HUGH OF ST. VICTOR: “THE THREE BEST MEMORY-AIDS FOR LEARNING HISTORY”

My child, knowledge is a treasury and your heart is its strongbox. As you study all of knowledge, you store up for yourselves good treasures, immortal treasures, incorruptible treasures, which never decay nor lose the beauty of their brightness. In the treasure-house of wisdom are various sorts of wealth, and many filing-places in the store-house of your heart. In one place is put gold, in another silver, in another precious jewels. Their orderly arrangement is clarity of knowledge. Dispose and separate each single thing into its own place, this into its and that into its, so that you may know what has been placed here and what there. Confusion is the mother of ignorance and forgetfulness, but orderly arrangement illuminates the intelligence and secures memory.

You see how a money-changer who has unsorted coins divides his one pouch into several compartments, just as a cloister embraces many separate cells inside. Then, having sorted the coins and separated out each type of money in turn, he puts them all to be kept in their proper places, so that the distinctiveness of his compartments may keep the assortment of his materials from getting mixed up, just as it supports their separation. Additionally, you observe in his display of money-changing, how his ready hand without faltering follows wherever the commanding nod of a customer has caused it to extend, and quickly, without delay, it brings into the open, separately and without confusion, everything that he either may have wanted to receive or promised to give out. And it would provide onlookers with a spectacle silly and absurd enough, if, while one and the same money-bag should pour forth so many varieties without muddle, this same bag, its mouth being opened, should not display on its inside an equivalent number of separate compartments. And so this particular separation into distinct places, which I have described, at one and the same time eliminates for the onlookers any mystery in the action, and, for those doing it, an obstacle to their ability to perform it.