The Book of Memory
Page 79
brackets). Clark understands simplicii to mean ‘‘laity,’’ but this is unlikely in
450
Notes to pp. 308–315
context: Hugh addresses the novices in monastic vocation, the ‘‘converted’’ in
the sense developed by the twelfth-century monastic reform centered around
the Cistercians (who thought of themselves as ‘‘the converted’’).
60. Hugh de Fouilloy, Aviarium, prol. 2: ‘‘Quod enim doctioribus innuit [s]crip-
tura, hoc simplicibus pictura . . . Ego autem plus laboro ut simplicibus
placeam, quam ut doctioribus loquar, et quasi vasculo pleno latices infun-
dam’’ (ed. Clark, 118, 120; my translation).
61. As Eugene Vance has remarked, ‘‘medieval sign theory necessarily involves a
problematics of memory,’’ Mervelous Signals, 304. Vance’s study, especially
chapter 3, is excellent on this relationship. A playful meditation by Umberto
Eco upon the relationship of artificialis memoria and semiotics, published in
English some twenty-two years after it was first written, is ‘‘An Ars
Oblivionalis? Forget It!’’
62. Isidore, Sententiarum, I I I , 14.3: ‘‘Multum prosunt in conlatione figurae. Res
enim quae minus per se aduertuntur, per conparationem rerum facile cap-
iuntur.’’ I used the literal translation, ‘‘gathering,’’ for the complex process
denoted by collatio, Isidore’s word, on the example of J. Taylor’s translation of
Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon.
63. See the description in the Huntington Library’s Guide to Medieval and
Renaissance Manuscripts.
64. This is especially true of Bodleian Library, MS. Lyell 2, a twelfth-century copy
of a life of Jerome and of some of his Epistles, and of Harvard College MS. 27,
a collection of saints’ lives. Lyell 2 also contains marginal titles enclosed in
geometric forms, though nothing so elaborate as HM 19915; Harvard College
27 contains a distinctive cryptogram of ‘‘NOTA’’ found also in HM 19915.
65. I have seen a much later manuscript in which the catchwords have been
decorated in a basically similar way (Trinity College, Cambridge MS. O.9.1;
see DeWit, 84). Catchwords, however, are for the use of scribes and binders;
the phrases so decorated in HM 19915 are tituli, and so can only be for the use
of readers needing to remember text.
66. Histoire de la Vulgate, 307; the discussion of tituli is in 307–315. The mne-
monic utility of these lectionis tituli, ‘‘summary-phrases for reading,’’ is clear
from comments by Cassiodorus, quoted by Berger, 308.
67. Tying a string around one’s finger as a mnemonic help is ancient; Quintilian
mentions it in his discussion of memoria, Inst. orat., XI. ii. 30. The many types
of mnemonic images discussed by Host von Romberch include implements,
animals, and birds, as well as architecture.
68. On marginal drolleries, see especially Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic
Manuscripts, and Camille, In the Margins. On the transmission and dissem-
ination of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, see Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric, and the
essays in Cox and Ward, The Rhetoric of Cicero, especially those by Taylor-
Briggs and Carruthers (on teaching memory arts).
69. This story is best-known to us through the version told in the beginning
reading book which the Knight of LaTour-Landry made for his daughters.
Randall collected a number of images which refer to this tale (misidentified as
Notes to pp. 315–324
451
‘‘man defecating’’): see esp. figures 530 and 581–584. In these latter figures, the
eggs laid by the squire have been collected into a basket. A great deal has been
published since the mid-1980s on bas-de-page images, including two fine
studies of the Luttrell Psalter by Camille and Sandler.
70. The mise-en-page of this book is ‘ altogether different . . . from any other known
system of decoration of Canon Law texts’’ (Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts,
no. 101). The book has now been studied in detail by Bovey, The Smithfield
Decretals. Taylor, Textual Situations, devotes a chapter to it, suggesting various
connections (some more persuasive than others) between its images and its
themes.
71. The chief illustrations of this book are reproduced in Plummer, The Hours of
Catherine of Cleves.
72. A well-known example is in the Book of Hours made for Engelbert of Nassau
in the fifteenth century, Bodleian Library MS. Douce 219, fo. 16v. Another
page (fo. 40r) has a border of pearl and ruby jewelry. Both pages are
reproduced in Alexander, The Master of Mary of Burgundy. Recent illuminat-
ing studies of how such books were used include especially K. Smith, Art,
Identity and Devotion, and Wieck, Painted Prayers.
73. See The Craft of Thought, 99–115 especially. Hair-pulling is featured in some of
the Romanesque capitals of the abbey church at Veźelay; these are understood
by Ambrose as images of violent disorder: see his The Nave Sculptures of
Veźelay. Struggle, however, especially with demons, not only is associated
with violence, but is part of the constant ascetic exercise of the athlete of God,
as the life of St. Antony attests. It soon became an ascetic trope.
74. The manuscript, in four volumes (BL MS. Royal 1 D V –V I I I ), is described by
Maunde-Thompson, A Catalogue of Ancient Manuscripts, vol. 1. 17–20. Such
drawings can be seen in vol. 2, fo. 148v, and vol. 4, fos. 5v, 76r. There are also
simple flowers and leaves, and baskets of fruit on other pages of this codex.
A facsimile, also edited by Maunde-Thompson, was published by the British
Museum, 1879–1883.
75. Commentary on Aristotle’s De memoria, I I , iii; ed. Borgnet, p. 110.
76. ‘‘That is the way of the cat; it wants the fish, but not the fishing,’’ Poetria
nova, 2028–2029 (trans. Nims). The saying is proverbial, recorded in
W. W. Skeat’s Early English Proverbs and Walther’s Lateinische Sprichwo¨rter,
esp. numbers 2490–2491, 2495, 2504. A common form is ‘ Cattus amat pisces,
sed non vult tangere flumen,’’ ‘ A cat loves fish, but does not want to touch the
river.’
77. See, for example, BL MS. Royal 5 D X . (English, late thirteenth century),
fo. 82v; in the left margin a hand pulls in a fish on a line opposite a text from
Augustine, beginning ‘‘Nam gaudet et piscis.’’ The drawing is later than the
writing of the manuscript, evidently the work of a reader. This manuscript
contains some of Robert Grosseteste’s indexing symbols, and is mentioned in
Hunt, ‘‘Manuscripts Containing Indexing Symbols.’’ Sandler, ‘‘Gone
Fishing,’’ discusses how a single, complex bas-de-page scene of apes fishing
and preparing their catch on the first folio of a Book of Hours serves to orient
452
Notes to pp. 324–329
readers to the whole book’s essential tasks. A famous book using fish as one of
its visual elements is the Book of Kells, of which I have more to say below.
78. The Winchester Malory (facsimile edition), ed. Ker, fo. 23.
79. Kauffmann, Romanesque Painting, 45.
80. Weitzmann, Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination, 112 and plate
41. Se
e also Cambridge Illuminations, no. 1, where the grid lay-out of the
pictures is described as ‘‘very unusual, especially for this early period’’ (47).
81. The Cuerden Psalter is also preceded by picture-pages in a rigid grid format.
The first of the picture-pages in M 183 (fo. 9v) contains in one of the roundels
reserved for saints an image which incorporates a common mnemonic of the
Seven Deadly Sins, the acronym SALIGIA. This is written on two sword-like
shafts which pierce the bosom of the Virgin, before whom a male figure kneels.
The background is plain gold leaf, the undifferentiated sort of color suggested
for memory places. It is an imago rerum for the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of
the Virgin. I would like to thank Dr. William Voelkle of The Morgan Library
for bringing this image to my attention.
82. Translated by Cahn, ‘‘The Allegorical Menorah,’’ 118; see also Smalley, Study
of the Bible, 214. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, a Cistercian chronicler, recorded
that Peter of Poitiers ‘‘pauperibus clericis consulens excogitavit arbores histor-
iarum veteris Testamenti in pellibus depingere,’’ MGH Scriptores XXIII. 886.
The text of the Genealogia and its manuscripts are discussed in detail by
Moore, The Works of Peter of Poitiers, 97–117.
83. On all of these manuscripts, see Pa
¨cht and Alexander, Illustrated Manuscripts
in the Bodleian Library, nos. 377 (Laud misc. 151), 429 (Lat. th. b. 1 and c. 2),
883 (Barlow 53). The lay-out of the two companion rolls is also discussed
briefly by Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 2, 180. See also Cahn, ‘‘The
Allegorical Menorah,’’ on the connection of this popular lecture diagram also
with Peter of Poitiers.
84. Moore, The Works of Peter of Poitiers, p. 99: ‘‘quasi in sacculo quodam
memoriter tenere narrationes hystoriarum . . . Quod et fastidientibus prolix-
itatem propter subiectam oculis habita [sic] memorie commendari et omnibus
legentibus utilitatem conferre.’’
85. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, 2013–2014. The translation is that of Nims
though I have kept the Latin words, as indicated by my italics.
86. Host von Romberch distinguished clearly between similitudo, figura, and
forma, which he defined as follows: ‘‘Forma dat esse specificum artificiato:
poterit per inde abstracta rei species in loco imaginata.’’ In other words, forma
fulfills the function of a diagram. Romberch is much too late to serve as
definite evidence for what the word meant to Geoffrey of Vinsauf, of course,
but it is interesting to see that forma acquired so technical a meaning in later
mnemonic practice.
87. The seminal discussion of later medieval diagrams is that of Saxl, ‘‘A Spiritual
Encyclopedia of the Later Middle Ages’’; a discussion in the general context of
memorial use is Friedman, ‘‘Les Images mne´motechniques dans les manu-
scrits de l’e´poque gothique,’’ 169–183, in Roy and Zumthor, Jeux de me´moire.
Notes to pp. 329–332
453
In the introduction to her study of the DeLisle Psalter, Sandler reproduces
versions of some of the more elaborate mnemonic formae of the late Middle
Ages; of particular interest is the independently produced ‘‘Tower of
Wisdom,’’ which utilizes an alphabet grid as its basic ordering structure.
The fact that such an elaborate set of mnemonic picturae is Franciscan-
sponsored is of interest because, we recall, one of the picture-making friars
mentioned earlier in this chapter, John Ridevall, was a Franciscan.
88. It is reproduced by Faral, Les Arts poe´tiques, 87; see also Lawler, 40–41. Book I X
of Isidore’s Etymologiae has several of what Isidore calls stemmata which
indicate complex degrees of kinship (and thus whom one cannot marry);
most are in tree form, like modern genealogies, but one is in the form of
partitioned concentric circles. Evidently such forms were later adapted to
show kinship among other kinds of things as well; they still are, of course.
89. OED, s.v. rote. MED, s.v. rote, gives additional Middle English citations, but
does not substantially change the meanings given by OED, and it does not, of
course, give etymologies.
90. The phrase also occurs in the Prioress’s Tale, where the ‘‘litel clergeon,’’ just
beginning his grammar-lessons, learns a hymn by listening, ‘‘And herkned ay
the wordes and the noote, / Til he the firste vers koude al by rote’’ (VII.
1711–1712); and in the portrait of the Sergeant of Law, who knew all the
statutes from the time of King William, and ‘‘every statut koude he pleyn by
rote’’ (I, 327). In these two instances, the phrase simply means ‘‘by heart’’ or
‘‘habit,’’ to use the commoner Middle English synonym.
91. In addition to her Art of Memory, see Yates’s essays collected in Lull and Bruno;
Hillgarth, Ramoń Lull and Lullism; and Johnston. The Evangelical Rhetoric of
Ramoń Lull and The Spiritual Logic of Ramoń Lull. On the affinities (and the
important differences) between Lull’s system and Francis Bacon’s systems and
other seventeenth-century efforts to create ‘‘real’’ languages and logics, see
Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, and R. Lewis, Language, Mind, and Nature.
Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory, discusses similar post-medieval studies in the
Italian academies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
92. On China, see Spence, Memory Theater of Matteo Ricci. On Mexico, see
especially P. Watts, ‘‘Hieroglyphs of Conversion,’’ demonstrating the impor-
tation by Franciscans of some of their familiar medieval mnemonic systems
for missionary purposes. Ramoń Lull’s missionary aims, for which his ‘‘Great
Art’’ was designed, clearly foreshadowed those of the sixteenth-century
Spanish friars who desired to convert the Mexican Indians. But when such
images were put to the new purpose of teaching alien speakers in alien cultures
(Mexico and China), the initial purpose of these image schemes – that is, to
serve the compositional needs of preachers already adept in their Bible and
theology – was radically altered to serve instead the elementary learning
requirements of a wholly catechumenal population.
93. Yates, Art of Memory, 176.
94. These roots in monastic disciplines are the focus of my The Craft of Thought,
and demonstrated as well in the works collected in Carruthers and Ziolkowski
454
Notes to pp. 332–337
(eds.), The Medieval Craft of Memory. That Neoplatonism may be overrated
as a major influence on twelfth-century art is the sobering conclusion of an
essay by Kidson, ‘‘Panofsky, Suger and St. Denis.’ Kidson argues that Suger
was no Neoplatonist, and not much of a dogmatic theologian at all, but
wrote from a practical belief that aesthetic experience and knowledge are
completely intertwined, an assumption that is evident as well in mnemonic
pedagogy.
95. Saxl, ‘‘A Spiritual Encyclopedia,’’ 83–84.
96. The history of these diagrams is fully discussed in Sandler’s introduction to
her study of them. Sandler has separately discussed the diagram called ‘‘The
Tower of Wis
dom’’ (turris sapientiae) in Carruthers and Ziolkowski (eds.),
The Medieval Craft of Memory, 215–225. On the Cherub diagram, also see
Carruthers, ‘‘Movement in the Mind’s Eye,’’ and the translation of De sex alis
by B. Balint in Carruthers and Ziolkowski (eds.), The Medieval Craft of
Memory, 83–102. Bolzoni has discussed the use of the Cherub device in a set
of vernacular sermons by Bernardino da Siena in The Web of Images.
97. Jacques Guilmain, ‘‘The Geometry of the Cross-Carpet Pages in the
Lindisfarne Gospels’’; the quotation is from p. 52. On the keeping of such
books as the Book of Kells, see Franc¸oise Henry, 149–153.
98. Giraldus Cambrensis, In topographia Hibernie. The translation is from the
text edited by James F. Dimock for the Rolls series. The recension Dimock
edited is of one of the last of Giraldus’s revisions; he produced at least five,
the first composed between 1185, when he went to Ireland, and 1188, when it
was read at Oxford. The account of the book is in a chapter now called ‘‘De
libro miraculose conscripto’ (II. 38). For the history of the text, and an
edition of the first recension (which excludes the last sentence I have trans-
lated here), see O’Meara, ‘‘Giraldus Cambrensis in Topographia Hibernie.’’
99. For basic information and bibliography on the Book of Durrow (Trinity
College Dublin MS. A. 4. 5) and the Book of Kells (Trinity College Dublin
MS. A. 1. 6), see Alexander, Insular Manuscripts. Both manuscripts have been
produced in facsimilies, the Book of Durrow edited by Luce et al., and the
Book of Kells edited by F. Henry.
100. De Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 101.
101. ‘‘Multa sunt alia que dici possent de his, que nos necessario in hoc loco
preterire oportet’’ (CCCM 176, 151, 26–27).
102. A variant of the proverb about the cat who likes fish but not to fish has to do
with cats who like full bellies but not catching mice. For example (one with
some of the obscurity generic to proverbs): ‘‘Cattus amat pisces, sed non vult
crura madere; / Isque adeo tumidus, si non vult carpere mures: / Nulla farina
tamen quamvis aliud sit in urna’’; ‘‘The cat likes fish but does not wish to get
his legs wet; / And he is very full indeed, if he does not wish to catch mice: /
no flour though, even if the other is in the storage-jar’’ (Walther 2491). The