Diagrams
A prominent feature of medieval book art is the use of diagrams. The
Canon Tables, written intercolumnia – between arched columns that are
decorated with birds and floral motifs – are one very early example, which
we find in books from the earliest medieval centuries (figure 6). The typical
lay-out of the Calendar, marked by images of the Zodiac and (later) the
labors of the months, is another. In fact, one of the more intriguing aspects
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of Hugh of St. Victor’s Ark-picture is its gathering of many common
medieval diagrams into one place, and, if one adds the columnar format he
employed for his Chronicle, it is clear that Hugh was accustomed, both in
teaching (lectio) and in his own meditational composition, to using vir-
tually every major genre of diagram common in the twelfth century –
ladders, trees, circles, columns, maps, and genealogical charts – all enclosed
within the rectangular shape of the memorial page. Even more interesting
is Hugh’s assumption that basic pedagogy consists in the ability to use such
structures readily to perform tasks of mnemonic calculation (collating
texts, for example). His own practice indicates that such recollective skill
is, in large measure, what he is referring to in his aphorism, ‘‘the whole
usefulness of education consists only in the memory of it’’ (‘‘In sola enim
memoria omnis utilitas doctrinae consistit’’).
In many ways, Hugh of St. Victor is a twelfth-century version of
Quintilian, not an innovator of technique so much as an admirably clear,
practical guide to the best pedagogy of his time. This pedagogy employed
visual aids and diagrams to an extent that many modern historians have
noted. For example, in his descriptive catalogue of English Romanesque
illuminated manuscripts, C. M. Kauffmann writes that ‘‘the pictorial dia-
gram . . . became one of the typical features of Romanesque art.’’79 But
most of these diagrams had been in common use for centuries before the
twelfth, as mnemonic compositional aids – one thinks, for example, of
the ladder with which Benedict organized the steps (gradus) of humility in
the seventh chapter of his Rule.
Indeed, it is a much-remarked-on medieval characteristic to treat the
space in a full-page drawing diagramatically, that is, with images placed in
specific locations, often grouped about a large central figure, often in an
architectural setting, often with related images enclosed in roundels or
other geometric forms, usually with a border, and commonly with inscrip-
tions, like tituli or rubrics, to be associated with the figure and to help
associate the figures with one another. The justification for this practice is
mnemonic necessity. The framework of the page provides a set of orderly
loci; furthermore, this frame remains constant while the images in it change
from page to page – that is the manner of a diagram, and it is also the
manner of the page of memory, imagines rerum imposed upon a set of
geometrically defined places in an orderly framework or grid.
Examples of this format span the whole period that we call the Middle
Ages. The Gospels of St. Augustine (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College
MS. 286), made in Italy or Gaul in the sixth century, was at Canterbury
during the Middle Ages, and is thought to have been brought to England
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29. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS. 286, fo. 125r (‘‘The Gospels of St. Augustine’’;
Italy or Gaul, sixth century). A picture-page, showing a grid format and frontal perspective
towards figures set against a plain background. Compare the instructions for forming
memory locations in Thomas Bradwardine’s De memoria artificiali.
from Rome by St. Augustine himself. A full-page picture (figure 29) groups
figural scenes of the Passion week, many containing textual tags, into a grid
of twelve cells, each set in a border. The whole rectangular construction is
enclosed in another border painted around the vellum page. The outer
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border demarcates the area or flat surface of the page, just as the memory-
page in Hugh of St. Victor’s Ark pictura has a border enclosing it. The loci
are small quadratures within this, three across in each of four tiers, clearly
separated from one another by a red-colored border. Some of the individ-
ual imagines are given a rudimentary background; others are set in what has
been called ‘‘hierarchical’’ space, wherein the figures are grouped in such a
way that the main figure, the first in the order, appears in the center and
larger than the subsidiary figures grouped to its right and left.
The background is simple, a single color, providing no more than the
barest suggestion of a setting for the figures. And the perspective of
the viewer is from the front and central, the qualities that define distancia
in the mnemonic advice that has survived from later centuries. In fact, this
page exemplifies so many of the rules for making mnemonic locations
described by Bradwardine that one might, at first, wonder if he must have
seen it; the manuscript was, after all, at Canterbury. Yet the details of
Bradwardine’s examples are not those of the drawings in the Gospels of
St. Augustine. Their similarity in principle, however, suggests strongly that
the same general rules that governed the making of the sixth-century
Gospels’ page were still a part of medieval mnemonic pedagogy in the
fourteenth century.
The picture-page in this Gospels provides a complete set, in order, of
imagines rerum for the Passion story, drawn not from a particular gospel
but synthesizing all four accounts. The picture-page comes between the
gospels of Mark and Luke; it is thought that similar pages, with images
from the earlier life of Christ, were placed before Matthew and between
Matthew and Mark, and that a page showing events from the Passion to the
Ascension preceded John. Such a placement is usual in early medieval
Gospels, which were large books designed for study within a monastery
community.80
Picture-pages in medieval books had cycles of popularity. A much later
example is a Flemish Psalter of the second half of the thirteenth century (The
Morgan Library MS. M.183), which contains four such pages. M. R. James’s
catalogue description of this manuscript demonstrates clearly how the
individual subjects of the images are inserted into a framework that is
stable in all four of these pages – stable not only in shape and configuration,
but in the type of content that occupies the different parts of the frame.81
Again, the places within the frame are separated clearly from one another
by borders; the imagines rerum refer to sixteen main events in the life of
Christ and to various saints. This framework is quite elaborate, though its
relationship to the common grid-format is evident.
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Such imagines rerum, either painted only mentally or also on parchment,
share many features with the teaching diagrams
which the later Middle
Ages produced in abundance. Diagrams were a common feature of medi-
eval classrooms. One of the better-known, and most widely used, was in a
tree form, composed by Peter of Poitiers towards the end of the twelfth
century. It is the genealogy of Christ, called Compendium historiae in
genealogia Christi or, simply, the Genealogia, and it is quite like the linea
genealogia we encounter in Hugh of St. Victor’s De formatione arche,
composed a half-century earlier.
Beginning with Adam, the names of Christ’s predecessors are listed in
order, with a brief biographical sketch. The names and their relationships
are indicated by lines and, usually, circles, with pictures of the chief events,
such as the Temptation of Adam and Eve and the Flood – often also
the diagram known as the Tree of Jesse is included. A version of the
diagram seems to have had an independent existence by the early thirteenth
century. An early thirteenth-century chronicler reports that Peter of
Poitiers had ‘‘designed for the benefit of poor clerics trees painted on
skins that displayed the history of the Old Testament.’’82 Much copied,
often incorporated into universal chronicles from the twelfth through
the fifteenth centuries; the Genealogia was also translated into several
vernaculars, including English, and had an exceptionally long run in the
classroom.
Frequently, the Genealogia was written on a continuous roll of parch-
ment rather than in a codex. Three examples in the Bodleian Library are of
some interest. An English codex of the second quarter of the thirteenth
century (MS. Laud Misc. 151), which contains both this text, in Latin, and
Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica, belonged to Cardinal Morton
(d. 1500) at one point in its history, and the first leaf pictures both his
coat of arms and a rebus for his name, a drawing of a cask, or ‘‘tun,’’ with
the letters ‘‘mor’’ written on it. A roll (MS. Barlow 53), dating from the
early fifteenth century, is an English translation of the Genealogia, with its
preface. And finally, another roll, MS. Lat. th. b. 1, also English and from
the first half of the thirteenth century, is especially interesting because its
companion roll (MS. Lat. th. c. 2), which may have been attached to it at
one point, contains diagrams of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Gifts of
the Spirit, and so on. The genealogy roll begins with a drawing and
exposition of the Menorah or seven-branched candlestick, proceeding to
enumerate a number of items in sevens and also in threes before it gets to
Peter’s diagram itself. Such a digest of preaching aids would be a useful tool
for classroom lecture as well as for sermon making. 83
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Peter of Poitier’s preface makes it clear that his format is a memory aid.
Considering the length of holy writ, he says, he has digested the genea-
logical information and presented it in this form so that students may
retain it in memory, as in a money-bag (quasi in sacculo). He uses the same
image for memory used by Hugh of St. Victor in his Chronicle Preface, that
of a sacculus or compartmentalized money-pouch, in which coins of various
sizes can be carried, each in its place without loss or confusion. As I showed
in my first chapter, this image is a common variant of the archetype of
memory as thesaurus or arca. And Peter goes on to say that his scheme,
though useful for all, is particularly so for those students who feel over-
whelmed by the bulk of historical material; with the aid of his diagram, that
daunting prolixity, having been made subject to the eyes, can be commit-
ted to memory and its usefulness realized.84
In his section on rhetorical memory, Geoffrey of Vinsauf (who was
Peter’s contemporary) emphasizes the mnemonic value of formae: ‘ loca,
tempora, et formae and other similar notulae are sure ways to lead me to
[what I have stored away].’’85 He does not define what these formae are. The
word can mean ‘‘shape’’ or ‘‘outward appearance.’’ But it can also mean
‘‘geometric shape’’ or ‘‘outline’’ – the sort of thing that a diagram is,86 and
given the fondness of the twelfth-century classroom for diagrams, this was
what Geoffrey probably meant. Diagrams formed of concentric circles,
rose diagrams (which are not confined to windows), the primitive chart
that forms the Genealogia, Hugh of St. Victor’s columns of persons, places,
and dates for his Chronicle, ladder diagrams, and the veritable forest of trees
used to illustrate the relations of parts of a subject whether it be preaching
or vices and virtues – all such formae are common features in manuscripts
too, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.87
There is one more famous diagram worth considering here, described by
John of Garland. I discussed in Chapter 3 John’s instructions for compos-
ing a three-columned memory tablet that was to include all the voces
animantium (chiefly animal names), words in various languages, and so
on, in alphabetical order; some manuscripts of John’s text include a partial
schematic drawing of this, but it was clearly designed as a mental structure,
infinitely expandable as such schemes are. John also mentions a diagram
‘‘quam pre manibus habimus,’’ ‘‘which we have in our hands,’’ the so-called
Rota Virgili or Virgil’s Wheel. 88 This circular diagram is also drawn in
some manuscripts of the Parisiana Poetria, and it shows a series of con-
centric circles divided into three wedges, within which comparisons, like-
nesses, occupations, animals, plants, and implements are written that
pertain to John’s subject, the three different kinds of audience to be
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considered in determining stylistic decorum. Virgil’s Wheel was clearly a
mnemonic diagram that his students held; it is likely that it could be
physically manipulated, as its concentric circles suggest.
This figure of the rhetorical Rota Virgili may provide the connection
between the Latin word rota, ‘‘wheel,’’ and the English phrase ‘ by rote.’’ Rote
is ‘ of obscure origin,’’ according to OED, although it appears as though it
should be derived either from Latin rota or from French rote, ‘ way, route.’ As
OED states, however, there has been ‘ no evidence to confirm the sugges-
tions.’ 89 My review of the evidence does not confirm a derivation either, but
it may help to strengthen the suggestion in favor of the Latin over the French.
‘ By rote’’ appears in English in the fourteenth century meaning both
‘ reciting (prayers, speeches, and the like) from memory’’ (an essentially neutral
usage) and, in a pejorative way, ‘ reciting unintelligently or by formula.’’ For
Chaucer, the word on its face is neutral, meaning ‘‘from memory exactly,’’ a
synonym of verbatim memory. The first clearly pejorative uses of the word
(which are from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) modify ‘‘rote’’ with
‘‘mere’’ or ‘‘pure.’’ ‘‘Rote’’ had also a generalized meaning of habit or
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br /> custom, that which memory produces. The earliest OED citation, in a
poem by William of Shoreham written probably in the 1330s, refers to a bad
habit as a ‘‘wikked rote’’; habitual knowledge is what the classroom rotae
were designed to instill. John Gower speaks of the ancient pagans’ ‘‘rote’’
(custom) in his Confessio amantis (VI, 1311), interestingly in the context of
knowing magical arts and sorcery (things that scholars, whose memories
were sure to be trained, would dabble in).
The clearest link between English ‘‘by rote’’ and the rhetorical tradition
which included using the Rota Virgili diagram is in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s
Tale, when the Pardoner describes his rhetorical tactics and how he adopts
his speech to his audience:
Lordynges, quod he, in chirches whan I preche,
I peyne me to han an hauteyn speche
And rynge it out as round as gooth a belle,
For I kan al by rote that I telle.
My theme is alwey oon, and evere was:
Radix malorum est cupiditas.
(VI, 329–334)90
The Rota Virgili showed schematically how to adopt one’s speech to partic-
ular kinds of audiences, something at which the Pardoner is especially adept.
Notice how he distinguishes between his theme, which is always the same,
and his ability to vary it to suit the particular occasion and congregation, ex
tempore dicendi, a boast he repeats in lines 412–420 when he describes how
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he has insulted particular enemies in his sermons. I have hardly settled the
etymological puzzle here, but the possibility of a link with memory devices
like the Rota Virgili is suggestive. It is also easy to see how, if it referred to a
mnemonic schoolroom diagram, ‘‘speaking by rote’’ could come to mean
‘‘speaking by mere formula.’’
Wheel-diagrams were not limited to the teaching of rhetoric. Wheels
that move and are intended to be manipulated are common enough
artifacts in manuscripts. For example, two moving wheels are found in
Bodleian Library MS. Bodley 177, a collection of scientific pieces made up
of four separate manuscripts written in the last part of the fourteenth
century. On fo. 63v there is a simplified astrolabe, made of two freely
moving concentric parchment disks, and on fo. 62r a wheel that reveals the
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