The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [45]
In a world where few could read or write, a good memory was essential. It is for this reason that rhyme, a useful aide-memoire, was the prevalent form of literature at the time. Up to the fourteenth century almost everything except legal documents was written in rhyme. French merchants used a poem made up of 137 rhyming couplets which contained all the rules of commercial arithmetic.
Given the cost of writing materials, a trained memory was a necessity for the scholar as much as for the merchant. For more specific tasks than day to day recall, medieval professionals used a learning aid which had originally been composed in late classical times. Its use was limited to scholars, who learned how to apply it as part of their training in the seven liberal arts, where memorising was taught under the rubric of rhetoric. The text they learned from was called Ad Herennium, the major mnemonic reference work of the Middle Ages. It provided a technique for recalling vast quantities of material by means of the use of ‘memory theatres’.
The material to be memorised was supposed to be conceived of as a familiar location. This could take the form of all or part of a building: an arch, a corner, an entrance hall, and so on. The location was also supposed to satisfy certain criteria. The interior was to be made up of different elements, easily recognised one from the other. If the building were too big, accuracy of recall would suffer. If it were too small, the separate parts of what was to be recalled would be too close to each other for individual recall. If it were too bright it would blind the memory. Too dark, it would obscure the material to be remembered.
Ramon Lull devised a series of tree diagrams to aid recall of nature, heaven, hell and so on. This one relates man (homo), on the trunk, to the elements of nature and logic written on the leaves and branches.
Each separate part of the location was to be thought of as being about thirty feet apart, so as to keep each major segment of the material isolated from the others. Once the memory theatre was prepared in this way, the process of memorising would involve the memoriser in a mental walk through the building. The route should be one which was logical and habitual, so that it might be easily and naturally recalled. The theatre was now ready to be filled with the material to be memorised.
This material took the form of mental images representing the different elements to be recalled. Ad Herrenium advised that strong images were the best, so reasons should be found to make the data stand out. The images should be funny, or bloody, or gaudy, ornamented, unusual, and so on.
These images were to act as ‘agents’ of memory and each image would trigger recall of several components of the material. The individual elements to be recalled should be imaged according to the kind of material. If a legal argument were being memorised, a dramatic scene might be appropriate. At the relevant point in the journey through the memory theatre, this scene would be triggered and played out, reminding the memoriser of the points to be recalled. The stored images could also relate to individual words, strings of words or entire arguments. Onomatopoeia, the use of words that sound like the action they describe, was particularly helpful in this regard.
The great medieval theologian St Thomas Aquinas particularly recommended the theatrical use of imagery for the recall of religious matters. ‘All knowledge has its origins in sensation,’ he said. The truth was accessible through visual aids. Especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the influx of new Greek and Arab knowledge, both scientific and general, made memorisation by scholars and professionals more necessary than ever.
As painting and sculpture began to appear in churches the same techniques for recall were applied. Church imagery took on the form of memory agent. In Giotto’s paintings of 1306 on the interior