The Book of Memory
Page 75
capiebat auditus, quod continua devotione ruminabat affectus. Hunc dis-
cendi legendique modum fructuosum dicebat, non per millenos evagari
tractatus’’; quoted by Balogh, 209, who also notes a change from Thomas’s
text when Bonaventure adapted it: ‘‘semel iniecerat, tenaciter imprimebat
430
Notes to pp. 217–221
memoriae, quia non frustra mentalis attentionis percipiebat auditu, quod
continuae devitionis [sic] ruminabat affectus.’’ Balogh thinks this remark is
significant as expressing a disdain on Bonaventure’s part for listening instead
of writing. But Bonaventure is concerned to contrast Francis’s mental atten-
tiveness (concentration) with vain listening, a variation of the traditional
silentium/strepitus opposition. His use of ruminare in the following clause
bears out this interpretation.
75. Didascalicon, I I I . 9; ed. Buttimer, 58, line 25.
76. Cicero, Brutus, 12. 47.
77. Inst. orat., I I . iv. 22 and V . xiii. 57. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, I . 2. 21–22, and
Cope, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 130–131.
78. PL 111. 11D–13A: ‘‘[C]ogitabam, quid Tuae Sanctitati gratum et utile in
scribendo conficere possem: quo haberes ob commemorationem in paucis
breviter adnotatum quod ante in multorum codicum amplitudine et facunda
oratorum locutione disertum copiose legisti . . . Haec enim omnia mihi
sollicite tractanti venit in mentem ut juxta morem antiquorum qui de
rerum naturis et nominum atque verborum etymologiis plura conscripsere,
ipse tibi aliquod opusculum conderem in quo haberes scriptum non solum de
rerum naturis et verborum proprietatibus, sed etiam de mystica earumdem
rerum significatione ut continuatim positam invenires historicam et mysti-
cam singularum expositionem.’’
79. The making of this complete line-by-line gloss of the Bible was a culminating
labor of monastic scholarship, completed by Anselm of Laon and his many
helpers by 1117. Like Smalley, G. R. Evans sees this as the labor that ended one
phase of Biblical scholarship and helped to enable another, the general
considerations of Biblical doctrine that we associate with the scholastics; see
her The Language and Logic of the Bible, esp. chapters 1–3. On the develop-
ment of the glossed Bible lay-out, see De Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible,
and L. Smith, Masters of the Sacred Page.
80. Isidore, Sententiae, I I I .14.7: ‘‘Lectio memoriae auxilio eget.’’
81. C. von Nolcken, ‘‘Some Alphabetical Compendia.’’ On the genres of medieval
florilegia, see Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons, esp. 3–42.
See also their ‘‘Florilegia of Patristic Texts.’’
82. The opinion is that of Peter, Prior of Holy Trinity in Aldgate, with my
emphasis added. It was first adduced by Hunt, ‘‘English Learning in the
Twelfth Century,’’ and subsequently by Smalley, Study of the Bible, 248, and
von Nolcken ‘‘Some Alphabetical Compendia,’’ 282. In such ways modern
scholarship also depends on the florilegial reading of others.
83. B. Munk Olsen, ‘‘Les Classiques Latins dans les florilèges me´die´vaux,’’ esp. 47–57.
84. Quoted by Munk Olsen, ‘ Florilèges,’ 56. Cf. 52, note 2, in which the verses of
Hadoard are quoted, explaining how, when he was in charge of the book-cases,
he gathered together extracts of material he wished to recollect; having preserved
and gradually built up this store, he will now pay out its image in the form of a
book. Munk Olsen discusses the purposes of Carolingian florilegia which
contain extracts from classical texts in ‘ Les Florilèges d’auteurs classiques.’’
Notes to pp. 221–224
431
85. On vocalizing while writing, see Balogh, ‘‘Voces paginarum,’’ 214–216;
McCartney, ‘‘Notes on Reading,’’ 184–187; and Skeat on ancient scribal
dictation. The most famous ancient allusion is in Ovid, Heroides 18. 19–20,
discussed in Chapter 6, below.
86. Inst. orat., I . i. 36; trans. Russell.
87. Riche
´, 464. Though a great deal has been written recently on the subject of
reading and ethics in the Middle Ages, the importance of pedagogical prac-
tices, especially at the elementary level, has not been sufficiently stressed. The
work of Judson B. Allen, Ethical Poetic, and Minnis (for example in ‘‘Art and
Ethics in John Gower’’) has focused on theoretical statements and advanced
practices, chiefly in university or court settings; this, I think, is to start at the
end of the matter not the beginning, although their work provides essential
explorations of the issues. See also Stock, Augustine the Reader, and Illich,
Vineyard of the Text, which have appeared since The Book of Memory, and
which complement both my discussion here and that of Leclercq, Love of
Learning and the Desire for God.
88. Metalogicon, I . 24: ‘‘Historias, poemata, percurrenda monebat, diligenter
quidem et qui uelut nullis calcaribus urgebantur ad fugam; et ex singulis,
aliquid reconditum in memoria diurnum debitum diligenti instantia exige-
bat’’; (I. 24. 89–92). On the long pedagogical tradition of such memory work
to build character and learn both reading and writing, see Orme, English
Schools, chapter 3.
89. The quotation from Cassiodorus is given above, Chapter 1, note 66.
90. Trans. Clanchy, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, 18–19. The quotation is
Pharsalia 8. 94b–98a. A case against accepting Abelard’s letters, including this
one, as genuine was made by John Benton, ‘‘The Correspondence of Abelard
and Heloise.’’ For my purposes, the question of authentic authorship, while of
interest, is not a dispositive one. What is important to my discussion is that
this supreme ethical moment is narrated not as a private, but a public, one –
designed to enrich the public memory. And it succeeded, for the story became
a medieval ‘‘classic,’’ helped along in part by its retelling in the Roman de la
Rose. Since I first wrote this note, scholarly opinion has decisively come to
accept Abelard’s authorship: see Clanchy, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise,
lviii–lxxxiv.
91. Southern, Medieval Humanism, 86–104, esp. 93–94. Southern also points out
that Heloise’s irony in choosing these words is lost on Abelard, for Pompey
shows his moral greatness in not accepting his wife’s offer, a crucial difference
between Cornelia’s fate and that of Heloise.
92. Conf., V I I I . xxix. Augustine elsewhere expresses disapproval of using Scripture
for sortilege, though only because divine words shouldn’t be asked to provide
answers to mundane business affairs; still, he says, it would be better to consult
Scripture than ‘‘demons’’; Epist., 55. 37.
93. Liddell and Scott, s.v. vaqajseq; for an interesting discussion of the use of the
word in rhetoric, see Hendrickson, ‘‘Characters of Style.’’ On the memorial
physiology of habit-building, see my discussion in Chapter 2, above.
432
Notes to pp. 224–229
94. Cicero, Orator, 36 (edited Hendricks, LCL); Ox. Lat. Dict., s.v. forma.
95. A careful attempt to articulate the Exeg
etical school’s position on the moral
function of medieval literature, which starts from the premise that literature
is properly part of ethics but ends up with conclusions quite opposite to those
I argue here, is Allen, Ethical Poetic. On the importance of the rhetorically
achieved negotiation of norm and occasion in ethics, see Trimpi, Muses of
One Mind.
96. Huizinga was one of the first historians to emphasize the theatre or perform-
ance aspect of late medieval culture (which he viewed, in The Autumn of the
Middle Ages, as a sign of decadence); the concept of performance in terms of
the oral character of vernacular literature has been developed especially by
Paul Zumthor – see his Essai, and especially La Poeśie et la voix.
97. A great deal has been written on the changing concept of the ‘‘individual’’ in
medieval culture. See Hanning, The Individual in the Twelfth Century
Romance; Benton, ‘ Consciousness of Self’’; Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition
of Reform; and Bynum, ‘ Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’’
(chapter 3 of Jesus as Mother). The term ‘‘subjectivity’’ I have taken from
Patterson, Negotiating the Past, esp. 182–184.
98. See Carruthers, ‘‘Mystery of the Bed-Chamber,’’ for a detailed working
through of these themes in Book of the Duchess.
99. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 47; my thanks to my
Illinois colleague, Ned Lukacher, for this citation.
100. Edited by F. J. Carmody, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xxiii (my translation of the
French).
101. Greene, ‘‘‘Festina lente,’’’ 134. An excellent study of Erasmus’s Adagia,
proverbs, and early modern notions of intellectual property is Eden,
Friends Hold All Things in Common.
102. Smalley, The Study of the Bible, 29 and note. The quote is from Epistula 36. 1:
‘‘ne me aestimas tantummodo dormitare, qui lectionem sine stilo somnum
putas’’ (‘‘for you do not think of me as asleep, you who believe that to read
without [writing] with a pen is to sleep’’). Jerome addresses Pope Damasus,
asking to dedicate to him a translation of the Greek expositor Didymus, on
the Holy Spirit, now lost.
103. Kristeller characterizes the culture of Renaissance humanism as basically ‘‘a
lay culture,’’ its religion ‘‘supported by laymen and secular clerics rather than
by monks and friars’’ (Medieval Aspects of Renaissance Learning, 114), though
he outlines certain important contributions of the religious orders in the final
essay, with its extensive bibliography, of this same volume. The relationship
between artificial memory books and these florilegial collections, especially
in a lay context and in southern Europe, is well set out by Yates, Art of
Memory, and Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory. Since Kristeller wrote, the
view of humanism as owing little to friars has been successfully challenged by,
among others, Bolzoni: see especially her The Web of Images.
104. Cited by von Nolcken, ‘‘Some Alphabetical Compendia,’’ 272, note 8, from
the preface to John of Mirfeld’s Florarium Bartholomei.
Notes to pp. 229–233
433
105. This citation and the following paraphrase are from Bartolomeo da San
Concordia, Ammaestramenti degli antichi, 1.
106. Dante, Inferno, V , 121–138; trans. Sinclair.
107. This assumption has come to characterize the exegetical school of medieval
literary criticism, associated prominently with the name of D. W. Robertson.
Though it is unfair to attribute to Robertson the original of it, he is perhaps
its most expressive proponent. But such an authoritarian view assumes
reliably authoritative texts, and medieval readers of written books could
hardly afford to take for granted the correctness or completeness of their
contents. Compare Richard de Bury’s complaints about scribes as cloudy-
headed word-scatterers, which is simply his version of a frequent, deeply
held, and empirically based medieval bias.
108. Piers Plowman, the B-Text, Passus I I I . 338–343.
109. Text ed. Sommers (1910), vol. 3, 263: ‘‘And the queen saw that the knight did
not dare to do more . and so she took him [Lancelot] by the chin and kissed
him before Galehot for a long enough time . until the lady of Malehaut
comprehended that she kissed him.’’ Paget Toynbee transcribed and trans-
lated the text for the Dante Society a century ago, noting that the Lady of
Malohaut’s reaction is alluded to in Paradiso 16. 14–15. He transcribed the
text from British Library MS. Lansdowne 757, which is punctuated exactly as
the edition I have just quoted here. Early commentary on the Paradiso
passage, cited by Toynbee, makes it clear that the Lady’s instant discovery
of the lovers’ fault was understood by its readers to be an essential part of this
famous scene; ‘‘Dante, and the Lancelot Romance,’’ Fifth Annual Report of
the Dante Society (1886), 41–74. Noakes, ‘‘The Double Misreading,’’ reviews
the criticism that understands reading to be a major theme in this scene, and
gives a fine analysis of it of her own. Medieval readers familiar enough with
the scene to understand Dante’s allusion at all (and it was a famous scene)
would have understood Francesca’s reference to the exact punto that over-
came them, for they memorized it in these divisions (recall Jerome’s admon-
ition to copyists to carefully preserve his cola et commata, essential, as Bishop
Langton said, for remembering the text).
110. Ambrose, Epist., V I I . 37, 2 (Sancti Ambrosi opera, X . 2), written c. 395. The text
is quoted by Balogh, 219. (In the Maurist’s register of Ambrose’s letters
printed in the PL, this is no. 47.) Ambrose explains that he has sent a
perfected codex to his correspondent, Bishop Sabinus, for his own copy-
texts are not written ‘‘ad speciem,’ ‘‘to be looked at,’’ but ‘‘ad necessitatem,’’
‘‘for use.’’ He does not like to dictate always to a scribe, especially when he is
doing what the Romans called ‘‘night-work,’’ lucubratio, study, reading, and
composition. I have freely translated the sentence that follows: ‘‘Nobis autem
quibus curae est senilem sermonem familiari usu ad unguem distinguere et
lento quodam figere gradu, aptius videtur propriam manum nostro affigere
stilo, ut non tam deflare aliquid videamur, quam abscondere neque alterum
scribentem erubescamus.’’ Senilis here refers to the ‘‘ancients’’ or ‘‘elders’’ of
the Church (Du Cange, s.v. Senex); deflare is a rare verb, usually glossed as
434
Notes to pp. 235–236
‘‘blab,’’ but with this citation from Ambrose being the only one given. It also
means ‘‘blow about or around’’ – Ox. Lat. Dict. s.v. deflo; similarly Lewis and
Short. Undoubtedly all sorts of textual study and meditational activities
associated with it are implied by distinguere ad unguem, not just what we
think of as punctuation, but, since the way one reads is by dividing, as
Quintilian and so many others all said, punctuation is the basis. And it is
clear that Ambrose is writing as an aid to his memory (it wouldn�
�t have
occurred to him to do otherwise), for not only is the activity of distinguendum
the first step to memorizing, but the verbs figere and affigere, ‘‘to fix,’’ the
notions of order and habituation implied in the words usus familiaris and
gradus, the time of day, and the contrast between scattering or idly ‘‘blowing’’
his studies ‘‘about’’ by dictating them to a scribe and hiding them away in
storage, all suggest the memorial nature of Ambrose’s activity.
C H AP T E R 6
1. The medieval category of intentio auctoris developed as an essential part of
understanding a text; see especially the commentaries translated in Minnis and
Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, and in Huygens, Accessus ad auctores. We might
think of it now as its ‘‘sense’ (Latin sententia, medieval English sentence), an
essential property of an artistic work which is yet not wholly circumscribed by its
immediate historical context or its composer: indeed, in the commentaries called
accessus ad auctores, the biography of the writer is treated quite separately from
the intentio auctoris (and is often left out). Michael Baxandall explored the
concept of an inherent intention in works of painting and architecture in
Patterns of Intention; his analyses have fruitfully influenced mine. I have discussed
it in relation to the late antique rhetorical concept of artistic ductus, and the
related notion that a work was structured as a set of itineraries and routes, in The
Craft of Thought, 77–94, 261–267, and at greater length in two essays, ‘‘Rhetorical
ductus’ and ‘‘Late Antique Rhetoric’’; see also ‘‘The Poet as Master Builder.’’
2. Cited by Minnis, Theory of Authorship, 247, note 4, from Albertus’s Super
epistolam ad Romanos, cap. IV, lect. 1.
3. As Minnis says, ‘‘The term auctor may profitably be regarded as an accolade
bestowed upon a popular writer by those later scholars and writers who used
extracts from his works as sententious statements or auctoritates, gave lectures
on his works in the form of textual commentaries, or employed them as literary
models’’; Theory of Authorship, 10. The etymologies and distinctions are
described in M. D. Chenu, ‘ Auctor, actor, autor,’ from which all subsequent