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

Abstract

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.