The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  the form of a glossed book. There is a manuscript of Boccaccio’s romance

  epic, Teseida, written entirely by Boccaccio himself, which is now in the

  Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence (MS. Acquisti e Doni 325). It

  is on parchment, of course, written out with rubrics, initials, and even a few

  decorations, and space has been left for additional miniatures. It is obvi-

  ously an exemplar, not a dictamen, so that its format was intended by

  Boccaccio to be copied by others. But it is a glossed book. The stanzas of

  the source-text are written in the large display hand reserved for auctores, and

  commentary, written in the appropriate script, surrounds it in the margins.

  These annotations, comments, and corrections are also Boccaccio’s. As

  Giorgio Pasquali said of this manuscript, ‘‘[Boccaccio] began and contin-

  ued in fits and starts to add notes at one or another point in his poem (at

  times brief interlinear interpretations, at times erudite excursus), without

  having completely compiled a running commentary,’’ though he seems

  headed in that direction. In Teseida, Boccaccio is both the originator of his

  text, and its reader; his own commentary invites commentary from others.

  And, of course, Teseida itself is a re-presenting of the classical legend, with

  Statius quite clearly remembered – so Boccaccio as composer is also,

  simultaneously, a reader. 91 Evidently, Boccaccio considered the heart of

  the process of making literature to be not the production of a beautifully

  written-out final text, but the unending collocation which the author-text

  conducted with its readers in the margins, the background for memory. By

  giving his new work all the trappings of a glossed book, Boccaccio was

  claiming for it the immediate institutional status of an auctor.

  In conclusion, I would like to look at the matter of plagiarism, as pre-

  modern centuries defined it. It is sometimes said that there was no plagiarism

  before there was a law of copyright; this is not true. But plagiarism was

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  differently defined, as a matter essentially of poor memoria. Composition

  cannot occur without authors, used in the way we have seen in these last

  two chapters. One’s audience will, of course, recognize them and their

  translation to the occasion of one’s own design, for they are in the public

  memory. The memoria of the composer and the memoria of the audience

  are thus bound in a dialogue of textual allusions and transformations, and

  not to engage in it is the mark of a dolt.

  Thus Quintilian scorns orators who simply repeat the words of others,

  or who boilerplate their own speeches, as much as he scorns those who

  appear to be rehearsing a word-for-word memorized speech. How shamed

  they should feel, he says, ‘‘by the detection of their wretched stock-in-trade,

  so familiar to the audience’s memory, and worn to shreds, as it were, by

  doing numerous different services for poor men who want to put on a

  show.’’92 Ad res memorizing supposes that the reader will recreate the

  original’s sententiae in words that are at least partly his own; this freedom

  respects the fruitful auctoritas of one’s source as ignorant parroting cannot.

  John of Salisbury, describing Bernard of Chartres’s custom of making his

  students recite daily from the works which were to serve as their models,

  suggests a distinction between true and false imitation that is close to

  Quintilian’s, and instructive:

  if, to embellish his work, someone had sewed on a patch of cloth filched from an

  external source, Bernard, on discovering this, would rebuke him for his plagiary,

  but would generally refrain from punishing him . . . if an unsuitable theme had

  invited this, he would, with modest indulgence, bid the boy to rise in [true]

  imitation [ad exprimendam auctorum imaginem . . . conscendere]. 93

  In a letter to Boccaccio in 1359, Petrarch writes of how he had thoroughly

  familiarized Virgil, Horace, Livy, Cicero, and some others:

  I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I swallowed as a boy what

  I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings

  [michi tam familiariter ingessere], implanting them not only in my memory but in

  my marrow . . . But sometimes I may forget the author, since through long usage

  and continual possession I may adopt them and for some time regard them as my

  own; and besieged by the mass of such writings [turba talium obsessus],94 forget

  whose they are and whether they are mine or others’. This then is what I meant

  about more familiar things deceiving us more than others; if at times out of habit

  they return to the memory, it often happens that to the preoccupied mind, deeply

  intent on something else, they seem not only to be yours but to your surprise, new

  and original . . . I grant that I like to embellish my life with sayings and admon-

  itions from others, but not my writings [Vitam michi alienis dictis ac monitus

  ornare, fateor, est animus, non stilum] unless I acknowledge the author or make

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  some significant change in arriving at my own concept from many and varied

  sources in imitation of the bees . . . I much prefer that my style [stilus] be my own,

  uncultivated and rude, but made to fit, as a garment, to the measure of my mind,

  rather than to someone else’s . . . each [writer] must develop and keep his own

  [style] lest . . . by dressing grotesquely in others’ clothes . . . we may be ridiculed

  like the crow. 95

  This eloquent characterization of his own practices is less a Petrarchan

  manifesto of a new Renaissance spirit of individuality and freedom from

  dead authority than a restatement of the very medieval description of reading

  and composing we encountered, also eloquently, in Hugh of St. Victor on

  the Ark of Wisdom. The life is adorned with others’ maxims so that by the

  process of domestication their character stamps the character of the man

  and becomes that of his style (and here we must remember that stylus means

  both pen and style in our sense of the word), cut, like good clothing, to

  one’s own measure of ability, ‘‘ad mensuram ingenii mei.’’ How the words

  of others become the measure of one’s own mind is described earlier in this

  book, the digestion and rumination by which they are made mine, ‘‘michi

  tam familiariter ingessere’’. Familiarizing makes the wholesale appropria-

  tion of one’s sources ‘‘honorable,’’ for, like a bee, one has transformed the

  many nectars of the reading-flowers in one’s memorial store-house into a

  single honey, ‘‘e multis et variis unum faciat.’’ If they haven’t been so

  processed, then the imitation is dishonorable.

  We, of course, would still regard the results as plagiarism, so long as the

  idea was recognizable. Perhaps that is because we think of plagiarism as

  theft and authors as owners with enduring rights to their work. But for

  Petrarch, as for Bernard and Quintilian, plagiarism occurs when one

  unwittingly or from laziness quotes verbatim because one’s memory-design

  has been overwhelmed by the over-crowded bits of one’s improperly
stored

  reading. That is a failure of memory, due to one’s own neglect and sloth

  (including the kind of sloth that overworks the body); it is not perceived as

  a matter of theft. The plagiarist is detected by the superior memories of the

  audience he is trying unsuccessfully to impress. Plagiarism is to be avoided

  because it makes oneself appear ridiculous and shameful in public, like a

  clown in ill-fitting clothing, whose garments are not familiar to him. It is a

  failure of invention because it is a failure of memory, that educated

  memoria of the trained author, who knows how to speak without appearing

  to have memorized at all.

  C H A P T E R 7

  Memory and the book

  ‘‘ P A I N T U R E ’’ A N D ‘‘ P A R O L E ’’

  The importance of visual images as memorial hooks and cues is a basic theme

  in all memory-training advice and practice from the very earliest Western

  text we possess, the Dialexeis. In that pre-Socratic fragment, one is advised to

  fashion rebuses, or visual riddles based on homophonies, to recall the sound

  of particular words (memoria verborum) such as personal names, and also

  heraldic images, such as Ares for anger, to remember themes (memoria

  rerum). In a study of the architectural mnemonic, Herwig Blum sought to

  link this technique to the plentiful use of decoration, such as mosaic, frieze,

  and painting, in ancient buildings, both domestic (as at Pompeii) and

  monumental.1 We have always known that certain classes of allegorical

  images, such as those in Renaissance emblem books, were to be used for

  meditational reminiscence, for their authors tell us so.2

  The function of picturae in medieval cultures has been, I think, rather

  misunderstood. In 600 Pope Gregory the Great wrote a letter to the hapless

  bishop, Serenus of Marseilles, who had become concerned that some of his

  flock might be engaged in superstitious worship of the holy images in his

  church. To prevent this, he destroyed all the pictures, thereby scandalizing

  his entire congregation, which deserted him on the spot. This story has

  been understood as an early indication that medieval images were a strict

  form of iconography, pictorial writing. The art historian Emile Maˆle

  analyzed the function of Gothic images as the literature of the laity,

  laicorum litteratura.3 The Gothic cathedral, Maˆle argued, was essentially

  a Bible in stone and glass, its images designed to substitute for the written

  word in communicating the stories of the Bible to a lay congregation which

  could not read and therefore, Maˆle assumed, had no other access to their

  content. The notion that the medieval laity as a group could not read at all

  has now been largely discredited by the accumulation of contrary evidence,

  from even the earliest medieval centuries. Explanations such as Maˆle’s also

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  Memory and the book

  275

  played down the fact that books and churches restricted to learned groups

  and clerical use were also profusely pictured. But Maˆle was not wrong to

  say that the cathedral was a non-verbal textual form, only in his under-

  standing of what that statement meant to a culture that did not share the

  bias ingrained in our notion of representational realism.

  For that is a non-medieval bias. Representation, as we have seen, was

  understood not in an objective or reproductive sense as often as in a temporal

  one; signs make something present to the mind by acting on memory. Just as

  letters, litterae, make present the voices (voces) and ideas (res) of those who

  are not in fact present, as Isidore said, so pictures serve as present signs of or

  cues to those same voces and res. Gilbert Crispin, the abbot of Westminster

  from 1085 to 1117, says this of pictura: ‘‘Just as letters are the forms and

  markers of spoken words, pictures exist as the likenesses [similitudines] and

  markers of written matters.’’4 As used here by Gilbert, similitudo does not

  mean ‘‘likeness’’ in the sense in which a painting of a dog is ‘‘like’’ a dog, for

  he is discussing the visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah, in particular the four-

  faced creatures of the divine chariot, whose faces Ezekiel saw in his vision

  ‘‘in the likeness’’ of a man, a lion, an eagle, and a bull (Ez. 1:10). These

  creatures do not represent God, they are signs of the presence of God. The

  Latin verb repraesentare, ‘‘represent,’’ is derived from the word meaning

  ‘‘present in time,’’ praesens. Abbot Gilbert’s is not a mimetic definition but

  a temporal one, in keeping with the traditions of both ancient and

  medieval philosophy and pedagogical practice; the letters and other

  images are signs (notae), not primarily by virtue of imitation but by virtue

  of recalling something again to memory, making one mindful as the

  prophet is made mindful. This understanding requires that pictures them-

  selves function recollectively, as letters do. 5 It is equally true to say that

  letters can function as pictures of a sort, a theme explored in this chapter.

  With reference to this very medieval notion of what a picture is for, we

  may look at what Gregory wrote to Bishop Serenus:

  It is one thing to worship a picture, it is another by means of pictures to learn

  thoroughly [addiscere] the story that should be venerated. For what writing makes

  present to those reading, the same picturing makes present [praestat] to the

  uneducated, to those perceiving visually, because in it the ignorant see what they

  ought to follow, in it they read who do not know letters. Wherefore, and especially

  for the common people, picturing is the equivalent of [pro] reading.6

  Several aspects of this characterization require comment. First, Gregory

  says that the picture is for learning a story, historia. It is not, in our sense, a

  picture of some thing but rather the means for knowing, memorizing, and

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  recollecting the same matters or stories that written letters also record. Like

  Abbot Gilbert (who would likely have received the idea from him),

  Gregory insists that picturae are essentially textual in the way that they

  function. What writing makes present, pictures also present, namely ‘‘quod

  sequi debeant,’ what they should do. Looking at pictures is an act analogous

  to reading. And reading, as we have seen, is a complex activity involving

  both an oral phase, that of lectio, and a silent one, of meditatio, committing

  the substance of the text to memory in mental images that enable one to

  mull it over and make it one’s own. That is the nature of learning it,

  ‘‘addiscere’’. So, as reading letters ‘‘praestat,’’ makes present, a story – and

  the Latin is emphatically temporal in its meaning – so too does seeing a

  picture. ‘‘[P]ro lectione pictura est’’ – picturing does what reading does and

  so can stand in for it (the force of pro in this formulation) because it is also an

  inventive, rhetorical activity. By Gilbert’s time, the use of images was

  justified theologically solely by their recollective value. Images are them-

  selves words of a sort, not because they represent words in our sense of

  ‘
‘represent,’’ but because, like words, they recall content to mind.

  Both textual activities, picturing and reading, have as their goal not

  simply the learning of a story, but learning it to familiarize and domesticate

  it, in that fully internalized, even physiological way that medieval reading

  required. But in order to profit from pictura, one must understand it

  rhetorically, as directly referential not to an object but to a narrative

  (historia) and thus to human mental processes involved in understanding

  (intellect) and persuasion (will). The phantasm or imago which the mind

  must shape out of the various data of the senses in order to know at all

  mediates to our intellects what our eyes take in. Phantasms, which are the

  materials by means of which people think, are mental ‘‘impressons’’ of our

  sensory experiences, used in constructing concepts that involve other

  mental materials as well, such as previous memories. A phantasm is not a

  direct transfer of whole experiences. This is a crucial point to comprehend

  about the psychology of images, especially in the medieval West. A physical

  image, such as a painting or a statue, cannot directly represent anything to a

  human mind because we humans can only understand what our senses

  have variously taken in by means of a phantasm constructed ‘‘spiritually’’

  (Augustine’s word – we now would probably say mentally or cognitively)

  by our imagination for use in our thinking. This psychology is found in

  Quintilian as well as Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. The diagram of the

  version of it shown in figure 3 underscores the way in which human imag-

  ination is involved throughout the process of thinking. Augustine wrote that

  human memory is never of the actual past because it is the recollection of

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  phantasms.7 Bishop Serenus was scandalized by his flock, before he scandal-

  ized them, because they failed to recognize exactly this distinction. They took

  the images to be directly representational of things themselves, and, having

  thus objectified them, they reified and mystified them.

  Picturae and litterae remain intimately linked in the later Middle Ages.

  A good example is the work of Richard de Fournival, who was a canon of

  Amiens cathedral in 1240, and its chancellor in 1246; later he became a