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The Art of Memory and the Art of Page Layout in the Middle Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Mary J. Carruthers
Mary J. Carruthers*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Since the theme of this issue is ‘back to the future,’ especially to the ways in which information formats before the age of printing anticipate and perhaps even may give some guidance to principles of organization and cognitive layouts for the ‘new’ science of information design, I am going to focus in my presentation on the design of memory storage, as it was taught and practiced in the Middle Ages. It is important to recognize that ‘memory-art’ accompanied every aspect of education in the ancient trivium, though different aspects and capacities of human memory were emphasized as appropriate to its various disciplines. What is commonly now taken to be ‘the art of memory,’ namely the advice to link powerful images of ‘content’ (imagines rerum) together in dramatic scenes conceived within a mental location (locus) (as described most completely in the early first century B.C. Rhetorica ad Herennium) is not a universal technique but specifically a device of Rhetoric, and thus of composition. There is also an ‘art of memory’ associated with Dialectic, and this is the device of the ‘topics’ or ‘seats’ (topoi) of argument, syllogism and enthymeme arranged in an orderly schematic of specific mental ‘places.’ Aristotle expounded this scheme as a variety of mnemonic art in his treatise Peri Topoi, and in turn it was further disseminated to later antiquity and the Middle Ages in works by Cicero and Boethius.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 49 , Issue 196 , December 2002 , pp. 20 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2002

References

Notes

The edition of Hugh of St.Victor's ‘De tribus' which I used for the translation of this text I am appending to my resumé is by William M. Green in the medieval journal Speculum 18 (1943), pp. 484-493. Thomas Waleys's ars praedicandi is edited in T.M. Charland, Artes praedicandi (Ottawa, 1936). An edition of Hugh of St. Victor's Didascalicon can be found in the Patrologia latina, vol. 176, but a better one is by C.H. Buttimer (Washington, D.C., 1939). I used the edition of Quintilian's Institutio oratoria by M. Winterbottom for the Oxford Classical Texts series (Oxford, 1970), and for Cicero's De oratore, the edition of A.S. Wilkins (Oxford, 1892). All modern editions of the Rhetorica ad Herennium derive from that of F. Marx for Tuebner (Leipzig, 1923). Editions of both Fortunatianus and Julius Victor's rhetorics can be found in C. Halm, Rhetores latini minores (Leipzig, 1863).

The essay by George A. Miller, ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two' is in Psychological Review 63 (1956), pp. 81-97.

The illustrations which follow offer two examples of the help provided in medieval manuscripts for different types of cognitive operations, such as the learning of elementary facts or routines, the in-depth study of important corpora of texts and the invention of logical arguments and new compositions. Within the structure of the classical trivium, these tasks are part of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. These illustrations are just a small sample of the richness of medieval manuscripts in this field.

* Blackwell Publishing would like to thank Rosemary Dear for her assistance in part of the translation/ editing of this paper.

1. An putas eos, quociens aliquem psalmorum numero designare volebant, paginas replicasse, ut ibi a principio compotum ordientes scire possent quotus esset quisque psalmorum? Nimis magnus fuisset labor iste in negotio tali (ed. Green, p. 489, 11. 42-44).

2. Memoria hominis hebes est et brevitate gaudet (Didas. III. 11; ed. Buttimer, p. 60, lines 24-25).

3. Quid vel maxime memoriam adiuvat? Divisio et conpositio: nam memoriam vehementer ordo servat.