The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  ing to write just the same. What Evan took for sleep may have been an

  extreme form of Thomas’s concentration. Or perhaps we should credit

  the story as told; since the matter had been worked out beforehand in

  8

  The Book of Memory

  Thomas’s memory, perhaps a kind of mental ‘‘automatic pilot’’ took over

  in times of extreme fatigue.

  Most remarkable is the testimony of all his pupils and secretaries,

  including Reginald, that ‘‘he used to dictate in his cell to three secretaries,

  and even occasionally to four, on different subjects at the same time.’’17 Gui

  comments, ‘‘No one could dictate simultaneously so much various material

  without a special grace.’’ Dondaine is inclined to discount this story as the

  evidence of the single Breton secretary (are Bretons especially credulous?).

  Yet Gui ascribes the testimony to all those who wrote to Thomas’s

  dictation. 18

  Moreover, as Dondaine himself notes, such stories have been told –

  though rarely – of other historical figures, notably Julius Caesar. Petrarch

  tells the story about Caesar, as an instance of trained memory (‘‘ut memoria

  polleret eximia’’), that he could dictate four letters on different subjects to

  others, while writing a fifth in his own hand. 19 Whether the tale is factual or

  not is less important for my analysis than that Petrarch understood it as

  evidence of the power of Caesar’s memory, for Petrarch himself had a

  significant reputation as an authority on memory training. Thomas’s

  biographer, too, understood a similar feat to be enabled by powerful

  memory. But it is not achieved by raw talent alone; indeed natural talent

  will not produce such facility or accuracy. Memory must be trained, in

  accordance with certain elementary techniques.

  The nature of these techniques and how they were taught is the subject

  of much of my study. Memoria meant, at that time, trained memory,

  educated and disciplined according to a well-developed pedagogy that was

  part of the elementary language arts – grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The

  fundamental principle is to ‘‘divide’’ the material to be remembered into

  pieces short enough to be recalled in single units and to key these into

  some sort of rigid, easily reconstructable order. This provides one with a

  ‘‘random-access’’ memory system, by means of which one can immediately

  and securely find a particular bit of information, rather than having to start

  from the beginning each time in order laboriously to reconstruct the whole

  system, or – worse – relying on simple chance to fish what one wants out

  from the murky pool of one’s undifferentiated and disorganized memory.

  It is possible for one with a well-trained memory to compose clearly in

  an organized fashion on several different subjects. Once one has the all-

  important starting-place of the ordering scheme and the contents firmly in

  their places within it, it is quite possible to move back and forth from one

  distinct composition to another without losing one’s place or becoming

  confused. As an experiment, I tried memorizing a few psalms (texts that

  Introduction

  9

  come to us with a divisional system already in place) in accordance with

  an elementary scheme described by the twelfth-century teacher Hugh of

  St. Victor – a scheme that I analyze in detail in Chapter 3. That scheme

  enabled me to recall the texts in any order I pleased. If one so novice and

  unskilled as I am can recite without difficulty three psalms ‘‘at the same

  time’’ (that is, going easily from one psalm to another, verse to verse,

  backwards or forwards or skipping around at will), a memory as highly

  talented and trained as Thomas’s could surely manage three quaestiones of

  his own composition at the same time. The key lies in the imposition of a

  rigid order to which clearly prepared pieces of textual content are attached.

  Both the initial laying down of the scheme and its recollection are accom-

  plished in a state of profound concentration. Proper preparation of mate-

  rial, rigid order, and complete concentration are the requirements which

  Thomas Aquinas himself defines in his discourses on trained memory, and,

  as we will see, they are continuously emphasized in all ancient and medieval

  mnemonic practices.

  Scholars have always recognized that memory necessarily played a

  crucial role in pre-modern Western civilization, for in a world of few

  books, and those mostly in communal libraries, one’s education had to

  be remembered, for one could never depend on having continuing access

  to specific material. While acknowledging this, however, insufficient atten-

  tion has been paid to the pedagogy of memory, to what memory was

  thought to be, and how and why it was trained. Nor can the immense value

  attached to trained memory be understood only in terms of differing

  technical applications, though these are basic.

  It is my contention that medieval culture was fundamentally memorial,

  to the same profound degree that modern culture in the West is docu-

  mentary. This distinction certainly involves technologies – mnemotechnique

  and printing – but it is not confined to them. For the valuing of memoria

  persisted long after book technology itself had changed. That is why the

  fact of books in themselves, which were much more available in the late

  Middle Ages than ever before, did not profoundly disturb the essential

  value of memory training until many centuries had passed. Indeed the very

  purpose of a book is differently understood in a memorial culture like that

  of the Middle Ages than it is today.

  A book is not necessarily the same thing as a text. ‘‘Texts’’ are the

  material out of which human beings make ‘‘literature.’’ For us, texts only

  come in books, and so the distinction between the two is blurred and even

  lost. But, in a memorial culture, a ‘‘book’’ is only one way among several to

  remember a ‘‘text,’’ to provision and cue one’s memory with ‘‘dicta et facta

  10

  The Book of Memory

  memorabilia.’’ So a book is itself a mnemonic, among many other func-

  tions it can also have. Thomas Aquinas makes this assumption about books

  in a comment on Ps. 69:28 (‘‘Let them be blotted from the book of life’’):

  A thing is said metaphorically to be written on the mind of anyone when it is

  firmly held in the memory . . . For things are written down in material books to

  help the memory.20

  Andrew of St. Victor, writing over a hundred years earlier, comments

  similarly on Is. 1:18 (‘‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white

  as snow’’):

  According to Jewish tradition, the sins of all men are preserved in writing on a

  shining white substance . . . Grievous sins are written in red and other colours

  which adhere more faithfully to the parchment and strike the reader’s eye more

  readily . . . When sins are said to be written in books, what else does it mean but

  that God remembers as though they were written? 21

  In the early twelfth century, Hugh of St. Victor, instructing some young


  students on how to remember, explains clearly the mnemonic utility of

  manuscript page layout and decoration. Repeating traditional advice about

  always memorizing from the same written source, lest a confusion of

  images caused by seeing different layouts make it impossible for the

  brain to impress a single image, he says:

  it is a great value for fixing a memory-image that when we read books, we strive to

  impress on our memory . . . the color, shape, position, and placement of the

  letters, . . . in what location (at the top, the middle or bottom) we saw [something]

  positioned, in what color we observed the trace of the letter or the ornamented

  surface of the parchment. Indeed I consider nothing so useful for stimulating the

  memory as this.

  Much later, in his Archiloge sophie (c. 1400), the humanist scholar Jacques

  Legrand gave similar advice to pay close attention to the color of lines and

  the appearance of the page in order to fix the text as a visual image in

  memory:

  wherefore one best learns by studying from illuminated books, for the different

  colors bestow remembrance of the different lines and consequently of that thing

  which one wants to get by heart. And indeed, when they wanted to record and

  learn a matter by heart, the ancients placed various colors and figures in their

  books to the end that the diversity and difference would give [them] better

  recollection.22

  Throughout this study, my concern is with educated memory. All my

  evidence comes from learned works, most of them written in Latin, from

  Introduction

  11

  about the fourth through the fourteenth centuries; the few vernacular poets

  I cite are themselves learned, working within a highly educated group.

  Memoria, as these writers understood and practiced it, was a part of

  litteratura: indeed it was what literature, in a fundamental sense, was for.

  Memory is one of the five divisions of ancient and medieval rhetoric; it was

  regarded, moreover, by more than one writer on the subject as the

  ‘‘noblest’’ of all these, the basis for the rest. Memoria was also an integral

  part of the virtue of prudence, that which makes moral judgment possible.

  Training the memory was much more than a matter of providing oneself

  with the means to compose and converse intelligently when books were not

  readily to hand, for it was in trained memory that one built character,

  judgment, citizenship, and piety.

  Memoria also signifies the process by which a work of literature becomes

  institutionalized – internalized within the language and pedagogy of a

  group. In describing the truth of Holy Scripture, John Wyclif argues that

  God’s text is contained only in a sort of shorthand form in books, language,

  and other human artifacts ‘‘which are the memorial clues and traces of pre-

  existing truth’’; because of this, the actual words are five times removed

  from Truth itself, and must therefore be continually interpreted and

  adapted to what he calls the liber vitae, the living book or book of life in

  the actual person of Christ.23 This opinion is a commonplace; Wyclif

  attributes it to Augustine, but we find it earlier than that, for the idea

  that language, as a sign of something else, is always at a remove from reality

  is one of the cornerstones of ancient rhetoric. This idea gives to both books

  and language a subsidiary and derivative cultural role with respect to

  memoria, for they have no meaning except in relation to it. A work is not

  truly read until one has made it part of oneself – that process constitutes a

  necessary stage of its textualization. Merely running one’s eyes over the

  written pages is not reading at all, for the writing must be transferred into

  memory, from graphemes on parchment or papyrus or paper to images

  written in one’s brain by emotion and sense.

  It should be clear from what I have said so far that I am not concerned

  with what has traditionally been the subject of studies of the rise of literacy

  during the Middle Ages, although I have, inevitably, run up against other

  scholars’ distinctions between oral and literate societies in the course of my

  work. As a historian of literature, my emphasis is on the function of

  literature in particular societies – and ‘‘literature’’ is not the same thing as

  ‘‘literacy.’’ The ability to write is not always the same thing as the ability to

  compose and comprehend in a fully textual way, for indeed one who writes

  (a scribe) may simply be a skilled practitioner, employed in a capacity akin

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  The Book of Memory

  to that of a professional typist today. The distinction of composing (or

  ‘‘making’’ in Middle English) from writing-down continued to be honored

  throughout the Middle Ages. Similarly, learning by hearing material and

  reciting aloud should not be confused with ignorance of reading. Especially

  in describing the Middle Ages, when the criterion of being litteratus was

  knowledge of Latin, one should be careful to remember that some degree of

  bilingualism (Latin and a vernacular) was a fact of every educated European’s

  life, and not confuse apologies for ‘ illiteracy,’’ meaning ‘ unable to compose

  fluently in Latin,’ with an apology for being unable to think or write clearly

  in any language.24

  Historians of literacy have been concerned with normative channels of

  communication in societies. An oral society is thus one in which communi-

  cation occurs in forms other than written documents, and in which law and

  government are conducted on the basis of orally preserved custom. For such

  a historian, much of the best evidence comes from studying the changing

  ways in which legally persuasive evidence was thought to be established. 25 In

  the medieval period, such studies have focused on the ways in which the

  tribal cultures of Germanic, northern Europe became acculturated to the

  literate norms of late Roman law and education, preserved primarily in Italy

  and in the institutions of the Roman church. Because oral cultures must

  obviously depend on memory, and hence value memory highly, such valor-

  ization has come to be seen as a hallmark of orality, as opposed to literacy.

  This has led to a further assumption that literacy and memory are per se

  incompatible, and that a ‘‘rise of literacy’’ will therefore bring with it a

  consequent devalorizing and disuse of memory.

  It is this assumption that my study calls particularly into doubt. For the

  cultivation and training of memory was a basic aspect of the literate society

  of Rome as well as Greece, and continued to be necessary to literature and

  culture straight through the Middle Ages. This privileged cultural role of

  memory seems independent of ‘‘orality’’ and ‘‘literacy’’ as these terms have

  come to be defined in the social sciences, and it is dangerous to confuse

  those terms with a literary and ethical concept like medieval ‘‘memory.’’

  Indeed, I think it is probably misleading to speak of literary culture as a

  version of ‘‘literacy’’ at all. The reason is simply this – as a concept, literacy

  privileges a phys
ical artifact, the writing-support, over the social and

  rhetorical process that a text both records and generates, namely, the

  composition by an author and its reception by an audience. The institu-

  tions of literature, including education in the arts of language, the con-

  ventions of debate, and meditation, as well as oratory and poetry, are

  rhetorically conceived and fostered.

  Introduction

  13

  The valuing of memory training depends more, I think, on the role

  which rhetoric has in a culture than on whether its texts are presented in

  oral or written forms, or some combination of the two. For the sake of

  definition, I will distinguish here between fundamentalism and textualism

  as representing two polar views of what literature is and how it functions in

  society. These two extremes are always in tension with one another; one can

  analyze many changes in literary theory as efforts to redress an imbalance of

  one over the other. (For example, some Biblical scholars of the thirteenth

  century stressed the literal ‘‘intention’’ of the text in order to redress what

  they saw as an excess of interpretative commentary on the part of earlier

  exegetes – in my terms, this would be a dash of fundamentalism injected to

  offset too excessive a textualism.)

  Fundamentalism regards a work of literature as essentially not requiring

  interpretation. It emphasizes its literal form as independent of circum-

  stance, audience, author – of all those factors that are summed up in

  rhetorical analyses by the word ‘‘occasion.’’ Legal scholars speak of ‘‘orig-

  inalists,’’ those who believe that the original intention of a written docu-

  ment is contained entirely in its words, and that all interpretation is

  unnecessary and distracting. The kinship of this position to religious

  fundamentalism is apparent. True fundamentalism understands words

  not as signs or clues but takes them as things in themselves. It also regards

  works exclusively as objects, which are therefore independent of institu-

  tions – perhaps that is why fundamentalism was so frequently a component

  of medieval heresies. 26

  Fundamentalism denies legitimacy to interpretation. Instead of inter-

  preting, a reader is engaged at most only in rephrasing the meaning of the

  written document, a meaning which is really transparent, simple, and