The Book of Memory
Page 78
Utrecht Psalter, 23–84). Important older studies include those of DeWald, The
Illustrations of the Utrecht Psalter, and Dufrenne, Les Illustrations du Psautier
d’Utrecht. Van der Horst comments on (81–83) and dismisses the idea that the
Psalter images could be mnemotechnical, citing particularly Gibson-Wood,
‘‘The Utrecht Psalter and the Art of Memory,’’ but also The Book of Memory.
His comments make it clear that he has misunderstood the nature of imagines
rerum, for he wrongly thinks that such advanced mnemonic craft was
designed for beginners just learning to read, and scorns the idea that a
complex manuscript like the Utrecht Psalter was composed for the use of
novice readers in the cloister. But the uses he ascribes to them (82–83) are
exactly those to which the method of imagines rerum is addressed – advanced
scholarly study. Van der Horst also (81) wrongly characterizes Hugh of St.
Victor’s Chronicle Preface as being in the Herennian tradition of architectural
mnemonic, with which it has no connection at all (see Chapter 4 above). See
also my further comments on the Utrecht Psalter in The Craft of Thought, 203.
25. As described in Chapter 3 above, the murmur of study was a valued and much-
remarked habit in antiquity as well as the Middle Ages.
26. I am indebted to William Noel’s excellent discussion of the English manu-
scripts in van der Horst et al., The Utrecht Psalter, 121–165. The Utrecht Psalter
was in Christ Church, Canterbury, during the eleventh to twelfth centuries,
and three copies of it made while it was there are extant: London, BL Harley
MS. 603 (begun c. 1025 but composed in fits and starts until c. 1200,
unfinished); Cambridge, Trinity College MS. R. 17. 1 (written c. 1155–1160,
drawn during Thomas Becket’s tenure as archbishop, complete); and Paris,
BnF MS. lat. 8846 (c. 1200, unfinished in England but completed later in
Spain); see also Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, 96–97. Jonathan
Alexander comments on the copy in MS. Harley 603 (The Harley Psalter),
and the difficult questions this poses, in Medieval Illuminators and their
Methods of Work, 73–76; I am grateful to him for many stimulating and
informative conversations.
27. DeWald, The Utrecht Psalter, 64–65; the illustrated page is fo. 82v (DeWald’s
Plate 129). Other examples are given by van der Horst et al., The Utrecht
Psalter, 55–73.
28. See the discussion by Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, no. 162, vol. 2,
157–162, and the bibliography which Morgan supplies on this manuscript.
29. The pictures in Douce 104 are discussed by Scott, ‘‘Illustrations of Piers
Plowman in Douce MS. 104,’’ and again in her commentary in the facsimile
volume, edited by Pearsall and Scott. She comments on the ‘‘idiosyncrasy’’ of
the drawings. She and Pearsall both agree that the manuscript is a personal
production, the work of either a single scribe-illuminator or two individuals
working very closely together; in any case the illuminator, like the scribe, was
an intelligent reader of the poem. Annotations in Douce 104 are by another
446
Notes to pp. 291–294
person, but one also working soon after the manuscript was made. The
evidence for the manuscript’s provenance is assessed by Kerby-Fulton and
Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader.
30. In her part of Iconography and the Professional Reader, Kerby-Fulton insists
that some patron must have commissioned the manuscript; she is reluctant to
consider the possibility that the scribe undertook to write it and illustrate it for
himself. (She goes so far as to imagine – in order to reject – an owner
‘‘scribbling’’ and sketching such a book for himself without any competencies
at all, a circumstance completely out of the question and never, to my
knowledge, suggested.) Despres, rightly in my opinion, argues for the ‘‘per-
sonal’’ nature of this book’s production as well as its conception. As she and
Kerby-Fulton both emphasize, there are other books – ones far more elaborate
and expensive than Douce 104 – which scribes are known to have made for
their own use. Most notable from the late English Middle Ages is the
encyclopedia book of James le Palmer, written and decorated by himself;
this is fully discussed by Sandler, Omne bonum.
31. Frances Yates noticed how much Holcot’s pictures were like imagines rerum:
The Art of Memory, 96–101.
32. Transcribed by Smalley, English Friars, 172–178.
33. Smalley, English Friars, 112.
34. Smalley, English Friars, 118. These images are also discussed by Allen, The
Friar as Critic, 51–52; his whole discussion is of interest (29–53), though he
does not mention a mnemonic connection.
35. Transcribed by Smalley, English Friars, 173 from Bodley 722, fo. 21: ‘‘Hic
dicendum est secundum Augustinum super Iohannem sermone 7: Qualem
faciem habet dilectio, qualem formam, qualem staturam, quales manus,
quales pedes habet, nemo potest dicere. Habet tamen pedes, quia ipsi ducunt
ad ecclesiam. Unde ex ista imagine potest caritas sive dilectio describi sicut una
regina in throno collocata, statura elevata, figura quadrata, Phebo maritata,
prole vallata, melle cibata, cum facie quadriformi et veste auriformi, manus
habens stillantes et porrectas, aures apertas et directas, oculos flammeos et
uxorinos et pedes caprinos’’ (comment in reference to Hosea 6). The heavy use
of internal rhyme is also characteristic of Holcot’s pictures, and mnemonically
effective, as counselled by Robert of Basevorn and other authors of arts of
preaching (see Chapter 3 above).
36. Smalley, English Friars, 172, 179.
37. On how the Rhetorica ad Herennium was taught, see Ward, Ciceronian
Rhetoric, and the essays in Cox and Ward, The Rhetoric of Cicero.
38. Smalley, English Friars, 173, transcribing from Bodley 722, fol. 30: ‘‘in fine
capituli, super illam litteram Noli letari, ubi loquitur de idolatria, pono
picturam antiquorum de idolatria.’’ Yates also comments on this passage,
Art of Memory, 99.
39. See Carlo de Clercq, ‘‘Hughes de Fouilloy.’’
40. Some scholars have believed the picture described in Hugh’s Libellus must
have been an actual object. Though both Sicard (in Diagrammes me´die´vales,
Notes to pp. 294–297
447
though he withdrew this opinion in his CCCM edition) and Zinn (‘‘Exile and
Hugh of St Victor’’) have held this opinion, the most forceful case is made by
Rudolph, Mystic Ark. Rudolph maintains that the Libellus is not the descrip-
tion of an actual painting nor instructions for making a real object, but a
gathering of materials for meditation that were initially guided by a real
painting, which was painted on some large flat surface at St. Victor (perhaps
a wall or the floor) and used by Hugh as the focus for a set of lectures, many of
which became what Rudolph calls ‘ The Moral Ark’ (i.e. De archa Noe). But the
lexical evidence remains strongly against such an interpretation. Latin pictura,
at this time, refers as readily to verbal ekphrasis and imagined pictures as it does
> to actual painting, and absent any evidence other than Hugh’s use of this word,
the case for a complex mural painting having been made at St. Victor – let alone
made as the focus for a set of lectures – is unproven, though it would certainly
be remarkable if it had occurred. See my comments on the meditational genre
of pictura in The Craft of Thought, esp. chapter 4 and also B. Newman, ‘‘What
did it mean to say ‘I saw?’’’ Hugh’s Libellus is translated by J. Weiss in
Carruthers and Ziolkowski (eds.), The Medieval Craft of Memory, 41–70.
41. Goy, Die Uberlieferung, 237; the first two rubrics are from Bodleian Library
Laud Misc. 370 and Laud Misc. 409, both twelfth-century mss. from
St. Albans, the third from BnF. lat. 10631, also of the twelfth century.
42. Smalley, Study of the Bible, 96; Smalley comments briefly, but cogently, on
how ‘‘the roles of text and picture, that we are accustomed to, seem to be
reversed in much of the twelfth-century educational literature. You begin with
your picture. . .’’; 95–96.
43. Rudolph argues that these gaps and inconsistencies are evidence that the
Libellus is an uncorrected reportatio, made by an incompetent student,
which somehow escaped Hugh’s normally careful correction (yet, unchal-
lenged, gave rise to many manuscript copies). This seems unlikely.
44. Hugh of St. Victor, De formatione arche, I . 1–25; trans. Weiss. The Latin text is
that of Sicard, CCCM 176. All subsequent citations are to this translation and
edition. Notice Hugh’s two-language pun on the Greek letter chi, X, the first
letter in the name Christos and also, in Latin, the number 10, written X, and so
resembling chi in its visual form. Migne regarded the writing of c here as a
simple error. But it is not. From the end of the Carolingian period, the final
sigma of the nomina sacra was often written as a c in Latin script – vq| – (see
Lindsay, Notae latinae, 396), though this apparent ‘‘c’’ is actually |. The
cabalistic principle that names and numerology are contained in the same
forms may also have influenced Hugh here, perhaps another example of the
interest in Jewish exegetical traditions that is associated by Beryl Smalley with
St. Victor; see Smalley, Study of the Bible, 103–105, 149–172, 361–365.
45. Hugh’s understanding of moralizing is very well described in his definition of
the tropological genre of Biblical exegesis: ‘‘tropology . . . is the changing-
direction word or the phrase folded-back, for truly we turn the word of a
narrative concerning others to our own instruction when, having read of the
deeds of others, we conform our lives to their example’’; see Appendix A.
448
Notes to pp. 297–302
46. At one point, Hugh refers to the right limb (cornus) of the central cross as
being on the north side, ‘‘dextero lateri, id est aquiloni’’ (II. 41) but in another
he says he labels the left limb as on the north side, ‘‘in sinistro, ‘latera
aquilonis’’’ (IV. 19). The inconsistency could arise from a difference in
Hugh’s mental orientation towards his figure, that is whether he imagines
himself looking towards it or out from it, an inconsistency that would arise
more easily if one were working with a mental image than with an actual
graph. Sicard attempted several drawings of the features described by Hugh;
these are reproduced for his edition as CCCM volume 176 A. It is telling that
he requires eleven plates to reproduce all the features that Hugh has put into
his single picture. Zinn has reproduced a computer-generated version from
Hugh’s ekphrasis in ‘‘Exile and Hugh of St. Victor,’’ though even it has had to
be simplified and requires a zoom tool in order to be fully practical.
47. De archa Noe, I . v. 157–158. A diagram of the Ark, shown as a cut-off pyramid,
accompanies some manuscripts of Peter of Poitiers’s Genealogia. An example
is Bodleian Library MS. Laud Misc. 151, fo. 1, a manuscript of the second
quarter of the thirteenth century (a century after Hugh of St. Victor) in which
the Genealogia precedes the texts of the Pentateuch and Peter Comestor’s
Historia scholastica. Two other diagrammatic drawings of the Ark as a cur-
tailed pyramid are in a genealogical roll written about 1420–1430 in English
(Bodleian Library, MS. Barlow 53); this roll is prefaced by a translation of
Peter’s preface, discussed later in this chapter. But the Ark took many forms
throughout this period.
48. Libellus de formatione arche, I . 87–95. I discussed the issue of whether Hugh’s
picture was real or not in The Craft of Thought, 243–246; see also the
introduction to Weiss’s translation in Carruthers and Ziolkowski (eds.),
The Medieval Craft of Memory. Though the evidence tends towards under-
standing Hugh’s description as verbal ekphrasis (the meaning of Latin descrip-
tio at this time), something rather like it was soon realized in varying forms in
Gothic church architecture, for the exegetical conflation of the church (and
church building) with Noah’s Ark is patristic, found as early as Ambrose.
Relevant matters are discussed in The Craft of Thought, 221–276, and see also
Carruthers, ‘‘The Poet as Master-Builder.’’
49. Libellus de formatione arche, I I . 67–69: ‘‘Post hec, singulis nominibus suas
imagines superpono semiplenas a pectore sursum, quales nonnunquam in
tabulis solent figurari, quas Graeci frequentiori usu ‘iconas’ uocant.’’
50. Libellus de formatione arche, I I . 73–78. At this time, the Bible was considered to
have 22 books in the Old Testament and 8 in the New, as Hugh of St. Victor
describes them in De archa Noe, Book I. v. 16–19 (ed. Sicard, 24).
51. Something like these circles, represented as lunettes, can be seen in Hugh’s
history diagram, figure 5. Hanning has argued suggestively that the Creator-
Majesty image was especially employed during the twelfth century as a model
for human as well as divine creativity: ‘‘‘Ut enim faber . . . sic creator.’’’
Hanning’s notes contain a bibliography of discussions of the Majesty image
from the early Middle Ages onward. It seems to have peaked in popularity,
Notes to pp. 303–308
449
judging by its survival in manuscript painting, during the twelfth to thirteenth
centuries; one should, however, be careful in relying too heavily upon such
evidence for a true assessment of the relative popularity of a particular
mnemonic device since mental composition and imaging, employing such
formae, seem to have been a feature even of early monastic culture. A good
example is the use, in Benedict’s Rule, of the scala Jacobis (Jacob’s ladder) to
organize the stages of humility.
52. This work is now fully available in a splendid edition and translation by
Willene Clark. On Hugh’s life, see Dictionnaire de spiritualite´, s.v. ‘‘Hughes de
Fouilloy.’’
53. See the essays by Carlo de Clercq, ‘‘Le Ro
ˆle de l’image’’ and ‘‘Hugues de
Fouilloy.’’
54. Those with complete cycles are Heiligenkreutz (a Cistercian monastery) MS.
226, British Library, MS. Sloane 278, St.-O
mer MS. 94 (from the Cistercian
abbey of Clairmarais), and Troyes MS. 177 (from Clairvaux itself). These
manuscripts are all of the thirteenth century. Two other manuscripts of the
twenty-one still extant have most of the cycle – Bodleian Library MS. Lyell 71,
the one I have examined most fully and the subject of de Clercq’s ‘‘Le Roˆle de
l’image,’’ and Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale MS. II, 1076. On the Lyell
manuscript itself, which was made in northern Italy around 1300, see de la
Mare, Lyell Manuscripts, 211–216. I commented briefly in Chapter 4 above,
and in The Craft of Thought, 84–101, on the significance of Bestiaries forming
so common a feature of Cistercian libraries, given the order’s strictures against
using excessive and monstrous decoration and ornament in the cloister (where
most reading occured), and especially representation of animals.
55. Hugh de Fouilloy, Aviarium, prol. 1: ‘‘Ego enim de clero, tu de militia. Ad
conversionem venimus ut in regulari vita quasi in pertica sedeamus’’ (ed. and
trans. Clark, 118–119).
56. I have described the image in MS. Lyell 71; MS. Sloane 278 has the same
image, somewhat less finely executed, as is true generally of this manuscript,
but with identical titles and lay-out.
57. Hugh de Fouilloy, Aviarium, prol. 1: ‘‘et qui rapere consueveras domesticas
aves, nunc bonae operationis manu silvestres ad conversionem trahas, id est
seculares’’. (ed. and trans. Clark, 118–119).
58. De Clercq, ‘‘Le Ro
ˆle de l’image,’’ 24. In the Authorized Version (1611), where it
is numbered Ps. 68:13, the word is rendered as ‘‘pots’’ (‘‘Though ye have lain
among the pots’’); the New Revised Standard (1989) reads ‘‘sheepfolds’’
(‘‘though they stay among the sheepfolds’’).
59. Hugh de Fouilloy, Aviarium, Prol. 1: ‘‘Desiderii tui, carissime, petitionibus
satisfacere cupiens, columbam, cujus pennae sunt deargentate et posteriora dorsi
ejus in pallore auri [Ps. 67:14] pingere et per picturam simplicium mentes
aedificare decrevi, ut quod simplicium animus intelligibili oculo capere vix
poterat, saltem carnali discernat: et quod vix concipere poterat auditus per-
cipiat visus’’ (ed. and trans. Clark, 116–117; my change indicated in square