As an artist who often considers how the unfurling of a gatefold can make a section of narrative more memorable, I was delighted to learn that many Medieval people saw books as mnemonic devices. In her classic text on the subject, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Mary Carruthers examined how books were used to foster memoria or trained memory. She wrote: “It is my contention that Medieval culture was fundamentally memorial, to the same profound degree that modern culture in the West is documentary” (1). Medieval Europeans recognized a properly trained memory as a crucial component of good character, citizenship and piety. Actual words on the page were seen as far removed from the truth itself. Words needed to be internalized to become meaningful, or as Carruthers put it: “A work is not truly read until one has made it a part of oneself…” (2). In this culture, stuck between the earth and salvation, meditating on illuminated manuscripts and carefully encoding mental images into a mental arca (storage chest) were integral parts of designing a memory that could survive into the afterlife, like Noah’s Ark.
Biblia. Pentateuchus [Pentateuque dit d’Ashburnham ou de Tours]
In an illuminated manuscript known as the Ashburnham Pentateuch, Noah’s ark was painted to look like a giant storage chest. Carruthers notes that such chests or arca were often used as a metaphor for memory. Using locational memory techniques, people would store concrete bits of information in different parts of their imaginary chest. In the twelfth century, theologian, Hugh of St. Victor wrote a treatise that mapped biblical teaching onto an imagined blueprint of Noah’s Ark (3). He associated the many rooms in the ark with locations on the route of the Exodus. Hugh endlessly complicates the design of this ark, even hiding concepts in the cubby holes he imagines on its exterior. There are no physical images in Hugh’s treatise, outside of those described in the text. Still, his work reflects the close relationship between words, images and memory evident in illuminated manuscripts.
Medieval manuscripts are full of visual mnemonic devices that help the reader encode their contents in memory. Scribes wrote sins in red ink and used marginalia to emphasize important passages. Sometimes the large letters at the beginning of blocks of text functioned as rebuses to help the reader remember key parts of the passage. In the Cuerden Psalter (ca. 1270) each psalm begins with an elaborately illuminated initial. These contain images that reference key words in the psalm. For example, in the initial for Psalm 72 a man on his knees uses low stools to support himself and another man walks hunched over with a walking stick (4). These men were painted to help emphasize the line: “but as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well-nigh slipped” (5). It’s worth noting how strange this image is. Unique imagery was considered a necessity in memory arts. As Carruthers puts it: “What is unusual is more memorable than what is routine” (6).
Manuscript painters made the margins as unforgettable as possible. In one striking example from the fourteenth century Hours of Saint-Omer a couple appears to be having sex while a bird pokes the man from behind him (7). Even this is a mnemonic. Michael Camille’s explains that the man is diving back into the womb prodded by a bird. The image references Psalm 87:5 in the text below: “This man and that man were born in you. The habitation of all delights is within you” (8). Camille argues that this particular Book of Hours was created for a women named Marguerite and the illuminations were geared specifically at her as a female of childbearing age. This page certainly would have helped her remember Psalm 87:5.
Which leads me wonder: will I ever really known a text as well as Marguerite?
(1) Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 2008).
(2) Ibid., 11.
(3) Hugh of St. Victor, De Arca Noe Morali, 1125-1130.
(4) Book of Hours, France, Saint-Omer, between 1320 and 1329, MS M.754 fol. The Morgan Library.
(5) Carruthers, 287.
(6) Ibid., 168.
(7) Book of Hours, France, Saint-Omer, between 1320 and 1329, MS M.754 fol. The Morgan Library.
(8) Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. ( London: Reaktion Books, 1992, 2003), 50.
Caitlin Cass makes comics and art installations about failing systems and irrational hope. She is the creator of Suffrage Song (Fantagraphics, 2024) which was named a Best Art Book of 2024 by Hyperallergic. Caitlin teaches Illustration at the University of Nebraska Omaha and is currently working on a graphic history about the visual culture of disaster.
