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1240s, his years at Paris. As we have seen, he connects Aristotle’s comments
on the associative nature of memory and the principles by which it operates
with the example of the advice and images adduced in Ad Herennium. He is
the first Western scholar to have done so. His pupil, Thomas Aquinas, does
the same, both in his own De memoria commentary and in the Summa
(1272). By mid-century the art of making memorial images in back-
grounds, and more importantly, the idea that memoria could be treated
as an art, with principles and structure, even though its specific application
varied so much with individual experience, had been accepted as philo-
sophically and logically reputable. As a result of this circumstance of its
revival, the art of memory is often dissociated from the study of rhetoric in
the later Middle Ages, and treated instead as a part of logic, or ethics – as
in Albertus Magnus’s treatise ‘‘on the Good’’ – or natural philosophy.
Separate memorial artes and essays on strengthening memory were typi-
cally composed and circulated as independent treatises, often in antho-
logies of works on natural philosophy, a description that fits well both of
the manuscripts in which copies of Bradwardine’s treatise are found, and
the essays of Matheolus of Perugia, Peter of Ravenna, and the most popular
art of memory of the late fifteenth century (printed throughout Europe),
that of a Spanish physician, Jacobus Publicius.
The linking of memory arts to dialectic and the discovery of arguments
goes back to Aristotle’s Topica at least. As I pointed out earlier (in
Chapter 3), Aristotle specifically mentions there that the topics or seats of
argument are stored in the mind using a method like that of the arts of
memory. This particular text of Aristotle was not lost in the Middle Ages: it
became a part of the medieval curriculum known as the old logic. Cicero
wrote an extended adaptation of Aristotle’s work in his own Topica, a work
known as well in the Middle Ages. But it was through Boethius’s sixth-
century treatise De differentiis topicis that the topics of argument, seen as
analogous to the places of recollection, gained full currency in the earlier
Middle Ages, for this work was an elementary text on reasoning and
logic.64 The idea that recollection, memoria, is itself a reasoning procedure,
which makes use of orderly series of mental topics (places) for the pro-
cedure of investigation, is fundamental from antiquity onward both in
dialectic and in rhetoric. In each of these linguistic arts, the compositional
task requires invention (discovery and recovery) of arguments, matters, and
materials, which in turn derive their power and persuasion from the mental
library one put away during the study of grammar. The initimate con-
nections among the three arts of the trivium, habituated throughout a
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medieval scholar’s entire reading life, should never be forgotten or set aside
in our own desire to analyze them separately.
All three of the twelfth-century commentaries on Ad Herennium address
the issue of how to classify memory art within the standard curriculum, and
all three regard it as both rational and persuasive, part of both dialectic and
rhetoric. The ‘‘Alanus’’ commentary, which dominated teaching of the text
known as Cicero’s New Rhetoric (the Rhetorica ad Herennium) through the
thirteenth century, paraphrases its initial definition of memoria as a ‘‘treas-
ury,’’ by calling it camera argumentorum as well, invoking again the
‘‘topics’’-of-argument model familiar in dialectic. Albertus Magnus and
Thomas Aquinas both discuss recollection (and the need to store memory
in such a way as to enable effective recollection) as a procedure of rational
investigation. They do so in the context of commenting on Aristotle’s De
memoria, but they did not need to learn this from him, for it was a
pedagogical commonplace. The commentary called Plena et perfecta puts
the matter succinctly. To the question whether arts of memory are to be
considered part of dialectic or rhetoric, the master replies that they belong
properly to both, for ‘‘memory is taught as a part of dialectic just as it is of
rhetoric.’’65
It was Aristotle who made these rules comprehensible through his
analysis of the imagistic and associative working of recollection. A manu-
script of the first decade of the fifteenth century (Ambrosiana MS. R.50.
supra) appends a poem of forty hexameters setting forth rules for the art of
memory to the Latin translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Though
it does not go so far as to attribute these verses to Aristotle himself, it is clear
that the connection – even a sort of authorship – between Aristotle and the
arts of memory had become by then something of a commonplace. The
renewed Aristotelian connection was not the first comprehend recollective
procedures as forms of reasoned investigation – they had always been
regarded as that. Its twelfth century commentaries recognized just such a
rational system in the Ad Herennium’s advice on rhetorical memoria. Nor
was it new to discuss memory within the context of ethical philosophy, as
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas both did (Thomas discusses it with
the virtue of prudence in the Summa theologiae, and Albertus in his treatise
De bono). In so doing, these two friars were following well-established
Ciceronian practice, for Cicero discussed the virtue of prudence, and
defined memory as part of it, in his first rhetorical work, De inventione,
the rhetoric text best known throughout the entire Middle Ages. The parts
of prudence, Cicero wrote, are ‘‘memory, intelligence, and foresight,’’
memoria, intelligentia, providentia (De invent. II. 53).
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But it was new to treat memoria as a separate study within psychology
considered as a natural science, as both scholars did in their commentaries
on Aristotle’s De memoria, and as Averroe¨s had done in his Epitome of
Aristotle’s psychological works. Aristotle’s De anima and its companion
treatises are associated with neither rhetoric nor dialectic nor ethics. The
lasting, distinctive contribution made by the two Dominicans, building on
one another’s work and on their Arabic forebears, was to rationalize the arts
of memory as a distinct subject in natural science, not solely within
dialectic and rhetoric (including that aspect of rhetoric, articulated by
Cicero, that dealt with civic virtues such as prudence and sound judgment).
Classifying the arts of memory within a scientific subject (psychology) that
was separable from the language arts of argumentation and invention
‘‘put . . . artificial memory on an altogether new footing,’’ as Frances
Yates rightly observed. 66 It was this new Aristotle-based classification that
made possible the extravagant scientific claims made for mnemonic art in
the Renaissance, as a speculative subject on its own. In the early eighteenth
century, Diderot re-classified the arts of memory as part of dialectic
(the invention of arguments), as Pierre Ramus had earlier done in the
seventeenth century. Though they do not say so, their scheme was not
unprecedented, but rather a return to the situation of mnemonic practices
in the twelfth- and early thirteenth-century medieval curriculum, as instru-
ments of verbal invention.
Yet the academic recovery of Aristotle’s major psychological texts is not
sufficient to explain the immediate popularity of ars memorativa in circles
that included theology students and professors, students of law, friars, and
(especially in Italy) bureaucratic clerks, merchants, physicians, and nota-
ries. A translation of the memory section of Ad Herennium appeared in
Italian not later than 1266, only a few years after Albertus Magnus’s
discussion of it in De bono, and before Thomas Aquinas commended it
in the second part of his Summa. And a French version was made by Jean
d’Antioche at the end of the thirteenth century, as part of a translation of
the Ad Herennium.67 The explanation for this popularity lies in cultural
and educational factors that greatly increased people’s need and oppor-
tunities for speaking publicly, to a variety of audiences both clerical and lay.
These came into prominence during the latter twelfth century, and were
fully developed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Unlike the situation in the earlier Middle Ages, when public oratory was
the responsibility primarily of abbots and bishops, addressing one another
or monks in their cloisters or a few aristocrats, the culture of the medieval
university called for public disputations, sermons, and other forms of oral
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address on the part of all students as well as professors. Lawyers had always
needed to retain quantities of detailed material and to be able to speak
disputationally; the study of law expanded greatly after the twelfth century.
The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 encouraged greater participation by
the laity in the life of the church, the chief vehicle for which was to be
vernacular sermons. The lay culture of courtiers and merchants also
incorporated the need to speak well publicly during the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. 68
We can trace these social developments in the rapid proliferation from
the thirteenth century on of memorial artes – some based mainly upon
Tullius, some (like Bradwardine’s) clearly not. They are written in Latin
and in the vernaculars, especially Italian and French. Often they are the
work of Dominican friars, though other orders and even laymen (especially
in the fourteenth century) were also active transmitters. Whatever their
content and provenance, however, they are all called artes memorativae after
the twelfth century, though the term is rarely used before then during the
Middle Ages when memoria is discussed.
It is a phenomenon of the very greatest importance to this study of what
I have called ‘‘memorial culture,’’ that the Dominican order, which was
responsible for developing many of the most useful tools for the study of
written texts during the thirteenth century, was simultaneously the most
active single proponent and popularizer of memory as an art, and especially
of the principles of Tullius. The Dominicans developed the written con-
cordance to the Bible, devised indexing schemes for texts that were to
continue in use for centuries (they are responsible, for example, for the
referential scheme of dividing a column of text into areas marked A
through G), and compiled many collections of distinctiones, quaestiones,
and other scholars’ and preachers’ aids. Of course the Franciscans and other
fraternal orders compiled similar reference tools, and practiced techniques
of traditional memoria that eventually also came to be called artes. But
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas are the two earliest theologians to
commend particularly the art of memory which Tullius taught as being the
best of all. These two great saints exercised their influence for several
centuries in ensuring Dominican sponsorship of the Herennian architec-
tural mnemonic. 69
Preaching friars and theology students were not the only groups in
the thirteenth century who took up ars memorativa with enthusiasm. The
mid-thirteenth-century Italian translation of Tullius, the earliest vernac-
ular one, was probably made by a Florentine jurist, Bono Giamboni,70 who
also translated Brunetto Latini’s Treśor into Italian from French. It is
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closely associated in the written record with a collection of rhetorical
precepts, chiefly from the Ad Herennium, made by a Dominican,
Guidotto da Bologna. Brunetto Latini himself was a great Ciceronian;
his Treśor is a compendious florilegium of things to be remembered from
classical writers on a variety of ethical and rhetorical subjects. Though it
does not include Tullius’ memory art, there is some basis for thinking that
such compilations were thought of specifically as memory books, and their
compilers revered at this time in Italy as major exponents of ars memora-
tiva. Bono Giamboni’s translation soon was attached, as a final appendix,
to an early Italian ethical florilegium, Ammaestramenti degli antichi, com-
piled around 1300 by the Dominican friar, Bartolomeo, of the convent of
San Concordio in Pisa.
The author of the Ammaestramenti supplement (Bono, lightly edited
by Bartolomeo) makes clear why he considers an art of memory to be
necessary for all educated men, including laity:
if a man has the wisdom to know well how to understand things, and also has
wisdom and justice, which is the firm desire to want to arrange things well, and to
want to do it rightfully, he must know how to speak . . . for without speech his
goodness would be like a buried treasure . . . We have already seen the first thing a
speaker must know, how he is to learn to speak good, ornamented, and ordered
speech, as I have shown you. Now I wish to show you the second thing a speaker
must know in order to speak perfectly, which is how his speech may be held in
memory, for no one will speak well if when he speaks he does not have it clearly in
mind. 71
The art of memory is specifically an aid for speakers, not for learners, for
composers, not for readers. This distinguishes it most clearly from the
elementary rules of memory training. But, like all memory training, it was
considered to be an ethical as well as a practical imperative.
C H A P T E R 5
Memory and the ethics of reading
There is no questioning the fact that written material came
increasingly into use from the eleventh century on; the reason that
more manucripts survive from the later Middle Ages is because more
were made. The making of scholarly compendia is a response to this
increase, and the larger educated, book-needing public that created it.
There is an increase not only in bulk, but in the complexity of indexing
and classifying schemes that one does not see before the late eleventh
century, and it is evident that, though th
ey derive from mnemonic prin-
ciples in use for centuries, they seem much too technical to have served
directly as a mnemonic – for them to be useful as memory devices, a user
would need some prior training and familiarity with basic mnemonic
principles.
But these facts do not seem to have altered significantly the value placed
on memory training in medieval education, nor to have changed the
deliberate cultivation of memoria. Medieval culture remained profoundly
memorial in nature, despite the increased use and availability of books for
reasons other than simple technological convenience. The primary factor
in its conservation lies in the identification of memory with creative
thinking, learning (invention and recollection), and the ability to make
judgments (prudence or wisdom). Writing, as we have seen, was always
thought to be a memory aid, not a substitute for it. Children learned to
write as a part of reading/memorizing, inscribing their memories in the act
of inscribing their tablets. Writing itself was judged to be an ethical activity
in monastic culture. A twelfth-century sermon says, in part: ‘‘Let us
consider then how we may become scribes of the Lord. The parchment
on which we write for Him is a pure conscience, whereon all our good
works are noted by the pen of memory.’’ The orator then proceeds to
moralize the various implements of writing: pumice, knife, pen, ruler,
chalk, ink, and so on. 1
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C O M P O S I T I O N A S G A T H E R I N G ( O C K H A M , R I C H A R D D E
B U R Y , A N D P E T R A R C H )
In 1330, the Franciscan friar William of Ockham, virtually interdicted from
the intellectual community of Western Europe by Pope John XXII for his
teachings challenging papal power, found himself living at the Franciscan
convent in Munich. There he spent the rest of his life. Having been a
member of university communities at Oxford, Paris, and in Italy, where he
had access to the best libraries in Europe, his isolation at Munich was
distressing to him, not least because there he had virtually no books, nor
means of obtaining them, for the Pope had warned that nothing was to be
sent to him. Ockham makes this quite clear at several points in his