The Book of Memory
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gible language.
Learning an alphabet is a part of grammar. This is also the point at which
one lays down one’s fundamental mnemonic apparatus. Mnemonic writers
like Thomas Bradwardine and John of Garland assume their students have
certain sets of images already in their memories – in addition to alphabets
and numbers, these include the Zodiac and the ‘‘characteristics of animals,’’
voces animantium, a collection of attributes that derives from the various
versions of the Bestiary, a work that itself goes back to Alexandrine Greece.
Ordered lists of this sort, I propose, were deliberately memorized in order
to serve as potential mnemonic heuristics, the seats (sedes) into which one
could place the variety of diverse material one would acquire in one’s
education and reading.
Morgan Library MS. M 832, a manuscript written and painted in the last
half of the twelfth century at the monastery of Go¨ttweig in Austria,
contains in its first folio the letters of five alphabets – Hebrew, Greek,
Latin, Scythian, and Runic, taken from Hrabanus Maurus ‘‘De inventione
linguarum.’’ The rest of the manuscript is a Bestiary. 110 In light of the
mnemonic role of alphabets and of the voces animantium, finding the two
sorts of material together in a single manuscript makes some practical
pedagogical sense, for such a manuscript would have served the monks
by providing them with material to help them form sets of memory-places
(indeed, it is hard otherwise to give a practical reason for twelfth-century
Austrian monks to learn such alphabets as Scythian or Runic).
There is evidence of scholars using both imaginary and real alphabetical
sets later in their careers. Robert Grosseteste’s scheme of referencing
symbols is derived eclectically from various alphabets, and many of his
notae are imaginary. The Bolognese rhetoric master, Boncompagno da
Signa, lists in his Rhetorica novissima (1235) a variety of signs and symbols
that are useful as artificial aids to natural memory, including deposita
alphabeta, and describes as well how he has used an imaginary alphabet
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as a memory code. By this means, he claims, ‘‘within thirty days I have
memorized the names of five hundred students. And I also affirm, which
will seem more remarkable, that in the sight of all I have named every one
by his own name, not omitting his surname and where he was from:
wherefore, together and singly, they were overcome with admiration.’’111
Boncompagno’s feat may appear pallid in comparison with some of
the feats of memory described by other scholars, but my concern is not
with his talent but with his method – using an imaginary alphabet.
Bernhard Bischoff describes some manuscripts from the ninth and eleventh
centuries in which the names of the months and of numbers in Greek,
Hebrew, and Coptic are given in parallel columns. Such lists, he says,
‘ worked like magnets’ in attracting names from other languages as well,
but ‘ I think . . . these lists and enumerations in general cannot be regarded as
the result of, or as an attempt at genuine language study. They might rather
be regarded as a symptom of a naive curiosity which manifests itself also in
the collecting – it is a kind of collecting – of foreign and strange alphabets
which can be observed in manuscripts from the eighth century on and
continued to post-medieval times,’’ collections which included, indiscrim-
inately, both real and invented alphabets.112 Such a long life would suggest
that readers found utility in these lists (after all, curiositas or the useless
collecting of knowledge was regarded as sinful); they provided collections of
notae that might be useful in schemes for memory coding, and supple-
mented, as a reader might wish, those with which he was already familiar.
Writing and memory
It was Isidore of Seville, that chief conduit of ancient pedagogy to the
medieval West, who defined the function of written letters in terms of their
memorial utility. Alphabets are a kind of notae, and these written letters
were invented ‘‘in order to remember things. For lest they fly into oblivion,
they are bound in letters. For so great is the variety of things that all cannot
be learned by hearing, nor contained only in memory.’’113 Writing is a
servant to memory, a book its extension, and, like the memory itself,
written letters call up the words of those that are no longer present. Two
things are worth emphasizing in Isidore’s definition. First, the primacy of
memory over writing, which one encounters as well in a text like Plato’s
Phaedrus, is still present here in Isidore. Secondly, writing and memorizing
are regarded by Isidore still as essentially the same process: writing is an
activity of remembering, as remembering is writing on the tables of the
mind. And all textual notae, such as marks of punctuation, or editorial signs
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and the shorthand symbols and abbreviations known properly as notaria,
are of the same class as letters. Isidore defines a nota as ‘‘figura propria in
litterae modum posita,’’ ‘‘a distinctive shape used in the manner of written
letters.’’ Isidore’s understanding of a note, or for that matter of a letter, is
not the same as our own, and this philological fact must be considered
carefully. In modern linguistic theory, graphemes (‘‘letters’’) represent one
or more phonemes, the units of meaningful sound that convey sense in any
language; thus philosophical issues of adequacy and truth of representation
can meaningfully apply to them. But a mnemonic cue does not represent
anything necessarily. Its effectiveness resides entirely in its satisfactory
performance as a mental marker, a reminder. Once it has successfully
cued the matter it marks, its function is completed. For mnemonic cues,
as indeed for tools generally, their ‘‘adequacy’’ is in respect of a task rather
than an idea or theory. A screwdriver is adequate to its task when it drives a
screw successfully. This is a fundamental definitional distinction, that must
always be taken into account in medieval discussions of the nature of
litterae, especially those contexts, chiefly pre-scholastic, in which the writer
claims that written letters are ‘‘like’’ the notae of recollective investigation.
By defining the essential utility of written letters as memorial in nature –
writing is to keep us from forgetting – Isidore gives a remarkably succinct
statement of a principle tenet of pre-modern pedagogy. A student in
ancient schools (and these earliest accomplishments were the work of the
nursery, according to Quintilian) first learned his letters, beginning with
their names even before their forms, though Quintilian prefers, he says,
that children learn the two together, endorsing especially the use of ivory
alphabet-blocks for children to play with. In a custom deriving from Greek
education, Latin letters were learned from A to X and then backwards from
X to A, and then in pairs, such as AX, BV, CT, DS, and so on. Finally,
breaking the order entirely, they were taught in all various combinations.114
Quintilian rightly stresses that such a method teaches children to learn
letters individually, not just in rote order. 115 But the exercise also induces a
facility for calculating with the alphabet, that is moving it around quickly
and surely in all sorts of both common and odd combinations. Such facility
is very useful for the kind of mnemonic shuffling necessary for composi-
tion, and would create an alphabetical heuristic as flexible as a numerical
one. As Quintilian says, ‘‘the elements of reading and writing are entirely a
matter of memoria’’; 116 he meant not only developing memorized content
but, of equal importance, the capability for secure, rapid, and capacious
system-building which characterizes trained memoria. ‘‘Memory . . . is very
necessary to the orator; there is nothing like practice for nourishing and
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strengthening it, and, since the age-group of which we are now speaking
cannot as yet produce anything on its own, it is almost the only faculty
which the teacher’s attention can help develop.’’117
After individual letters, instruction proceeded to syllables (ba-, be-, bo-,
bi-, bu-, etc.) and then to words; all this time, writing was also taught, the
student doing exercises on his wax tablet to complement the mental
exercises performed on the tablet of his memory. Reciting was part of the
reading–writing process from the very beginning. Quintilian recommends
that students learn reading, recitation, and writing from material that
contains sound moral advice, 118 the sayings (dicta) of famous men and
lines from the poets. As Marrou says, ‘‘A la lecture et à l’ećriture est
intimement associeé la rećitation: l’enfant apprend par coeur les petits
textes sur lesquels il s’est exerce´, à la fois pour se former et meubler sa
me´moire.’’119 ‘‘To form one’s character and furnish one’s memory’’ – they
were the same goal in educational practice and philosophy from antiquity
throughout the Middle Ages (and indeed well into the twentieth century).
Reading required careful preparation, including learning the proper use of
punctuation. Marrou mentions traces of such student-originated prepara-
tion still observable on papyri (which were written without any sort of
punctuation, even word divisions), where strokes have been made, by
students not the scribe, to separate the words and lines, and to cut words
up into syllables for scansion.120 Cola, commata, and periodi served a dual
purpose; they marked the sense- and pause-divisions, and they also cut the
text into the brief segments that could be memorized as a single unit.
Quintilian says that a period should never be too long to be recited or read
in a single breath. It also must not be ‘ too long to be retained in the memory’
as a single, intelligible unit.121 A period contains at least two cola, Quintilian
says, units that are not self-standing but are yet ‘‘rhythmically complete,’
sensus numeris conclusus. 122 The use of rhythm to define units of prose is also
mnemonically valuable, of course, for rhythm serves the synaesthetic require-
ments of rich mnemonics. A basic memorial unit is the colon, a short
segment of text that is coherent (it is, says Isidore, a sententia – ‘ sentence,’
in Middle English), and is marked by a medial point in many manuscripts. 123
Notae also included short-hand marks and abbreviations. Systems of
such marks, numbering many hundreds, were taught as the notataria to
ancient and medieval notaries and lawyers; students were taught the com-
plex system of Latin abbreviations that we encounter in medieval manu-
scripts. Thomas Bradwardine concludes his treatise on artificial memory
(completed soon after 1333) by saying that ‘‘one who has learned the notary
art will attain the highest perfection’’ in the craft of memory.
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John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, written some fifty years after Hugh of
St. Victor’s Chronicle Preface, is particularly interesting for the light it
sheds on what was thought to be the link between memory and notaria.
Like Hugh, John of Salisbury characterizes memory as ‘ the mind’s treasure-
chest, a sure and reliable place of safe-deposit for perceptions.’ 124 Memory is
a natural gift, but, like all natural abilities, must be cultivated and trained
(here John echoes both Ad Herennium and De oratore).
John of Salisbury especially laments the decline of training in notaria.
He is discussing punctuation, and evidently thinking of what Isidore called
the notae sententiarum, the editorial marks devised in antiquity for textual
scholarship. These little notes, which ‘‘indicate the mode of what is written
and show [what] is clear or obscure, certain or doubtful, and so on’’ were
powerful tools, ‘‘highly effective for both comprehension and retention [my
italics].’’ They are to reading and memory what notes are to the chant.
That such great import has existed in such tiny notations should not seem strange,
for [musically knowledgeable] singers likewise indicate by a few graphic symbols
numerous variations in the acuteness and gravity of tones. For which reason such
characters are appropriately known as ‘‘the keys of music.’’ If, however, the little
notations we spoke of above gave access to such [a powerful key to knowledge],
I am surprised that our forefathers, who were so learned, were not aware of this, or
that the keys to so much knowledge were lost. 125
Two things are being spoken of at once here. First of all, he speaks about
the particular system of editorial notae (obelisk, apostrophe, etc.) described
by Isidore of Seville, which John claims is no longer taught, and the secret
of which has been lost. John of Salisbury also recognizes the general
importance of all kinds of notae for memory training, for he assumes that
these strange marks, like all the other notae, are memory aids, necessary for
both retention and comprehension. And though the knowledge of some
systems of ancient notae and memory coding are now obscure, still gram-
mar, including memory, must be studied at least from the books we do
have. For ‘‘if all the books of the grammarians are not available, it is still
very helpful, for the interpretation of what we read, to have fixed in our
memory even this fragmentary survey’’ (the Metalogicon itself).126
That the ars notaria was associated specifically with memory training is
also suggested by a twelfth-century gloss on the Ad Herennium, the so-
called ‘‘Alanus’’ gloss, which may be the work of Alan of Lille, although no-
one can say certainly.127 Commenting on the passage in Book III, in which
Tullius cautions against those Greek works which offer lists of pre-formed
imagines verborum, because they are both inadequate in scope and less
effective for memory than images one makes oneself, the glossator writes
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that the author ‘‘did not have the notarial art in mind.’’128 He clearly knows,
recognizes in his comment that the accumulation of notae that one learned
in the advanced studies of this art helped to perfect the training of memory.
Indices and chains
Memorial notae were commonly used for concording schemes. Of these,
the prototype is an alphabetical heuristic, which has left many traces in the
organization of written texts. The existing account of it, which describes its
use with a degree of detail comparable to what Hugh’s Preface tells us
about the number grid, is very late (fifteenth-century). Still, what it
describes is borne out by the actual design of medieval concordances,
distinctio collections, and other preachers’ tools. And we also have
Aristotle’s succinct account of an alphabetical memorial system in De
memoria, Quintilian’s reference to key-words to aid recollection, and
certain other evidence which we will look at soon. This alphabetical system
produces what is essentially a catena, in which a key-word or phrase acts as
the hook for several bits of stored material, the indexing words themselves
being stored alphabetically. The monastic practice so well described by Dom
Leclercq, ‘ whereby the verbal echoes [of Scripture] so excite the memory
that a mere allusion will spontaneously evoke whole quotations, ’ 129 is a
version of this type of memorial organization.
The description occurs in the testamentary letter by Peter of Ravenna
which I cited earlier in this discussion; it prefaces the memory rules which
form the body of his book, Fenix. 130 As is the custom of such advertise-
ments, the language is self-congratulatory and inflated, but the method
itself is credible, and borne out by other evidence. Peter says he has
‘‘placed’’ 20,000 legal extracts, 1,000 texts from Ovid, 200 from Cicero,
300 sayings of the philosophers, the greater part of Valerius Maximus,
7,000 texts from Scripture, and other chunks of his learning on 19 letters of
the Roman alphabet. If he searches the letter A, for example, he is able to
produce immediately texts and examples from learned sources on a variety
of subjects, ‘‘de alimentis, de alienatione, de absentia, de arbitris, de
appellationibus, et de similibus quae jure nostro habentur incipientibus