‘he diligently and insistently

  demanded from each, as a daily debt, something committed to memory’’;

  trans. McGarry, 69.

  34. Riche

  ´, Education and Culture, 200, note 146. See also now Ziolkowski,

  ‘‘Mnemotechnics and the Reception of the Aeneid,’’ for additional examples