The Book of Memory
Page 80
first part is clear – the second part seems to mean that the cat must be very
satisfied to forgo catching mice in a flour container because it might also get
some flour (on its feet?).
Notes to pp. 339–345
455
A P P E N D I X A
1. My translation from the edition of William M. Green, ‘‘De tribus maximis
circumstantiis gestorum.’’ This edition was based on the twelfth-century St
Victor manuscript, with accompanying diagram (figure 3), which is now BnF
MS. lat. 15009. Two typographical errors in that text have been corrected:
ornatem (for ornatam), 490.24, and pituit (for potuit), 490.40. With permission
of The University of Pennsylvania Press, I have used my own translation,
previously published in Carruthers and Ziolkowski (eds.), The Medieval Craft
of Memory.
2. Hugh uses such words as distinctio, discretio, partitio with both rerum, referring
to the division and classification of subject matters, and locorum, referring to
the mental locations imagined for the mnemotechnique he is describing. This
lexicon shows how, from the beginning of scholastic method, locational
‘‘rhetorical memory’’ for composing an oration and ‘‘dialectical memory’’ for
analyzing and composing an argument were intentionally closely allied.
3. Evidently a box-like structure rather than a point on a line, Hugh’s mental
locations have dimension.
4. Hugh confirms that his technique is intended to facilitate and ease recollection
on the part of those for whom the individual Psalm texts are already known by
rote, and thus can be visualized and divided according to the consciously held
requirements of each practitioner, filling each cell-like ‘‘number’’ in the grid
with the familiar incipits of Psalm verses. The mental grid described here has
the textual numbers in order, but as read and sung for the liturgical offices the
psalter did not, since the texts were ordered by different schemes. Complete
beginners at this time memorized their Psalms through reciting the offices. As
Hugh says, his method is for the more advanced students needing to support
arguments in school disputations and like situations, and remains useful for
senior scholars composing colloquies and sermons.
5. No English word captures the double and simultaneous meaning of Latin
ornatus and ornamentum, ‘‘equipment, adornment.’’ The marriage of function
and beauty, use and delight, which this family of words achieves I have rendered
into English alternately with words conveying usefulness and function, and
words referring to decoration.
A P P E N D I X B
1. My translation is based on the Geyer edition of the works of Albertus Magnus,
vol. 28. Albertus’s comments on this same passage in the Rhetorica ad
Herennium in his commentary on Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia
have been translated into English by Ziolkowski, in Carruthers and
Ziolkowski (eds.), The Medieval Craft of Memory, 118–152. Thomas Aquinas’s
commentary on Aristotle’s treatise, now available in two different English
translations (see Bibliography) is also especially pertinent; see The Medieval
Craft of Memory, 153–188.
456
Notes to pp. 345–358
2. See Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, 77–78, and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics,
1139b 15.
3. Albertus’s concern in this first article is to define how rhetorical memoria, as it is
discussed in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, can be fitted into Aristotle’s philo-
sophical discussion, especially in De memoria et reminiscentia, with its distinc-
tion between the psychological powers of memory and reminiscence. This
requires Albertus to distinguish the trained habits of memory technique from
the psychological faculties which Aristotle defined, and show how mnemo-
technique requires the action of both faculties in its working. I have left the
Latin word untranslated but in italics, in order to convey the fact that memoria
is a term under discussion in this article, and not a word whose definition is
settled.
4. The quotations are from Ad Her. I I I .16.28ff., as Albertus continues his effort to
fit the rhetorician’s understanding of memoria to that defined in Aristotle’s
psychological works. Inductio is probably understood technically here, refer-
ring to a kind of argumentation, discussed by both Cicero and Quintilian,
which proceeds by analogy from a number of specific cases to infer a general
principle or universal rule.
5. Albertus may be thinking here of Aristotle’s definition of memoria, which
includes the observation that a memory can be generated only after some
time has past after the event we remember. But the idea that past time is part
of the very definition of memory is familiar in the thirteenth century, and does
not have to be related specifically to Aristotle – recall the common figure of
Prudence with three eyes, looking to past, present, and future.
6. As shown in Chapter 4, the obscurity of this segment of the Rhetorica ad
Herennium is not helped by the fact that Albertus was using a bad edition of it.
The correct reading is, in part, ‘‘Aesopum et Cimbrum subornari ut ad
Iphegeniam in Agamemnonem et Menelaum,’’ ‘‘Aesop and Cimber being
dressed as Agamemnon and Menelaus for [a drama of] Iphigenia.’’ Albertus’s
text read something like ‘‘Aesopum et Cimbrum subornari ut vel vagantem
Ephigeniam.’’ Albertus does what he can with this senseless quotation – under-
standing subornari as ‘‘supply, prepare, equip,’’ he has Aesop and Cimber being
supplied or fitted-out as wandering Iphigenia (though he seems to reverse the
order of the characters in the last clause of his explanation).
7. Again, Albertus has an altered text: Ad Herennium reads ‘‘egregie turpe,
inhonestum, inusitatem, magnum, incredibile, ridiculum’’; Albertus has ‘‘egre-
gie aut honestum aut turpe in homines, tum inauditum, magnum, incredibile,
periculosum.’’
8. In his response, Albertus reverses the order of the fourth and fifth of Tullius’
precepts, as set forth in his first statement of them. This reversal seems to reflect
Albertus’s understanding that the rule regarding intervalla, which I discussed in
Chapters 2 and 4, refers not to the viewer’s imagined distance from the background but to the differentiation of one imagined location from others in its set
(which is a possible meaning of intervalla, just not the one operative here). In
later memory arts, such as Peter of Ravenna’s Fenix and Robert Copland’s
Notes to pp. 358–368
457
English version of it (1548), both imagined dimensons are given, roughly thirty
feet for the imagined distance of the viewer and five or six feet for the distance
between the imagined locations.
9. On Albertus’s distinction between vis formalis and vis imaginativa, see
Wolfson, ‘‘The Internal Senses,’’ and Chapter 2 above. Basically, the ‘‘shap-
ing-power’’ (formalis) is more simply passive than the ‘‘image-making-power’’
(imaginativa), though both are prior (and so ‘‘lower’’) to the ‘‘higher’’ function-
/> ing of memory and recollection.
A P P E N D I X C
1. I have translated the text which I edited from the three extant manuscripts. The
manuscripts, authorship, and manuscript variants are all discussed in that
edition. See also my introduction to this text in Carruthers and Ziolkowski
(eds.), The Medieval Craft of Memory. Previously published in The Medieval
Craft of Memory, the translation is printed here with permission of The
University of Pennsylvania Press.
2. The linguistic legerdemain in this text is noteworthy. Not only are puns made
readily across the three main languages of England (English, French, and Latin)
but dialect variants also are pressed into service. Bradwardine exploits ‘‘the
sounds of all languages’’ as John of Garland had also advised a century earlier.
Just as Latin qui is sounded as ky, so this pun would require that anguilla be
sounded as angilla to make a proper, if partial, homophony with anglia.
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