Мурат Зулейка
Уорикский университет, Великобритания
This paper aims to analyse a little known, yet extremely important phenomenon of reception of classical antiquity and its legacy in the Middle Ages. It deals with the Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, a biblical anthology created at the end of the 12th century by Peter of Poitier, theologian and teacher at the Cathedral school of Paris, an important centre of Scholastic philosophy.
In the prologus, Peter himself declares that the purpose of his work is to help his students to fix in memory the complex biblical material. For this reason not only is the text written in a simplified and recapitulary way, but it is also complemented by an unusual apparatus of images that were aimed to visualize the main concepts which the students had to learn and memorize. In addition, text and images were usually traced on scrolls, which were hung on the walls of the lecture halls,
providing the students with the mnemonic images depicted on it. The wide success of the Compendium as a didactic device is proved by the great amount of manuscripts which were created and used all over Europe, many of which still survive.
Peter seems to have been the inventor of the figurative apparatus of the Compendium. But what models did he have at his disposal? As a Scholastic master, he was aware of the classical tradition and the rhetorical treatises written by Greek and Roman orators that often theorized mnemonic rules. Their method was based on the mental association between an ordered group of notions and well-defined images, which were to be utilized in order to suggest the concepts that one aimed to remember intuitively. Such mental images had to be characterized by a restricted colour spectrum, not to stimulate too much the senses, and by the repetition of specific colours or figures to make associations between events related to one another. These are precisely the same features which connote the figurative apparatus of the Compendium.
Through selected case studies, I aim to demonstrate how classical antiquity and its legacy made a contribution in the creation of that specific art system, tracing the connections between ancient theory and medieval practice.