The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  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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  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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  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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  213

  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