The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures

The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

This anthology examines the medieval craft of memory: how we recollect or “see again” our past experiences in a process that includes thought and will. Memory consequently is both passive and active, the storage of our past and the reassembling of it for present and future concerns. This anthology collects the tools thought useful during the medieval period for memory-making and presents them in both word and pictures, representing the spiritual and material worlds.

Memoria, the act of composing, was given this name in monasticism and formed the basis of rhetoric, the primary pedagogical device to shape excellence in students. Augustine, John Cassian, Jerome, and others practiced mnēmētheou, “the memory of God,” that included the recitation of memorized sacred texts and images so people could “see” the divine. Memoria therefore was not simply concerned with retention but the making of new things, such as prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems. Interesting, or paradoxically, the spread of literacy and written compositions in western Europe in the twelfth century and afterwards resulted in an increased rather than decreased interest in memoria.

The art of composition required material that was flexible, secured, and easy to recombine in new patterns. To accomplish these goals, division and composition were required. Division cut material up into distinctiones and then were marked and memorized in a readily recoverable order (e.g., numerically, alphabetically). Each distinctiones should be short so it could be readily accessed by short-term or working memory. By building blocks of distinctiones, one could memorize a long work like the Psalms and use it when preaching about them. Thus, this simple, rigorous ordering scheme permitted speakers to enlarge certain points, digress, make rhetorical side remarks, because they always knew where they were in their composition.

The complementary principle to division was gathering and collecting: each new composition was conceived as a place into which recollected material was gathered or collected. Imaginary buildings, gardens, and biblical structures were often invoked to collect material for one’s memory. This act of gathering and collecting in “pictures” made memory as a type of place or location within the soul, with content associatively related through analogy, transference, and metaphor. Justice was a courtroom; feebleness an infirmary; and so on. Because memory worked by association, it was also attached to emotions. Aristotle taught that every memory had a likeness or image that was visual in nature and an emotional resonance which, in turn, anchored the memory in one’s psyche.

Classical rhetorical textbooks recognized two kinds of remembering: memoria verborum and memoria rerum.[1] The former was the remembering of every word of a distinctiones by associating each syllable with a particular visual cue; the latter was the remembering the main subjects of a speech by associating each one with a summary image (e.g., a sermon with five parts would be associated with five feathers of a wing). Memoria verborum was to establish the foundation of one’s memory, while memoria rerum was the finished product of it.

Memoria as both memorization and recollection was practiced in all aspects of the trivium and cultivated during the medieval period. Grammar required verbatim memorization; rhetoric demanded recollection; and logic called for dialectical memory, a form of reasoning of logically related topics. Memoria connected grammar, rhetoric, and logic together: students had to memorize core texts and stories which in turn allowed them to use rhetoric and reason in argumentation. Likewise, memoria connected arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy in the quadrivium in the use of number to memorize and recollect material. Arithmetical memory helped divide material into smaller groups; geometric memory was used to build three-dimensional structures; musical memory manipulated a system of musical notation for recall; and astronomical memory used large maps and images of the cosmos as mnemotechnic devices.

In antiquity mnemotechnics was traced to Simonides, who was able to recall where his host and fellow guests had been sitting before an earthquake caused the roof of the banquet hall to collapse. Cicero, Quintilian, Consultus Fortunatianus, Martianus Capella, and others wrote about the techniques for remembering which were known in the medieval period and preserved in the monastic tradition by the likes of Augustine, Basil, Jerome, Cassiodorus, and John Cassian. However, memory mostly followed the monastic mode of rumination (ruminatio) that was based on verbatim recall rather than the recollection of content of the Bible. But by the twelfth century what was essential to remember included elaborate schemes of virtues and vices, lay people, and new religious orders. The recovery of Greek philosophy and the broader circulation of the writings of Quintilian, Cicero, and others resurrected interest in mnemotechnic systems and classical views of memory.

The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures represents medieval thought about memory from 1135 to 1470 in treatises, lectures, sermons, and drawings. There are selected excerpts and pictures from Hugh of St. Victor, “The Guidonian Hand,” Alan of Lille, Boncompagno da Signa, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Francesc Eiximenis, Thomas Bradwardine, John of Metz’s “The Tower of Wisdom,” Jacobus Publicius, and the anonymous blockbook, “A Method for Recollecting the Gospels.” Before each excerpt there are historical, philosophical, and theological explanations to provide context of the writings and drawings as well as an appendix of excerpts of Consultus Fortunatianus and Julius Victor. The book also has an excellent introduction, which I have summarized above, and a useful bibliography.

Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141), a Saxon theologian, employed the medieval technique of circumstantiae (who wrote it, where, when, and for what occasion) to teach students who were beginning their Bible studies: the students must memorize persons, places, and dates and store them as “chunks” in their minds. Another technique Hugh of St. Victor used was having students copy his diagram, like his Noah’s Ark, which was based on the literal, emotional, and intellectual truth of the Bible. Students who copied and memorized the diagram would in turn undertake a journey of spiritual progress to know God better.

“The Guidonian Hand” (c. 1105-10) was another example of drawings used to prompt students to learn by memorization. “The Hand” was a visualization of musical pitches and was the primary way to transmit music from the ninth to the mid-sixteenth century. Students memorized the drawing to develop a conscious mastery over it and incorporate it into their own teaching, compositions, and performances.

Alan of Lille (c. 1120-c.1202), a French theologian and poet, also utilized drawings in his defense of the doctrine of penance which was under attack during his life. On the Six Wings was a drawing of an angel with six wings that provided a reason on each wing why the sacrament was valid: it placed penance in the context of the Old Testament and it crystalized the idea that the forgiveness of sin was a process of discrete stages that was illustrated in the drawing. It also has been suggested some scholars that On the Six Wings was a pedagogical tool to teach people about the sacrament.

Boncompagno da Signa (c.1170-c.1240), an Italian philosopher and rhetorician, wrote Rhetorica novissima (1235), a treatise to teach students of civil and canon law judicial oratory in a simplified and practical manner that was new. Book 8, “On Memory,” was an example of using memory that depended little on ancient models. He emphasized the “craft” of memory which cannot be learned by generalized rules alone but required an individual’s imagination. To help with a person’s imagination, Boncompagno created a catalog of potential mnemonic signs – wax tablets, knight standards, the slaps of bishops given to adults during anointing – to aid students to remember.

Albert Magnus (c. 1193-1280) followed Aristotle in understanding the function and character of memory: a material form passed through the eyes to create a mental impression, which common sense fused with images from the other senses, to create the intention and likeness of the material form. But Albert saw a gap between the initial act of memory and its recollection where the original experience cannot be entirely reconstructed. Thus, memory was similar to imagination, requiring an image or drawing to bring it forth.

Aquinas (c. 1224-74) followed his teacher, Albert Magnus, by looking at Aristotle on memory, writing his commentary on Aristotle’s On Memory and Recollection: memory was a different type of cognition; its object was what is past; it relied upon an image; it provided an exposition of mnemonic techniques, like the place system; and it differentiated, on the one hand, between memory and imagination, on the other hand, and recollection and remembrance. Of importance to Aquinas was the distinction between perfect animals, which included humans and their capacity of memory, and humans, to whom along belong the capacity of recollection. This distinction was critical for refuting the Averroist’s heresy and salvaging Aristotelian philosophy for Christian theology.

Francesc Eiximenis (1330-1409), a Catalan Franciscan, wrote Art of Preaching in response to the demand for it in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Most manuals that taught preaching emphasized 1) the theme, a statement of the day’s scriptural quotation; 2) an opening prayer for divine aid; 3) the pro-theme, a second scriptural quotation; 4) the division, a statement of the parts of the theme; 5) the dilation, the amplification of the parts of the division; and 6) sometimes a conclusion. Eiximenis work on memoria was based on Aristotle’s four causes. For him, the final cause of preaching is the reason one has for it; the efficient cause is the preacher’s demeanor; the formal cause is the method one uses to preach; and the material cause is the content. Eiximenis also outlined seven aspects of preaching: preaching should be brief, very fervent, leisurely, devout, moral, prudent, and ordered. Order was crucial because it coordinated what one needed to remember and could be logical, verbal, visual, or spatial. Finally, he departed from his predecessors by recommending people to remember things signified through names rather than the image of things and recall the name, words, and terms of things rather than create an image for words.

Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1300-49), was archbishop of Canterbury, wrote On Acquiring a Trained Memory which was a description of several techniques to recall specific material through the use of graphically detailed images grouped together into organized scenes. The internal order of these images was not only based on its content but the relationships among themselves. These images, and the backgrounds of these images, formed the contents of one’s memory. When one was preaching, one would situate these recollected images in the contemporary time and place of the preacher’s so he or she could refer to contemporary events to make the sermon more interesting to the audience.

John of Metz’s “The Tower of Wisdom” (c. 1310) was a pictorial diagram in the shape of a building whose components were labeled with moral injunctions and the names of Virtues.  Metaphorical structures were common in medieval writings and were aids for people to memorize Biblical teachings. In “The Tower of Wisdom” there were 131 named units with Gothic structural features. The drawing allowed the Church’s teaching about virtue and wisdom to be communicated to people who could read and who could not.

Jacobus Publicius (1447-c.1528), a self-identified “Florentine” (which he was not), was author of The Art of Memory, an influential book about memory in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The book reviewed Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria and other classical philosopher’s views of memory; discussed the use of images in aiding memory; and recommended certain medical and dietary habits to strengthen memory. The book was filled with drawings and diagrams to pictorially represent Publicius’ ideas and to prompt students to memorize his teachings.

The final section is the anonymous blockbook, “A Method for Recollecting the Gospels” (c. 1470), probably produced in a Bavarian monastery. The book has a brief text with diagrams to help people remember the contents of each chapter in the Four Gospels. Each image within a picture has a number associated with it that corresponded to a text that explained the Biblical event and meaning. During the fifteenth century, the blockbook was one of the most popular form of publishing Biblical teachings.

The Medieval Craft of Memory is a wonderful book to see how the medieval world combined text and images to teach people how to learn, memorize, and recollect in their world. It is an extraordinary achievement in scholarship and opens the window to the medieval world of religion, philosophy, learning, and literature. The introductions and commentary place the primary text in the right context and allows the authors to speak for themselves in their own voices. It is a critical book to have for any serious scholar.

Notes

[1] There also was memoria recitatio, the recitation of a text, but this was considered part of the discipline of grammar rather than rhetoric.

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