6 ideas
After a banquet hall collapsed and crushed the guests beyond recognition, the poet Simonides identified each corpse by recalling where each guest had been sitting. From this he inferred that orderly arrangement of places is the key to memory. The story served as the founding myth of the art of memory throughout classical and later tradition.
The classical art, codified in the Ad Herennium, has the practitioner memorize a series of well-lit, distinct, moderately spaced places (loci) in a building. The practitioner then deposits vivid, emotionally charged images (imagines) standing for things or words at those places. Recall means walking the building in order and reading off each image, so that the sequence of places preserves the order of the material.
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas classified memory as a part of Prudence rather than only as a rhetorical technique, which made the art a moral duty for remembering virtues, vices, heaven and hell. Yates argues this reclassification means medieval allegorical imagery, including Dante's Inferno, can be read as memory images arranged in ordered places.
Yates reads buildings, frescoes, cosmological diagrams, and literary structures as possible storage devices: ordered places filled with memorable images for internalizing a body of knowledge. Under this reading, much Western visual and literary art served a cognitive function as well as a decorative or expressive one.
Renaissance Neoplatonists and Hermeticists turned the art from a storage technique into a magical practice. Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre and Giordano Bruno's systems used talismanic, astral images arranged by celestial order to imprint the structure of the cosmos on the mind. The aim was to reflect the universe in memory and so gain divine or magical powers over it.
Yates traces a line from Ramon Lull's combinatory wheels and the occult memory systems to the 17th-century projects of Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz for universal method and characteristica universalis. The drive to order all knowledge in memorable, combinable forms carried over into the logic and classification schemes of early modern science.