The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  tion of the balance of humors. One of the most famous physicians of the

  late Middle Ages was Arnaldus de Villanova, Chaucer’s ‘‘Arnold of Newe-

  Town,’’ a Catalan who died in 1311. He translated many medical works

  from Arabic to Latin, and wrote several tractates of his own. His name is

  attached to one of the most widely printed medical compendia of the late

  Middle Ages, Philosophi et medici summi, though not all it contains is his.18

  Among the contents is a collection of medical aphorisms, Doctrina aphor-

  ismorum, which contains some dietary prescriptions and recipes for aiding

  the memory, and a separate, brief treatise, ‘‘De bonitate memoriae.’’19

  Many of the same prescriptions occur also in the fifteenth-century memory

  treatise which I have mentioned earlier, the De augenda memoriae by the

  physician, Matheolus of Perugia.

  Since the brain is moist and cool, it needs to be protected against

  overheating of all sorts. Drunkenness is especially bad, but so are all sorts

  of immoderate or superfluous activities, including the sexual. 20 Too much

  meditatio, however, can also be bad; Arnaldus prescribes ‘‘temperate joy

  and honest delight’’ as beneficial for maintaining memory (and, as we shall

  see, the idea that the memory should not be crammed at one sitting, but fed

  temperately only until it is satisfied, not satiated, is a commonplace in

  teaching). 21 A diet which includes fatty meats, strong wine, vinegar and all

  sour things, legumes such as beans, and especially garlic, onions, and leeks

  is very bad for memory. (It is a wonder that Chaucer’s Summoner has any

  mind left at all.) These are all very hot foods of the third or even fourth

  degree. 22

  Generally, whatever is good for the health of the body also aids the

  memory, so various purges can be efficacious.23 Matheolus advises a seven-

  day regimen of drinking sugared water for several days instead of wine

  (since sugar was thought to have medicinal value perhaps it would seem to

  safeguard the water). Certain herbs, especially ginger and coriander, when

  chewed or taken in powdered form, are particularly good. Arnaldus and

  Matheolus also suggest bathing the head in a concoction which contains

  laurel leaf, camomile, and a honey-derivative, and Arnaldus also

  recommends frequently bathing the feet in a similar potion.24 Physical

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  The Book of Memory

  prescriptions, however, are secondary to the need for memory training and

  practice. Matheolus’s medical advice comes briefly at the end of several

  paragraphs devoted to the training advice of Thomas Aquinas, Hugh of

  St. Victor, and Cicero; Arnaldus says that the chief way to strengthen and

  confirm memory is through ‘‘concentration [solicitudo] and frequent rec-

  ollection of what we have seen or heard.’’25

  In his discussion of memory as a function of the sensitive soul, Thomas

  Aquinas follows the outline of his chief sources, Avicenna and Averroe¨s,

  and his master, Albertus Magnus. He enumerates the interior senses in the

  Summa during his discussion of human psychology, especially in Ia, Q. 78,

  article 4. Four powers are described: common sense; the fantastic (imagi-

  nation: ‘‘as it were a storehouse of forms received through the senses’’); the

  estimative; and the memorative. That power called estimative in animals is

  called the cogitative in humans, or the ratio particularis. In his ‘‘De potentia

  animae,’’ cap. 4,26 Thomas defines the powers more particularly, enumer-

  ating five this time: the sensus communis; phantasia (retentive imagination);

  imaginativa (the composing imagination); aestimativa seu cogitativa (called

  the latter in human beings, and also ratio particularis or ‘‘collativa inten-

  tionum individualium,’’ the opinions, beliefs, prejudices, of a particular

  individual human); and memorativa. But the composing imagination

  (imaginativa) is elsewhere combined with imaginatio (or phantasia) and

  called simply phantasia seu imaginatio.

  In addition to the memory of sensorily perceived objects, Thomas

  Aquinas distinguishes a type of memory which he calls ‘‘intellectual.’’

  This distinction arose in part to resolve the problem of how one could

  remember conceptions, since one’s memory stored only phantasms of

  particular sense objects or composite images derived from particular

  sense objects. The type of memory which recalls abstractions, things

  created in thought rather than sensorily perceived, is a part of the intellect;

  Thomas defines it in article 6 of Q. 79 (ST I), as ‘‘a power to keep thoughts

  in mind,’’ rather than only individual things, and it is peculiar to human

  beings. Animals have memories too, but only of discrete experiences – they

  cannot generalize or predict on the basis of what they remember. But

  concepts ‘‘are not retained in the sense part of the soul, but rather in the

  body–soul unity, since sense memory is an organic act’’ (ad. 1). Human

  memory is thus both material, as it retains the impress of ‘‘likenesses,’’ and

  yet more than that, for people can remember opinions and judgments, and

  predict things, based upon their memories.

  The concept of ‘‘intellectual memory’’ is attributed by Thomas Aquinas

  to Augustine, although in De memoria, Aristotle distinguishes the two

  Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory

  63

  kinds of memory (449b 30ff.), as he also does in De anima in his effort to

  qualify Plato’s doctrine of recollection. Aristotle says that both concepts

  and ‘‘singulars’’ are known through images – sensory objects by the like-

  nesses we get through our senses, and concepts by images which we

  associate with them. ‘‘Memory, even the memory of objects of thought,

  is not without an image. So memory will belong to thought in virtue of an

  incidental association, but in its own right to the primary perceptive

  part.’’27 When we think of the concept ‘‘triangle,’’ Aristotle says, we think

  of a triangle, even though we understand our image to be a conceptual

  model, ‘‘as in drawing a diagram.’’28 No human being is capable of think-

  ing entirely abstractly without some sort of signifying image. Thomas

  Aquinas, though differing from Aristotle in how and where images for

  thought were retained, also believed that no human thinking could take

  place without some sort of image.

  The two major faculties of the sensory soul which Aristotle describes in

  De anima are the common sense (sensus communis) and the imagination.

  Sensus communis is the receptor of all sense impressions. (Avicenna defined

  it as ‘‘the center of all the senses both from which the senses are diverted in

  branches and to which they return, and it is itself truly that which

  experiences.’’)29 It unites and compares impressions from all five external

  senses, but it is also the source of awareness. It both receives the sensation of

  hearing a sound and realizes that hearing is taking place.30

  While all animals have sensation, not all have imagination – yet imag-

  ination is not thought either. It is the process in all animals capable of


  learning (like dogs, horses, birds, and perhaps bees and spiders) whereby

  phantasmata are formed and move the creature to action. Human imagi-

  nation, however, involves some quasi-rational activity, for humans are not

  just moved by imagination’s products, but judge and form opinions about

  them. Human imagination is what Aristotle calls ‘‘deliberative’’ (bouleutik¯e

  or logistik¯e): ‘‘Imagination in the form of sense exists, as we have said [in

  De anima III, ii], in other animals, but deliberative imagination only in

  those which can reason’’ (De anima, III, xi, 434a 5ff.). Pure sensation is

  always true, enjoying something of the status which contemporary philos-

  ophers accord to what some of them call ‘‘raw feels’’; but imagination can

  be false.31 It is therefore a more rationalizing activity than the elementary

  sensory receptiveness of the common sense.

  Aristotle’s definitions of the stages in the sensory/consciousness process

  can be classified in two ways: (1) whether or not actively conscious behavior

  is involved; and (2) as types of interior activity. According to the first

  kind of classification, sensus communis and imagination (in humans) are

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  The Book of Memory

  differentiated from one another; so too are ‘‘believing’’ and ‘‘thinking,’’ and

  memory and recollection. In this classification, the ‘‘faculties’’ or interior

  senses are six in number, pairs of receptor (passive) and conscious (active)

  operations. But described as types of interior activity, Aristotle distinguishes

  only three: the activity of forming the mental images (phantastikon); the

  activity of reacting to or forming opinions about these images (dianouti-

  kon); and the activity of recalling those images and reactions (mn¯emoneu-

  tikon). The threefold classification of mental activity was authoritatively

  fixed by ‘‘Galen’’’s immensely influential medical compendium in the

  anterior, medial, and posterior parts of the brain, as described by ancient

  anatomists. Medieval encyclopedists, like Bartholomaeus Anglicus, often

  paired ‘‘passive’’ and ‘‘active’’ states of these three functions, ascribing them

  to these distinct areas in the brain, which were described as cavities or

  chambers in the brain’s soft matter, filled with ‘‘animal spirits’’– from

  anima, the soul as energy – that power the various processes of thinking.32

  Aristotle’s great medieval Arabic and Hebrew commentators elaborated,

  and, to some extent, continued to localize, the somatic psychology of their

  Greek sources, to a degree that no student of medieval psychology can

  afford to ignore. Their description attempts to fill in (usually by compli-

  cating) that of Aristotle, both detailing more precisely the physical nature

  of the sensory process, including memory, and reifying the non-corporeal

  aspects of thinking, especially about abstract knowledge-bodies like con-

  cepts. Though they do not introduce an actual ‘‘mind–body problem,’’

  Avicenna and especially Averroe¨s do seem to emphasize a mind–body split

  by their insistence that human intellect, as part of an independent ‘‘agent

  intellect,’’ can directly consider abstractions. This characteristic of their

  psychology is usually related to the attempt, in late Alexandrine philoso-

  phy, to reconcile Plato (as Neoplatonism) to Aristotle.

  Avicenna’s long commentary/compendium of De anima and the Parva

  naturalia is the Liber de anima, composed in the early eleventh century and

  translated into Latin in the twelfth. In the fourth part, Avicenna details the

  powers of the soul that are involved in translating sense impressions (which

  he also thought to be in some way corporeal) into thought. First, there is

  the sensus communis, having the Aristotelian functions of receiving and

  combining external impressions and of basic awareness (knowing that one

  is sensing). Next, he defines imaginatio, solely a retentive faculty: ‘‘that

  [power] detains the sensible form which is called formalis and imaginatio

  and it does not categorize [lit. separate] it in any way.’’33 Scholastic writers

  sometimes called this function vis formalis, as indeed Avicenna himself does

  Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory

  65

  here. It is often paired with sensus communis and located in the paired front

  ‘‘ventricles’’ or chambers of the brain.

  There is also, however, a ‘‘deliberative’’ kind of imagination (as Aristotle

  suggested), one which has a composing function, joining images together:

  ‘‘the construction out of images of things existent, new composite images of

  things non-existent, or the breaking up of images of things existent into

  images of things non-existent.’’34 As Wolfson suggests, this is basically

  Aristotle’s ‘‘deliberative imagination’ (phantasia logistik¯e or bouleutik¯e),

  by which ‘‘we have the power of constructing a single image out of a

  number of images.’’35 This power of composing an image in both humans

  and animals is joined to a power of judgment, whereby we form an opinion

  of the image we have composed. This was called in Latin estimativa, a

  translation of the Arabic word wahm, introduced into the classification by

  the Arabic Aristotelians.36 Latin scholastic writers re-defined estimativa as

  something like ‘‘instinct’’ in animals, the reaction whereby a lamb, seeing a

  wolf for the first time, knows to fear it, or seeing its mother knows to follow

  her. They called the human power cogitativa, defined as a conscious,

  though pre-rational, activity. 37

  Avicenna’s scheme also distinguishes between the form and intentio of a

  sense-image, every such image being composed of both. Each aspect, form

  and intentio, of the sense-image has its own apprehending faculty and a

  store-house into which it goes. Intentio means opinion about or reaction to

  something. It also means something less definite, related to the concept in

  rhetorical and literary theory of ‘‘point of view.’’ Since our knowledge

  comes to us through our senses, every image impressed in our memories

  has been filtered and mediated through our senses – it is not merely

  ‘‘objective.’’ Our senses produce affects in us, changes such as emotions,

  and those effects include memories themselves.

  Thus to say that all memory-images are made up of both likeness and

  intention is to say that the way we have perceived something is an inevitable

  necessary part of every image we have. Our recollections are never just

  neutral (or ‘‘factual’’ as we prefer now to say). Our memories store like-

  nesses of things as they were when they appeared to and affected us. 38 This

  analysis – we should note – requires that all memory-images have some

  experiential and affective quality, which each phantasm acquires in the

  process of being made in the brain. Form and intentio, the completed

  phantasm, then is stored together as a single memory-phantasm in the

  virtus custoditiva or virtus memorialis, becoming the experiential basis of

  knowledge. Here again Avicenna is following Aristotle, who says in I, i, of


  Metaphysics that ‘‘experience is formed of many memories.’’39

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  The Book of Memory

  3. Cambridge, University Library MS. Gg 1.1, fo. 490v. From an anthology of eclectic

  materials, made c. 1330 in England (West Midlands); the greatly various texts were written

  by one scribe, in Anglo-Norman and in Latin, with illuminations by a single artist. This

  diagram of the brain is discussed in Chapter 2.

  Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory

  67

  A late medieval diagram shows these processes well (figure 3). It is in a

  mainly French-language manuscript, Cambridge University Library MS.

  Gg 1.1, written in England in the fourteenth century. This book was

  evidently made for an aristocratic household, which still conducted its

  culture primarily in French, though there are Latin and even a (very) few

  English works in it as well. Amongst some Latin prayers and many French

  histories and romances is written a summary of Aristotelian doctrine

  about the brain, which also incorporates this picture diagram of its

  processes, as then commonly understood. The manuscript picture dia-

  grams human cognitive process as described in the late medieval tradition

  of Aquinas, deriving from Aristotle via Avicenna: indeed the textual

  summary states that it shows thinking as ‘ tractat Thomas in prima parte

  summe,’’ as Thomas analyzes it in the first part of his Summa theologiae

  (the part that contains Aquinas’s teaching on human psychology, though

  the terms used accord in many ways with Avicenna’s analysis more than

  with Aquinas).

  In this diagram, the various activities involved in thought are drawn as

  cellae or compartments, linked by ‘‘channels’’ (nervi in Latin), which the

  artist has drawn leading from the eyes (as similar nervi do from all the sense

  organs) and between the various activities in the brain. It is important to

  understand that this drawing is a diagrammatic representation, not an

  anatomical drawing. It was drawn in order to make clear the relationships

  of activities involved in the process of thinking, but the first three activities

  shown in this diagram as if sequential were actually thought to occur

  simultaneously.

  The diagram shows how sensations are channeled from the various