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
xii
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,
xiv
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