sacris intendere libris.’’97 One notes the allusion to Psalm 1:2 in the
invitation to meditate upon the holy law; the allusion seems to have been
fairly commonly used when talking about the reading of Scripture.
Scrinium maintained its association with books as well as saints through
the Carolingian period at least. Isidore had some of his verses written on
the book-cases of the episcopal palace at Seville; among them were these:
‘‘En multos libros gestant haec scrinia nostra; / Qui cupis, ecce lege, si tua
vota libent,’’ ‘‘Lo these our book-boxes breed many books; / You who wish,
look [and] read, if they answer to your desires.’’98 These books, he writes in
verses on another wall, are really gardens full of thorns and flowers; if you
haven’t the strength to take up the thorns, take the roses instead. Take and
read.99 (Notice again the persistence of memorial gardens.) Around 794,
Alcuin, complaining of the heat and politics in Rome where he had
journeyed on business, wrote to a student, ‘‘O how sweet was life when
we sat quietly among the shrines of wisdom, among the abundance of
books, among the venerable wisdom of the Fathers.’’100 Thus, as used by
Isidore and Alcuin, scrinia has become a metaphor for books themselves,
not only their repository.
Especially in the earlier Middle Ages, books were decorated in the same
way as shrines, like reliquaries of saints, another memorial object. Book
covers with jewels, ivory, and other precious material were used to bind
Gospels and other precious books, the material making literal the book’s
function as a scrinium for its contents. The Book of Kells, for example, is
said to have been originally covered with gold beaten over wood, which
was wrenched from it after it was stolen in the eleventh century. 101 And it is
recorded in the Book of Durrow that a silver case was made for it by Flann
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1. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS. 917 (‘‘The Hours of Catherine of Cleves,’’
Netherlands, Utrecht, c. 1440) p. 300. Pearl and gold jewelry used as a border, as
in the common trope of the precious jewels of memory, using as an example the ‘‘pearls’’
of Christian wisdom.
Models for the memory
49
(d. 916), son of king Malochy of Ireland. Many jewelled book covers
still exist, however, for the practice continued into the sixteenth century. 102
As a motif of illumination, jewels – often pearls, rubies, and other stones
mentioned in the Bible – were commonly painted into the margins of
Books of Hours at the end of the Middle Ages, an allusion to their nature as
memorial shrines and thesauri (see figure 1).
The Middle English word male (Modern English ‘‘mail’’) is a ‘‘travelling-
bag’’ or ‘‘pack’’ of leather, for leather-makers constructed them. 103 Its
immediate origin is French, but it is not a Latin-derived word; cognates
suggest its origin to be Germanic. 104 One could carry various items in a
male, including clothing and other gear; in the Romance of Sir Bevis of
Hamptoun someone takes bread and meat from his ‘‘male,’’ and in the
Towneley First Shepherds’ play a shepherd takes a roasted oxtail from his
‘‘mayll.’’105 But they also held valuables, especially gold; thus in Havelock,
someone carries gold in his ‘‘male’’ on his back; Chaucer’s Pardoner carries
his relics in his ‘‘male’’; in Piers Plowman, Avarice goes a-thieving in the
night and riffles some pedlars’ ‘‘males’’; and in the earliest recorded occur-
rence of the word, in Layamon’s Brut, Gordoille (Goneril) tells a servant
that her father can have a ‘‘male riche’’ of a hundred pounds. 106
Males also had at least some internal compartments. Thus a fifteenth-
century cookbook instructs one to season with various powdered spices ‘‘of
þe male,’’ ‘‘from your bag’’107 – obviously powders that were kept sepa-
rately. There is a leather-covered small box bound with a buckled belt and
cylindrical locks in Holbein’s portrait of the merchant, George Gisze, now
in the Staatliche Museum, Berlin – his strongbox or male. 108 Such a male is
like a sacculus, divided into internal compartments for ease of sorting and
changing money.
When Chaucer uses the English word figuratively in The Canterbury
Tales, he has in mind a male such as I have been describing, a leather
strongbox bound with a buckle, rather than the ‘‘pedlar’s pack’’ that Walter
Skeat, and every subsequent annotator, gives as a gloss of this word. If it is
understood in the sense I am suggesting, then the metaphor becomes an
English-language version (indeed the first recorded) of an author opening
the organized compartments of his memory to disclose its store of riches.
Chaucer’s metaphor seems to have been immediately and widely imitated.
Thus in The Tale of Beryn, ‘‘Harry Bailly’’ asks, ‘‘Who shall be the first that
shall vnlace his male / In comfort of vs all, & gyn som mery tale?’’109
(I don’t claim that it was well imitated.)
But it is Stephen Hawes who most evidently understood this image of
Chaucer’s as I am suggesting it should be. In The Pastime of Pleasure (1517),
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Dame Rhetoric, whose wise advice the narrator has carefully ‘‘marked in
memory’’ (645)110 (that is, ‘‘tagged’’ as well as ‘‘stored’’), gives instructions
on invention (composition), interesting for being among the earliest
presentations in English of mnemonic teaching. Invention needs the five
inward wits, Rhetoric says, the hindermost of which is ‘‘the retentyfe
memory’’ (750), the agency that gathers together all thought. The orator
hears various tales, encloses them ‘‘in due ordre’’ (1258) in his retentive
memory, and, when he needs material, he brings forth both a tale and its
moral from his store, ‘‘his closed male’’:
Yf to the orature many a sundry tale
One after other treatably be tolde
Than sundry ymages in his closed male
Eche for a mater he doth than well holde
Lyke to the tale he doth than so beholde
And inwarde a recapytulacyon
Of eche ymage the moralyzacyon
(1247–1253)
There are a number of interesting matters in these lines, in addition to
Hawes’s use of male as an image of trained memory. The image which the
orator makes for the sundry tales he hears is ‘‘Eche for a mater,’’ that is,
memory according to the res, the ‘‘matter.’’ He holds these ‘‘One after other
treatably,’’ in orderly fashion; because the memorial imprinting is ‘‘in due
ordre, maner and reson,’’ everything comes forth ‘‘eche after other with-
outen varyaunce.’’ These tales are held in memory according to both the
subject matter (ad res) and their ‘‘moralyzacyon.’’ Here Hawes means the
moral category of virtue or vice under which inwardly one ‘‘recapitulates’’
each ‘‘image’’ – literally gives it a ‘‘re-chapter’’ (from Latin capitula, ‘‘head-
ing’’), or cross- referenc
e. In other words, one stores the tale itself and also
indexes it mentally under a subject classification, advice that also occurs in
some of the early thirteenth-century artes poeticae (see Chapter 4).
This method of memory is learned in ‘‘the poetes scole’’ (1267), and
Hawes calls it ‘‘the memoryall arte of rethoryke’’ (1269), which although at
first obscure will be mastered ‘‘with exercyse’’ (1273). An art, for a medieval
scholar, was a method and set of guidelines that added order and discipline
to the pragmatic, natural activities of human beings. Hugh of St. Victor
remarks in Didascalicon that while people certainly calculated and meas-
ured, wrote and spoke, reasoned and played music before the artes were
introduced, the arts gave them order and enabled them to be systematically
learned. Harkening back to Aristotle’s definition, an art is a set of principles
deduced from many experiences, which in turn result from many repeated
memories: ‘‘All sciences, indeed, were matters of practice [in usu] before
Models for the memory
51
they became matters of art [in arte] . . . what was vague and subject to
caprice . . . [was] brought into order by definite rules and precepts.’’111
The final member of the group of metaphors which I want to discuss is
arca, the commonest and in some ways the most interesting of them all. An
arca is basically a wooden ‘‘chest’’ or ‘‘box’’ for storage, and, like the other
items, it came in several sizes and was used for varying purposes. Small
arcae were used for transporting valuables, including books.112 And the
chests or cupboards in which books were kept in early monastic libraries
were sometimes called arcae. So the Regula Magistri states that books
should be brought for distribution from the ‘‘arca.’’113 When Hugh of
St. Victor says that wisdom is stored in the ‘‘archa’’ of the heart, and
there are many compartments in this storage-chamber, he is taking advant-
age specifically of the long association of arcae with books. Memory is not
just any strongbox or storage-chest – it is particularly one in which books
are kept, a powerful portable library. Indeed, as John of Salisbury wrote,
‘‘the memory truly is a sort of mental bookcase, a sure and faithful
custodian of perceptions.’’114
But there is another meaning of arca which is associated from earliest
times with the process of Scriptural lectio and study. As arca sapientiae,
one’s memory is the ideal product of a medieval education, laid out in
organized loci. One designs and builds one’s own memory according to
one’s talent, opportunities, and energy. That makes it a construction, an
aedificatio. As something to be built, the trained memory is an arca in the
sense understood by the Biblical object called Noah’s Ark, the construction
of which occupies some detail in Genesis, and the Ark of the Covenant,
into which the books of the Law were placed: ‘‘Take this book of the law,
and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God’’
(Deut. 31:26). 115
The double understanding of arca, ‘‘chest,’’ as both the Ark of Noah and
the Ark of the Covenant, is clearly set out in a painting of the Deluge in the
Ashburnham Pentateuch, shown in figure 2, a manuscript of the late sixth
or early seventh century, possibly made in Rome (BnF MS. n.a.l. 2334).
The Ark, floating above a sea full of drowned corpses, is shaped distinctly
like a wooden chest with feet, its sides curved and bound with strips of red,
pink, and brown, that are shown nailed to the surface boards, as leather
strips were nailed to the frame of an actual chest. It has a wooden door and
wooden-shuttered windows cut into it, and a wooden cover set over the box
like the lid of a chest.116
By no means are architectural devices confined particularly to the
Herennian mnemonic tradition. Philo speaks of Scriptural study as being
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2. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS. n.a.l. 2334, fo. 9r. ‘‘The Ashburnham
[or Tours] Pentateuch’’; late sixth century or early seventh century, Italian [Rome?]
or Spanish or North African [Carthage?]. Noah’s Ark, in the shape of a four-legged wooden
storage chest, floats atop a sea of drowned people, animals, and giants.
Models for the memory
53
like constructing a building, 117 and the metaphor is a common one for the
method of exegesis developed during the Middle Ages, whereby one builds
layers of interpretation according to allegorical, moral, and mystical senses
upon the foundation of the literal words. A well-known example of such
analysis occurs in Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job: ‘‘For first we lay a
secure foundation of history; next through typological signification we
raise up in the citadel of faith a structure of our mind [fabricam mentis]; on
the outside as well through the grace of the moral sense, we clothe as it were
the superstructure of the edifice with color.’’118 By mens Gregory meant the
educated, trained memory; mens frequently is used by medieval writers to
mean the whole complex of processes occuring in the brain, including
memory, that precede understanding or intellection. 119 Hugh of St. Victor
uses Gregory’s description in Didascalicon, but his most original develop-
ment of it is in his treatise on Noah’s Ark, known in many manuscripts
with varying titles including ‘‘De arca Noe pro arca sapientiae,’’ ‘‘De archa
intellectuali,’’ and ‘‘De quatuor archis.’’120
It was also an exegetical commonplace to regard the development of
the moral life of a Christian in terms of building a temple or church;
Jerome’s commentary on Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple contains an
elaborate example of such exegesis.121 Hugh of St. Victor’s particular genius
in De archa Noe is to bring together the processes of Scriptural reading,
moral development, and memory training in the single image of Noah’s
ark. ‘‘I give you,’’ he writes, ‘‘the ark of Noah as a model of spiritual
building, which your eye may see outwardly so that your soul may be
built inwardly in its likeness.’’122 His exegesis is on three levels, though the
major part of the treatise is devoted to the third: first, the historical ark built
by Noah; second, the ark of the Church which Christ built; and third, the
arca sapientiae, which ‘‘every day wisdom builds in our hearts from con-
tinuous meditation on the law of God.’’123 Hugh’s words make it clear that
it is memory he means by this last ‘ ark’’; meditatio is the stage at which
reading is memorized and changed into personal experience, and ‘‘in our
hearts’’ was understood throughout the Middle Ages to be an adequate
synonym for ‘ in our memories,’ as the injunction to ‘‘write upon the tables
of thy heart’ makes clear. Jerome, for instance, glosses the Biblical phrase in
corde tui as ‘‘in memoriae thesauro.’ 124 Jerome’s comments on Ezekiel 3:2–5,
when the prophet is instructed to ‘ eat the book,’’ are also of interest:
‘
Consumption of the book is the foundation of reading and the basis of
history. When, by diligent meditation, we store away the book of the Lord in
our memorial treasury, our belly is filled spiritually and our guts are satisfied
that we may have, with the apostle Paul [Col. 3:12], the bowels of mercy.’ 125
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Jerome then links this action of eating the book to the story of Samson
finding honey in the lion’s mouth (Judges 14:8) and to Proverbs 6:8 (‘‘Go to
the bee’’), read as an admonition to store the honey of Scripture in one’s
own memory/heart. In this way, he concludes, one imitates the prudence of
the serpent and the innocence of the dove (a verse usually understood as an
exegetical emblem of Ethica). The passage is an astonishingly compact
memorial gathering-up or chain (catena) of many of the major themes
which I have discussed in this chapter.
The arca sapientiae is constructed in the mind of each student. Hugh
compares it to the arca of the Church, built in the eternal mind of God. In
human minds, time exists, and yet by disciplined thought we can withdraw
from it and in some way imitate the eternal present of God. ‘‘Thus, indeed,
in our mind past, present, and future exist in thought at the same time. If
therefore by a difficult program of meditation we begin to dwell in our
heart, then in a certain way we withdraw from time, and, as though made
dead to the world, we live within God.’’126 It is clear that Hugh specifically
means memory here, for in his Augustinian-influenced psychology, it is
memory that makes time. Moreover, through disciplined training of and
communion with our memory, we build the ark/chest/library of wisdom
which allows us to dwell inwardly with God, ‘‘per studium meditationis
assidue,’’ ‘‘through the hard discipline of meditatio.’’ ‘‘This,’’ Hugh con-
cludes, ‘‘is the ark you ought to build.’’127
The arca sapientiae is thus the process and product of a medieval
education, both the construction process and the finished structure. The
ark of full understanding (arca intellectualis) has three compartments in it
(mansiones), and Hugh proceeds to detail at some length the characteristics
of these rooms/way-stations. The ark is, on a grand scale, the compart-
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