The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  essential human competencies (like the ability to add) rather than techni-

  ques (like digital computation) or technologies (like silicon chips). As

  M. T. Clanchy says of literacy, ‘‘It has different effects [on human societies]

  according to circumstances and is not a civilizing force in itself ’ (my

  emphasis).62 The ancients began from the twin assumptions that the

  mind already writes when it stores up its experience in representations,

  and, as a corollary, that the graphic expression of such representations is

  not an event of particular importance, at least for ‘‘ways of thinking about

  things’’ – no more important than the sound of an individual’s voice is to

  his or her ability to use language. From this viewpoint, the symbolic

  representations that we call writing are no more than cues or triggers for

  the memorial representations, also symbolic, upon which human cognition

  is based. And to mistake one sort of thing for the other would be a

  significant error. Writing something down cannot change in any signifi-

  cant way our mental representation of it, for it is the mental representation

  that gives birth to the written form, not vice versa.

  From this viewpoint also anything that encodes information in order to

  stimulate the memory to store or retrieve information is ‘‘writing,’’ whether

  it be alphabet, hieroglyph, ideogram, American Indian picture-writing, or

  Inca knot-writing. Writing is as fundamental to language as is speaking.

  We still habitually use ‘‘he said’’ to mean ‘‘he wrote’’; though this idiom has

  been adduced as evidence of deeply buried ‘‘aural residue,’’ it can equally

  well be interpreted as an acknowledgment that both writing and speaking

  are expressions of a more fundamental human competency.

  Clearly various societies have felt variously a need to put systems of

  mental representation and organization down on some surface, but the

  impulse to do this, and the preserved form it may take, has more to do with

  the complexity of their social organization, the other groups with which

  they come into contact, the nature of materials used and their accessibility,

  than with the way in which a human being is able to form and organize

  mental representations for cognition, and to understand that they are

  representations (i.e. they ‘‘stand for’’ something). I will later discuss a

  case wherein a lag of well over a millennium demonstrably exists between

  the common use of a particular scheme of mental organization and its first

  Models for the memory

  37

  appearance in written form. Similarly, neither the prevalence nor the form

  of written materials in a culture should, I think, be taken as any sure

  indication of those people’s ability to think in rational categories, or of the

  structures those categories may take. I am not suggesting that technique

  and technology have no effect upon human culture; this study is concerned

  to identify and describe a number of distinctive features in medieval literary

  culture which are sometimes expressed in particular techniques, such as

  page layout. But I try not to reify technique, and in particular I think it very

  important to recognize that the form in which information is presented to

  the mind does not necessarily constrain the way in which such information

  is encoded by the brain nor the ways in which it can be found and sorted.

  The three are distinct. 63 Classical and medieval philosophers recognized

  this when they said that all information, whatever its source or form,

  becomes a phantasm in the brain. And those phantasmata are retrieved

  by heuristic schemes that need bear little resemblance to the form in which

  the information was originally received.

  The idea that language is oral, that writing is not a fundamental part of

  it, is a modern one, enunciated by linguists like de Saussure and Leonard

  Bloomfield, and then generalized into a theory of culture and even of

  epistemology by the French Structuralists, chiefly Claude Le´vi-Strauss. It

  has become a canon in this theory that Western culture can be divided into

  periods characterized by ‘‘pre-’’ and ‘‘post-Gutenberg man [sic],’’ and the

  dividing line is marked by a ‘‘veering toward the visual,’’ to use Walter

  Ong’s careening image. 64 My study will make it clear that from earliest

  times medieval educators had as visual and spatial an idea of locus as any

  Ramist had, which they inherited continuously from antiquity, and indeed

  that concern for the lay-out of memory governed much in medieval

  education designed to aid the mind in forming and maintaining heuristic

  formats that are both spatial and visualizable.

  T H E S A U R U S S A P I E N T I A E

  The second major metaphor used in ancient and medieval times for the

  educated memory was that of thesaurus, ‘‘storage-room,’’ ‘‘treasury,’’ and

  ‘‘strongbox.’’ Whereas the metaphor of the seal-in-wax or written tablets

  was a model for the process of making the memorial phantasm and storing

  it in a place in the memory, this second metaphor refers both to the

  contents of such a memory and to its internal organization. An important

  ancient version of the storage-room metaphor occurs in Plato’s Theaetetus,

  when Socrates, explaining how one is able to recall particular pieces of

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  The Book of Memory

  information, likens the things stored in memory to domestic pigeons

  housed in a pigeon-coop. This occurrence attests to the antiquity of the

  store-house; indeed, these metaphors, equally visual, equally spatial, seem

  to be equally ancient as well. But we should also take careful note of Plato’s

  metaphor for memory’s contents, namely domesticated birds. Pigeons have

  two salient characteristics for this model: they are raised for nourishment,

  and they naturally fly away. In his Institutiones, Cassiodorus uses a signifi-

  cant variant of Plato’s pigeon-coop. He describes the structured memory,

  this mirabile genus operis or ‘‘remarkable piece of work,’’ as a kind of

  inventoried set of coops or animal-pens. One should think of each stall

  or coop as a labeled ‘‘topic’’ or place, which not only keeps things, but

  informs the otherwise untrammeled brain, directs it, and makes it useful, in

  this case for the task of thinking.

  Although the metaphor of animal-coops appears to be the same as the

  now-maligned filing-cabinet model for human memory, the reference of

  this pre-modern metaphor is considerably different, in a way that pro-

  foundly affects how we should understand it historically. The ‘‘filing-

  cabinet’’ model in Modernist psychology refers to the mind’s success in

  finding unaltered, unculled material in memory, material that, like stored

  documents, remains unchangingly complete and accurate. In other words,

  the modern metaphor concerns memory’s ability wholly to recapture a

  past, complete and unaltered, for its own sake. But the purpose of the

  metaphor in antiquity and the Middle Ages is not that. Treasuries and

  book-chests are not like twentieth-century filing-cabinets. They contain

  ‘‘
riches,’’ not documents. And their contents are valued for their richness in

  terms of their present usefulness, not their ‘‘accuracy’’ or their certification

  of ‘‘what really happened.’’ When a medieval abbot wanted to authenticate

  the charters of his foundation, he sought out a written document in his

  monastery’s library (or he forged one), he did not search for it in the

  scrinium of his well-structured memory.65 This is a crucial difference

  between the pre-modern and modern notions of the goals of human

  memoria. Medieval abbots also cared deeply about authenticity, especially

  when the legal standing of their monasteries was at stake, but their own

  memory training served a different purpose, and its contents were imag-

  ined as alive (animals and birds) or as materials to be used richly in the

  commerce of creative thought (coins, jewels, foods).

  In the medieval metaphor, memory’s storage structures allow the mind

  its truly ‘‘liberal’’ essence, just as training a horse enables the animal to

  function at peak ability, to become what its nature intends. As Cassiodorus

  says, the inventory of topica memoriae at once structures and channels the

  Models for the memory

  39

  untrammeled intellect (‘‘conclusit liberum ac voluntarium intellectum’’),

  because whatever notions (‘‘cogitationes’’) the mind may have entered

  upon (‘‘intraverit’’), the intelligence (‘‘humanum ingenium’’) drops into

  (‘‘cadat’’) one or another of these places (‘‘in aliquid eorum’’), and having

  done this, then coherent thoughts can be formed out of the mobility and

  variety of the mind’s experiences.66

  The relationship which Cassiodorus conceives between the structures

  and their content is quite clear in this passage. Of first importance is the

  comprehensive form, laid out in topica memoriae, places of memory

  appropriate to rhetoric, dialectic, poetry, and jurisprudence – this structure

  (the trained memory) sorts and gathers the knowledge a person has gained.

  One is not born with this structure, nor is it passively gained; one con-

  structs it oneself during one’s education. And whatever experiences one has

  will be channeled by this previously laid-out inventory, and will find their

  appropriate place, each contributing its matter to the general store.

  Without the sorting structure, there is no invention, no inventory, no

  experience, and therefore no knowledge – there is only a useless heap, what

  is sometimes called silva, a pathless forest of chaotic material. Memory

  without conscious design is like an uncatalogued library, a useless contra-

  diction in terms. For human memory should be most like a library of texts,

  made accessible and useful through various consciously applied heuristic

  schemes. St. Jerome wrote of a gifted young scholar that ‘‘by careful reading

  and daily meditation his heart [i.e. by means of his memory] constructed a

  library for Christ.’’67 In order to understand something, we must first have

  a place to put it, something to attach it to in the inventory of all our

  previous experience.

  Modern scholars usually translate cogitatio as ‘‘thought,’’ but this con-

  ceals a crucial difference in how pre-moderns conceived of what that is

  from how we conceive of it. Cassiodorus says literally that ‘‘the mind enters

  into thoughts’’; a modern would much more likely say ‘‘the mind thinks.’’

  Cogitatio (con þ agito, ‘‘move, rouse’’) is defined in rhetoric (and in Greco-

  Arabic somatic psychology) as a combinative or compositional activity of

  the mind. It necessarily uses memory because it combines imagines from

  memory’s store. One should therefore think of a single cogitatio or

  ‘‘thought’’ as a small-scale composition, a bringing-together (con þ pono)

  of various pieces (as phantasmata) from one’s inventory. The topica provide

  both content and structure for these cogitationes. Aristotle – and all succeed-

  ing writers – distinguishes between ‘‘general’’ topica and ‘‘particular’’ ones;

  basically, in this context, the general topics are structuring devices solely,

  such as comparison, contrast, and the like, while the particular topics are

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  The Book of Memory

  the collected expressions of an ethico-political concept, such as mercy,

  wisdom, justice, and so on. A commonplace is described as being ‘‘made’’

  or ‘‘manufactured’’ – Augustine says that Simplicius, when asked for a locus

  communis on some subject, would ‘‘make’’ it (‘‘de quocumque loco volui-

  mus . . . fecit’’). One does not simply parrot forth some previously recorded

  dictum word for word by rote, but builds a ‘‘topic’’ or ‘‘commonplace’’ out

  of materials from one’s memorial inventory.

  The topica provide the construction materials for thoughts, for whether

  one takes a simple Aristotelian position that knowledge is composed of

  experience constructed from many memories, or whether one shares with

  the (Neo)Platonists the belief that knowledge is a process of remembering

  the imprints of hypostatized Ideas, thoughts cannot be made without the

  materials in memory. For whatever memory holds occupies a topos or place,

  by the very nature of what it is, and these topica, like bins in a storehouse,

  have both contents and structure. Every topic is in this sense a mnemonic, a

  structure of memory for recollection.

  The image of the memorial store-house is a rich model of pre-modern

  mnemonic practice. It takes a number of related forms and gives rise to

  several allied metaphors for the activity of an educated mind, but all center

  upon the notion of a designed memory as the inventory of all experiential

  knowledge, and especially of those truths of ethics, polity, and law, which

  are copious and rich in their very nature. Synonyms of thesaurus which

  are also used for the memory include cella or cellula, arca, sacculus,

  scrinium, and the Middle English word male (carry-sack), used perhaps

  most famously in Harry Bailly’s comment to the company in The

  Canterbury Tales just after the Knight has spoken: ‘‘This gooth aright;

  unbokeled is the male!’’ It occurs again, of course, at the end of the tale-

  telling, when Harry Bailly cautions the Parson to ‘‘unbokele and shew us

  what is in thy male.’’68

  Zeno the Stoic (fourth–third century BC) defines memory as th¯esaurisma

  phantasio¯n or ‘‘storehouse of mental images.’’69 Thesaurus is used meta-

  phorically in both Romans (2:5) and the gospel of Matthew (6:19–20) in

  the sense of storing up intangible things for salvation, the Greek being

  translated by Jerome as a verb, thesaurizare, thus: ‘‘Nolite thesaurizare vobis

  thesauros in terra . . . Thesaurizate autem vobis thesauros in caelo.’’70 The

  Rhetorica ad Herennium calls memory the treasurehouse of invented things,

  ‘‘thesauru[s] inventorum’’ (III, 16), referring particularly to a memory

  trained by the artificial scheme which the author proceeds to recommend.

  Quintilian, also recommending a cultivated memory, calls it ‘‘thesaurus

  eloquentiae�
��’ (XI, 2, 2).

  Models for the memory

  41

  But these metaphorical uses, though they clearly demonstrate the per-

  vasiveness and antiquity of the link between thesaurus and a trained

  memory, do not help us know how a medieval student, encountering the

  word, might visualize the object denoted. Thesaurus refers both to what is

  in the strongbox, the ‘‘treasures,’’ as when Augustine speaks of the treasures

  of countless images in his memory, ‘‘ubi sunt thesauri innumerabilium

  imaginum’’ (Conf., X, 8), and to the strongbox itself. When the wise men

  kneel before Jesus in Matthew’s account (2:11), they bring out their offer-

  ings of gold, frankincense, and myrrh from opened thesauri: ‘‘et apertis

  thesauris suis obtulerunt ei munera, aurum, thus, et myrrham.’’71 The

  thesauri of the wise men are portable strongboxes such as a merchant

  might carry.

  Cella, the word used by Geoffrey of Vinsauf for the memory (which he

  calls a cellula deliciarum) also means ‘‘storeroom,’’ as indeed its derivative

  form, cellarium, English ‘‘cellar,’’ still indicates. When Chaucer’s Monk

  threatens to tell numerous tragedies ‘‘Of whiche I have an hundred in my

  celle’’ (VII. 1972), he is more likely using the word to refer to his memory

  ‘‘cell’’ or store than to a cell in his monastery. After all, a hundred tragedies

  housed in books back home are not going to do him any good when having

  to tell a tale or two on the road to Canterbury, but stories in his memory-

  cell are a different matter. Therefore, though virtually every editor of

  Chaucer has thought the Middle English word needed no gloss, it does:

  the Monk is saying that he has a hundred stories tucked away in his

  memory. The gloss is underscored by the Monk’s mention two lines later

  of the ‘‘memorie’’ of tragedies made to us by ‘‘olde bookes.’’

  But the Latin word cella has a number of more specialized applications

  that link it complexly to several other common metaphors for both the

  stored memory and the study of books, as well as words like arca and

  thesaurus. Cellae are stalls or nesting-places for domestic animals and birds,

  and, by a transference of meaning, small rooms or huts for people (whence

  derives the word’s monastic usage, invoked by Hugh of St. Victor as a