sive, and memorable in all its details (the medieval ars dictaminis addresses
this specifically). For the stage of compositio, a set of waxed tablets or other
informal (easily correctable) writing support could be used, on which one
might write down all or parts of one’s res to make stylistic tinkering easier.
But, depending on one’s maturity and experience, this process could, like
invention, be completely mental.
When the dictamen was shaped satisfactorily, the composition was fully
written out on a permanent surface like parchment in a scribal hand; this
final product was the exemplar submitted to the public. (Often a scribe’s
fair-copy was submitted once again for a final corrective collation by the
author or author’s agent before the exemplar was made available for further
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copying.) The word ‘‘writing’’ properly refers to this last inscribing process,
which the author might do himself, but usually did not. Saint Anselm’s
biographer, Eadmer, clarifies this when he describes how he wrote his
biography of Anselm:
when I had first taken the work in hand, and had already transcribed onto
parchment a great part of what I had drafted in wax [quae in cera dictaveram
pergamenae magna ex parte tradissem], Father Anselm himself one day called me to
him privately and asked what it was I was drafting and copying [quid dictitarem,
quid scriptitarem]. 14
Eadmer was reluctant to comply with his abbot’s request, knowing Anselm’s
humility, but showed his work in the hope that Anselm would correct it. In
fact, Anselm did so, deleting some things, approving others, and reordering
some material. But, as Eadmer feared, Anselm’s reticence showed itself a few
days later when he called Eadmer in and told him to destroy all ‘ the quires in
which I had put together the work.’’ Eadmer obeyed the letter of Anselm’s
order and destroyed the quires after first copying their contents into others.
In this admission of guilt, Eadmer makes clear the distinction between
the composing and copying stages. Of the first, he uses the verb dictare, of
the second scribere. Dictare is done in cerae, ‘‘on wax’’; scribere is the action
whereby the dictamen is traditum, ‘‘transcribed,’’ to parchment. Since
Eadmer did his own copying the distinction is an interesting one, for it
indicates that Eadmer thought of the two activities as different, even when
the same person performed them. Dictare, for Eadmer, evidently simply
means to compose, without any suggestions of oralness (one can dictate
with one’s stylus on wax); scribere is what a scribe does, even when the
scribe is also the author. One needs to be careful not to over-generalize
Eadmer’s consistent distinction, for there are instances when the verb
dictare means dictate to a secretary, as Thomas Aquinas did, sometimes
from a written dictamen (in littera inintelligibilis) and often directly from
memory.15 And scribere is used in contexts when the author is still compos-
ing. But the fact that these two verbs sometimes overlap in meaning does
not indicate that the two processes, of composing and of transcribing in
secretarial hand, were undifferentiated. The author produces a res or dicta-
men; that which is a liber scriptus is in a formal hand on parchment, and the
product of a scribe.
The distinction is long-lived. Chaucer makes it, in English, when he
begs his scrivener, Adam, that he should ‘‘after my makyng . . . wryte more
trewe.’’16 Once the work was written out, it was corrected by the author
(Chaucer complains of the amount of rubbing and scraping of parchment
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he must do after Adam’s work), as Anselm corrected Eadmer’s written
composition, and equally, as Bernard of Clairvaux and Augustine corrected
the reports (reportationes) of their oral sermons. It is important to realize
that the written version of a text was considered to be a scribal or secretarial
product and not an authorial one no matter who the scribe was. All written
texts are presumed to need emendation and correction; emendare is also a
stage of the composition, formation, and ‘‘authorizing’’ of a text, which
follows the fair-copy product. This is very different from the status which a
printed text has now, for a medieval text was not presumed to be perfectus,
‘‘finished,’’ even though it had been scriptus, ‘‘written.’’ The first task which
both ancient and medieval elementary students performed in school when
they had written copies of texts before them was collatio, in which the
grammaticus read aloud from his text while the pupils emended theirs; thus
the introduction a child had in school to a written text was as something
that needed to be checked and corrected.17
C O L L E C T I N G A N D R E C O L L E C T I N G
Having sketched these stages out, I now want to examine in more detail
how they are related to the procedures of trained recollection.In Book X of
his Institutio, Quintilian describes an unskilled student in the throes of
starting a composition (the stage of invention), as lying on his back with
eyes turned up to the ceiling, trying to fire up his composing power by
murmuring to himself, in the hope that he will find things in his memorial
inventory to bring together into a composition. (Quintilian doesn’t
approve of such desperation, preferring that one compose more calmly,
but that is not germane to my present concern.)18 If a modern teacher were
to describe such a scene of typical desperation, she would not do it in these
terms. Instead, someone would be described with pen in hand, seated at a
desk amid heaps of crumpled paper. And while the person might have a
desperate or vacant look, while he might get up to pace the floor or stare
out of a window, he would be silent, returning constantly but silently to his
pen and sheets of paper (or her computer screen). And when composition
finally began, that too would be silent (even though, in fact, many people
still subvocalize while actually composing). What Quintilian describes,
however, is a student murmuring during recollective meditation in order
to compose. And this he regards as the typical initiating activity of com-
position – what one does in order to get ‘‘the idea’’ for a work.
The mental activity which Quintilian’s desperate author is attempting to
stimulate is cogitatio. This is one of the functions of the inner sense, and, as
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we saw in Chapter 2, while it gets defined with somewhat different emphases
in the various accounts of human psychology, it is the ability to compose.
The process is shown in the late medieval brain diagram in CUL MS. Gg. 1.1
(reproduced as figure 3 and discussed at greater length in Chapter 2), which explicitly invokes Thomas Aquinas as its authority. To review, vis cogitativa
in medieval psychology works with the imaginary things conjured by vis
aestimativa and the vis formalis or fantasia. According to Avicenna, who
defines it most stringently, it is the compositive human imagination, or the<
br />
activity of taking the individual phantasms produced by imagination (vis
formalis) and putting them together with other images, mainly those pre-
viously stored in memory. In the diagram shown in figure 3, vis cogitativa is
also called vis imaginativa, and a striking feature of the diagram is how
imagination and its materials are implicated at every stage in the process of
making thoughts. Vis imaginativa corresponds to what Aristotle calls the
deliberative imagination, a combination of phantasia with dianoia, or the
power of constructing with conscious judgment a single image out of a
number of images. 19 Some medieval psychologists distinguished the simple
act of putting images together from the act of judging the result, and use vis
imaginativa for the former, reserving vis cogitativa for the judging faculty. 20
But throughout its long history, cogitatio is basically the activity of putting
images together in a consciously recollected, deliberative way. Though it is
often translated into modern English as ‘‘thought,’’ one should never forget
that the vis cogitativa is an activity of animus, the sensory-emotional soul; it
therefore is never as abstractly intellectual as the modern word implies. Its
judging power is based in emotion, the sort of thing that causes a lamb,
seeing a wolf, to run in fear. For Aristotle, the cogitative activity (diano¯etik¯e
psycheˆ) is ‘ the faculty which judges what is to be pursued and what is to be
avoided,’ what is good and what is evil, not after intellectual consideration
but as an initial responsive judgment; cogitation, he says, also comprises the
functions of combination and separation. 21 So the act of invention, carried
out by cogitation, was thought to be one of combining, or ‘‘laying together,’’
in one place or compositive image or design, divided bits previously filed and
cross-filed in other discrete loci of memory. The result was a mental product
called the res, the model of one’s composition. It is this that an orator or
preacher would lay up in imagines rerum when preparing to speak, and its
close kinship is apparent to the technique of memorizing texts according to
their res, which one would then shape to suit a particular occasion.22
For composition in the Middle Ages is not particularly an act of
writing. It is rumination, cogitation, dictation, a listening and a dialogue,
a gathering (collectio) of voices from their several places in memory. The
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245
fifteenth-century Italian physician, Matheolus of Perugia, wrote that
meditatio is derived from mentis dictatio. 23 The ancient writers frequently
speak of the importance of listening to what one is composing. In
Heroides, Ovid’s Leander writes that ‘‘having spoken in such words to
myself in a low murmur, the rest my right hand talked through with the
parchment.’ 24 Thus, the vox tenuis which accompanied meditative read-
ing seems to have accompanied composition as well; we might recall the
story of Thomas Aquinas’s conversations with Saints Peter and Paul that
so disturbed his socius. I have used the phrase ‘‘hermeneutical dialogue’’ to
describe the relationship between a reader and his reading in meditatio; it
applies also to composition, for indeed that hermeneutical dialogue
constitutes the process of composing, as reading and other experience is
gathered together and domesticated in memory.
But what exactly was this process of collectio thought to be, as it relates to
our own acts of composing? One of the boldest and most complete
accounts comes from Augustine, as one might expect. During his medi-
tation on memoria in Book X of the Confessions, Augustine speaks of how
the sense impressions are ‘‘impressed’’ in the mind as images stored up in
the wondrous cells of memory. 25 Then he proceeds to discuss cogitatio and
collectio, as the power and particular activity involved in making ideas,
creating thoughts. Cogitando [thinking] is ‘‘nothing else but by meditating
to gather together those same things which the memory did before contain
more scatteringly and confusedly.’’ Augustine’s use of colligere, deriving
from the verb which means both ‘‘to collect’’ and ‘‘to read,’’ carries in this
context a specific meaning of gathering together the memories of what one
has read and stored in separate places earlier, as well as a general meaning of
collecting up earlier experiences of all sorts.
We discover (‘‘invenimus’’) such things as concepts and ideas when by
the activity of thinking we collect (‘‘cogitando quasi colligere’’), and by the
act of turning our animus we attend to (‘‘animadvertendo curare’’), those
things which our memory was holding here and there, unarranged in any
particular design (‘‘passim et indisposite’’). These we gather together in our
memory, so those matters which formerly lay scattered from each other and
unnoticed (‘‘ubi sparsa prius et neglecta latitabant’’) now readily occur to us
as part of our familiar mental equipment (‘‘iam familiari intentioni facile
occurrant’’). The process Augustine describes is generally recognizable
from other writers too, for this is what was later called vis cogitativa.
Cogitatio finds matters held in various memory-places and collects them
into one place, ready at hand (‘‘ad manum posita’’) for our intellect’s
further attentions and uses. 26
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How many matters of this kind our memory holds, Augustine continues,
placed ready at hand . . . things which we say we have learned (‘‘didicisse’’)
and know (‘‘nosse’’). If we stop recollecting them (‘ recolere’’) then once again
they break apart and slip away (‘ dilabantur’’) into the remoter recesses of our
memory (‘‘in remotiora penetralia’ ), whence we must draw them together
again (‘‘cogenda rursus’ ) in order to know them again. Knowing, cogitan-
dum, derives its name from this action of continually gathering dispersed
images and matters together (‘ ex quadam dispersione colligenda’ ). For cogo,
‘‘draw together,’ and cogito, ‘ cogitate,’ are derivative one from the other, as
are ago, ‘ do,’ and agito, ‘ do continually,’’ and facio, ‘‘make,’ and facito,
‘ make frequently.’ 27
So learning is itself a process of composition, collation, and recollection.
But the result of bringing together the variously stored bits in memory is new
knowledge. It is one’s own composition and opinion, familiaris intentio.
This is the point at which collation becomes authorship. Augustine under-
stood this quite well in his own composing experience, for he speaks of the
process of cogitatio/collectio as an expansive one; paradoxically perhaps, the
act of bringing memory-images together into a single, compositive design is
the path to enlarged understanding. ‘ I know . . . but I do not understand,’ he
says in one of his sermons, drawing a characteristic distinction, ‘ yet cogi-
tation makes us expand, expansion stretches us out, and stretching makes us
more capacious.’ 28 For
Augustine, the pieces brought together in cogitatio
make a sum greater than its parts. Knowledge extends understanding not by
adding on more and more pieces, but because as we compose our design
dilates to greater capacity and spaciousness. New knowledge, what has not
been thought, results from this process, for dilation leads ultimately even
through the deepest caves of memory to God. Augustine characteristically
speaks of this as a transit through memory. How shall I reach God? he asks.
‘ I shall pass through [transibo] even this power of mine which is called
memory; I shall pass through it to reach Thee, sweet Light.’’ God is indeed
beyond memory, but the only way there is through and by means of it.
Augustine gives the process a metaphysical twist, but his description of how
invention occurs as an activity of memoria belongs clearly to the ordinary
pedagogy of rhetoric.29
In practice, invention was an intensely emotional state, more so than we
now associate with thinking. We have very few specific medieval accounts
of people doing what we call composing. Among the best are those of
Thomas Aquinas, and Eadmer’s description of Anselm, written around
1100.30 The work in question was the Proslogion; Eadmer reports what
Anselm told him of the great difficulty he experienced composing it:
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partly because thinking about it [haec cogitatio] took away his desire for food,
drink and sleep, and partly – and this was more grievous to him – because it
disturbed the attention [gravabat intentionem ejus] which he ought to have paid to
matins and to Divine service at other times. When he was aware of this, and still
could not entirely lay hold on what he sought, he supposed that this line of
thought [hujusmodi cogitationem] was a temptation of the devil and he tried to
banish it from his mind [repellere a sua intentione]. But the more vehemently he
tried to do this, the more this thought pursued him [tanto illum ipsa cogitatio magis
ac magis infestabat]. Then suddenly one night during matins the grace of God
illuminated his heart, the whole matter [res] became clear to his mind, and a great
joy and exultation filled his inmost being. Thinking therefore that others also
would be glad to know what he had found, immediately [ilico] and ungrudgingly
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