ues, as a famous pastor has said, just as smoke drives out bees, so belching
caused by indigestion drives away the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
Belching and farting, however, are caused by the preparation and digestion
of food. ‘‘Wherefore, as a belch bursts forth from the stomach according to
the quality of the food, and the index of a fart is according to the sweetness
or stench of its odor, so the cogitations of the inner man bring forth words,
and from the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks (Lk. 6:45). The just
man, eating, fills his soul. And when he is replete with sacred doctrine,
from the good treasury of his memory he brings forth those things which
are good.’’39 No comment is needed on this text, so very odd and even
irreligious to us, except to observe that I can think of few more cogent
statements of the curious consequences deriving from ancient and medie-
val notions of the soul’s embodiment than this serious, pious linking of the
sweetness of prayer and of the stomach. The notion of the Spirit (flatus) as a
breath or wind is Biblical; modern scholars, accustomed to thinking of this
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trope as a mere figure of speech, would never make the connection with a
fart (also flatus) that this medieval writer did. It stems from exactly the
psychosomatic assumptions that directed medical writers to prescribe foot-
soaking, head-washing, and chewing coriander to improve memory, sweet-
ness of the mouth and stomach being evidently as necessary to the healthy
production of memory as a stress-free body (with relaxed feet and a non-
itching scalp) is to productive concentration. Modern scholars who think
they have observed subversion, class rivalries, or even a ribald ‘‘medieval
unconscious’’ at odds with its piety in the vomiting, shitting, farting,
and belching that characterize the hybrids in some late thirteenth- and
fourteenth-century English manuscripts containing texts such as Psalters
and Decretals – texts which require much memory work – would do well to
ponder the pervasive, Biblically based, monastic trope of prayer as spiritual
flatulence. It was often intended to provoke laughter and humility, but its
use in books of meditation is not unconscious, nor should we assume it to
be impious. 40
The monastic custom of reading during meals is described in some texts
as an explicit literalizing of the metaphor of consuming a book as one
consumes food. A late Regula for women adapted from the writings of
St. Jerome makes the connection clear: there should be reading during
meals ‘‘so that while the body is fattened [saginatur] with food, the mind
should be filled [saturetur] with reading.’’41 Benedict’s Rule says that ‘‘while
the brothers are eating they should not lack in reading’’; 42 the somewhat
later Regula magistri gives the reason why in words much like those of the
later rule I just quoted.43 Every brother who has learned his letters should
take his turn reading during meals, ‘‘so that there should never be a lack of
restoration for the body nor of divine food, for as Scripture says, man does
not live by bread alone but in every word of the Lord, so that in two ways
the Brothers may be repaired, when they chew with their mouths and are
filled up through their ears.’’44 The Rule for women continues by charac-
terizing how each sister should follow the reading. With absorbed, intent
mind (‘‘mens sobria intenta sit’’), she should actively, emotionally enter
into the reading. She sighs anxiously when, in prophecy or historical
narrative, the word of God shows enmity to the wicked. She is filled with
great joy when the favor of the Lord is shown to the good. ‘‘Words do not
resound, but sighs; not laughter and derision but tears.’’45 This last com-
ment is a reformation of one of Jerome’s dicta, that ‘‘the preacher should
arouse wailing rather than applause,’’46 itself an idea that accords with the
advice given by Quintilian and others that an orator must above all arouse
the emotions of his audience. This Rule admonishes against laughter
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209
because, like applause, derision is associated by the writer with detachment
and disengagement from the material, tears with the opposite. The state of
being ‘‘engaged with’’ and ‘‘totally absorbed in’’ the text (as I would trans-
late the adjectives sobria and intenta) is necessary for its proper digestion.
Commentary on the two moments in Scripture (Ezekiel 3:3 and
Revelation 10: 9–11) in which a prophet is given a book to eat that is
sweet as honey in the mouth underlines the need to consume one’s read-
ing.47 ‘‘Therefore we devour and digest the book, when we read the words
of God,’’ says Hugh of Fouilloy in the twelfth century. ‘‘Many indeed read,
but from their reading they remain ignorant . . . others devour and digest
the holy books but are not ignorant because their memory does not let go
of the rules for life whose meaning it can grasp.’’48 And Jerome, comment-
ing on the Ezekiel text, says ‘‘when by assiduous meditation we shall have
stored the book of the Lord in the treasury of our memory, we fill our belly
in a spiritual sense, and our bowels are filled, that we may have with the
Apostle the bowels of mercy (Coloss. 3:12), and that belly is filled concern-
ing which Jeremias said: ‘My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very
heart’ (Jer. 4:19).’’49
Biblical study provides a model for other literary study. In the same part
of the second dialogue in Secretum we looked at earlier, Augustine says that
one needs a store of precepts from one’s reading, in order to guard against
sudden emotion and passion – anger, for instance. Yes, replies Francesco,
he has found much good on this matter not only in philosophers but in
poets as well. And he proceeds to give an interpretive reading of Aeneid, I,
52–57, the description of Aeolus in the cave of the winds:
As I carefully study every word, I have heard with my ears the fury, the rage, the
roar of the winds; I have heard the trembling of the mountain and the din. Notice
how well it all applies to the tempest of anger . . . I have heard the king, sitting on
his high place, his sceptre grasped in his hand, subduing, binding in chains, and
imprisoning those rebel blasts. 50
And he demonstrates his interpretation by appealing to the last line of
Virgil’s description, ‘‘mollitque animos et temperat iras’’ (I. 57); this, says
Petrarch, shows that this passage can refer to the mind when it is vexed by
anger.
Augustine praises the meaning which Francesco has found hidden in the
poet’s words, which are so copious and familiar in his memory. For,
‘‘whether Virgil himself meant this while he wrote, or whether, entirely
remote from any such consideration, he wished only to describe a maritime
storm in these verses and nothing else,’’51 the lesson which Francesco has
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derived concerning anger is truthful and well-said. Extraordinary as
this
opinion is to a scholar brought up on notions of the inviolate authority of
the text, we should not assume on the other hand that Petrarch’s words, in
the mouth of his revered mentor, indicate only an extreme subjectivity.
Virgil’s words remain significant themselves as the subject of the disciplines
associated with lectio, and a source of wisdom and experience (via memory)
for anyone who cares to read and remember them. The focus for Petrarch
at this point is rather on what the individual reader makes of those words,
and that focus is not scientific but ethical.
Virgil’s words, having been devoured (or one might say harvested),
digested, and familiarized by Francesco through meditatio, have now
become his words as they cue the representational processes of his recol-
lection. It is as though at this point the student of the text, having digested
it by re-experiencing it in memory, has become not its interpreter, but its
new author, or re-author. Petrarch has re-spoken Virgil; re-written Virgil,
we would say with strong disapproval. But the re-writing which is acknowl-
edged in what both Augustine and Francesco say, is seen as a good, not for
Virgil’s text, which is irrelevant at this point except as it has occasioned
Petrarch’s remembrance, but for Francesco’s moral life. 52
Hugh of St. Victor’s Preface to the Chronicle (Appendix A) gives usefully
succinct definitions of the three ‘‘levels’’ of Biblical exegesis which indicate
quite clearly which belong to the activity of lectio and which to meditatio.
Littera is the subject of grammatical and rhetorical study; historia is the
foreshadowing relationship of one event in the Bible to another, and is
what is often also called allegoria. After these disciplines comes tropologia
(which is more like what we think of as ‘‘allegorical’’); it is what the text
means to us when we turn its words, like a mirror, upon ourselves, how we
understand it when we have domesticated it and made it our own, and that
is the special activity of memorative meditatio, the culmination of lectio but
bound by none of its rules, a free play of the recollecting mind. ‘‘Holy
Scripture,’’ wrote Gregory the Great, quoting Augustine, ‘‘presents a kind
of mirror to the eyes of the mind, that our inner face may be seen in it.
There truly we learn our own ugliness, there our own beauty. There we
know how much we have gained, there how far we lie from our goal.’’53 As
we do this, the text’s initial sweetness may well turn to indigestion and
pain, as it did for St. John, but such dolor is to be welcomed. For, as Hugh
of Fouilloy comments on Apocalypse 10:11, ‘‘He certainly suffers pain in his
stomach who feels affliction of mind. For this can be understood because,
while the word of God may begin by being sweet in the mouth of our heart,
before long the mind [animus] grows bitter in doubt against itself.’’ And he
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211
quotes Gregory, ‘‘We devour the book when with eager desire we clothe
ourselves with the words of life.’’54
The psychology of the memory phantasm provides the rationale for the
ethical value of the reading method which Petrarch describes. A properly
made phantasm is both a likeness (simulacrum) and one’s gut-level response
to it (intentio), and it is an emotional process that causes change in the body.
The insistently physical matrix of the whole memorative process accounts for
Petrarch’s slow, detailed refashioning of Virgil’s description. The active
agency of the reader, discutiens, ‘‘breaking up’’ or ‘ shattering’ (one could
even translate ‘ deconstructing’ ) each single word as he recreates the scene
in his memory, is emphasized: ‘‘Ego autem audivi . . . audivi . . . audivi.’’ He
re-hears, re-sees, re-feels, experiences and re- experiences. In this way, Virgil’s
words are embodied in Petrarch’s recollection as an experience of tumult
and calm that is more physiological (emotional, passionate) than mental, in
our sense. Desire underlies the whole experience, changing from turmoil
through anger to repose. 55 The recreated reading becomes useful precisely
because in the heat of passion Petrarch’s emotions replay that process of
change, for he can remember what right action feels like. That is not a logical
decision process, but one of desire and will guided through the process of
change by remembered habit, ‘ firma facilitas’’ or hexis.
I have noted before that the medieval understanding of the complete
process of reading does not observe in the same way the basic distinction we
make between ‘‘what I read in a book’’ and ‘‘my experience.’’ This dis-
cussion by Petrarch, I think, makes clear why, for ‘‘what I read in a book’’ is
‘‘my experience,’’ and I make it mine by incorporating it (and we should
understand the word ‘‘incorporate’’ quite literally) in my memory. One
remembers the boast of Chaucer’s eagle in The House of Fame that he can so
palpably represent ‘‘skiles’’ (arguments) to his students that they can ‘‘shake
hem by the biles’’ (HF, II, 869–70), the avian manner of making them one’s
dear friends.
In this way, reading a book extends the process whereby one memory
engages another in a continuing dialogue that approaches Plato’s ideal
(expressed in Phaedrus) of two living minds engaged in learning. Medieval
reading is conceived to be not a ‘‘hermeneutical circle’’ (which implies mere
solepsism) but more like a ‘‘hermeneutical dialogue’’ between two memo-
ries, that in the text being made very much present as it is familiarized to
that of the reader. Isidore of Seville, we remember, in words echoed notably
by John of Salisbury, says that written letters recall through the windows of
our eyes the voices of those who are not present to us (and one thinks too
of that evocative medieval phrase, voces paginarum, ‘‘the voices of the
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pages’’).56 So long as the reader, in meditation (which is best performed in a
murmur or low voice), reads attentively, that other member of the dialogue
is in no danger of being lost, the other voice will sound through the written
letters. Perhaps it is not inappropriate to recall again, having just spoken
of Petrarch, the Greek verb, anagignoˆskoˆ, ‘‘to read,’’ but literally ‘‘to know
again’’ or ‘‘remember.’’
T W O W A Y S O F R E A D I N G
A great deal has been written on the subject of audible reading in antiquity,
and its apparent replacement by silent reading at some later time. Reading
aloud is assumed to have been the more common method, and those who
believe that there is sharp contrast between orality and literacy have made
much of a change from one form to the other, seeing it as a shift of
sensibility from the ‘‘earmindedness’’ of orality to the ‘‘eyemindedness’’ of
literacy. Judicious scholars of this school have always known that silent
reading to oneself was also practiced in antiquity, but have insisted that it
was regard
ed as strange and uncommon. 57 It seems to me, however, that
silent reading, legere tacite or legere sibi, as Benedict and others call it,58 and
reading aloud, clare legere in voce magna or viva voce, were two distinct
methods of reading taught for different purposes in ancient schools and
both practiced by ancient readers, and that they correspond roughly to
those stages in the study process called meditatio and lectio. They clearly
acquire additional meanings, perhaps even a whole theology, in medieval
monastic culture;59 and university library statutes suggest that reading
silently (legere tacite) may have become more noiseless in a university
reading room than the phenomenon of the same name may have been in
a monastic cell. 60 But I think these developments themselves were founded
in and continued to be based upon these distinctive but complementary,
elementary pedagogical procedures, the viva vox of lecture and the vox
tenuis, as it is called sometimes, of memory and meditation. 61
The locus classicus for any discussion of ancient reading habits is, in fact,
from late antiquity: Augustine’s description in the Confessions, VI, iii, of
Ambrose reading:62
Now I regarded Ambrose himself as a fortunate man as far as worldly standing
went, since he enjoyed the respect of powerful people . . . I had not begun to guess,
still less experience in my own case, what hope he bore within him, or what a
stuggle he waged against the temptations to which his eminent position exposed
him, or the encouragement he received in times of difficulty, or what exquisite
delights he savored in his secret mouth, the mouth of his heart [memory], as he
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chewed [over Your bread] [occultum os eius quod erat in corde eius, quam sapida
gaudia de pane tuo ruminaret] . . . There were questions I wanted to put to him, but
I was unable to do so as fully as I wished, because the crowds of people who
came to him on business impeded me, allowing me little opportunity either to talk
or to listen to him. He was habitually available to serve them in their needs, and
in the very scant time that he was not with them he would be refreshing
[lit. remaking] either his body with necessary food or his mind with reading
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