The Book of Memory Read online

  complete – but which the detritus of history and linguistic change have

  temporarily concealed. Fundamentalist translations are considered to be

  merely restatements of an inerrant truth that is clear and non-ambiguous –

  they are not adaptations or interpretive readings. Fundamentalism ideally

  should produce no gloss or commentary. Thus the role of scholarship is

  solely to identify the accumulations of interpretive debris and to polish up

  the original, simple meaning. It is reasonable, from a fundamentalist

  attitude, that God must be the direct author of the Bible. This belief

  holds true as well among secular fundamentalists writing about literature,

  who postulate a God-like author who plans, directs, and controls the mean-

  ing of his work.

  But texts need not be confined to what is written down in a document.

  Where literature is valued for its social functions, works (especially certain

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  The Book of Memory

  ones, of course) provide the sources of a group’s memory. Societies of this

  sort are ‘‘textual communities,’’ in Stock’s phrase, whether those texts exist

  among them in oral or written form. The Latin word textus comes from the

  verb meaning ‘‘to weave’’ and it is in the institutionalizing of a story

  through memoria that textualizing occurs. Literary works become institu-

  tions as they weave a community together by providing it with shared

  experience and a certain kind of language, the language of stories that can

  be experienced over and over again through time and as occasion suggests.

  Their meaning is thought to be implicit, hidden, polysemous, and com-

  plex, requiring continuing interpretation and adaptation. Taken to an

  extreme, of course, textualism can bury the original work altogether in

  purely solipsistic interpretation. Beryl Smalley, who spent her scholarly life

  reading medieval commentaries, once remarked wryly that ‘‘choos[ing] the

  most arbitrary interpreter of Biblical texts of the Middle Ages would be

  rather like awarding a prize for the ugliest statue of Queen Victoria.’’27

  In the process of textualizing, the original work acquires commentary

  and gloss; this activity is not regarded as something other than the text, but

  is the mark of textualization itself. Textus also means ‘‘texture,’’ the layers of

  meaning that attach as a text is woven into and through the historical and

  institutional fabric of a society. Such ‘‘socializing’’ of literature is the work

  of memoria, and this is as true of a literate as of an oral society. Whether the

  words come through the sensory gateways of the eyes or the ears, they must

  be processed and transformed in memory – they are made our own.

  Thomas Aquinas was a highly literate man in a highly literate group, yet

  his contemporaries reserved their greatest praise not for his books but for

  his memory, for they understood that it was memory which allowed him to

  weave together his astonishing works.

  Memory also marked his superior moral character; it should not go

  unnoticed that the praise heaped on his memory came at his canonization

  trial. In fact, prodigious memory is almost a trope of saints’ lives. One

  thinks of St. Anthony, who learned the whole Bible by heart merely from

  hearing it read aloud (the fact that he never saw the words written is what

  astonished his contemporaries); of St. Francis of Assisi, reputed by his

  followers to have a remarkably exact and copious memory. Tropes cannot

  be dismissed as ‘‘mere’’ formulas, for they indicate the values of a society

  and the way in which it conceives of its literature. The choice to train one’s

  memory or not, for the ancients and medievals, was not a choice dictated

  by convenience: it was a matter of ethics. A person without a memory, if

  such a thing could be, would be a person without moral character and, in a

  basic sense, without humanity. Memoria refers not to how something is

  Introduction

  15

  communicated, but to what happens once one has received it, to the

  interactive process of familiarizing – or textualizing – which occurs between

  oneself and others’ words in memory.

  Many historians will wonder why I have avoided assigning Neoplatonist

  or Aristotelian labels in my discussion of memorial technique and practice,

  especially given the role of memory in Neoplatonist philosophy. But my

  decision is deliberate. A currently accepted picture of the intellectual

  history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is one of movement from a

  Neoplatonist matter/spirit dualism, influenced profoundly by Augustine

  (though not identical with his thought), to an Aristotelian hylemorphism

  articulated most successfully by Thomas Aquinas. But to associate an

  interest in memorial practice with one of these schools more than the

  other is misleading, as I discovered early in my study of the subject. While

  the Neoplatonist–Aristotelian distinction is crucial in some areas of medi-

  eval culture, it is not, I think, when it comes to this one. In fact, intellectual

  history, as traditionally practiced, is not the best way to go about studying

  the role of memory in medieval culture.

  Memoria is better considered, in the context of my study, as praxis rather

  than as doxis. Practices are sometimes influenced by ideas (and vice versa) –

  Chapter 4 describes one major instance of this in later medieval mnemo-

  technique – but they are distinct, and follow different patterns and tempos

  of change. Historians of rhetoric have sometimes described Memory as

  one of the two ‘‘technical’’ parts of their subject, along with Delivery,

  distinguishing it thereby from the ‘‘philosophical’’ areas of Invention,

  Arrangement, and Style. This classification may well have contributed to

  the impression that memoria, being merely technical, was limited in its

  applicability to the conditions of oral debate, as was Delivery.28 But as the

  practical technique of reading and meditation, memoria is fundamental in

  medieval paideia, having even greater importance in that context than it

  does as a ‘‘part’’ of rhetoric. If my study achieves nothing else, I hope it will

  prevent students from ever again dismissing mnemonics and mnemotech-

  nique with the adjective ‘‘mere,’’ or from assuming that memory technique

  had no serious consequence just because it was useful and practical.

  The historian Lawrence Stone has wisely remarked that all historical

  change is relative. Within any given period, we may stress differences or

  continuities. Most historians of the Middle Ages are now engaged in

  detailing the differences that existed among Western peoples during that

  immensely long stretch of time, geography, and linguistic and institutional

  developments that we hide within the blanket designation ‘‘the Middle

  Ages.’’ In this study, I stress the continuities, though I am aware of the

  16

  The Book of Memory

  differing circumstances that separate the various scholars and poets whose

  work I discuss. I am concerned with elementary assumptions and the

  commonplaces which underlie the practices that are the
subject of my

  study.

  My method is, I hope, made legitimate by the nature of the topic I am

  studying: memoria, in the rich complex of practices and values that word

  acquired. It is also justified by the elementary nature of my subject, whose

  training began in one’s earliest education and was basic to both reading and

  composition. And while this study lays some foundations, it is in fact the

  first of three. It must be complemented by a full study of how mnemo-

  technique changed over the medieval centuries (I glance at this aspect of my

  subject in Chapter 4). The third study would consider memoria not as a

  technique but as a cultural value or ‘‘modality’’ (in the sense developed by

  A. G. Greimas) of literature, and this aspect of it is touched upon especially

  in Chapters 5 and 6. 29

  I begin this book with an examination of two of the governing models

  for the operation of memory in respect to knowledge, expressed as two

  families of related metaphors: memory as a set of waxed tablets upon which

  material is inscribed; and memory as a storehouse or inventory. These

  models are complementary; they are also archetypal Western commonpla-

  ces. The next two chapters examine the workings of memory itself.

  Chapter 2 begins by considering memory’s psychosomatic nature in clas-

  sical and medieval psychology, its intermediary relationship between sen-

  sory information and intellectual abstraction, and its identification with

  habit in the ethical realm. Chapter 2 next considers the ethical imperative

  attached to memory training, and ends by examining a parallel between the

  ancient memory system based upon placing images mentally in architec-

  tural places and the case history of a ‘‘memory artist’’ described by the

  Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria.

  Chapter 3 describes several elementary schemes taught for designing a

  trained memory, which utilize the principle of a rigid order into which

  short pieces of material are placed and consciously supplied with a network

  of associations, the aim being to provide a securely accessible ‘‘library’’ (as it

  was often called) known by heart. In Chapter 4, I examine the circum-

  stances in which the ancient mnemotechnique described in the Rhetorica

  ad Herennium, attributed to Cicero, was revived in the scholastic setting of

  the universities and by the early humanists, and examine carefully three

  scholastic arts of memory that seem to show how an essentially medieval

  mnemotechnique was married (somewhat awkwardly) to principles of the

  ancient architectural scheme. I have provided, in appendices, English

  Introduction

  17

  translations of three medieval texts that are not easily available now, but

  that are important descriptions of various memory techniques. 30

  The last part of this book turns from the theory and practice of

  mnemotechnique itself to examine why it was held in such esteem. Here

  I define in detail the important institutional role of memoria, first in

  relation to reading and then in the context of the activity of composition.

  These related discussions in Chapters 5 and 6 clarify how literature was thought to contribute to the ethical life of the individual and to the public

  memory of society. Finally, in Chapter 7, I examine how the memorial

  needs of readers and the memorial nature of literature affect the presenta-

  tion and layout of the text in the physical book itself.

  I would like to acknowledge at this point certain works whose influence

  on my opinions came as I was working out the earliest parts of this study,

  and is consequently more profound than may be entirely evident from my

  notes: Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor; Jacques Derrida, ‘‘White

  Mythology’’; Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind; Gerald Bruns,

  Inventions; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Clifford

  Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures; A. J. Greimas, On Meaning; Jean

  Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God; the studies of ancient

  and early medieval education by H.-I. Marrou and Pierre Riche´; and Brian

  Stock, The Implications of Literacy. I have raided the footnotes of many

  scholarly studies, but none more fruitfully than those of Richard and Mary

  Rouse. Finally, and most importantly of all, any work on artificial memory

  systems must begin with the studies of Frances Yates and Paolo Rossi;

  though mine range far from theirs, I could not have done without them.

  My subject is multifaceted. I have tried to keep my analysis adequate to it,

  though I know I have simplified some things, perhaps overly so. I must ask

  for some patience from my readers, as I follow out various strands of what is,

  actually, a skein. If I seem to be digressing unconscionably, I hope that they

  will bear with me until we come back to the main subject, enriched in

  understanding. (And perhaps some of the memory techniques described in

  my early chapters will help in remembering the parts of this discussion.) For

  this book can be read in at least two ways: as a history of a basic and greatly

  influential practice of medieval pedagogy, and as a reflection on the psycho-

  logical and social value of the institution of memoria itself, which is in many

  ways the same as the institution of literature.

  C H A P T E R 1

  Models for the memory

  T A B U L A M E M O R I A E

  Readers who are familiar with a current opinion that there are radical

  differences between oral culture (based upon memory) and literate culture

  (based upon writing) may be puzzled by the very title of this book, and even

  consider it self-contradictory. My source, however, is Dante,1 who was

  newly articulating a very old observation. Even the earliest writers I discuss

  did not operate within a culture that could be described as fully oral. Yet for

  all these writers, memory is a central feature of knowledge – its very basis in

  fact – whether through recollection (as for Plato) or as the agent building

  experience (as for Aristotle). This emphasis upon memory persists, shared

  by societies varying widely in the availability of books to readers: that is, in

  their literacy. (I am adopting here Eric Havelock’s useful definition of

  ‘‘literacy’’ as coterminous with ‘‘book-acquiring public.’’)2

  In none of the evidence is the act of writing itself regarded as a supplanter

  of memory, not even in Plato’s Phaedrus. Rather books are themselves

  memorial cues and aids, and memory is most like a book, a written page

  or a wax tablet upon which something is written. Cicero writes about the

  relationship of writing to memory in his elementary work, Partitiones

  oratoriae:

  [M]emory . . . is in a manner the twin sister of written speech [litteratura] and is

  completely similar to it [persimilis], [though] in a dissimilar medium. For just as

  script consists of marks indicating letters and of the material on which those marks

  are imprinted, so the structure of memory, like a wax tablet, employs places [loci]

  and in these gathers together [collocat] images like letters. 3

  This metaphor is so ancient and so persistent in all Western cultures that it

  must be
seen as a governing model or ‘‘cognitive archetype,’’ in Max Black’s

  phrase. 4 In the passage most familiar to the later Middle Ages, the image is

  used by Aristotle in his treatise De memoria et reminiscentia. A memory is a

  mental picture (phantasm; Latin simulacrum or imago) of a sort which

  18

  Models for the memory

  19

  Aristotle defines clearly in De anima, an ‘‘appearance’’ which is inscribed in

  a physical way upon that part of the body which constitutes memory. This

  phantasm is the final product of the entire process of sense perception,

  whether its origin be visual or auditory, tactile or olfactory. Every sort of

  sense perception ends up in the form of a phantasm in memory. And how is

  this ‘‘mental picture’’ produced? ‘‘The change that occurs marks [the body]

  in a sort of imprint, as it were, of the sense-image, as people do who seal

  things with signet-rings’ (my emphasis). 5 In this particular passage, Aristotle

  uses, in addition to his usual word phantasm, the word eiko¯n or ‘‘copy,’’

  which he qualifies by calling it ‘‘a sort of eiko¯n.’’ His language here derives

  in turn from Plato, who uses several of the same words in his own

  descriptions of what constitutes the physiological process of memory. As

  Richard Sorabji notes, for Plato, too, recollection involved ‘‘the seeing of

  internal pictures’’ which are imprinted upon the memory as if with signet

  rings.6

  The idea that the memory stores, sorts, and retrieves material through

  the use of some kind of mental image was not attacked until the eighteenth

  century. 7 It has recently been vigorously revived by certain cognitive

  psychologists, some of whose experimental work provides startling appa-

  rent corroboration of ancient observations concerning what is useful for

  recollection. 8 According to the early writers, retention and retrieval are

  stimulated best by visual means, and the visual form of sense perception is

  what gives stability and permanence to memory storage. They do not talk

  of ‘‘auditory memory’’ or ‘‘tactile memory’’ as distinct from ‘‘visual mem-

  ory,’’ the way some modern psychologists do. 9 The sources of what is in

  memory are diverse, but what happens to an impression or an idea once it