While I regularly reference monastic composition as defined by Mary Carruthers, searching through the blog, I don’t think I’ve ever properly summarized it. Here’s my summary, taken from Ch. 2 of my dissertation:
Monastic Composition
In The Craft of Thought and elsewhere (âLate Antique Rhetoric,â âThe Mystery of the Bed Chamber,â and âThe Poet as Master Builderâ), Carruthers argues that medieval memoria has its origins in monastic rhetoric, which, she explains, âemphasized âinvention,â the cognitive procedures of traditional rhetoricâ (Craft of Thought 3). Monastic rhetoric, she argues, was âan art of composingâ rather than an art of persuasion, and its practice of mediation involved the creation and use of âmental images or cognitive âpicturesââ as the building blocks of invention. She summarizes her concept of monastic composition thusly:
The orthopraxis, or normative âway,â of monastic meditation was directed towards the vision of God by means of what amounts to a form of literary invention, using as its primary materials or res the texts of the Bible, considered not as âobjects of studyâ in any way we would now recognize as scholarship, but as recollective âsitesâ for new compositions, constructed by drawing in (tractanda is a word of choice for composition) and augmenting a textual âseedâ with other matters, âcollectedâ (another favorite word) in long chains (catenae) of freely ranging associations (concatenations) on the part of the mediator. (âLate Antique Rhetoricâ 241).
While monastic in origin and originally intended for the creation of monastic art, monastic compositionâs reliance upon the techniques of memoria came to be practiced outside monastic culture. For example, as Yates, Carruthers, and others have argued, poets such as Dante and Chaucer made use of these compositional practices. In âArt of Memory and the Art of Poetry in the House of Fame,â Beryl Rowland argues that medieval poets such as Chaucer took words from books, made them images in their mind, and then turned those images into new words, into new poems. Likewise, in âBishop Bradwardine, the Artificial Memory, and the House of Fame,â Rowland argues that Chaucerâs House of Fame âmay be seen as an externalization of [the] memory processâ described in Bradwardineâs De Memoria Artificiali. Building upon Rowlandâs arguments, Elizabeth Buckmaster argues that The House of Fame is an exploration of the practice of Prudence, the cardinal virtue intimately tied to ars memoria because it requires knowledge of the past, present, and future. Buckmaster also argues that in The House of Fame Chaucer represents this connection by presenting his knowledge of the sciences, arts, and philosophy by creating memory palaces in the poem, one for each book. The first palace represents the past, the second the present, and the third the future. She concludes that The House of Fame is an inner journey, an act of meditation such as we find in Ignatius Loyolaâs Spiritual Exercises.
Works Cited
Buckmaster, Elizabeth. âChaucer and John of Garland: Memory and Style in the First Fragment.â Medieval Perspectives 1.1 (1986): 31-40.
—. âMeditation and Memory in Chaucerâs House of Fame.â Modern Language Studies 16.3 (1986): 279-287.
Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
—. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400 â 1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
—. âLate Antique Rhetoric, Early Monasticism, and the Revival of School Rhetoric.â Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice. Ed. Carol Dana Lanham. London: Continuum, 2002. 239-257.
—. ââThe Mystery of the Bed Chamberâ: Mnemotechnique and Vision in Chaucerâs The Book of the Duchess.â The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony: Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne. Ed. John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2000.67-87.
—. âThe Poet as Master Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages.â New Literary History 24 (1993): 881-904.
Rowland, Beryl. âThe Art of Memory and the Art of Poetry in the House of Fame.â Revue de lâUniversite dâOttawa 51.2 (1981): 162-171.
—. âBishop Bradwardine, the Artificial Memory, and the House of Fame.â Chaucer at Albany. Ed. Rossel Hope Robbins. New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1975. 41-62.
Yates, F.A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.