The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  was addition and what we might think of as digression. Dilation, dilatio,

  allowing space for matter that might occur to you while you revise, is just as

  necessary as excision. As a beginner writing one’s res onto tablets, one

  should, says Quintilian, be sure to allow such space physically, in the form

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  of blank leaves, and also be sure not to cover all the space of the tablet page,

  but leave generous margins. 47 The practice seems self-evident, and I don’t

  wish to belabor it, but it underscores how the original text, the res, was

  conceived of as a mental location into which new material was collected

  from other places, amplified and adapted, as one refined one’s dictamen for

  delivery to an audience. For Quintilian does not recommend that one

  continuously recopy one’s revised text to make a clean copy seamlessly

  incorporating such additions. A set of written tablets would show visually

  just what was original and what was added (erasures are not so apparent on

  wax as on paper because the end of the stylus smooths the wax out). This is

  the visual image of his prepared oration which a young student would set in

  his memory places before the exercise of delivery, not as a clean or fixed

  document but rather as the memorandum of a work, a palimpsest of the

  series of his compositional drafts. It is a procedure that invites ongoing

  digression and commentary.

  Having learned to revise with stylus and tablets, a student advances to

  the technique of cogitatio proper, the ability to revise mentally (Quintilian

  is using the word cogitatio to refer to a technique, not simply to the natural

  psychological process). ‘‘Proxima stilo cogitatio est,’’ he writes, ‘‘our next

  topic is mental preparation [cogitatio], which itself derives its strength from

  writing, and is a sort of halfway house between the labour of writing and

  the chanciness of speaking impromptu [extemporali].’’ It is more frequently

  used by mature orators than either of the other two extremes of method,

  solely writing and then memorizing verbatim, or solely speaking extem-

  pore. 48 Eventually, through practice, we will develop our skill to the point

  where we can rely as surely on what we have prepared by cogitation alone as

  what we have written out word for word and memorized. Cogitatio,

  however, requires an especially careful conception of the order of the

  composition, so that we may take advantage of things occurring to us at

  the moment (those which we would add in the margin if we were using a

  tablet). Such a composition ‘‘must be so conducted as to allow us to depart

  from it or return to it with ease . . . the most important thing is to bring

  with us . . . a ready prepared and reliable store of speech; all the same it is

  deeply stupid to reject any gift the moment [temporis munera] brings.’’49

  ‘‘The greatest fruit of our studies, the richest harvest of our long labours

  is the power of improvisation [ex tempore dicendi facultas],’’ especially for

  an advocate who cannot always count on having time to prepare himself,

  and must instead rely on the agility and readiness which he has acquired by

  practice and training. Ex tempore dicendi is emphatically not unprepared.

  Ancient and medieval extempore speaking is the highest expression of

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  artistic mastery and learning. Quintilian discusses at length the procedures

  by which one can master what we now would call improvisation: com-

  menting on the ancient idea of what we might call talent or artlessness

  (being atechn¯e, without art), he says that such a gift ‘‘will only be useful if it

  is based on the art of which we have spoken, so that an intrinsically

  irrational activity comes to be grounded on reason.’’ Artlessness is espe-

  cially the product of art, impromptu speaking the product of preparation.

  One must first of all know the way of one’s speech (‘‘Nota sit primum

  dicendi via’’), the order and route through which the points of an argument

  proceed, from first to second to third and so on. Divisio is absolutely

  essential to establish the ‘‘modum et finem,’’ ‘‘definite bounds and limits,’’

  of a composition ‘‘which cannot exist without a Division’’ of the material.

  The mind must be so trained that it can pay attention to the invention,

  arrangement, and style both of what we are saying at the moment and what

  we will say next, for an extemporaneous speech must especially exhibit ‘‘an

  orderly, formal, and fluent manner.’’ To achieve this, a speaker must not

  only have his immediate subject in mind but be able mentally to look ahead

  and ‘‘have in sight everything on the road and around it, and see not only

  the end, but all the way up to the end.’’50

  To ensure such facility, Quintilian counsels that, together with all the

  relevant questions, persons, and arguments, we must keep before our

  mental eyes rerum imagines or phantasiai. The phrase is used technically

  here, to refer to those vivid images of subject matters, those which we have

  associated with the res of our composition. Their function is not only to

  keep track of the composition’s form (as it is in Ad Herennium) but to

  awaken the emotions of the orator. 51 ‘‘Maxima enim pars eloquentiae

  constat animo; hunc adfici, hunc concipere imagines rerum . . . necesse

  est,’’ ‘‘eloquence is mainly a psychological matter: it is the mind which must

  be emotionally stirred and must conceive images.’’52 Rhetoric mainly

  involves functions of the sensory soul, forming, combining, reacting to,

  storing, and recollecting the imagines rerum which are critical to eloquence.

  Elsewhere, Quintilian more particularly describes the value of the phanta-

  siai to the orator, for thereby ‘‘the images of absent things are presented to

  the mind [repraesentantur animo] in such a way that we seem actually to see

  them with our eyes.’’53 By this the orator is moved and thus is enabled to

  move others. The purpose of such images is not description but persuasion.

  The mature orator will use all three methods of composition which he

  has learned. He will write out and memorize some of his speech (perhaps

  the beginning) and may use his tablets as he is composing to perfect

  particular phrases, he will above all carefully plan out and prepare the

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  bulk of his oration by meditation and cogitation, and be able to adapt to

  sudden turns of a case, or to sudden inspiration, by speaking extempore

  when he wants to. Cicero himself kept notebooks (‘‘libellos’’) of his

  memoranda; Quintilian says he will allow the use of such jottings, which

  may even be held in the hand and occasionally glanced at while speaking.

  But he urges that we not write down anything that we cannot investigate as

  well in memory (‘‘quod non simus memoria persecuturi’’), lest we be

  enslaved by our prefabricated composition and unable to take advantage

  of the momentary chances and opportunities a particular occasion may

  present. 54

  Throughout the Middle Ages, preaching included much ex
tempore

  dicendi, as one might expect. The Dominican friar Giordano da Pisa

  (1260– 1310, he who first publicized eyeglasses) can be quite frank about

  his freedom. ‘‘I thought of preaching to you not about this, but about

  something else; but when it pleased Him that I should be so fluent in this,

  thank God this has really been a good sermon. But anyway I want to tell

  you a little about what I had planned to say.’’55 On another occasion, ‘‘I am

  so full, and I have so much in me, and I am so rich that I do not know what

  to say to you: I have said nothing of what I prepared, not a thing.’’56 The

  friar’s sermons were taken down by reporters, whose comments are pre-

  served;57 this reportatio represented the first written version of the work,

  which Friar Giordano seems not to have subsequently corrected.

  The written reportatio was customarily submitted to the author for

  emendation before being published. Deferrari quotes from Gregory

  Nazianzus’s farewell sermon: ‘‘Farewell, ye lovers of my discourses, in

  your eagerness and concourse, ye pencils [graphides] seen and unseen,

  and those balustrades, pressed upon by those who thrust themselves for-

  ward to hear the word.’’58 These human pencils continued to be a fact of life

  in both the lay and learned circles throughout the Middle Ages; it is,

  I think, worth noting that Gregory refers to them as simple machines.

  He is, of course, being witty but his wit tells us something quite profound

  about the way in which the reporter’s role was regarded. The scribe as such

  is not a thinking being, a reader or scholar, certainly not an auctor himself,

  but a mere pencil, performing the humble and subservient task of writing.

  Christian sermons were thus composed and published in the manner of

  all ancient orations, worked out mentally in the ways that Quintilian

  describes, written down at the time of delivery by reporters and then

  often corrected by the author before being made available for further

  dissemination in an exemplar. The Greek church historian, Socrates, says

  of Atticus, bishop of Constantinople: ‘‘Formerly, while a presbyter, he had

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  been accustomed after composing his sermons, to commit them to mem-

  ory, and then to recite them in church; but by diligent application, he

  acquired confidence and made his instruction extemporaneous and elo-

  quent. His discourses, however, were not such as to be received with much

  applause by his auditors, or to deserve to be committed to writing.’’59

  Atticus demonstrates exactly the sequence of training and proficiency

  which Quintilian describes, even though his results were disappointing to

  his congregation. And we must also notice that a sharp distinction is made

  between Atticus’s writing and memorizing his composition verbatim for

  oral delivery (regarded as a mark of ineptitude), and the exemplar written

  by a scribe which marks a text deemed worthy to be preserved.

  St. Augustine composed mentally with much happier results than poor

  Atticus. In a 1922 article, R. J. Deferrari gathered much of the extensive

  evidence in Augustine’s sermons which indicates the cogitative and extem-

  pore nature of their composition, among which this remark may stand

  as typical. In an Easter sermon on the text ‘‘et Verbum erat apud Deum’’

  ( Jn 1:1), Augustine speaks of how the ‘‘inner word’’ (God’s res, as it were,

  which by grace informs human speech) is translated into ordinary dis-

  course. The speaker has planned his sermon in his mind as an inner word

  which he will varyingly express to fit the occasion. ‘‘For I who speak with

  you,’’ he says of his own habitual practice, ‘‘before I came before you,

  I mentally composed [cogitavi] in advance what I would say to you. When

  I was composing what I would say to you, already a word was in my mind.

  Nor would I be speaking to you, unless I had previously thought about it in

  my mind.’’60 This mixture of prior cogitatio and purely ex tempore dicendi is

  a common feature not only of Augustine’s sermons but of those of his

  contemporaries, Roman and Greek, and clearly continued throughout the

  Middle Ages. Not only does Augustine’s De doctrina christiana assume that

  preachers will compose in this way; so, as we have seen, do the later medieval

  artes praedicandi of Robert of Basevorn and Thomas Waleys. The reason

  for numerically dividing sermons is to allow the preacher to take off on an

  extempore digression without losing his place in his premeditated design

  (he would have no need for such an aid if he were reading from a written

  text) – or to speak in terms of memory-design, to allow him to compose

  (gather together) material from other memorial loci into the locus where the

  eye of the mind is following its text. Friar Giordano’s admittedly extem-

  poraneous sermons employ numerical divisiones just like pre-planned ones,

  pulled in from the numbered bins of his memorial treasury. 61

  Yet we must be careful not to regard the informal style of the popular

  sermon as caused by its predisposition to extempore composition.

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  Quintilian, speaking for the central tradition of classical rhetoric, does not

  associate particular compositional methods with any of the three kinds of

  style distinguished in that tradition, nor with any particular genre of

  discourse. There are, however, two fatal errors in delivery which an orator

  can make (and these cautions are repeated by every writer on the subject

  through the Middle Ages). The first is to lose one’s way in one’s oration,

  hesitate, or be reduced to needing a prompt. The second is to appear in any

  way to be reciting word for word a prefabricated text. Quintilian counsels

  various ways of avoiding this, such as seeming to grope for a word, pausing,

  perhaps wondering aloud how to answer an opponent’s charge, and other

  devices which give the effect of spontaneity. But genuine spontaneity is

  equally bad if one cannot achieve the same level of crafted eloquence one

  attains by careful cogitatio; that is why ex tempore dicendi is reserved only to

  masters whose memories are fully stored and effectively designed. 62

  This ability to appear unrehearsed despite elaborate preparation is what

  the Romans considered the crowning achievement of rhetorical memoria,

  regarded in the context of performance. In all the rhetorical textbooks,

  memoria precedes pronuntiatio or delivery and the discussion concerns how

  to achieve facility and the mastery of memorial design necessary for this

  end. The assumption that writing is handmaid and servant to memory is

  once again demonstrated in this ancient prejudice against any composition

  appearing to have been written down in advance of delivery. Cicero says of

  the great orator Marcus Antonius that ‘‘his was the best memory, with no

  suggestion of prior meditation [erat memoria summa, nulla meditationis

  suspicio]; he always seemed unprepared to begin speaking, but he was so

  well prepared that after he had spoken it was the judges that rather

  appeared to have been insufficiently prepared for defe
nding their posi-

  tion.’’63 I know of no more succinct demonstration of how greatly we

  misunderstand when we reduce ancient and medieval memoria to our word

  ‘‘memorization.’’

  T W O M E D I E V A L A U T H O R S A T W O R K

  I would now like to consider two case studies of medieval authorship,

  which indicate in practice the distinctions I have drawn so far. The first is

  Hugh of St. Victor’s De archa Noe, a wide-ranging commentary on

  Genesis 6–7; the second continues Eadmer’s account of Anselm compos-

  ing his Proslogion. In his preface to De archa Noe, Hugh describes how the

  work began as an exchange ‘‘in conventu fratrum,’’ ‘‘in a gathering of the

  brothers,’’ while he sat once with them responding to their questions. His

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  sermones on that occasion so pleased them that he decided to write down

  what he had said: ‘‘However, because I knew certain things to have been

  especially pleasing to the brothers, I specially wanted to commit them to

  the care of my pen in a collatio, not so much because I thought them

  worthy to be written but because I recognized that material new to that

  occasion [literally ‘‘unheard before then’’] would be yet more pleasing in

  this way [i.e. written down].’’64 In other words, De archa Noe began as an

  oral exchange between Hugh and a gathering of his fellow canons of

  St. Victor, the sort of lectio that Augustine hoped he might have (but

  didn’t) with Ambrose. Such a discussion session, during which the master

  responds to questions, and comments on a base text by extending its

  meaning with reference to other texts, is called collatio by Isidore of

  Seville: the word also referred to the monks’ daily meal.65

  Hugh’s oral collatio on that occasion becomes then the basis for the

  composition which he commits to writing. This written version is what he

  actually calls his collatio. Again, the link of reading, composition, and food

  is apparent; De archa Noe itself was certainly read at monastic collationes of

  various sorts, the mental meal to accompany the physical one. Evidently, in

  its many uses, collatio retained the idea of gathering together, of texts with

  one another, of masters and students, and of monks over their reading in

  chapter and at meals. It is also an informal stage of composition, between