Mary Carruthers

The Mystic Ark is a forty-two page description of the most complex work of art from the entire Middle Ages: a painting also known as The Mystic Ark.  The purpose of the painting was to serve as the basis of a series of brilliant lectures undertaken by Hugh--who was considered to be the leading theologian of Europe during his life--from around 1125 to 1130 at Saint Victor, a Parisian abbey of Augustinian canons, whose school, along with those of Notre-Dame and Ste-Geneviève, acted as the predecessor of the University of Paris.  The purpose of the text (which I have translated from the Latin) was to enable others outside of Saint Victor--teachers, advanced students, scholars, monks, canons--to undertake similar discussions themselves by providing the information necessary to produce the image.  Containing all time, all space, all matter, all human history, and all spiritual striving, this highly political image dealt with a series of crucial cultural issues in the education of society's elite during one of the great periods of intellectual change in Western history.  Essentially a visualization of Hugh's summa-like systematic theology, De sacramentis, the multiplication and systematization of imagery in The Mystic Ark bridged the gap between literature's potential for complex expression and such expression in large-scale public art, an achievement that led to the creation of the Gothic portal: the major means of public communication apart from the spoken word, and the most significant, fully indigenous expression of Northern European, public figural art of the Middle Ages.
    Hugh of Saint Victor's Mystic Ark: Illustrations: http://mysticark.ucr.edu.  This site presents a collection of images of The Mystic Ark that repeat in greater visual detail the same illustrations published in my study The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century for those who would like to study the image of The Mystic Ark more closely than is possible with the printed illustrations.

The word " delight " is perhaps more associated with aesthetics and the Victorian era than with medieval rhetoric. Carruther's collection of wide-ranging essays by an equally diverse range of scholarly authors strongly suggests that the milieu of the medieval was one in which pleasurable engagements with and in acts of persuasion were common.

As praias de Agnès é um filme elaborado por meio de um movimento retrospectivo em que a cineasta Agnès Varda reflete sobre sua vida e compõe uma costura entre a sua narrativa e a maneira como mobiliza trechos de diversas obras suas. O trabalho está voltado para analisar o filme partindo da hipótese de que As praias de Agnes, além de estabelecer esse contato entre recordações e processo de criação, reúne elementos que atravessam a filmografia da cineasta. A pesquisa esteve dedicada a lançar luz sobre as recorrências mas também observando as singularidades de cada trabalho, percebendo neles o que torna Agnès Varda uma artista que instiga o estudo sobre sua obra. O esforço foi de investigar o modo como a cineasta aliou seus temas à forma fílmica a partir da relação que estabelece entre memórias, história e os contatos que promove entre o cinema e outras artes.

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The beaches of Agnès is a film elaborated through a retrospective movement in which filmmaker Agnès Varda reflects about her life and composes an articulation between her narrative and the way she mobilizes excerpts from her various works. This work is focused on analyzing the film based on the hypothesis that The beaches of Agnès, in addition to establishing this contact between memories and the creation process, brings together recurring elements in the work of the filmmaker. The research was dedicated to shed light on the recurrences but also observing the singularities of each work, realizing in them what makes Agnès Varda an artist whose study of the work becomes so instigating. The thesis investigates the way in which Varda articulates form and content through an analysis of the rapport between memory ans history and of cinema relationship with other forms of art.

Abstract - The article explores Bonaventure's use of formal rhetorical tropes as theological devices. That is, it argues that Bonaventure uses devices in classical rhetoric as a kind of formal theological argument. The Itinerarium, embellished in several places and rhetorically spare in others, aims to guide the reader into the love of wisdom and away from 'vain curiosity.' In this light, the Itinerarium is an intentional, condensed 'performance' of the habits of both prayer and discursive reason, of symbol and of syllogism, of scriptural exegesis and metaphysics, all inscribed in right relation, not only by discursive argument, but also through Bonaventure's rhetorical invention.


Sommario: L'articolo esplora l'uso che Bonaventura fa dei tropi formali della retorica come strumenti teologici. Si dimostra cioè che Bonaventura usa gli strumenti della retorica classica come una specie di argomento teologico formale. L'Itinerarium, abbellito dalla retorica in diversi luoghi e misurato in altri, tende a condurre il lettore all'amore della sapienza e lontano dalla 'vana curiosità'. Sotto questo aspetto l'Itinerarium è una voluta e densa 'performance' dei caratteri sia della preghiera che del discorso ragionato, del simbolo e del sillogismo, della esegesi scritturale e della metafisica, il tutto inserito in una corretta relazione non solo dal ragionamento deduttivo, ma anche dalla creazione retorica di Bonaventura.

I It is necessary that a man should dwell with solicitude on, and cleave with affection to, the things which he wishes to remember. —Thomas Aquinas, paraphrasing the Ad Herennium (cited in Yates 1974, 75) I've recently been reading Mary Carruthers' work on the medieval arts of memory (2002, 2003, 2005) as well as Francis Yates' wonderful work The Art of Memory (1974) and Brian Stock's (1983) work on 11 th and 12 th century images of written language. This study began on the advice of Michelle Bastock, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the University of Calgary whose wonderful dissertation on the relation between word and image opened up for me this new area of exploration and intrigue (see Bastock 2005; Bastock & Jardine 2006). I was especially interested in these matters for a couple of reasons. First, in my work in elementary schools, rarely do I hear teachers and students talking about memory except perhaps under the guise of rote memorisation of spelling lists and the like. However, and in direct contradiction to this, some classrooms I've witnessed (intriguingly, very often the youngest of grades) are taking on the task of remembering in a different way. They are exploring ancestries, who has travelled down this road before me, where these old objects in our house have come from, and whose hands handed them to us, and so on. They are asking themselves the question of what is it that is important to remember, and whose story is this anyway, and how shall we proceed, given what we now know and cannot pretend to forget. 1 This gracious, difficult work (work, not of rote memorization, but of, somehow, cultivating the experience of something memorable) plays with an etymological twist hidden in Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (1989, 240-262)—the German-rooted relatedness of experience (Erfahrung) and ancestors/ancestry (Vorfahrung). Experience, here, is imagined as a journey (Fahrung)—an undergoing, a " suffering " (256

In the medieval sources, works of art are rarely referred to, let alone described in any detail.  When they are mentioned, it is seldom with more than a word or phrase, at the most a sentence.  Hugh of Saint Victor's Mystic Ark is a forty-two page description of what seems to be the most complex single work of art of the entire Middle Ages, a fundamentally political painting also known as The Mystic Ark, making both the text and the painting among the most unusual sources we have for an understanding of medieval artistic culture and its polemical context.
The Mystic Ark is known to have arisen from a series of brilliant lectures given by Hugh--considered to be the leading theologian of Europe during his life--sometime from 1125 to early 1130 at Saint Victor, a house of Augustinian canons in Paris whose school was a predecessor of the University of Paris.  Because of the immense difficulty of its text, The Mystic Ark has been almost completely ignored by art historians and often misunderstood by other scholars.  Generally speaking, it has been seen as a "step-by-step" set of instructions that were rarely or even never used to create an actual painting, the text being meant to be read strictly as a work of ekphrasis (the verbal evocation of an imaginary work of art) or as a memory aid in order to conjure up a purely mental image.
"First, I Find the Center Point": Reading the Text of Hugh of Saint Victor's The Mystic Ark (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, forthcoming 2004) corrects this neglect and misunderstanding through a study of the nature of the text of The Mystic Ark as a necessary first step in a larger study.  It acts as a literal analysis for the non-literal conclusions of this larger study, The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, forthcoming 2013) (1258 typescript pages), in which I analyze the context and meaning of the painting of The Mystic Ark and demonstrate how it formed a crucial stage in the conceptual development of the Gothic portal, perhaps the most significant fully indigenous expression of Northern European, public figural art of the Middle Ages.)
My approach to the problem in Center Point is three pronged.  First, through close study of the text, I show that The Mystic Ark is not a work of literature properly speaking but a reportatio (something similar to class notes) by one of Hugh's students, although Hugh himself very much remains its author.  Recognition of this previously unrecognized aspect goes a long way in clarifying many difficulties of the text that previous authors were at pains to explain.  Second, I refute a large and impossibly complex body of opinions that has arisen to explain the relation between the painting of The Mystic Ark, the different recensions of The Mystic Ark, and The Moral Ark (a related treatise by Hugh).  In place of those tortuous arguments, I provide straightforward explanations for these relationships through analysis of the textual tradition and historical context of The Mystic Ark.  And third, having established The Mystic Ark as a reportatio and explained the relation of the painting and the various texts, I address the nature and immediate function of the text of The Mystic Ark, clearly establishing that a painting of The Mystic Ark originally existed at Saint Victor, probably in the form of a wall painting, an image I believe was painted by Hugh himself.  I show that, although the text of The Mystic Ark was not an actual "step-by-step" set of instructions, its purpose was to enable scholars outside of Saint Victor to undertake similar lectures and discussions based upon a reconstruction of the painting.  Since the major themes of the painting were the subjects of contemporary controversies such as the history of salvation, creation, neoplatonism, and the place of science in the education of society's intellectual elite, my conclusions demonstrate that The Mystic Ark--of which enough manuscript copies survive to indicate that it was the medieval equivalent of a best seller--served as a major and novel statement in the current intellectual controversies of the mid-twelfth century, a time of great intellectual and cultural change.
In the end, Center Point clarifies generations of confusion surrounding The Mystic Ark.  It reveals the striking role that a complex image could play in the spiritual and intellectual controversies of the day.  And it sets the stage for my future book on this amazingly popular image and text that, together, form one of the most important sources we have for medieval art in its social context.
    Hugh of Saint Victor's Mystic Ark: Illustrations: http://mysticark.ucr.edu.  This site presents a collection of images of The Mystic Ark that repeat in greater visual detail the same illustrations published in my study The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century for those who would like to study the image of The Mystic Ark more closely than is possible with the printed illustrations.

This study deals with the ways that Christine de Pizan (1365-c.1430) transformed her personal memories of King Charles V into an enduring form of national memory by allying her 1404 biography of Charles with official French history. To legitimize her role as royal biographer, Christine created a double-gendered persona evocative of Mary and Christ and Mary and David. Her persona allowed her (1) to 'give birth' metaphorically to the idea of a 'wise king' capable of guiding the nascent 'nation' of France mentioned in the official history, and (2) to unite symbolically the kingdom's male and female subjects behind present and future monarchs.

I propose here an interdisciplinary approach for a better understanding of medieval works. To do that, many scholars have already pointed out the importance of taking into considerations some studies about meditation, image, mnemonics, iconography or history of reading. Following thus these guidelines, we will see how this hermeneutics is appropriate for the analysis of the Speculum, a work of the thirteenth-century Carthusian writer Marguerite d'Oingt.