Preaching the Memory of Virtue and Vice: Memory, Images, and Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (review)

This book examines memory, which, since the influential studies by Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers, has been a familiar subject to medievalists, and preaching in the Middle Ages. Kimberly Rivers's stated aims are to demonstrate the integral role of memory and mnemonic technique in medieval preaching across Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, and in so doing to provide a chronology for the development of mnemonic techniques in the Middle Ages.

The book is divided into three parts. The first and most complex section deals with the medieval sources of mnemonic techniques. This includes discussions of both monastic meditative memoria and scholastic memory in the twelfth century, when the pressure to absorb more and more information stimulated the recovery and development of ancient memory methods. For example, the Augustinian Hugo of St Victor, practised collectio and divisio, derived from Quintilian, which involved organizing or classifying material into digestible, more memorable parts, in addition to using mental images of locus or place to aid recall, a technique also used in antiquity.

In the thirteenth century, the new mendicant orders had a clear need for mnemonic strategies, and Rivers shows how both the Dominicans and the Franciscans used and developed memory techniques for oratory. The Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herrenium (c. 88-85 bc), out of favour since the fourth century, was revived by Dominicans such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. This tract emphasized the placing of textual images of striking, memorable things (rather than words) within logically ordered mental loci as a method for remembering.

Rivers argues that while Franciscan and Dominican sermon mnemonics had much in common, Franciscan practice was distinctive in that it employed mental images drawn from the meditative spiritual exercises of the Order. In their writings, Franciscans Guibert of Tournai and David von Augsburg both advocate the order and discipline of meditation as a means of focusing on the 'memory of the benefits of God'. For example, a mental image of the Passion or virtues will serve to drive images of vice from the memory. Structure is provided by other images such as a ladder, used to create a clear path through otherwise distracted thoughts, each rung representing increasing illumination.

The second part of the book is a discussion of how the preacher's memory was constructed. Rivers draws on Ars praedicandi treatises, in particular that by fourteenth-century Franciscan, Catalan Francesc Eiximenis, evidently the only work to give specific advice to preachers for remembering sermons. Francesc is strictly pragmatic in that he follows no particular system other than what works to encourage recall. His techniques include ordering in numbers (Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Seven virtues and vices), bringing to mind a similitude (such as a crucifix that signifies the Passion), and mapping, in order, the things to be remembered on an imagined road or path.

While order was often seen to be more important than imagery, it was recognized that mental pictures greatly aided recall, and preachers used imagery in their sermons in the form of stories or exempla. While these were expected to have the authority of scripture, the fourteenth-century English 'classicising friars' (as first named by Beryl Smalley), also employed moralized verbal pictures or picturae of gods and goddesses, as well as virtues and vices. These personifications were equipped with various attributes, the more bizarre the better for remembrance. For example, Neptune, also identified as Intelligencia is described in Ridevall's Fulgentius metaforalis as 'Horned, despoiled of riches, aided by the Harpies, lofty in stature and weighty in size, white haired, crowned with salt, sceptered with a trident, married to the Styx' (p. 219). Order and structure were provided by imagining the picturae placed in a locus such as a castle or ship or along the parts of...