The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  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<
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  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