THE INTENTION OF THE WORK

This chapter explores connections between memory work of the sort I have been discussing, and medieval assumptions about the nature of authority and authorship. Composition is the activity which links them, and most of this chapter discusses in detail the process itself of composing texts designed for oral or written delivery, as it was taught and practiced in schools. Composition is one of the two activities of meditation, and the complement to divisio in designing a memory for inventive recollection. As division is the mode of reading, as Hugh of St. Victor says, so composition – the placing together of pieces laid away by division and marking – is the mode of text-making, what we, imprecisely, call writing. The memorized chunks culled from works read and digested are ruminated into a composition – that is basically what an author does with authorities.

It is also important to recognize that there are two distinct stages involved in the making of an authority – the first is the individual process of authoring or composing, and the second is the matter of authorizing, which is a social and communal activity. In the context of memory, the first belongs to the domain of an individual’s memory, the second to what we might conveniently think of as public memory. Texts are one important medium of this social memory-bank, the archival scrinia available to all, from which, by the methods already examined in this study, an individual could store, by the sense (sententialiter) or word for word (verbatim), the chests of his or her own memory.