The Book of Memory
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metaphor for trained memory, which he likens in his Chronicle preface to
the cellae of a cloister or ambitus). In classical Latin, a dove-cote was called a
cella columbarum.72 The compartments made by bees for their honey are
called cellae (still called ‘‘cells’’ in English). So Virgil in his Fourth Georgic
describes the various tasks of bees: ‘‘aliae purissima melle / stipant et liquido
distendunt nectare cellas,’’ ‘‘others pack the purest honey and distend the
cells with liquid nectar.’’73
Bees and birds (which pre-modern natural history thought of as closely
related creatures, ‘‘flying animals’’) are also linked by persistent associations
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with memory and ordered recollection. Indeed there is a long-standing
chain or – a better word – a texture of metaphors that likens the placement
of memory-images in a trained memory to the keeping of birds (especially
pigeons) and to the honey-making of bees. Trained memory is also linked
metaphorically to a library. And the chain is completed by a metaphoric
connection of books in a library both to memories placed in orderly cells
and to birds and bees in their celled coops and hives. These links are
extensive and commonplace in Greek and Latin, as well as later languages.
I hope I may be indulged for a few paragraphs while I trace some of them.
My method of demonstrating these links, though hardly constituting proof
in modern terms, may be justified its place in this study as an example of a
basic memory technique called collatio, ‘‘gathering,’’ which builds up a
network, a texture, of associations to show a common theme.
First, pigeons. The first-century Roman writer, Junius Moderatus
Columella, whose De re rustica is a guide to agricultural practices, calls
the coop in which pigeons were kept a cella or cellula. He also uses the word
loculamenta, and describes how such ‘‘tiers of pigeon-holes’’ are constructed
of boards and pegs to make a structure divided into separate cells or
compartments suitable for each pigeon to nest in. This structure he calls
‘‘columbis loculamenta vel cellulae.’’74 The word loculamenta was also used
at this time for bookcases. Seneca so uses it for personal bookcases; Martial
uses the related word nidus, ‘‘nest’’ or ‘‘pigeon- hole,’’ for the place where
his book-seller kept copies of his work. In one of his epigrams, he says that
his works can be bought easily from a book-seller: ‘‘Out of his first or
second pigeon-hole [nidus], polished with pumice, smart in a purple
covering, for five denarii he will give you Martial.’’75 Another word for
Roman bookcases was forulus, a diminutive of forus, meaning a ‘‘gallery’’ or
‘‘tier,’’ and used by Virgil for the tiers of cells that make up a bee-hive.76
J. W. Clark concludes that papyrus rolls were kept in shelving against a
wall, in which the horizontal shelves were subdivided by verticals into
pigeon-holes (nidi, foruli, loculamenta) ‘‘and it may be conjectured that the
width of the pigeonholes would vary in accordance with the number of
rolls included in a single work.’’77 The English word ‘‘pigeon-holes,’’
meaning compartments in a desk or cabinet into which papers are sorted
and filed, is a recent imitation of classical usage (OED’s earliest citation is
late eighteenth century).78
In the light of this ancient association between nesting birds and ‘‘nest-
ing’’ scrolls, one might reconsider Plato’s other metaphor in Theaetetus for
memory, namely ‘‘pigeon-holes,’’ peristereon. A peristera is the familiar
domestic pigeon, columba livia, which inhabits buildings of every sort,
Models for the memory
43
whether especially designed for it or not.79 The pigeons, Plato says, stand
for bits of knowledge, some in flocks, some in small groups, some solitary.
When we are infants, our coops are empty, and as we acquire pieces of
information, we shut them up in our enclosure – this is called ‘‘knowing.’’80
Plato is clearly being partly playful, though peristereon certainly belongs
to the large class of ‘‘store-room’’ images for the memory. Birds are a
common image for souls, memories, and thoughts throughout the ancient
world, both classical and Hebrew. Feathered thoughts and winged mem-
ories copiously flock in the Psalms, in Virgil, and many lesser texts, though
one of the best and, in the Middle Ages, most remembered is that of
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, IV, prose and meter 1. 81 But here
Plato refers specifically to pigeons, not (more abstractly) souls with wings
attached, like angels. Given the fundamental ancient assumption that
written material in essence is an expression or extension of memory,
I wonder if this Theaetetus image hasn’t got something also to do with
the use of words and phrases meaning ‘‘pigeon-holes’’ and ‘‘dove-boxes’’ for
library-cases full of various sorts of written rolls. Perhaps Plato was fanci-
fully playing with an established metaphor which the Romans later imi-
tated, or perhaps this helped to establish later use. The point cannot be
settled. There is, however, a curious use of the word epistylion in Aristotle’s
Constitution of Athens. The epistylion is the architrave on which, in the
Doric architectural style, rested the characteristic entablature of metopes
and triglyphs. In context, Aristotle’s use of the word is a metaphoric
transference, which John Edwin Sandys, the nineteenth-century classical
scholar, explains as follows: ‘‘I should understand it to mean a shelf
supporting a series of ‘pigeon-holes,’ and itself supported by wooden
pedestals, in the office of the public clerk. The entablature in Doric
architecture, with its originally open metopes alternating between the
triglyphs, may well have suggested a metaphorical term for a shelf of
‘pigeon-holes,’ used for the preservation of public documents.’’82 While
I am engaged in this wild speculation concerning the foundations of the
pigeon-hole metaphor, we might consider as well that open metopes make
splendid pigeon-roosts, columba livia being no respecter of public build-
ings. I realize that these are slender reeds – but there they are.
The metaphoric relationship of birds, especially pigeons, to thoughts
and memories persisted in the Middle Ages, aided by Boethius and the
Holy Spirit, as well as the dove (columba) released by Noah from the Ark,83
but medieval writers do not pick up the pigeon-hole/book/memory con-
nections, probably because the idiom fell into disuse after the codex-book
was generally adopted, for codices were kept flat on horizontal shelving
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The Book of Memory
without verticals, in a cupboard-like structure, free-standing or (more
commonly) built into a recess in the thick medieval walls – called arca,
armarium, bibliotheca, or columna.84 Bees and honey-cells, however, are a
different matter.
The earliest surviving occurrence of the trope is in Longinus, but
Longinus himself suggests that he is using a wel
l-established metaphor
(as indeed the use of loculamenta and forulus for both ‘‘beehive’’ and
‘‘bookcase’’ would corroborate). Quintilian likens the orator, who makes
eloquence from many arts and disciplines, to bees which ‘‘turn various
kinds of flowers and juices into that flavour of honey which no human skill
can imitate’’; the trope is also used by Seneca, in a version I discuss at length
in Chapter 6.85 Richard de Bury, the fourteenth-century English humanist and Chancellor to Edward III, seems to have thought that the metaphor lay
in some way behind Virgil’s poem on bee-keeping, the Fourth Georgic,
because of the mnemonic associations centering in the word cella and its
synonyms, and the trope of readers as bees.
Richard de Bury’s language (if it is his, though I see no reason to saddle
Robert Holcot, in spite of that friar’s own extreme inventiveness, with the
preciosity of Philobiblon)86 is allusive (several less kind adjectives also
present themselves). He is inordinately fond, by modern taste, of elaborate
allegories and learned conceits, obscure allusions, unattributed echoes, and
other devices that test or flatter the learning of his readers, a style he
characterizes as ‘‘stilo quidem levissimo modernorum,’’ ‘‘in the very playful
modern manner.’’87 An example of it is the following description of how to
read a book:
But the written truth of books, not transient but permanent, plainly offers itself to
be observed, and through the translucent spheres of the eyes [per sphaerulas
pervias], 88 passing through the vestibule of the common sense and the atriums
of imagination, it enters the bed-chamber [thalamum] of the intellect, laying itself
down in the beds [cubili] of memory, where it cogenerates [congenerat] the eternal
truth of the mind. 89
Bury is playing with a number of traditions here, among them the newly
rediscovered ancient mnemonic based on architectural places of memory.
Wisdom in books must be memorized to be useful and truth-producing –
what more light-hearted modern way to state this old adage than by a witty
play with the most learned and humanistic of mnemonic arts? Hence the
process of turning a sense perception into a thought is imaged on the places
of a classical house: vestibulum, atrium, thalamus, and cubile. But that is not
all. Bury also seems to me to invoke here the Fourth Georgic particularly,
Models for the memory
45
for Virgil speaks of the bees’ cells as ‘‘cubilia’’ (42, 243), and of the bees
retiring for the night in their bed-chambers: ‘‘iam thalamis se composuere’’
(189). ‘‘Honeycombs,’’ ‘‘bees,’’ and ‘‘bee-hives’’ figure commonly as meta-
phors for books, book-collecting, memory, and scholarship elsewhere in
Philobiblon, and to catch the allusion here to Virgil’s bees in a discussion of
memory and books would, I think, please Bury immensely. It’s exactly the
obscurely lumbering sort of pedantic play he found amusing.
But if Bury is being allusive, he is playing with one of the commonest
medieval metaphors for study, that of a bee collecting nectar with which
she makes honey to pack her cella or thesaurus with wisdom. Hrabanus
Maurus, writing at the end of the ninth century, says that ‘‘Divine Scripture
is a honeycomb filled with the honey of spiritual wisdom.’’90 Ever alert to a
bibliophilic cliche´, Richard de Bury likens the labors of those who collect
books to bees storing their cells with honey: ‘‘industrious bees constantly
making cells of honey.’’91 This association of bee-cells and honey with
books whose wisdom is to be packed into the compartments, cellae or loci,
of an ordered memory carries over also to the metaphors that liken books
and memory to fields and gardens (campi and prata) full of flowers, which
the reader must cull and digest in order to store the cella of his memory.
In other words, one should be alert in medieval discussions of honey-
bees, for a trained memory may very well lurk within the gardens and
flowers, chambers, treasure-hoards, and enclosures of the hives/books. The
topic has a long history among people with a classical education. Francis
Bacon likens a scholar–scientist to a bee in the first chapter of his Novum
organon; in the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift invokes the metaphor
in his preface to The Battle of the Books, and Isaac Watts may also have
been thinking of it, however dimly, in his poem ‘‘Against Idleness and
Mischief,’’ about the ‘‘busy little bee’’ improving ‘‘each shining hour.’’ And
it seems to me possible that the seventeenth-century Barberini pope, Urban
VIII, was making a witty pun on this long-established trope when he
fastened his family’s insignia, bees, to the doors of the Vatican Library,
that inventory filled with the gardens, flowers, and cloister-garths of
memory.
Related to the concept of ‘‘treasure-hoard’’ is that of ‘‘money-pouch’’ or
sacculus, the metaphor for trained memory used extensively by Hugh of
St. Victor and other twelfth-century writers. In a variation of the seal-in-
wax metaphor, Hugh likens the making of a memory-image to a coin
stamped by the coiner with a likeness which gives it value and currency.92
Coins were kept in coin-sacks. The sacculus was not a sack into which one
dumped things any which way, but a leather moneybag with internal
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compartments which sorted coins by their type and size. Its outer shape is
unclear from what Hugh says, though its compartmentalized nature is not;
it may have been like a saddlebag or a leather-bound box tied onto a horse
as such objects are described in Middle English, or it might have been a
much smaller, wallet-like object, as the diminutive ending of the Latin
suggests. In the Dialogues Concerning the Lives and Miracles of the Italian
Fathers, the author (traditionally Pope Gregory the Great) tells how Abbot
Equitius, in his frequent preaching journeys, mounted on a nag and
humbly dressed, carried the sacred codices with him in leather saddle-
bags (‘‘in pelliciis sacculis’’) hung from left and right, and wherever he went
he would tap the fountain of the scriptures and water the meadows of
people’s minds. 93 This suggests that a sacculus could be something rather
larger than a purse, and was used sometimes to carry books as well as coin –
very precious things, useful for nourishing minds.
The word scrinium in classical Latin denotes a letter-case or book-box, or
any chest in which papers are kept. In the late Empire it came to mean the
state archives; according to the sixth-century jurist, Julian Antecessor, who
lived in the time of the younger Justinian, there were four state scrinia or
repositories, the scrinium libellorum, the scrinium epistolarum, the scrinium
dispositionum, and the scrinium memoriae. 94 Monasteries, churches, and
the papacy had scrinia where documents relating to their rights and
property were kept. More generally, scrinium was a synonym for thesaurus
or fiscus, the treasury or mint, but in Christian usage it seems
to have been
associated with the keeping of all valuable ecclesiastical items, including
records, books, and relics – things for remembering. These meanings are
still present in the English word ‘‘shrine,’’ which derives from the Latin.
Spenser’s historian, Eumnestes, ‘‘of infinite remembraunce,’’ rightly lays
what he records ‘‘in his immortall scrine,’’ both his archive and his
memory.95
The scrinium was presided over by an official called the scrinarius. The
papal court had such an office, as did larger churches and monasteries. This
person was an archivist, and he also wrote official documents; thus a
document is authenticated, ‘‘scriptus per manum Petri Scrinarii sacri
palati.’’96 The close connection between writing and things laid in memory
is evident – memory is not associated here with the oral, but with books.
A scrinarius is often synonymous with a secretarius, as a scrinium, at least in
the earlier Middle Ages, was also a secretorium; the words suggest a
repository for (written) things that are closed away as well as precious, as
treasure is laid or hidden away, most notably (for Christians) in Matthew
13:44, where the kingdom of heaven is likened to treasure hidden in a field.
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47
The connotation of hidden treasure also links up with the common
metaphor for memory as a cave or recess, which we see in Augustine and
Hugh (antrum, cavus). I have already noted that Virgil calls the beehive,
into which honey is closed, a caveus. Likening memory to an inner room or
recess is also very common in antiquity, so much so that one cannot help
speculating about its connection to the architectural mnemonic described
in the Rhetorica ad Herennium. In meditational work, Quintilian says, one
should withdraw both literally into a closed inner chamber (cubiculum
clausum; X. iii. 25) and a mental inner chamber or secretum (X. iii. 30),
where one can concentrate in intense communion with one’s recollective
and compositive faculties.
An early Christian secretorium is described by Paulinus of Nola. A part of
the church, it contained at least the Bible, and these verses were inscribed:
‘‘Si quem sancta tenet meditanda in lege uoluntas / Hic poterit residens