Ideas: Philosophy, Religion and History, in: A Cultural History of Memory in the Middle Ages, ed. Gerald Schwedler, London, Bloomsbury Academic. 2020. (original) (raw)

The understanding of memory has never been static. In the last three centuries of the Middle Ages, several aspects of medieval memory practices started to change. Two examples should illustrate these transformations here: Around 1500, a franciscan friar in Poland devised three images which were supposed to help the memorization of his sermons, which he appended to his manuscript containing mnemonic advice (Kiss et al. 2016). The first one represents Christ with a dagger and a flute, a cartwheel, a candle, and a jar attached to his two hands and legs, whereas he wears a cross on the top of his head. These kind of images with Christ and a dagger etc. are not a rarity by the end of the Middle Ages: The verses of the Gospels have been similarly depicted and summarized in a series of curious illustrations that have been copied in manuscripts and later on printed with the title Figurae Evangelistarum. 1 The following two drawings reveal a more startling aspect of the late medieval understanding of memory. The contents of two sermonsprobably held in front of a franciscan community-are summarized by the images of two devils, one of them sitting, the other standing naked upfront (figures 1 and 2). How was it possible that the Christian message of the sermon, stored in the form of mnemonic symbols on the five body parts of Satan could be reconciliated with Satan itself? The advice of rhetoric is well known-one should conceive striking and occasionally alarming images because they help memory. 2 However, is it not somehow forbidden to combine a virtuous message with a devilish image? Is not the mind contaminated if it retains devils just in order to be able to deliver a sermon? Should not virtuous messages be remembered by virtuous mental images? or is immoral imagination allowed if the general purpose is morally good? The second change that needs to be addressed can be illustrated by an early print, the Congestorium artificiose memorie (Compilation about artificial memory) of Johannes romberch, a German Dominican from Cologne who wrote it at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but the text was published in Venice only in 1520 (romberch 1520). romberch's work has been justly called a final stage of late medieval art of memory, as the author compiled a number of memory aids which were circulating in manuscript form in the fifteenth century into one single collection (yates 1966). It is a treatise on memory as a part of rhetoric practice. Nevertheless, the first image contained in the book (see figure 5.3) is not an imago agens, an "active image" that would be typical for a medieval art of memory. Instead, it displays an anatomical head marking four senses out of the five, and depicting the internal structure of the brain, starting with common sense (sensus 36677.indb 91 30/03/2020 16:47