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three rows of teeth, which Hugh of St. Cher proceeds to moralize in terms
of a backbiter’s nasty characteristics.
Where did the bear come from? Judson Allen, who carefully studied this
matter, says that Hugh’s comment is found in no other Psalter gloss; it is
his own. Hugh of St. Cher cites the most famous bear in Scripture, the one
with all the teeth in Daniel’s dream (Dan. 7:5). This text supplies the details
of the image: ‘‘tres ordines erant in ore ejus, et in dentibus ejus,’’ ‘‘there were
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three rows in the mouth thereof, and in the teeth thereof’’ (Douay trans-
lation; the King James Version differs markedly from the Vulgate).
The bear has a wide, devouring mouth, as does death, as do backbiters –such
connections are clear in the Daniel text, for the bear is commanded to
‘‘Arise, devour much flesh.’’ And the connection of death with biting
is clear and traditional, made by means of the homophony of Latin mors,
‘‘death,’’ and morsus, ‘‘bite.’’ Furthermore, though Latin dectractor has
no homophonic or etymological connection to mors or morsus, the late
Latin participle mordentem, from mordere ‘‘to bite’’ and, by a metaphorical
extension, ‘‘to make a caustic comment,’’ clearly connects to ‘‘detractors’’ in
meaning, and to ‘‘death,’’ ‘‘biting,’’ and ‘‘teeth’’ in sound. The Old French
word, mordant, ‘‘bitter speaking,’’ would have been familiar to Hugh, for
he was French; he may well also have known the word backbiter from
English students at Paris. Such a mnemonically useful tissue of homo-
phonies accords with John of Garland’s advice regarding the use of the
sounds of all kinds of languages to help fix etymologies and interpretations
in the memory. But none of these words requires a bear.
I suspect that the reason why a bear entered Hugh of St. Cher’s composi-
tional memory is because the word ursus, like umbra, starts with a U. Ursus,
together with its voces – the most vivid of which is its big mouth, according
to Isidore, who derives ursus from os, ‘‘mouth’’ – and texts relevant to it,
such as this obvious one from Daniel, would be stored in Hugh’s memory
under ‘‘U,’’ helping to mark etymologies, distinctions, and interpretations
of words and texts which also start with ‘‘U.’’ And so, when composing his
distinctio on umbra, his U-animal comes to mind, and it has characteristics
(voces) which, happily, can this time be pressed into service of the point he
wishes to make. In other words, what first led Hugh to a bear was not some
hermeneutical or iconographic correlation, but the simple fact that ursus
and umbra have the same initial letter. The word ursus was thought to
originate in os, oris, hence ‘‘teeth,’’ and a link to the happy homophony
of mors and morsus. So the bear’s appearance in the written text is a vestige
of Hugh’s mental organizational scheme. That it also serves his inter-
pretation is, of course, why that connection is preserved in the final
composition.
John of Garland’s memory advice confirms certain features as standard
in medieval mnemotechnique. In particular, treating the memory as
though it were an area divided linearly into columns within a grid seems
distinctly medieval. Hugh of St. Victor describes the elements differently,
but he too says to treat memory as a linea, a line of cells in a numerically
addressed grid. The earliest source of such a lay-out is unclear, but linearly
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formatted diagram pages, such as Eusebius’s Canon Tables, were widely
known and used from earliest times. 19 The development of tabular lay-outs
and the advice to use them mnemonically went hand in hand, since there is
a clear, persistent theme in all medieval mnemonic advice: to take advant-
age of the presentation of the physical page as a fixative for memory.
T H O M A S B R A D W A R D I N E , O N A C Q U I R I N G
A T R A I N E D M E M O R Y ( C . 1 3 3 5 )
John of Garland’s presentation of memoria in his Parisiana poetria is too
informal to be a complete art of memory. A proper art requires general
principles and a system which one can apply to a variety of circumstances,
and these are not features of John of Garland’s mnemonic advice. But a
medieval treatise on memory that does meet the criteria for being an art, yet
owes as little to Ciceronian sources as does the advice of John of Garland, is
the ars memorativa attributed to Thomas Bradwardine, mathematician and
theologian at Merton College from 1325 to 1335. Subsequently, he was
chancellor of St. Paul’s and prebend of Lincoln, then a chaplain to
Edward III, and finally he died of the plague in August, 1349, a month
after his consecration as archbishop of Canterbury. Bradwardine is best
known for his participation on the orthodox side in the debate regarding
the roles of predestination, grace, and free will, through his theological
tract, De causa Dei, ‘‘the case for God.’’ His other work is mathematical in
nature – a tractatus on proportions, one on the problem of squaring a
circle, a speculative arithmetic, and a speculative geometry. And then there
is the tract we are concerned with here, De memoria artificiali adquirenda.
This treatise belongs to Bradwardine’s Merton years.20 It is of consider-
able interest that it was not composed by a professional teacher of rhetoric,
like John of Garland, nor for elementary-level students, but by a theologian
and professor of natural philosophy lecturing for university students.
The work exists in three manuscripts: British Library MS. Sloane 3744,
British Library MS. Harley 4166, and Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge)
MS. McClean 169. All are English in origin, of the late fourteenth century
and the first part of the fifteenth, the work itself being datable to 1333–1335.
The McClean version is part of a book, the work of a single scribe,
containing other scientific material, astrological, herbal, alchemical, and
mathematical in nature. The Sloane manuscript version in contrast is a
digest of Bradwardine’s advice; it was written in a single pamphlet, together
with a treatise on heraldry. It is also incomplete, missing the discussion of
memory for syllables and memory for words, and containing a different,
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abbreviated conclusion. The McClean manuscript contains a version that
is nearly three times the length of that in Sloane 3744. The text in Harley
4166 contains about two-thirds of the material in McClean, with which its
readings agree closely. Harley 4166 is a book made up of a number of
isolated fragments bound together; because of this it is no longer possible
to tell how the original manuscript was copied, and it appears to have been
unbound for a long time.21
Bradwardine’s treatise is interesting on two grounds. First, it codifies
mnemonic advice of the sort that exists piecemeal in a few sentences in
other medieval documents, and secondly, though some of its precepts
resemble one
s in the classical architectural mnemonic, Bradwardine obvi-
ously draws on a different tradition. His ars memorativa has been treated by
some modern scholars as though it were in the Ad Herennium tradition, but
it is not.22 It articulates a completely medieval art of images in places, which
owes very little directly to the Ad Herennium and is not associated by
Bradwardine with any ancient authority. The incidental similarities
between Bradwardine’s rules and those of ‘‘Tullius’’ are explained by two
factors, one being certain enduring requirements of human recollection
(such as having a rigid, easily reconstructable order to the backgrounds;
making visually remarkable and emotionally laden associations through
images; and the rule of Seven Plus-or-Minus Two), and the other being a
few continuous pedagogical traditions. For, as in the case of the advice
given by Hugh of St. Victor, there is no reason to believe that Bradwardine
created a wholly new art of memory. At most, he was drawing together in a
single handbook advice that had been practically, if not so systematically,
available for centuries. And, as we will see, these same conventions are to be
found not in a textual tradition but in manuscript painting traditions from
the early Middle Ages. This suggests to me that the mnemonic role of book
decoration was consciously assumed from the beginnings of the book in the
West; we have seen other evidence of this close link in the specialized
vocabulary of memory techniques as well.
It is in a few generalities rather than specifics that Bradwardine’s system
resembles that described in the Ad Herennium, written 1,500 years earlier.
Bradwardine distinguishes many of the basic terms of memorial art:
memory for subject matters and memory for words, natural and artificial
memory, the archetypal metaphor of memory as a surface onto which
letters are written, and the very idea of places and images. But both the
manner and specifics of his presentation are quite different from what is in
Ad Herennium. He begins by describing six general properties of places or
locations (loci): the size, shape, and characteristic features of a single
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location, and the number, order, and distance away that characterize a set
of such background locations.
A locus should be of a size neither greater nor smaller than what the eye
can take in at a single glance – a small garden or a cloister are ideal in their
extent. In shape it should be rectangular, like a page or a tablet. This is a
striking and significant difference between Bradwardine’s rules for the loci
and those of the Herennian mnemonic. It clearly is related to both John of
Garland’s and Hugh of St. Victor’s use of the word locus to refer to the
presentation on the page of the textual matter to be remembered. The locus
should be a lighted, completely open space, with no distracting detail of its
own. It must be neither too dark nor too glaringly illuminated. One should
not imagine a crowded location, such as a church or marketplace. One
should use real places, which can be visited and re-inspected frequently, in
preference to wholly imaginary ones, which are trickier and would require
greater mastery to keep clearly and unchangingly in mind.
The places in their ordered sets should contrast with one another in
color as well as content. Bradwardine describes making a first set of five
locations on the theme of a field: the first might be a waste field, the second
a green garden, the third the same field at harvest, the fourth the field after
harvest when only the stubble remains, and the fifth the field blackened by
burnt stubble. (It is of some interest, I think, that Bradwardine uses the
common motif of the seasonal changes as a set of memorative locations.)
One multiplies one’s available locations in such sets of five, Bradwardine
counsels, working upward from ground-level to the upper storeys, as
though of a building. After the set of fields, he describes a set of flat raised
locations: a large couch, an armoire, a table, a tomb, an altar. Then come
roofs (wood shingles, thatch, slate, tile, and lead) and terraces (floored with
earth, greenstone, tiles, straw, or carpeting). By multiplying sets of five in
this manner, one never has to think of more than five closely related
locations at any one time, but one can also extend the multiplying process
as much as one chooses, though Bradwardine suggests that no more than
ten related sets be constructed at one time, lest the fabrication become too
unwieldy.
For one must be able to keep track exactly of each location in relation to
the others in its own and related sets. So the places must have contiguity (or
‘‘neighborliness,’’ to use Aristotle’s word) and direction – as the order of
numbers and alphabets have both of these basic features. Without such a
rigid schematic order, one cannot find places easily, nor can one move
about or gather them together. I have stressed before the shuffling require-
ment which a memory system must address – Bradwardine’s method of
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multiplying sets in fives does this. These locations are the mental bins of
one’s inventory, each of similar size, shape, and illumination, and each of a
monochromatic color but the colors contrasting with those of the other
locations in its set (the carpeted flooring of the fifth member of
Bradwardine’s fourth set suggests that a simple pattern within the mono-
chrome was tolerable). One relates these to one another basically in the
manner in which people construct a grid or matrix, as sets of empty boxes,
built one on top of the other, and addressed individually by means of a pair
of coordinates that places them within the matrix.
One final feature of the locations concerns what Bradwardine calls
distancia and distancia intercepta. By this term he seems to mean what we
call perspective, both with respect to the position of the observer and with
respect to the distance depicted in the location itself, foreground and
background. The observation point is frontal, and far enough away from
the scene that everything in it can be seen clearly, fully, and at once. There
is no suggestion here, as there is in the Ad Herennium, that the mental eye’s
perspective will change as one imagines a walk through it – in the
Bradwardinian account, the eye is positioned optimally, so that one takes
in the whole location at one glance. Additionally, within the location,
whatever detail (a hill, perhaps, or a tree or a couch) is needed to set the
image is depicted, but no distant background is shown, for this might
distract from the clarity of the mnemonically important image. Thus, a
mnemonic scene in its background may have some shallow suggestions of
setting, but no deep perspective. Bradwardine says that the ‘‘distance’’ in
the location should be void – a single color or a simple design. Both of these
perspectival conditions are common in early medieval painting. Indeed
the picture-page of the sixth-century Gospels of St. Augustine (figure 29)
provides an excellent illustration of such a locational arrangement, frontal
perspective, and emptiness of distance. One finds such features still in late
medieval painted scenes.
Into the cell-like arrangement of locations in tiers, one places the
imagines. Bradwardine gives several general rules for the construction of
memorial images for content (res) and images for words. This organiza-
tional feature of his treatise is another significant difference from the Ad
Herennium, for it clarifies the fact that as images, those employed for
various mnemonic functions do not differ significantly in their character-
istics. Memorative images should be of moderate size, but that is their only
moderate feature. Because the memory retains distinctly only what is
extraordinary, wonderful, and intensely charged with emotion, the images
should be of extremes – of ugliness or beauty, ridicule or nobility, of
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laughter or weeping, of worthiness or salaciousness. Bloody figures, or
monstrosities, or figures brilliantly but abnormally colored should be
used, and they should be engaged in activity of a sort that is extremely
vigorous.
These figures are to be grouped against the plain background in an active
scene, their relative positions acting as cues to the order of the material with
which they are associated. So, the image for the first matter to be recalled is
placed towards the front of the location, its torso occupying the center.
Then the second image is placed on its right hand, and it is helpful if the
central image has limbs or some means of attaching the other images to
itself physically. The third and fourth images (if they are needed) are
attached serially to the right of the second. A fifth image is attached to
the left side of the central image, with the following ones joined serially to
it. To read this composite, one begins in the center, then looks right as far
as one can, and then returns to the center and looks left. The figures are
joined to one another in an active, even violent, manner. The first image is
to strike or hold the second with its right hand, the third to ride around the
second, and so on, so that these vigorous activities ‘‘will be, as it were, a
fastening together of their order in the series.’’ One can have three or five or