The Art of Memory (1966)

You may have heard the story of the ancient Greek poet Simonides who was engaged to give a panegyric honoring the host of a banquet. But said host reneged on the deal, agreeing to pay Simonides only half the amount originally offered because the panegyric included a section praising the twin gods Castor and Pollux, from whom the poet was told to seek payment for the balance. At some point Simonides was called outside and while absent from the banquet hall, the roof caved in killing everyone inside, including the mean spirited host. The identities of the dead were so complete obliterated that mourners who came to claim the bodies were unable to recognize their own kin. But Simonides remembered where everyone was seated and was able to assist the families in locating their dead.

It has come down to us that this event was the source of the memory technique which was attributed by the ancients to Simonides. In ancient times before books were commonplace, in those storied times when Homer's epics were passed on by word of mouth, people depended upon memory for the retention and transmission of knowledge to a degree that staggers the imagination today. Apparently there were techniques for retaining prodigious amounts of material beyond the obvious rote memorization. It is those techniques that are the subject of Frances Yates' The Art of Memory.

What we know about these techniques is scanty at best because those whose writings on the subject that have survived only speak about the methods in the broadest terms, under the assumption that every reader would know what they were talking about so widespread was the understanding as recently as the time of Cicero. In fact, Cicero's De Oratore is one of only three ancient Roman sources that talk about the art of memory at all, the other two being an anonymous document known as the Ad Herrenium, which for many centuries was erroneously attributed to Cicero, and a work of Quintilian called Institutio Oratorio.

The technique involved memorizing the architectural details of an existing building, such as a temple, and then affixing ideas that one wanted to commit to memory to specific locations within that building so that they would come to mind in a prescribed order. Cicero speaks in De Oratore about how he memorized important speeches before the Roman senate using this technique.

Similarly, it was reported by Quintilian that a Greek named Metrodorus of Scepsis used the twelve signs of the Zodiac divided into 360 subsections in a similar fashion as a storehouse for memorization. Because Quintilian wrote in less than glowing terms of the art of memory, it fell out of use and was completely lost by the time of Charlemagne. But the ideas were resurrected at some point and names associated with variations on the theme of the art of memory include Ramond Lull, Giulio Camillo, Thomas Aquinas, Giordano Bruno, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon and ultimately the Enlightenment philosopher Leibnitz, among many others.

The story is astounding of how the relatively simple idea of memorizing by association with a building — whether a temple or in later times a theater — the zodiac, or both, was enlarged upon to such an extent that the idea took on a life of its own. What was at first intended to be a tool for simple memorization of speeches or poetry became under Giordano Bruno and others a superstructure for containing all the world's knowledge. In the course of the Renaissance, it acquired occult attributes which put it in danger from Church authorities with the net effect of driving it almost completely underground. And once again, through the developments that occurred during the Renaissance, it becomes apparent that humanists and Neoplatonists were quite different breeds of cat and not at all on the same page philosophically.

The Art of Memory opens a window on a relativelly unknown aspect of Western intellectual history. The first quarter of the book should be of general historical interest. Beyond that it goes deeper and deeper into abstruse documents, almost none of which have been translated from their original Latin or French or German into English. So in addition to being rather arcane subject matter to begin with, unless one can read five-hundred-year-old texts fluently, there is hardly anywhere to go with this subject for most of us.

Interestingly, memory systems as such are still alive and well. I have a book on my shelves called Stop Forgetting by Dr. Bruno Furst, which was published in 1949. Two approaches to memorization are given, one of which invites you to memorize a list of words ingeniously associated with numbers from, say, one to a hundred which become part of your permanent memory. You are then supposed to associate, for example, items on a grocery list with the assigned numbered words and create an image in your mind linking the two. For example, if the number one is associated with the word "tea" and you need to replenish your supply of Darjeeling at the grocery store, that is an easy association. This is merely a variation on the theme of memory by association that was used by Simonides, Cicero and the rest.

Readers who are interested in ancient, medieval or Renaissance intellectual history will find The Art of Memory to be a storehouse of fascinating information. I am only assigning it three and a half stars because I believe it contains more information than the average reader wants to know, but this is not to detract at all from the quality of writing and clarity of presentation. On the whole, I found it to be an unusually interesting book. ( )

Must read for all Renaissance devotees and occultists ( )

Rather turgid treatment of the much-forgotten art of a good mnemonic. ( )

Non Fiction, Memory, Mnemonics, History of culture, Chiari e convincenti il cap. I e, in parte, il cap. VI. Il resto, nonostante il notevole sforzo di ricerca, è esposto in maniera molto confusa. First published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1966, hardcover, 8vo, 400 pp.; University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1966; First Italian edition Torino, Einaudi, 1972, 374 pp., under the title: "L' arte della memoria", translated by Albano Biondi ( )

A truly wonderful book, joining mnemotechnic, Shakespeare's theatre, and Western esotercism. ( )