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tituli are each enclosed in an elaborately drawn image, each one unique,
each colored in washes of several hues (figures 17–19). Several of the enclosing forms are geometrical (a square, a lozenge), some are architectural (steps surmounted by a column and tablature), some are banners on
which the titulus is written, and some – the most surprising of all – are
animals. 65 There is one showing two dogs’ heads ringing each end of a
banner, on which is written the titulus which summarizes that part of the
text (figure 17); one is a dragon breathing forth a pall of smoke on which is
written a command to the reader to mark (signa) a particularly apt bit of
text (figure 18); another shows a dog chasing a hare, their tails forming a
17. San Marino, California, Huntington Library MS. HM 19915, fo. 5r (English, c. 1200).
Detail of dogs’ heads and a banner marking a titulus, ‘‘Quid sit proprie spes,’’ ‘‘What is
properly hope,’’ keyed to Augustine’s Enchiridion. From the library of the Cistercian
monastery of St. Mary’s Holmecultram, Cumbria.
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18. San Marino, California, Huntington Library MS. HM 19915, fo. 46r. Detail of a
dragon marking the Enchiridion, with the annotation, ‘‘Signa utilissimam sententiam
breuemque,’’ ‘‘Mark this most useful and brief aphorism.’’
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19. San Marino, California, Huntington Library MS. HM 19915, fo. 36v. Drawing of a
dog and a rabbit marking a notation that reads: ‘‘Signa humanam benevolentiam,’’
‘‘Mark human goodness,’’ also for Augustine’s Enchiridion. It seems apparent from
the grammar that Signa, like the common Nota, is an imperative
directed to the reader.
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ring in which is written the notation, ‘‘Signa humanam benevolentiam,’’
‘‘Mark[:] human benevolence’’ (figure 19).
The function of tituli as mnemonic helps, a part of the rubrification of a
written text, is well understood. They are found from antiquity, and they
present the longer content of a text, the prolixitas, in a brief summary
(breviter), a ‘‘reśume´ des chapitres,’’ as Samuel Berger calls it in his history
of the Vulgate Bible.66 Written in the margin, tituli became part of the
apparatus of the Bible at an early period; they could be either summaries, as
we understand that word, or a quotation of the first few words in a textual
division. In other words, they present the text according to the principles of
memoria rerum, in which the sentence (to use the Middle English word) and
principal words are used to cue the memory.
Enclosing the tituli in images, as in HM 19915, was evidently done to
enhance their mnemonic function, by adding to something which was
already understood to be mnemonic in function (the titulus), an attribute
(the lively image) known particularly to impress memory. There is no other
plausible reason for adding such images, because they are not related
iconographically to the text they accompany, nor do they serve mechanical
needs of a scribe or binder, as catchwords do. I have examined all of the
manuscripts still extant from Holmecultram (there are eleven); others have
marginal titles, sometimes enclosed in geometric or architectural forms, but
none have the elaborate designs of HM 19915. Furthermore, these designs
occur in only one of the works copied in this manuscript, Augustine’s
Enchiridion. As a primer of faith, the Enchiridion was a text that beginning
students needed to learn. These vividly decorated tituli and notes would help
them. The cultivation of images as recollective devices in such a basic book is
an important link in the evidence which establishes that one of the earliest
tasks taught in learning to read was learning to mark text with mnemonically
useful mental images.
Marginal notations, glosses, and images are an integral part of the painture
of literature, addressing the ocular gateway to memory and meditation.
Indeed, the margins are where individual memories are most active, most
invited to make their marks, whether physically (as in the ubiquitous
‘ NOTA’’ command or a pointing finger, sometimes drawn with a string
around it, or crudely sketched human and animal heads, or, especially in
later manuscripts, implements such as shovels) or only in their imagina-
tion.67 But the images in medieval books function in other mnemonically
significant ways. These include rebus-like images which pun visually on
certain words or themes of a text, all sorts of diagrams, and pictures that are
of the type which Lydgate suggestively called meditaciouns, focal images
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like the ‘‘pity’’ (pietà) which he saw in his mental book, and which can
stimulate a recollective composition of texts.
As we have seen, the observations that memory is easily overwhelmed by
too solid or lengthy a diet, that it requires pleasing, that it retains best what
is unusual and surprising, that memorizing is best served when one fixes
what one is learning within a fully synaesthetic context, are standard
features of mnemonic advice in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is
significant that the style of painting drolleries in manuscript margins comes
into widespread use in the mid thirteenth century, along with the fashion
for the thematic sermon (the sort of composition served by Bradwardine’s
memoria orationis), at the same time that the mnemotechnique described in
the Ad Herennium was revived, under the twin sponsorship of the first
humanists and the Dominicans.68 The grotesque creatures, the comic
images of monkeys and other animals mimicking human behavior, images
that are violent, ugly, salacious or titillating, noble, sorrowful, or fearful
possess the qualities recommended for memory images by the Ad
Herennium. This may represent an instance where a particular mnemo-
technique did influence a new style in book decoration, though one should
remember that the general principle of making extraordinary images to
influence memory was known all along.
In addition to discrete marginal images, some manuscripts employed bas-
de-page (bottom margin) pictorial narratives. These, commonly, refer either
to saints’ lives or to well-known comic cycles like the Renart stories or Aesop’s
fables, or to fabliaux such as ‘‘the squire who laid eggs.’’69 A fourteenth-
century manuscript of the Decretals, written in Italy but illuminated in
England, provides a virtual feast of such narratives, most carrying over several
pages. It belonged to the priory of St. Bartholomew’s, Smithfield (where John
of Mirfeld was a canon), and it is now in the British Library MS. Royal
10. E. I V. The Decretals are a digest of canon law, and required memorizing in
order to be fully useful. It was one of the essential books that William
of Ockham insisted his pupil store away. The bottom margins of the
Smithfield Decretals are filled with stories told entirely through pictures, like
a running cartoon. These are not illustrations of the text; many have no
apparent rel
ationship to the material in the text which they accompany.
There are saints’ lives, with their usual complement of grotesque incident; a
salacious story of a friar who seduces a miller’s wife and murders her husband
(fos. 113v–117); and a number of animal fables, some involving characters from
the Renart cycle, and some seemingly made up. Two involve a group of killer-
rabbits, who track down a human hunter and truss him up, and then capture a
hunting dog, try him in a rabbit-court, and hang him (figures 20–24).70
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20. London, British Library MS. Royal 10. E. I V , fo. 62r. Written in Italy, painted in
England some forty years later). The start of a sequence of bas-de-page narrative pictures: a
hunting dog is wounded by a rabbit-archer.
21. London, British Library MS. Royal 10. E. I V , fo. 62v. Two rabbits tie up the dog.
Memory and the book
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22. London, British Library MS. Royal 10. E. I V , fo. 63r. The dog is tried before
a rabbit-judge.
23. London, British Library MS. Royal 10. E. I V , fo. 63v. The dog, bound and gagged, is
taken in a cart to the gallows.
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24. London, British Library MS. Royal 10. E. I V , fo. 64r. The dog is hanged. A rabbit
thumbs its nose at the corpse, while brandishing a victory banner.
But there is yet another sort of marginal image, both more ancient and
more persistent than the drolleries and grotesques. Certain classes of
images appear over and over in the margins from the earliest decorated
books through hand-painted printed books. These include jewels, coins,
birds, fruit, flowers (sometimes shown with insects sucking their nectar),
and scenes of hunting and fishing, by both animals and humans. Examples
of several of these, from a Book of Hours made around 1440 in Utrecht for
Catherine of Cleves, the Duchess of Guelders (The Morgan Library MSS.
M.917 and M.945), are shown in figures 25–28 and figure 1. 71 As meta-
phorical tropes, these same classes of image figure persistently in the
pedagogy of invention and memory, those two processes for which books
are the sources and cues. Of course there were major shifts in painting style
and in the market for books as they became more numerous and widely
available. But, as we have seen, the assumption that writing is the servant of
memory persisted over a long time. Trained memory is a store-house, a
treasure-chest, a vessel, into which the jewels, coins, fruits, and flowers of
texts are placed. The reader gathers nectar from these flowers to furnish the
cells of memory, like a bee (figure 26). Coins and other treasure are perhaps
the most common of memory tropes; they also have a complementary
association (as do gold, pearls, and rubies) with the Biblical treasures of the
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25. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M 917, p. 240 (‘‘The Hours of Catherine of
Cleves’’; Utrecht, c. 1440). Coins used as a border, as in the common trope of memory as
coins to be laid away in one’s memory treasury.
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26. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M. 945, fo. 20r (‘‘The Hours of Catherine of
Cleves’’; Utrecht, c. 1440). Bees in a hive and gathering nectar from flowers in the border, as
in the common trope of memory as the gathered flowers of reading (florilegium) to be culled
by readers as bees gather nectar in their hives.
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27. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M. 917, p. 247 (‘‘The Hours of Catherine
of Cleves’’; Utrecht, c. 1440). Caged birds, used as a border, as in the common
trope of memory as birds caged or penned in coops.
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28. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M. 917, p. 266 (‘‘The Hours of Catherine of
Cleves’’; Utrecht, c. 1440). Fish used as a border. Notice that they form a chain,
one fish fastening itself to the next, and that the chain is drawn by fishhooks, like the
‘hook’ that draws a catena or chain of texts.
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323
Kingdom of Heaven (figure 25). Some Books of Hours have pilgrims’
badges as a marginal decoration; a book such as this was traditionally
thought of as a scrinium, a shrine, the pilgrim’s object.72
Birds, a common and long-lasting element in book decoration from the
early programs for the Canon Tables to the elements of Insular interlace to
the margins of psalters and Books of Hours, have also a very long associ-
ation with thoughts and memories, as we saw in Chapter 1. Birds, like
memories, need to be hunted down (by a fowler or hawker, a common
variation on the general motif) or stored up in a cage or coop, as in
figure 27. They are also part of the Christian motifs of the Tree of Life
and Book of Life, so clearly linked to one another exegetically, as in Hugh
of St. Victor’s De formatione arche. Jesus likened the kingdom of Heaven to
a mustard seed that grows into a tree so large that all the birds of the air
might live in its branches: ‘‘et fit arbor, ita ut volucris caeli veniant, et
habitent in ramis ejus’’ (Mt. 13:32). This exemplary tree is also, by the
mnemonic technique of collation, the Tree of Life thus linked to the Book
of Life, as Hugh says. Another ubiquitous trope employed in marginal
images is wrestling, with hands, feet, arms, and sometimes hair-pulling,
alluding to the common idea (Biblical as well as classical) of meditation as
exercise (melet¯e), and of ascetics as spiritual athletes.73
Such images are not iconographical, nor do they illustrate or explain the
content of a particular text. They serve the basic function of all page
decoration, to make each page distinct and memorable, but their content
is not only specific to the particular page on which they are drawn. One
should consider them as images which serve to remind readers of the
fundamental purposes of these books – Bibles, psalters, decretal collec-
tions, prayer books – books that are made for study and meditation, to be
mulled over. They contain matter to be laid down and called again from
their memorial store-houses, shrines, fiscal pouches, chests, vases, coops,
pens, cells, and bins. A very early example makes my point. The Codex
Alexandrinus, a fifth-century Greek Bible, has drawings of an empty vase
into which a titulus, written in increasingly shorter lines, seems to fall as
though in a stream. This simple image serves as a reminder that the words
of God pour forth in a stream from the book into the vessel of memory,
and that one’s task is to be sure they are laid away there properly.74
Metaphors of fishing, hunting, and tracking down prey are also traditional
for recollection. Aristotle speaks in De memoria of how people recollect from
some starting-point: they ‘‘hunt successively’’ (451b19). The verb he uses is
th¯er-a¯ma, ‘‘to hunt or fish for something.’’ The same image is incorporated
into the very definition of recollection by Albertus Magnus: ‘ reminiscenti[a]
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nihil aliud est nisi investigati[o] obliti per memoriam,’’ ‘‘recollection is
nothing but the tracking-down of something hidden away in memory.’’75
The metaphor is also used, elaborately, by Quintilian, who, defining the
places of argument laid down in memory, likens a skillful orator to a
huntsman or fisherman who knows exactly the habits and haunts of
his game (Inst. orat., V. x. 20–22). The metaphor in the word error, both
error and wandering, is an aspect of this same idea, for one who wanders
through the silva (meaning both forest and disordered material) of his
untrained and inattentive memory is one who has either lost the footprints
(vestigia) that should lead him through, or never laid them down properly
in the first place.
Hunting and fishing go together in this trope of memory. The mnemonic
notae which one uses to get around one’s store-house are called both tracks
(vestigia) and hooks (unci). Geoffrey of Vinsauf, discussing memoria,
advises students to be diligent and practice the contents of their memorial
store, laid away with markers of whatever sorts of notae suit them.
Otherwise, they will be like a cat, which wants the fish but not the fishing.76
Fish are fairly common in a number of manuscripts, sometimes drawn
crudely by a reader opposite a portion of text, thus functioning like a
‘‘NOTA’’ admonition.77
Many manuscripts’ margins contain images that seem to grow out of the
words and into the margins, a kind of emphasizing bracket that becomes
the shape of a hand or a head. Heads are very common, possibly because
the head is the seat of memory. Heads also can be differentiated more easily
than pointing hands (which can be provided with a string or a cuff, but not
much else), for they can wear a variety of headdress, be male or female,
frontal or in profile, and so on. A head, drawn with a text-balloon such as
modern cartoonists use, as though it were mindful of the words of a titulus,
occurs in a margin of the Winchester manuscript of Malory. 78 This image
clearly indicates that this reader understood drawings of heads to be a part
of a book’s mnemonic apparatus.