Middle Ages, see Cox and Ward, The Rhetoric of Cicero. Though classicists
refer to the author of Ad Herennium as ‘‘auctor ad Herennium’’ or as ‘‘pseudo-
Cicero,’’ for the sake of brevity in my discussion I have adopted for him his
early English name of Tullius. I use Tullius only for this author, however;
Cicero gets credit for those things that are genuinely his. Calboli has made a
case for identifying Cornificius as the anonymous author, but this has not
won wide acceptance, and Tullius was the usual name assigned to the author
by medieval scholars.
Notes to pp. 88–91
395
119. Albertus Magnus, De bono, I I , art. 2: ‘‘Dicimus ergo cum Tullio, quod
memoria pertinentium ad vitam et iustitiam duplex est, scilicet naturalis et
artificialis. Naturalis est, quae ex bonitate ingenii deveniendo in prius scitum
vel factum facile memoratur. Artificialis autem est, quae fit dispositione
locorum et imaginum, et sicut in omnibus ars et virtus sunt naturae perfec-
tionis, ita et hic. Naturalis enim perficitur per artificialem.’’ Translated in
Appendix B, below.
120. ST I –I I , Q. 58, art. 1.
121. Hugh of St. Victor, De institutione novitiorum (PL 176, 933B): ‘‘Figura
namque quae in sigillo foris eminet, impressione cerae introrsum signata
apparet, et quae in sigillo intrinsecus sculpta ostenditur, in cera exterius
figurata demonstratur. Quod ergo aliud in isto nobis innuitur, nisi quia nos
qui per exemplum bonorum, quasi per quoddam sigillum optime exsculptum
reformari cupimus, quaedam in eis sublimia et quasi eminentia, quaedam
vero abjecta et quasi depressa operum vestigia invenimus?’’ (translated by
Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 97–98). According to his biographer, Anselm of
Canterbury used this same trope for moral education, alluding as well to the
ancient belief that the wax of memory is softer and better able to take
impressions in youth than in age (Southern, Eadmer’s Life of Anselm, 20–21).
122. Its composition is discussed by Caplan in the Loeb edition, vii–xxxiv, and see
also the introduction by G. Calboli to his edition of the work (1993), and that
of G. Achard to his.
123. A good, if somewhat controversial, treatment of this relationship is Enders,
Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama; see as well her The Medieval
Theater of Cruelty.
124. I have discussed this in some detail, with sources cited, in my chapter on
‘‘Memoria’’ in Cox and Ward, The Rhetoric of Cicero.
125. Cicero says he will not insult his audience by describing the scheme in detail:
‘‘ne in re nota et pervulgata multus et insolens sim’ (my emphasis).
126. This idea was familiar to the early Middle Ages through Boethius, who
articulates it in his translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge. The relationship
between mnemonic places or topics, and what came to be known as ‘‘topics’’
in logic is a vexed one, since there did seem, to many ancient philosophers, to
be some sort of relation, and yet the mnemonic place has a physiological
‘‘location’’ that seems more ontologically real than the logical or even
rhetorical topics do, both of which seem to be entities only of language
rather than also of some sort of ‘‘space.’ Ancient and medieval philosophers
worried the question of the ontological status of the logical topics without
reaching any consensus; for a review of the problem at several stages in its life,
see the final chapters of Stump, Boethius’s De differentiis topicis. Though the
problem is more one of philosophy than of practical pedagogy, uncertainty
about it seems to be reflected in the way in which Aristotle’s Topica and
Cicero’s work on the same subject are claimed by some writers on the topics
of rhetoric and writers on mnemotechnique, as well as thought to be works of
dialectic. I discuss this somewhat more in Chapter 3.
396
Notes to pp. 91–100
127. Translated by May and Wisse, Cicero On the Ideal Orator, 220–221. The
translators comment that the passage is difficult, and their sense of it is often
variant from Rackham’s translation for the LCL. It seems unlikely that
Cicero was thinking of ‘‘perspective,’’ as Rackham has it: but distinguishing
one’s various places clearly from one another is a basic requirement of
memory craft.
128. Quintilian’s method is discussed in Yates, Art of Memory, chapter 2, to which
I am much indebted, and also in Harry Caplan’s essay ‘‘Memoria’’ in Of
Eloquence.
129. Luria, Mind of a Mnemonist, 33, note. The connection between this case-
study and the rules of the architectural mnemonic was first made by Sorabji,
Aristotle On Memory, to which I am indebted. A number of mnemonists’
techniques are discussed by Baddeley, The Psychology of Memory, 347–369.
130. Luria, Mind of a Mnemonist, 33–34.
131. For literary examples of using synaesthesic imagery for memory work, see
Carruthers, ‘‘Chaucer, Italy, and Fame’s House,’’ and ‘‘The Poet as Master
Builder.’’
C H A P T E R 3
1. Most of these are described at least briefly by Hajdu, Das mnemotechnische
Schriftum. A digital mnemonic from an early fourteenth-century Anglo-
Norman manuscript is described in Hasenohr, ‘‘Me´ditation me´thodique et
mne´monique.’’ The syllogism mnemonic is keyed, by the vowels of its various
syllables, to the types of proposition that a syllogism can contain. A commonly
used mnemonic verse for the ecclesiastical calendar, ‘‘Cisiojanus,’’ is discussed
by Kully. Several of these content-specific mnemonics are discussed in Eco, ‘‘An
Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!’’
2. Thompson, The Medieval Library, 613. He describes an interesting verse-
catalogue from St. Albans abbey of ‘‘all those [books] which are placed in the
windows,’’ 379.
3. The characteristics of these influential medieval schemes from late antiquity to
the sixteenth century, with English translations of some key texts, are demon-
strated in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, eds., The Medieval Craft of Memory. The
university-based late medieval dissemination of the specific scheme described
in the Ad Herennium is analyzed in Carruthers, ‘‘Rhetorical memoria,’’ and see
Chapter 4 below.
4. A portion of the Chronicle without the preface was published in the MGH. The
prologue is discussed as a mnemonic text by Grover Zinn, ‘ Hugh of St. Victor
and the Art of Memory.’’ A list of contents written on the end-paper of an early
fourteenth-century manuscript of the text (B.n.F. lat. 14872) calls it an art of
memory (‘‘Tractatus, vel potius artificium memoriae’’); this characterization of it
was dismissed as ‘ adventitious’ by R. Baron (Zinn, 211, notes 2 and 3). For
reasons that will become apparent in my next chapter, it is significant that the
phrase ‘ artificial memory’’ was used by a post-thirteenth-century reader to
Notes to pp. 100–104
397
describe this text, though it was not called that in the twelfth century, when it
was first composed. (Goy, 40, ascribes this manuscript t
o the late thirteenth to
early fourteenth century; it had been ascribed to the twelfth by Delisle.) That
the number scheme was understood to constitute an ‘‘art of memory’’ by late
medieval and Renaissance writers is apparent from the title of a manual for
confessors by the Augustinian friar, Anselmo Faccio: Memoria artificiale di casi
di conscienza . . . disposto artificiosamente per via di numeri (Messina, 1621).
5. Hugh’s Chronicle does seem to have been known in England, though it
remains unclear how long the Preface was studied. See Harrison, ‘‘The
English Reception of Hugh of St. Victor’s Chronicle.’’
6. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis, ed. Green, 486.
7. Goy, Die Uberlieferung der Werke Hugos von St. Viktor, 36–43.
8. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis: ‘‘In sola enim memoria
omnis utilitas doctrinae consistit’’; ed. Green, 490, lines 39–40.
9. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis: ‘‘ut interrogatus sine
dubitatione respondere possim, sive ordine prolatis, sive uno aut pluribus
intermissis, sive converso ordine et retrograde nominatis ex notissa locorum
dispositione, quis primus, quis secundus, quis etiam xxvii, xlviiii, sive quotus-
libet sit psalmus. Hoc modo scripturas se affirmasse ostendunt qui, auctoritate
psalmi alicuius usuri, hoc dixerunt in lxiii, hoc in lxxv, sive alio quolibet
psalmo scriptum est’’; ed. Green, 489, lines 36–41.
10. Brevity is one of Thomas Bradwardine’s mnemonic principles – see
Appendix C, and compare what both Hugh of St. Victor and Albertus
Magnus have to say about brevity (appendices A and B). The fact that Latin
is a syntactically more compressed language than English is also reflected in
the greater number of words in the English translation, but is immaterial to
the basic principle of mnemotechnical ‘‘chunking’ and brevitas (one simply
needs more divisions in English to accomplish the same task). Yet its greater
compression may well have helped to make a better, more witty game out of
mnemonic brevitas. On the important role of play in mnemotechnical art, see
Chapter 4, below, and The Craft of Thought, esp. chapter 3.
11. Particular thanks to my colleagues Henrietta Leyser and Michael Clanchy,
who realized the oddities and significance of this text in the context of
monastic educational practice in ways I had overlooked.
12. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis: ‘‘Ego puto ad memoriam
excitandam etiam illud non nichil prodesse, ut eas quoque quae extrinsecus
accidere possunt circumstantias rerum non neglegenter attendamus, ut verbia
gratia, cum faciem et qualitatem sive situm locorum reminiscimur ubi illud vel
illud audivimus, vultus quoque et habitus personarum a quibus illa vel illa
didiscimus, et si qua sunt talia quare gestionem cuiuslibet negotii comitantur.
Ista quidem omnia puerilia sunt, talia tamen quae pueris prodesse possunt’’;
ed. Green, 490, lines 25–31.
13. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis: ‘‘Memoria enim semper
gaudet et brevitate in spatio et paucitate in numero, et propterea necesse est ut,
ubi series lectionis in longum tenditur, primum in pauca dividatur, ut quod
398
Notes to pp. 104–109
animus spatio comprehendere non potest saltem numero comprehendat’’; ed.
Green, 490, lines 6–9.
14. Didascalicon, I I I . iii, translated Taylor, 87. The standard edition of the Latin
text is that of Buttimer; I cite it only when I think Taylor’s translation needs to
be modified.
15. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis: ‘‘An putas eos, quociens
aliquem psalmorum numero designare volebant, paginas replicasse, ut ibi a
principio compotum ordientes scire possent quotus esset quisque psalmorum?
Nimis magnus fuisset labor iste in negotio tali’’; ed. Green, 489, lines 42–44.
16. Didascalicon, I I I . xi, trans. Taylor, 93. ‘‘Colligere est ea de quibus prolixius vel
scriptum vel disputatum est ad brevem quandam et compendiosam summam
redigere’’; ed. Buttimer, 60, lines 16–18.
17. Didascalicon, I I I . xi; ‘‘Memoria hominis hebes est et brevitate gaudet’’; ed.
Buttimer, 60, lines 24–25.
18. Didascalicon, I I I . xi; ‘‘Debemus . . . omni doctrina breve aliquid et certum
colligere, quod in arcula memoriae recondatur’’; ed. Buttimer, 60, lines 26–27.
19. Dudai, Memory From A to Z, s.vv. Capacity, Internal representation, Working
memory.
20. Miller, ‘‘Information and Memory.’’ The limits of working memory have
been known and studied for some time experimentally; some of the earliest
experiments recorded in modern psychological literature are from the eight-
eenth century; see Miller, and also Norman, Memory and Attention, 98–124,
and Dudai as in note 19 above.
21. Miller, ‘‘Information and Memory,’’ 45. On the role of ‘‘gathering’’ in complex
learning, see also Norman, Learning and Memory, esp. 80–116, and Bower,
‘‘Organizational Factors.’’
22. Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus maximis circumstantiis, ed. Green, 489, line 41.
23. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 65–66, 80, 195–196.
24. Julius Victor, Ars rhetorica, cap. 23: ‘‘Memoria est firma animi rerum ac
verborum ad inventionem perceptio’’; ed. Halm, 440, line 11. This and
subsequent quotations from Julius Victor are from Ziolkowski’s translation
in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, eds., The Medieval Craft of Memory. The
twelfth-century gloss on Cicero’s De inventione by Thierry of Chartres echoes
this paraphrase: ‘‘[Memoria est] firma animo percipere, memoriter retinere
que sunt apta ad inventione sive verba sive res, i.e. sententie’’ (Ward,
Artificiosa eloquentia, vol. 2, 226–7, transcribed from Brussels ms. Bibl. Roy.
10057–10062).
25. Julius Victor, Ars rhetorica, cap. 23: ‘‘[N]am qui recte conpegerit orationem,
numquam poterit errare’’ (ed. Halm, 440, lines 25–26). This is an interesting
modification of Quintilian’s original: ‘‘nam qui diviserit, numquam poterit in
rerum ordine errare’’ (Inst. orat., XI. ii. 36). Both ‘‘dividing’’ and ‘‘composing’’
are thought of as specific, definite tasks performed to ensure against error
(failure of memory) by imposing a numerical order (one, two, three, etc.).
26. Julius Victor, Ars rhetorica, cap. 23: ‘‘In his autem, quae cogitamus, et in his,
quae scribimus, retinendis proderit multum divisio et compositio . . . Et si
Notes to pp. 109–112
399
prima et secunda deinceps cohaereant, nihil per oblivionem subtrahi poterit,
ipso consequentium admonente contextu’’; ed. Halm, 440, lines 24–25,
27–29. Cf. Quintilian, Inst. orat., X I . ii. 36ff., and notice again the utter
confidence that if one memorizes properly in order, one cannot err or forget.
27. The comment is made in Remigius’s commentary on Donatus; see Minnis,
Theory of Authorship, 19, 226 (notes 75, 77).
28. Regula Benedicti, cap. 48. 15–16: ‘‘In quibus diebus quadragesimae accipiant
omnes singulos codices de biblioteca, quos per ordinem ex integro
legant; qui
codices in caput quadragesimae dandi sunt’’ (‘‘In these Lenten days, they
should each receive a separate codex from the library [or of the Bible] which
they are to read straight through to the end. These books are to be given out at
the beginning of Lent’’). (Translated by Kardong, 383.) Alternative interpre-
tations of this instruction understand biblioteca as ‘‘Bible’’ or ‘‘library,’’ and
codices either as ‘‘books’’ or as ‘‘the volumes’’ in which the Bible was bound in
Benedict’s time. But, as later monastic customaries make clear, medieval
monks received other sorts of books as well. See Kardong’s comments,
391–392, citing Mund ò, ‘‘Bibliotheca, bible, et lecture.’’
29. The foundational connection of memory-work to meditative reading and
visionary spirituality in monastic life is the subject of Carruthers, The Craft of
Thought.
30. Halm’s edition of Fortunatianus has been superseded by a critical edition,
with extensive notes and introduction, by Lucia Calboli-Montefusco.
Calboli-Montefusco provides a complete review of the evidence for
Fortunatianus’s career and works, including definitively correcting his given
name to Consultus from the erroneous form (often found in older texts)
Chirius Consultus. All subsequent references to Fortunatianus’s Artis rhetor-
icae libri III are to this edition.
31. Fortunatianus, Artis rhetoricae libri, I I I , 13; ‘‘Quid vel maxime memoriam
adiuvat? Divisio et conpositio: nam memoriam vehementer ordo servat.’’
I quote from the English translation of Ziolkowski, in Carruthers and
Ziolkowski, eds., The Medieval Craft of Memory, 295–297.
32. Fortunatianus, Artis rhetoricae libri, I I I , 13; ‘‘Semper ad verbum ediscendum
est? si tempus permiserit: sin minus, res ipsas tenebimus solas, dehinc his verba
de tempore accommodabimus.’’
33. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, I , 24. 91–92: ‘‘he diligently and insistently
demanded from each, as a daily debt, something committed to memory’’;
trans. McGarry, 69.
34. Riche
´, Education and Culture, 200, note 146. See also now Ziolkowski,
‘‘Mnemotechnics and the Reception of the Aeneid,’’ for additional examples
The Book of Memory Page 68
