The Book of Memory Read online

  standing of the cognitive function of memory. To have forgotten things is

  seen by us now as a failure of knowledge, however ordinary a failure it may

  be, and therefore a reason to distrust the power of memory altogether. Yet

  to have forgotten some things was understood in Augustine’s culture as a

  necessary condition for remembering others. It is helpful to distinguish two

  sorts of forgetting, resulting from different causes. There is the kind that

  results from failing to imprint something in the first place – the sort

  Augustine seems to be talking about here. This should not even be called

  forgetting because, as Aristotle remarked in his discussion of memory and

  recollection, one cannot be properly said to have forgotten something that

  was never there in the first place.

  On the other hand, there is deliberate or selective forgetting, the sort of

  forgetting that itself results from an activity of memory. In the passage

  I have just quoted, Augustine is certainly speaking of a consciously trained

  memory, one whose denizens, like prey (for he often speaks of memories as

  being like animals hunted from their lairs, whose tracks or vestiges are to be

  followed through their familiar pathways in the forest), can be rationally

  sought out via their particular paths when needed for use, and then

  returned to their proper places when finished with. But this edifice, this

  vast treasury, is chosen and constructed. It is a work of art, using the

  materials of nature as all arts do, but consciously crafted for some human

  use and purpose.

  In his book on Memory, History, Forgetting, the French philosopher Paul

  Ricoeur, himself a profound student of Augustine, complained that arts of

  memory are ‘‘an outrageous denial of forgetfulness and . . . of the weaknesses

  inherent in both the preservation of [memory] traces and their evocation.’’2

  In a similar vein, Harald Weinrich in Lethe, a book that sweeps engagingly

  over the theme of forgetting in canonical Western literature, states that ars

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  Preface to the second edition

  memorativa represents itself to be ‘ an art that can serve to overcome forget-

  ting.’’3 And he archly observes that in its celebrated advice about making

  multi-compartmental structures for a rich trove of remembered matters,

  ‘ only forgetting has no place.’’ But, as Augustine makes abundantly clear,

  Weinrich is wrong about that. Not only does forgetting have its honored

  place in an examination of memoria – indeed Augustine devotes a whole

  section of his discussion to the paradox that he can remember that he has

  forgotten something (Confessions X.16) – but forgetting, of a sort, is essential

  to constructing an art of memory in the first place.

  Aristotle distinguishes clearly between the objects of memory and the

  investigative search, in his treatise ‘‘On memory and recollection’’ in the

  Parva naturalia, a matter I have dwelt on at some length in Chapter 2, and

  that is fundamental to all later analysis of the psychological processes of

  memory. This distinction is germane to the seeming lack of concern with

  forgetting in pre-modern teaching on memory, because the main focus of

  the arts of memory is on recollection – the search for stuff already there–

  and not on the representation of the object remembered. One can dem-

  onstrate this emphasis from the so-called artes oblivionales found in a few

  late humanist treatises on memory art. The ‘‘oblivion’’ discussed is to

  do with how to refresh one’s search networks, not with worries about

  the accuracy or partialness of one’s memories. As Lina Bolzoni has

  commented, ‘‘The techniques for forgetting handed down by the treatises

  are testimony to the persistence and power of the images,’’ for they address

  the tasks of sorting out and reducing the number of memory places rather

  than with suppressing or otherwise editing content one has previously

  learned. 4

  Another matter to which the first edition gave much too short a shrift is

  the place of rote memorization – memorizing by heart – in the edifice of an

  ancient and medieval education. Most students of the arts of memory

  (including, when I began, me) have made a basic error when considering

  the relationship of memory craft to rote learning, by thinking both to be

  methods for initially memorizing the basic contents of educated memory.

  We have all been in good company in this confusion, for even the

  seventeenth-century Jesuit, Matteo Ricci, who practiced an art of memory,

  elided the two when he tried to teach his art as a helpful device for passing

  the content-based examinations of the Chinese imperial civil service. 5

  Where this analysis went wrong was in supposing that learning an art for

  memory was intended as an alternative to rote learning, and in misunder-

  standing the ancient mnemotechnical term memoria verborum as a syno-

  nym for the verbatim memorization of long texts.

  Preface to the second edition

  xiii

  Matteo Ricci’s Chinese hosts were on the right track when they com-

  plained that memorizing a scheme of memory places and cues added far too

  burdensome and confusing a task to the already difficult one of memorizing

  by rote – why memorize things twice? Why indeed. That simple question is

  the heart of the matter. In revising The Book of Memory, I have tried to set out

  the answer plainly in Chapter 3, during my discussion of Hugh of St Victor’s

  preface to his elementary tables of the names and dates of Biblical history,

  addressed to the pueri or students of St. Victor in about 1135, after he had

  composed Didascalicon, his treatise on the goals and methods of education.6

  It is with some chagrin that I realize now how wrong I was about this and

  for how long. When I first came across Hugh’s preface in the early 1980s,

  I recognized that it offered the clearest presentation of an art of memory

  extant, much clearer than that in the Rhetorica ad Herennium – and also

  completely different in its details, though not in its basic principles.

  Seeking to understand it, I spent several months, while commuting to

  work in Chicago on the elevated train, memorizing psalms with the

  method Hugh described. I attached pieces of the texts I already knew by

  heart to the places I had created by using a mentally imposed grid system

  which was exactly that of the chapter and verse scheme of a modern printed

  Bible. I realized quickly that doing so gave me complete flexibility and

  security in finding the verses again in whatever order I chose. I could

  reverse the order, pull out all the odd-numbered verses, or all the even-

  numbered ones, or alternate reciting the odd verses in forward order and

  the even ones in reverse. I could also mentally interleave and recite the

  verses of one psalm with those of another. Bewitched by my new-found

  skill (I even once began a lecture by interleaving the verses of Psalm 1 in

  reverse order with those of psalm 23 in forward order), I overlooked the fact

  that I wasn’t actually memorizing the words for the first time. I was instead

  imposing a divisional system onto something I already kn
ew by heart.

  This was a crucial ingredient of the method’s success, though I failed to

  pay proper attention to it in my initial analysis. I did note that, for the

  quickest and most secure results, I needed to say the psalm text in English

  (and in the 1611 version which I learned as a child) and that I also needed to

  call up ‘ The Lord is my shepherd’ by its number in the Protestant Bible (23),

  not the Vulgate (22). What I was demonstrating was the power of such

  mental devices as finding tools rather than as retention devices. In fact, it

  was easy to impose such a scheme on material I already knew by heart (in

  King James English) because, with a bit of review and practice, the cues

  provided to my memory by just a few words of the texts I knew so securely

  brought out the whole quotation. Once started, my rote memory took over,

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  Preface to the second edition

  and by conscious habit produced what I needed, very much in the manner of

  the Read-Only memory of a computer. The recollection devices of mne-

  monic art, like a Random-Access structure, took me where I wanted to go, in

  the order I had chosen and in the directions my mind had given to itself.

  Many people have asked me over the years if memory arts really work.

  The answer to that is yes – if you know how to use them. They are not a pill

  or potion, and those who attempt to sell them as if they were are as

  fraudulent as any fake medicine purveyor. Nor can they be patented, or

  licensed to others like the secret recipe for a special sauce. All teachers of the

  subject, from the days of Cicero and his Greek masters, have made just

  these same points. It is amusing to me to read now in the science press some

  breathless accounts of how to improve memory by using the amazing

  Method of Loci, or to hear of efforts to introduce into schools a patented

  memory curriculum, guaranteeing improved learning for all. Some things

  never change . . .

  Certainly, were I to begin The Book of Memory today, I would do it

  differently, but that is the way of scholarship. I have left the Introduction to

  the first edition unchanged, partly to measure just how much good work

  has been done in the subject since those words were first written in 1989.

  Most of this work has come from historians – of art and architecture, of

  music, of rhetoric, of law, of reading and of the book, of monasticism and

  religion, and of literature both in Latin and in vernaculars – but some as

  well has come, gratifyingly if astonishingly to me, from psychologists,

  anthropologists, neuroscientists, and computer designers. It did not

  occur to me when I began the project that it would resonate so broadly,

  nor that I would find myself keeping delightful intellectual company for so

  long a time with so wide a spectrum of scholar-scientists. Their friendship

  and collegiality towards me and my subsequent work has nourished and

  enriched me more than I could ever hope to acknowledge adequately. Most

  appear in my notes and bibliography, the site of our continuing conversa-

  tions. One individual needs to be named: Linda Bree, literature editor at

  Cambridge University Press, who kept after me with unfailing good humor

  and gentle persistence until this work was done. Thank you. Three insti-

  tutions also should be thanked: the University of Oxford and its unparal-

  leled community of medievalists who have made me one of their own; the

  John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, with whose support

  I was able to continue this work and begin new projects; and New York

  University, my familiar base in the city that has been my home for so long.

  Oxford and New York, 2007

  Abbreviations

  (Full citations for published titles are in the Bibliography.)

  AASS

  Acta Sanctorum

  Ad Her.

  [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium

  AMRS

  Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Studies

  Avi. Lat.

  Avicenna (Ibn Sinna) latinus

  CCCM

  Corpus christianorum continuatio medievalis

  CCSL

  Corpus christianorum series latina

  CHB

  The Cambridge History of the Bible

  Conf.

  St. Augustine, Confessiones

  CSEL

  Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum

  DTC

  Dictionnaire de theólogie catholique

  Du Cange

  C. Du Cange et al., Glossarium mediae et infimae

  latinitatis

  EETS

  The Early English Text Society

  Etym.

  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum libri

  Inst. orat.

  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria

  JMRS

  Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies

  (now Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies)

  JWCI

  Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes

  LCL

  Loeb Classical Library

  Lewis and Short

  C. T. Lewis and C. Short, A Latin Dictionary

  Liddell and Scott

  H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon

  MED

  The Middle English Dictionary

  MGH

  Monumenta Germaniae historica

  MRTS

  Medieval and Renaissance Texts Series

  OED

  The Oxford English Dictionary

  Ox. Lat. Dict.

  The Oxford Latin Dictionary

  PG

  Patrologia cursus completus series graeca.

  Compiled by J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1857–1866.

  PIMS

  Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies (Toronto)

  xv

  xvi

  List of abbreviations

  PL

  Patrologia cursus completus series latina. Compiled

  by J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1841–1864.

  SC

  Sources chre´tiennes

  ST

  St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae

  STC

  A Short-Title Catalogue (Pollard and Redgrave)

  TLL

  Thesaurus linguae latinae

  Introduction

  When we think of our highest creative power, we think invariably of the

  imagination. ‘‘Great imagination, profound intuition,’’ we say: this is our

  highest accolade for intellectual achievement, even in the sciences. The

  memory, in contrast, is devoid of intellect: just memorization, not real

  thought or true learning. At best, for us, memory is a kind of photographic

  film, exposed (we imply) by an amateur and developed by a duffer, and so

  marred by scratches and inaccurate light-values.

  We make such judgments (even those of us who are hard scientists)

  because we have been formed in a post-Romantic, post-Freudian world, in

  which imagination has been identified with a mental unconscious of great,

  even dangerous, creative power. Consequently, when they look at the

  Middle Ages, modern scholars are often disappointed by the apparently

  lowly, working-day status accorded to imagination in medieval psychology –

  a sort of draught-horse of the sensitive soul, not even given intellectual status.

  Ancient and medieval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest

  geniuses they describe as people of s
uperior memories, they boast unasham-

  edly of their prowess in that faculty, and they regard it as a mark of superior

  moral character as well as intellect.

  Because of this great change in the relative status of imagination and

  memory, many moderns have concluded that medieval people did not

  value originality or creativity. We are simply looking in the wrong place.

  We should instead examine the role of memory in their intellectual and

  cultural lives, and the values which they attached to it, for there we will get

  a firmer sense of their understanding of what we now call creative activity.

  The modern test of whether we really know something rests in our

  ability to use what we have been taught in a variety of situations (American

  pedagogy calls this ‘‘creative learning’’). In this characterization of learning,

  we concur with medieval writers, who also believed that education meant

  the construction of experience and method (which they called ‘‘art’’) out of

  knowledge. They would not, however, have understood our separation of

  1

  2

  The Book of Memory

  memory from learning. In their understanding of the matter, it was

  memory that made knowledge into useful experience, and memory that

  combined these pieces of information-become-experience into what we

  call ‘‘ideas,’’ what they were more likely to call ‘‘judgments.’’

  A modern experimental psychologist has written that ‘‘some of the best

  ‘memory crutches’ we have are called laws of nature,’’ for learning can be

  seen as a process of acquiring smarter and richer mnemonic devices to

  represent information, encoding similar information into patterns, organ-

  izational principles, and rules which represent even material we have never

  before encountered, but which is like what we do know, and thus can be

  recognized or remembered. 1 This is a position that older writers would

  have perfectly understood. It will be useful to begin my study by compar-

  ing descriptions of two men whom their contemporaries universally rec-

  ognized to be men of remarkable scientific genius (assessments which time

  has proven correct, though that is only partly relevant to my discussion):

  Albert Einstein and Thomas Aquinas. Each description is the testimony

  (direct or reported) of men who knew and worked intimately with them