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are invited to praise the Lord: angels, hosts, sun and moon, stars, heavens of
heavens and waters above the heavens (1–6); dragons and deeps, fire and
hail, snow and vapors, stormy wind (7–8); mountains and hills, fruitful
trees and cedars, beasts and cattle, creeping things and flying fowl (9–10);
kings and all people, princes and judges, young men and maidens, old men
and children (11–13), for God exalts ‘‘the horn of his people,’’ Israel (14).
The picture shows, at its upper center, a large figure of Christ (‘‘Dominus’’)
the Creator, in a mandorla – He is flanked by ‘‘angels.’’ At each end of this
upper space, or ‘ heaven,’ are two gigantic figures drawn from the waist up,
one holding up the ‘‘sun’ and the other the ‘ moon.’’ Below the Christ are
‘ mountains’’ and ‘ hills.’’ A ‘ fire’’ is burning on them, and they are covered
with ‘ fruitful trees, and all cedars.’ On the ground, and in the tree branches,
are ‘‘beasts, and all cattle, creeping things, and flying fowl.’’ Beside the
mountains and hills are two people, each with an open book (verse 6: ‘ he
hath made a decree which shall not pass’’). They are at the head of four
groups of people, ‘ kings,’ ‘ princes and judges’ (dressed as soldiers), ‘ young
men and maidens,’ and ‘‘old men and children.’’ At the bottom of the picture
is shown ‘‘all deeps’’ and ‘ dragons.’’
As is the case with Psalm 148, the picture of each Psalm in this Psalter
provides a set of cueing images for its principal words and themes. These
images cue verses which one can then complete by note recitation. It is
incorrect to think of the images as substituting for the words, or as an aid
for beginners who do not already know the texts by another means. The
pictures are only a jumble if, on seeing them, one does not recognize the
topics which the images elicit, or – equally important – the order in which
the verses occur. As is the case with Hugh of St. Victor’s Chronicle Preface
(Appendix A), this mnemonic system is based on a prior-retained
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10. Utrecht, University Library MS. 32, fo. 82v (‘‘The Utrecht Psalter,’’ France, near Reims,
ninth century). Picture-summary for the text of Psalm 148.
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foundation of verbatim memorization, acquired and fortified during the
daily round of monastic offices by those using the Utrecht Psalter as it was
by the novices of St. Victor studying history. The images provide a full
memoria rerum of the Psalms.
Thus to term these images ‘‘word-pictures’’ is misleading, for the char-
acterization mis-states their main function, which is to cue and trigger
recollection of textual material that the reader already knows. They are
agent images in the proper sense, for they are devices and tools. The
method of imagines rerum is designed for those studying and composing
colloquies, meditations, and sermons on the basis of those studies. They
have an important practical function. The imagines rerum of a psalter such
as the Utrecht lay out the essential subjects of each Psalm in a clear order,
quickly apparent to one who recognizes the cues provided. In their groups
the images are clarus (well lit), rarus (not crowded), and solemnis (disposed
in coherent order). Evidently, internalizing such a system of images will
draw in the habitually retained texts and topics to which each image is
attached, providing a completely portable mental instrument, readily
available on any number and variety of occasions, as needed – exactly the
situation envisioned by Hugh of St. Victor in his advice to impose a linea or
structure upon the rote-retained texts of Psalms (Appendix A). The psalters
of the ‘‘Utrecht family’’ demonstrate very well how artificial memory
schemes build upon a foundation of prior learning, not as substitutes or
alternatives but as notae and imagines rerum, markers and cues to the
mental library retained by heart which formed the foundation of ancient
and medieval education.
Another example, painted in a style quite different from the Utrecht
Psalter though also using imagines rerum, is the Cuerden Psalter now in the
Morgan Library (MS. M 756), made in England, probably Oxford, around
1270. The use of word-pictures is unusual in thirteenth-century English art,
more typical at this time of French art. There is a donor picture in the
book, which would indicate the involvement of a lay patron, but
Dominicans are also pictured frequently in its pages, suggesting that this
order had a role as well in its making.28
Each Psalm in this book has an initial which contains a rebus-like picture
of key words within the Psalm. Psalm 38 starts ‘‘Dixi custodiam vias meas
ut non delinquitur in lingua mea. Posui ori meo custodiam cum consisteret
peccator adversum me,’’ ‘‘I said I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not
with my tongue: I will place a guard on my mouth when the sinner comes
before me.’’ The initial of this Psalm in the Cuerden Psalter (‘‘D’’) shows a
nimbused Christ seated at the center of the picture (figure 11). David with
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11. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M. 756, fo. 60r (‘‘The Cuerden Psalter,’’
England, Oxford, c. 1270). Initial of Psalm 38 (39).
his harp is shown to His left, and Christ covers David’s foot with His own.
The Christ figure looks to His right, where the same David figure is shown
kneeling, and pointing to his extended tongue: his foot also is covered by
Christ’s. The position of these three figures suggests the mnemonic prin-
ciples which Bradwardine’s treatise expounds, though they were drawn
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287
some seventy years earlier. Christ is in the middle, and to His left (our
right) is David, who is the subject of the first word in the text, Dixi. Christ
steps on David’s foot, thereby joining the figures in an action of hitting,
touching, striking, or something similar. The left side of the scene provides
an image of chief words in the second and third phrases of the first verse,
non delinquitur in lingua mea and posui ori meo custodiam. To remember
the correct order of the words, one first looks to the right and then to the
left of the central figure, their orderly joining being indicated by the actions
of the central image, covering a foot in one case and looking in the other.
Another good example of the sort of imagines rerum that occur in the
Cuerden Psalter is the initial to Psalm 72, Quam bonus (figure 12), which
shows a crippled man moving about on his knees, while balanced by two
low stools which he holds in his hands, while a second stooped figure with a
staff goes behind him. This image refers to verse 2 of this Psalm, ‘‘mei
autem pene moti sunt pedes, pene effusi sunt gressus mei,’’ ‘‘but as for me,
my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped.’’
The initial of Psalm 52 (figure 13), which begins ‘‘Dixit insipiens,’’ shows,
on the left, a
figure of the fool with a club, eating a round loaf of bread.
This figure is often found in psalters, to mark the initial of Psalms 13 and 52,
which are virtually identical texts. (The round loaf refers to verse 4 [modern
numbering], in which the ‘‘workers of iniquity’’ are said to ‘ eat up my people
as they eat bread.’’) But other figures appear in the initial as well as the fool.
These refer to verses 2 and 3; at the bottom of the round space inside the D
are two male figures lying on the ground together in what appears to be a
homosexual embrace: they are those who ‘‘are corrupt and are made abho-
minable in their inquities’ (verse 2). To the right and top of the space, a
nimbed Christ looks down and points to two other male figures, one of
whom is tonsured: these refer to verse 3, ‘ God looked down from heaven on
the children of men to see if there were any that did understand, or did seek
God.’ Reading this scene counter-clockwise from the top produces the
correct order of the verses: ‘ Dixit insipiens,’ ‘ Corrupti sunt,’ and ‘ Deus
de celo prospexit.’’
One sees this impulse to provide textual pictures in late medieval
vernacular manuscripts produced by lay scribes, so it is not confined, at
least by the end of this period, to Latin productions. These vernacular
productions are often done in a style that is idiosyncratic and bears little
relationship, either in iconography or in execution, to the books produced
by professional workshops. This makes their use of pictures all the more
interesting as an indication of what readers thought they needed in order to
profit from a book.
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12. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M. 756, fo. 105v (‘‘The Cuerden Psalter,’’
England, Oxford, c. 1270). Initial of Psalm 72 (73).
Among such manuscripts, a copy of Piers Plowman in the Bodleian
Library (MS. Douce 104, written in 1427) contains drawings on almost
every page, which relate to the poem in several different ways. Some are
imagines rerum related to the content in a manner that we recognize easily,
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13. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M. 756, fo. 79r (‘‘The Cuerden Psalter,’’
England, Oxford, c. 1270). Initial of Psalm 52 (53).
such as the drawings of the Seven Deadly Sins. So, opposite the text’s brief
description of the courtesan, Pernel prout hert, is drawn a woman-dandy
who wears a gorgeous robe and a belt with golden balls on it (fo. 24). The
text describing Gluttony is written over a drawing of a figure with a cup
and a swollen belly (fo. 29) – here the relationship of word and picture is
made concrete. Others of the pictures are associated with the marginal
tituli; for example, opposite text discussing the duties of knights is a knight
with the words ‘‘nota de knyZthod’’ written across it (fo. 35v).
Still other images follow the precepts for imagines rerum by cueing either
chief words or concepts of the text with which they are associated. For
example, opposite a discussion of Charity appears the figure of a young
man in hose and doublet holding a round mirror – this evokes (but does
not explain) the line ‘‘Ac I seygh hym neuere sothly but as my-self in a
miroure’’ (fo. 74). A speech by Free-Will (Liberum Arbitrium) on how
Holy Church is a love-knot of loyalty and faithful belief is accompanied by
a drawing of a man hanged on a gibbet, an allusion not to the theme of the
speech but to one line in it, ‘‘And þeues loueþ and beleuþ hateþ and at þe
last be hongyt’’ (manuscript reading) (fo. 79; see figure 14). Finally, a
number of images are not obviously related to particular texts but recur
at intervals in the margins, probably according to the reader’s own system;
chief among these is a figure suggesting meditation, shown either as a
14. University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 104, fo. 79r (Piers Plowman C. X V I I .
118–148). Text in Hiberno-English dialect, manuscript made in Ireland in 1427, likely by a
single scribe–illustrator, with annotations made soon afterward by another scribe writing
the same hand. The drawing of a man on a gibbet cues the text, ‘‘And þeues loueþ and
beleuþ hateþ and at þe last be hongyt’’ (line 138). Over the figure’s legs seems to be
written (the ink is badly rubbed) ‘‘Nota de mandatu,’’ ‘‘Make a note concerning
the commandment,’’ in reference to the underlined verses in Latin, lines 140a–c.
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291
seated man holding his head on his hands (fos. 54, 63) or as a male head
shown gazing pensively at the text (fo. 65). 29 Made in Ireland in 1427, fifty
years or so after Langland’s poem, Douce 104 is a unique production,
written in Hiberno-English dialect by an Irish scribe and decorated either
by the same person or by a painter he worked with closely. Kerby-Fulton
and Despres argue that it is the work of a single scribe-illustrator – perhaps
a clerkly maker not unlike Langland himself – who made this book for his
own use and that of his friends. 30 Many Piers Plowman manuscripts seem
made for personal use by admirers of the work. Though it is not without
skill and training either in its writing or in its decoration, Douce 104 shows
few signs of derivation from the court culture of the age. But neither does
Piers Plowman. The text is basically that which modern editors recognize as
C, but it contains a number of odd and idiosyncratic readings, suggesting
that it may have been at least partly a production for meditation in the
manner of memoria rerum.
M E N T A L P I C T U R E S
Painture, as Richard de Fournival’s comments make clear, is a function of
words themselves, not only of what we think of as painting. Through
ekphrasis and related figures, one could paint with words alone, making
imaginary pictures that never seem to have been realized in what we would
consider to be a pictorial way. Such verbal picturae are addressed directly to
the memory of the reader, for it is in one’s own vis imaginativa and
memoria that they are given picture form. The author is a painter, not
only in that the letters he composes with have shapes themselves, but in that
his words paint pictures in the minds of his readers.
By the same token, the graphic forms in a book talk, they have parole,
sometimes literally represented in the form of a voice-scroll, the cartoon-
like banner that emerges from a figure’s mouth. All the carefully painted
letters made by a scribe signal voces, words conceived of as sounding. In the
useful counsel which he appended to his florilegial Ammaestramenti degli
antichi, discussed at the end of Chapter 4, Fra Bartolomeo advised sound-
ing texts aloud while one read them, for ears and eyes help each other
to confirm memory. There is not the sharp division of seeing from
hearing, the visual from the verbal, that we have become so accustomed
to making that we are often unaware of how unusual it is. The carefully
fabricated aural-visual synaesthesia (often including the other senses too)
common in mediev
al arts articulates and supports, among other things, a
psychological need to make mnemonically rich images; one recalls how
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crucial a role synaesthesia played in the successes of Luria’s subject, the
memory-artist, S.
Examples of verbal pictures which are described as paintings even though
no drawing accompanies them are frequent in medieval literatures, both
Latin and vernacular. Some interesting examples from the fourteenth cen-
tury were described by Beryl Smalley in her book on the English classicizing
friars, especially Robert Holcot, the Dominican who was closely associated
with Richard de Bury.31 Smalley discusses the verbal pictures of two friars in
particular, Holcot and John Ridevall, a Franciscan who lived somewhat
before Holcot. Ridevall’s pictures are found in his Lectura and Holcot’s
in his Commentary on the Minor Prophets, both works addressed to clerics,
who would have used the material in composing their own sermons.
Smalley includes an index of seventy such pictures, culled from these
works and others, and also prints a partial transcription of the ones in
the Bodleian Library manuscript of Holcot’s commentary (MS. Bodley
722).32 Smalley was concerned particularly with the sources of these images;
it is clear from her discussion that some of their attributes are conventional,
found even in classical literature, and some were apparently invented.
My concern here is with the form in which they are presented.
Ridevall calls his images poeticae picturae, which are ‘‘painted according to
the poets [pingitur a poetis].’ 33 But they are not extracted from earlier
authors, for they cannot be found in the sources he cites. They are, however,
pictorial in their details, not abstract or simply narrative. And Ridevall insists
that these pictures are images that he and his sources painted. If we take what
Richard de Fournival has to say about the way words paint pictures and
apply it here, it will help us to understand Ridevall’s meaning. His classical
authors did indeed paint these images in a sense, but as ekphrases and other
figures with stylistic vividness addressing imagination. They arise from ear-
lier texts but through the medium of his own image-making, as a means for