The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  canon of Rouen, and chaplain to Cardinal Robert de Sommercote. He died

  not later than 1260. He is remembered for a work that exists in many

  manuscripts of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Li Bestiaire d’amours;

  so popular was it in its day that it acquired a critical answer from an

  unnamed woman, Li Response du Bestiaire. 8 Richard had designed his text

  as a picturebook, the writing and seventy-plus drawings of animals forming

  a unit. He explains his plan in a preface. All people by nature desire

  knowledge, he says, and because they live so short a time, they must rely

  upon the knowledge gained by others as well as their own experiences. To

  gain such knowledge, God has given the human soul the ability of memory. 9

  Memory has two gates of access, sight and hearing, and a road particular to

  each of these portals. These roads are called painture and parole. 10

  Painture serves the eye and parole the ear. Both are equal means of access

  to the ‘ house of memory,’ which holds all human knowledge of the past,

  and each has cognitively the same effect. But the painture of a text is not

  confined only to the pictures painted on a page, as Richard de Fournival

  makes clear. Its painture also includes the mental images which it raises in its

  readers’/listeners’ minds: ‘‘When one sees painted a story, whether of Troy or

  something else, one sees those noble deeds which were done in the past

  exactly as though they were still present. And it is the same thing with

  hearing a text, for when one hears a story read aloud, listening to the events

  one sees them in the present.’ 11 It is significant that Richard uses the verb veir

  of what happens in memory both from something received from sight and

  from hearing. Because it is translated into predominantly visual images by

  the mind, even lectio, lire, ‘‘reading-aloud,’ creates painture. Thus, seeing is

  not confined to silent reading, any more than speaking is to reading aloud.

  Because memory has these two gates, Richard says, he has designed his

  book to be especially memorable by enhancing both its painture and parole.

  In saying this he does not mean simply that he has put together a book with

  illustrations, although he has done this as well. ‘‘And I will show you how

  this text has both painture and parole,’’ he continues: ‘‘For it is clear that it

  has parole, because all writing is made in order to signify parole and in order

  that one should read it: and when one reads it aloud, writing returns to the

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  nature of parole [speech]. On the other hand, it is clear that it also has

  painture because the letter does not exist unless one paints it [that is, unless

  one gives it a visible form].’’12 Richard claims for his book rhetorical

  energeia/enargeia, or ‘‘bringing-before-the-eyes,’’ that much-prized quality

  of vividness which takes hold of a reader’s imagination and, especially in

  narrative, enables one to experience the events as though they were happen-

  ing before one’s very eyes and ears.13

  ‘ For I send you in this writing [cis escrit],’ continues Richard, ‘ both

  painture and parole, so that when I am not present this writing by its painture

  and by its parole will make me present to your memory.’’14 Richard refers to

  his picture book, underscoring that it has both painture and parole, and that

  together both will make him present to its readers in their memories. This is

  a remarkable restatement of the idea, found in Isidore, that letters are signs of

  sounds (voces) which in turn signify things. A written word has both visual

  shape (its painture) and calls to mind sound (its parole); which one of these

  two senses affords the gate to memory thus depends not on whether a text

  was composed orally or in writing, but on how it is presented to its audience

  on a given occasion, whether by being read aloud or silently to oneself. The

  distinction Richard makes here is related to the long-standing, and at this

  time universal, one between legere clare and legere tacite, which require

  different tasks from a reader. In either case, the sensory gateway is always

  dual (though the proportions of seeing and hearing differ according to the

  two types of reading), for all words are both shape and sound by their very

  nature, and all sensory impressions are processed so as to act upon memory

  in the same way, making what is no longer physically before one present to

  the mind’s eye. [O]n les ve¨ıst, ‘‘one sees them,’ says Richard of the events in

  the story of Troy, whether through looking at their pictures, reading and

  listening about them in words, or – best of all – both at once.

  Thus the visual presentation of a text was considered, at least by the

  learned, to be a part of its meaning, not limited to the illustration of its

  themes or subjects but necessary to its proper reading, its ability-to-be

  significant and memorable. Malcolm Parkes has spoken of punctuation

  and other aspects of lay-out as the ‘‘visual grammar’’ of language, as

  necessary to comprehension as the pauses and accents of spoken language. 15

  This is another way of saying, in essence, that language has both painture

  and parole in its nature, precisely what Richard is talking about.

  The idea is articulated often. When, at the beginning of La vita nuova,

  Dante addresses his readers to explain the genesis of his work, he says that

  ‘‘in the book of my memory’’ he found ‘‘a rubric which says: Incipit vita

  nova. Under which rubric I find written the words which it is my intention

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  to copy into this little book; and if not all, at least their substance.’’16

  Somewhat later (2: 10), he refers to words ‘‘scritte ne la mia memoria sotto

  maggiori paragrafi,’’ ‘‘written in my memory under large paraphs.’’ Charles

  Singleton has written cogently on Dante’s use of this conceit to govern the

  progress and nature of his work, and the extent to which the image of

  himself as the scribe and glossator of a previously extant text is exploited. 17

  In composing, Dante sees the work in visual form, written in his memory

  as pages with text, rubrics, and paraphs. Notice also that he treats his own

  work as though it were an auctor, which he will treat sententialiter as he

  wishes to adapt it, unconstrained by verbatim quotation.

  In a similar fashion, the English poet, John Lydgate, begins a poem on

  ‘ The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary’’ by describing how he came to write

  it. First, he saw a Pity ‘ sett out in picture,’ that is, the painted scene we now

  call the Pietà. As he inspects this meditacioun closely (and the picture itself is

  termed the meditation), it resolves itself into ‘ Rubrisshes departyd [separate

  rubrics] blak and Reed / Of ech chapitle a paraf in the heed / Remembryd

  first Fifteene of her gladynessys / And next in ordre were set hyr hevy-

  nessys.’ 18 Like Dante, Lydgate thinks of his poem as laid out in his memory

  like a written page, with an illumination, text, rubrics, and paraphs, a page of

  the book of his memory that seems in lay-out very like that of a fifteenth-

 
century Book of Hours, which is the sort of memory book that a fifteenth-

  century poet’s readers would know best. Memoria is stored and inventoried

  in such divisions, inscribed as visual images; this was the elementary peda-

  gogy which Dante and Lydgate shared, and which long predates them both.

  I have already mentioned a passage from Chaucer’s The House of Fame, in

  which all the voices, the parole, of human beings are described as rising from

  earth to Fame’s house, where they assume the shape of those who spoke

  them. It is an exceptionally exact realization in poetry of the traditional

  medieval understanding of what words are. These human paroles do more

  than just represent (in form and time) the voces of those who spoke them,

  they also come clothed in language’s graphic form, its manuscript painture:

  Whan any speche ycomen ys

  Up to the paleys, anon-ryght

  Hyt wexeth lyk the same wight

  Which that the word in erthe spak,

  Be hyt clothed red or blak,

  And hath so very hys lyknesse

  That spok the word that thou wilt gesse

  That it the same body be,

  Man or woman, he or she.

  (House of Fame, 1074–1082)

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  The Book of Memory

  9. University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 717, fo. 287v (?Norman, late 11th

  century). The inscription above the drawing of the scribe reads ‘‘Imago pictoris et

  illuminatoris huius operis. Hugo pictor,’’ ‘‘The image of the painter and

  illuminator of this work. Hugh the painter.’’

  The figures are clothed in red or black, according to the ink in which the

  letters forming these words were written. Chaucer has peopled his House

  of Fame with literature that has both painture and parole. He also gives us a

  precise image of how litterae, written in black and red, are signs of voces

  (both voices and words) and voces re-present in our memories those no

  longer immediately present to us.19

  The scribe who wrote out the letters was often identified as the painter or

  picturer of the manuscript. For example, a late eleventh-century manuscript,

  perhaps from Normandy (figure 9), pictures a monk named Hugo, with his

  scribal pen and knife, identifying the portrait as ‘‘imago pictoris et illuminatoris

  huius operis.’’ Very similar is a portrait of a monk named Isidore in a manu-

  script of 1170 written for the cathedral at Padua, which calls him the painter of

  the manuscript, yet shows him in the act of writing. And the nun Guda wrote

  in her colophon, ‘ peccatrix mulier scripsit quae pinxit hunc librum.’ 20 Indeed,

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  the earliest medieval evidence suggests that at that time, too, the scribe was

  most often also the book’s decorator, and that often when an author wrote out

  his own text he also punctuated and decorated it in a scheme that he intended

  copyists to preserve. The Latin verb, distinguere, means ‘ divide up,’ ‘‘mark,’

  ‘ punctuate,’ and ‘ decorate,’ all activities pertaining to the fundamental task

  of divisio. Thus, Jerome admonishes later copyists to preserve his punctu-

  ation of the Bible. There is evidence that Eusebius himself designed the

  Canon Tables named for him; the decoration of the fourth-century

  Virgilius Augusteus (MS. Vat. lat. 3256) was done by the scribes. The earliest

  illustrations in books occur at the beginning of sections of the text in order to

  mark its divisions, thus serving as what Carl Nordenfalk called ‘ a kind of

  pictorial rubrics.’ 21 The Augusteus manuscript of Virgil has colored initials,

  the earliest surviving examples of this feature, at the beginning of the first

  line occurring on each page, but such large initials were soon used to mark

  the beginning of each major division of a text. The monks at St. Albans in

  the twelfth century described the finishing of a text by decorator and

  rubricator as a task of exacting division, ‘‘ad unguem,’’ which they were

  proud to have done ‘‘irreprehensibiliter.’’22 Though the forms of decora-

  tion and rubrication they put in their book were very different from those

  in fourth-century use, their phrase recalls that of St. Ambrose laboring over

  his books distinguendam ad unguem. Nordenfalk observes that book dec-

  oration was born of ‘‘the necessity of providing a dividing and supporting

  framework for tabular texts,’’ such as lists of numbers, or names of persons

  and places, or ‘‘words divided into syllables by punctuation.’’23 Such

  phenomena need the ‘‘visual grammar’’ that lines and columns provide

  because they have no grammar of their own. But whereas the earliest kind

  of decoration one finds in papyri is of this sort, I do not think that

  decoration was generated solely to organize lists. It is rather a subspecies

  of punctuation itself, and thus basic to reading and retention, for, to quote

  again Hugh of St. Victor’s succinct aphorism: ‘‘Modus legendi dividendo

  constat.’’ Manuscript decoration is part of the painture of language, one of

  the gates to memory, and the form it takes often has to do with what is

  useful not only to understand a text but to retain and recall it too.

  Imagines rerum in psalters for study

  One of the continuing themes in medieval manuscript illumination is the

  making of what some art historians have called word-pictures, or images

  linked to (or even substituting for) words through a visual pun. The

  technique is clearly related to the practice of making mnemonic imagines,

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  and examples of it can be found which pre-date by many centuries the

  thirteenth-century acceptance of the Ad Herennium. One of the best-

  known examples is the Utrecht Psalter, of which a number of medieval

  copies were made. In it, picturae and litterae together make up the littera-

  tura, the text, and both address the ocular gateway to memory. The

  words, however, can also be sounded aloud, and so can also address its

  aural gateway, and as signs of voces the images do as well. 24 It is well to keep

  mind when considering medieval habits of study, that ‘‘silence’’ was neither

  necessarily nor often totally ‘‘quiet,’’ without any sound. 25

  Though the manuscript was made in the vicinity of Reims in the ninth

  century, the style of its drawings reflects older models, Byzantine and even

  late classical. This suggests that these images belong to a long tradition of

  imagines rerum associated with the Psalm texts; if the images were thought to

  be especially useful – for example, for the memory work of meditative study –

  that would help to account for their longevity and continued copying,

  which is otherwise something of a mystery. Certainly the excellence of the

  Utrecht’s system of Psalm images was recognized at the monastery of

  Christ Church, Canterbury, for it was used as a model in the making of

  other psalters. It was, for example, copied in the Canterbury scriptorium in

  a manuscript that still exists (British Library MS. Harley 603) but uses a

  different text of the Psalms than that in the Utrecht Psalter itself, the

  Roman text, based on the Old Latin versions, ra
ther than Jerome’s

  Gallican version, which used the Greek Septuagint.

  If the images were used only as verbatim cues to specific syllables (as

  imagines verborum, in the language of memory art), these verbal differences

  between the Psalter versions would indeed pose a difficulty, but since they

  evidently were not, they have considerable value as imagines rerum for

  signaling the chief topics and key ideas of each Psalm in order. The method

  of memoria rerum and its fundamental role in meditational exercise accounts

  for the image schemes’ value to generations of monks, for the English copies

  of the Utrecht Psalter are in fact adapted flexibly to the varied interests and

  circumstances over time of those making and using them. They are obviously

  study manuscripts. Two of them set out all three medieval versions of the

  psalms side by side, plus commentaries and glosses – and one, the Eadwine

  Psalter, also contains translations of Psalms into early English and Anglo-

  Norman. Tellingly, the designers of these later copies did not merely iterate

  the original images but changed them, added to them, and even made up

  new ones on their model.26

  The Utrecht Psalter demonstrates very well some essentials of the techni-

  que known as memoria rerum. Like the others, this psalter is a study book,

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  made not for novices just learning their Psalms but for readers who already

  have the Psalms by heart, and who therefore can recognize and profit

  from the subject- and topic-cues which the images provide. The images

  of each Psalm are drawn in a grouped scene at the beginning of each Psalm

  text; as a norm, they are read from left to right as one reads written

  text, though certain dominant images, such as those of Christ, can be

  placed centrally. Many engage in activities which underscore their

  relationships.

  One example will suffice as an illustration of the technique used for each

  of the Psalms.27 Psalm 148, Laudate Dominum, calls upon the various parts

  of creation to praise the Lord. It is fairly long, and needn’t be quoted in full,

  but a summary of its constituent verses is useful for understanding the

  picture-scene which accompanies it in the Psalter (figure 10). The following