memory phantasm, as we have seen, employs exactly the same model,
that of ‘‘seal’’ or ‘‘stamp,’’ in wax most commonly, but also on a coin (as in
Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon). The Greek concept of hexis, crucial to
an understanding of moral behavior, is a predisposition that ‘‘stamps’’ or
‘‘forms’’ the embodied soul towards behaving in certain ways rather than
others. Perhaps here as clearly as anywhere else in ancient and medieval
culture, the fundamental symbiosis of memorized reading and ethics can
be grasped, for each is a matter of stamping the body–soul, of charakteˆr.
Heloise’s moment of moral decision is articulated as a rhetorical action.
This is the most telling feature of the entire incident. It gives us a clear way
of understanding just how ethics and rhetoric were thought to coincide,
and as there has been a great deal of misunderstanding about this, especially
in the modern school of Exegetical criticism, I want to analyze her action
carefully.
Exegetical critics believe that literature is ethical in nature, but they think
of the ethical use of texts in entirely normative and definitional terms. All
medieval literature, they believe, was thought to promote charity, and the
only value of the specifics of a text, its ‘‘literal level,’’ is as an instance of a
universal and normative moral principle. But the direction of this analysis
runs exactly counter to that of any rhetorical situation. Rhetorically con-
ceived, ethics is the application of a res or generalized content (most often
expressed in a textual maxim) to a specific, present occasion which is public
in nature, because it requires an audience. Rhetoric composes common-
places by a process of adaptation. Normative or transcendental analysis, in
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225
contrast, discovers a universal, timeless principle amid the detritus of the
event, and its moral truth is unconditioned by audience, occasion, speaker,
or text. But rhetoric does not normalize an occasion, it occasionalizes
a norm.95
What is so striking, and so strikingly medieval, in Heloise’s action is her
articulation of her own present dilemma and decision by means of her
memory of a text in the public domain (as we would say). She re-presents
Cornelia in her own present situation; the text from Lucan provides a
temporal and spatial meeting-ground, a common place, between a public
memory and her personal situation, and gives her a way of talking about
herself in the present. Heloise is ‘‘making a commonplace’’ even as she
speaks to her grieving friends and relatives, and in the process she is
re-presenting Cornelia. Or rather, she implies, both Cornelia’s action
and now her own are part of a definitional copiousness, which can be
usefully held together within a common memory locus – that is why the
presence of an audience is so crucial. And copiousness, as I argued in
Chapter 1, is not a process of analytical definition so much as it is compiling
a memory place that is most like a florilegial entry, an indefinitely expand-
able grouping of dicta et facta on some common theme or subject. And, as
I also have said, these themes (‘‘Justice,’’ ‘‘Wifely Chastity,’’ ‘‘Disgraced
Husbands’’) do not function as a-priori definitive norms, but as labels, the
mnemonically necessitated listing of the memorial chest. And, of course,
sayings and stories can be listed in more than one place, for, like ethics
itself, they are copiously – rhetorically – defined.
The presence of an audience would appear to be crucial to the making of
the ethical action. This simply reminds us that a rhetorical conception of
ethics requires that its social and public nature be stressed. But it is
remarkable that instances of moral judgment in medieval literature seem
so often to require both a literary text and an audience to complete them,
whether the audience is in the work itself or is created by a direct address to
readers (Petrarch speaks to Augustine about Virgil, Dorigen utters a formal
complaint ‘‘as ye [that is, we readers] shal after heere’’).
The function of this audience, however, is not to supply a norm. It is to
supply a memory. Heloise’s friends and relations try to dissuade her ‘‘in
pity for her youth’’; sobbing so that she can scarcely speak, Heloise breaks
out ‘‘as best she could’’ with Cornelia’s lament and takes the veil. The scene
is deliberately made memorable – perhaps even contrived to give the
appearance of spontaneity, in the best traditions of Ciceronian rhetoric –
and speaker and audience together collaborate in this. Memorableness,
enabled for this occasion by the quality some writers have called
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‘‘performance’’ (and to which we might apply the rhetorical term, ‘‘deliv-
ery’’) would, in fact, seem to be the necessary source of the ethical nature
and efficacy of Heloise’s act. 96 And the mediator of the action is a piece of a
literary text. Why? Because it is that which is common to both the subject
and the audience, a piece of their common memorial florilegium. If the
audience did not recognize Heloise’s quotation, the scene would lose its
ethical effectiveness. Instead of talking about ethical rules in medieval
culture, it would be truer to speak of ethical memories, contained in
texts as dicta et facta memorabilia; they are not ethical algorithms or
universal definitions, but are ‘‘copious,’’ like literature. And they require
not to be applied (like a theorem) but to be read, interpreted.
This brings us back to the third element in the complete, ethically
valorized action – Heloise herself. For it is her memory that is the first
mover, as it were, of the whole incident. Clearly, she is not, in our sense,
expressing herself. Self-expression is a meaningless term in a medieval
context – on that point I agree with the Exegetes, for there was no concept
of an autonomous, though largely inarticulate, individual self, to be
defined and given a voice against social norms. Heloise is not expressing
herself, but neither is she simply expressing Lucan. She is expressing her
‘‘character,’’ which is a function of memoria.
So instead of the word ‘‘self ’ or even ‘‘individual,’’ we might better speak
of a ‘‘subject-who-remembers,’’ and in remembering also feels and thinks
and judges. In other words, we should think of the apprehending and
commenting individual subject (‘‘self ’’) also in rhetorical terms. Her sub-
jectivity is located in Heloise’s memory, including her whole florilegium of
texts, one of which she invents (in the ancient sense) for this occasion,
thereby investing it, the occasion, and her own action with common ethical
value, and giving her audience something to think about.97
It seems to me that the basic notion of a memory-place as a commonplace
into which one gathers a variety of material is essential to understanding how
the process of ethical valorizing occurs. In considering what is the ethical
nature of reading, one could do much worse than to start with Gregory the
Great’s comment, that what we see in a text is not rules for what we ought to
be, but images of what we are, ‘ our own beauty, our own ugliness.’ It is this
which enables us to make these texts our own. We read rhetorically, memory
makes our reading into our own ethical equipment (‘‘stamps our character’’),
and we express that character in situations that are also rhetorical in nature,
in the expressive gestures and performances which we construct from our
remembered experience, and which, in turn, are intended to impress and
give value to others’ memories of a particular occasion.
Memory and the ethics of reading
227
Thus, the entire ethical situation in Abelard’s account is socially and
rhetorically conceived: it requires a recollecting subject, a remembered text,
and a remembering audience. These, of course, are also the three ingredients
found in virtually all medieval narrative literature. What makes a poem like
Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess ethical is its construction: a recollecting
subject (the dreamer, the Man in Black), remembered dicta et facta (the
dream itself, fair White, the Ovidian tale of Ceyx and Alcyone), and the
remembering audience (the dreamer who listens to the Man in Black, and we
readers).98 That the poem also talks generally about death, love, or honor
does not in itself make it an ethical poem. Rather, the ethical content is made
by both the common and specific topics of death, love, and honor, recol-
lected and spoken by somebody to somebody else in this poem, which
thereby lodges as an experienced event in the memories of its audience,
memories that are made up equally of imagines (likenesses) and intentiones
(feelings). Ethics is inseparable from the copiousness of the text itself and its
effect upon the memoria of its audience and witnesses. It is interesting to
reflect that the psychoanalytical situation is in some respects parallel to the
one I have just described, for the same three ingredients are present: recol-
lecting subject, remembered dicta et facta in all their copiousness, and a
remembering audience. But psychoanalysis is neither public nor social in its
occasion, and it is therefore not truly rhetorical, despite these structural
similarities. Nonetheless, psychoanalysis often presents itself as a modern
version of memoria (and sometimes as a modern version of ethics too),
though in fact by privileging the concepts of privacy and subjectivity it is
greatly different from medieval memoria. Jacques Lacan sounds very much
like Cassiodorus when he writes that: ‘ [Psychoanalytic] recollection is not
Platonic reminiscence – it is not the return of a form, an imprint, an eidos of
beauty and good . . . coming to us from the beyond. It is something that
comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble’’ (my emphases).99
But of course the ‘‘structural necessities’’ that Cassiodorus meant when he
spoke of the containers of trained memory that give shape to the uneducated
mind (I would have used the adjective ‘ private,’ but it is too anachronistic)
were neither generic attributes of Man, nor infusions from some vague
cultural mentality, but were the publicly held commonplaces laid down
according to a manner and method that everyone knew and approved.
F L O W E R S O F R E A D I N G I I : F R A N C E S C A
Italian and French humanism of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is
studded with vernacular florilegia, including Brunetto Latini’s Treśor,
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written in French for the circle at Avignon (c. 1266) but soon translated into
Italian. A modern editor of Treśor writes disparagingly of it as a compila-
tion of compilations, which ‘‘contains no element of imagination, no
artistic pretension.’’100 Yet Dante has memorialized it as Brunetto’s chief
work, the fame of which will live forever. And Petrarch did not disdain to
produce an ethical florilegium (in Latin, to be sure, but for a lay audience),
derived mainly from Valerius Maximus’ very similar compilation (known
by its medieval title, Dicta et facta memorabilia), though Valerius Maximus
was also much admired and studied at this time.
It is certainly true to observe that ethically directed florilegial
compilations are distinctive (though not original) products of the early
Renaissance, from Treśor (1266) to such an Erasmian product as Adagia
(1508). As Thomas M. Greene has observed in a fine essay on the Adagia,
‘‘the impulse, whatever it was, that produced this [florilegial] text and its
thousands of companions, has to be regarded with some curiosity.’’101
Clearly it was an impulse distinct from, though not in conflict with, the
equally typical humanistic one to restore the original purity and wholeness
of ancient texts. These two activities are fundamentally adaptations of the
two kinds of reading, lectio and meditatio, which had been developed in
medieval schools. The desire to establish true texts evolved from the
scholarship of grammar and rhetorical study, a careful restoration and
analysis of textual litterae. This sort of study – together with commentary
and the questions it invokes and responds to – were traditionally the tasks
of lectio, a master reading a text aloud to his students, responding to
questions, elucidating hard passages, and, above all, establishing the text.
In monastic tradition, lectio encompasses all the disciplines of the sacred
page; Hugh of St. Victor makes this clear in the program he sets forth in
Didascalicon. But lectio is the preface to, and must be completed by,
meditatio, if study is to be a truly moral, useful activity. This link between
studious reading and meditative composition based upon the flowers
culled from reading goes back to the Rome of St. Jerome and is very
much a heritage of ancient rhetoric. Jerome wrote to Pope Damasus that
‘‘to read without also writing is to sleep.’’102 The humanist impulse to
compile florilegia directs the literary enterprise specifically to forming,
from humanist sources, the ethical character of the laity, while at the
same time confirming one’s own memory and providing an occasion for
meditative composition. Making florilegia is an unbroken tradition of
medieval pedagogy; these humanist examples in the genre broaden it
to include exactly the audience to whom the humanist memory-texts
are also directed: lawyers, physicians, merchants, aristocrats, and clerical
Memory and the ethics of reading
229
bureaucrats of all sorts, the components of the extensive secular society
coming into existence in southern, and then later northern, Europe.
And in this enterprise, the florilegial books of ethical instruction compiled
by the regular clergy also played their part.103 Even in fourteenth-century
England at least one such compendium was made for personal meditation
and not primarily as a preachers’ manual. At the very end of the century,
John of Mirfeld, an Augustinian canon of St. Bartholomew’s, Smithfield,
made his Florariu
m Bartholomei, which he prefaces by saying that it provides
a ‘ storehouse’’ of material ‘‘which every Christian soul needs for its virtuous
behaviour and its salvation . . . Understand, however, that [these texts] are
not to be read amidst tumults, but in quiet; not speedily, but one subject at a
time, with intent and thoughtful meditation.’’104
Bono Giamboni’s role as translateur of both Treśor and Tullius on
memory is revealing, for it connects both Treśor and the Ammaestramenti
with memory training, for which the Herennian precepts offered a human-
istically approved method, more authentically classical (perhaps this is
what was thought) than methods associated with university training,
such as those taught by Thomas Bradwardine. Bartolomeo, the Italian
Dominican, begins his florilegium with the passage from Cassiodorus
(cited sententialiter and in the vernacular) which I quoted earlier in this
chapter: ‘‘Siccome dice Cassiodoro: Lo senno umano se egli non eàjutato e
restaurato per le cose trovate d’altrui, tosto puote mancare del suo pro-
prio’’, ‘‘As Cassiodorus says: human judgment if it is not adjusted and
restored by things found in [the works of] others, promptly will fall short of
its true nature.’’105 There are few clearer statements of this eminently
florilegial formulation concerning the nature of human character, and
the role which public memory, enshrined in books, must play in the
development of individual ethical behavior.
Human beings are born imperfect, needing to be completed. To be sure
this Augustinian doctrine is thought of in terms of vice and virtue, but it is
very easy, especially if one thinks in modern popular-Freudian terms, to fall
into an essentially Manichaean understanding of the process as a kind of
war between the superego and the unconscious. It is truer to the assump-
tions driving the compilers of florilegia to think of character in terms of
completion or filling-out or building (the root concept in Latin instruo,
‘‘instruct’’). Public memory is a needed ethical resource, for its contents
complete the edifice of each individual’s memory.
Therefore, says Bartolomeo, it behooves a wise man not to rest content
with his own ideas, but by diligent study to search out those of others. Of
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