Yates - Selected works / 3 : the art of memory

THE subject of this book will be unfamiliar to most readers. Few people know that the Greeks, who invented many arts, invented an art of memory which, like their other arts, was passed on to Rome whence it descended in the European tradition. This art seeks to memorise through a technique of impressing places and images on memory. It has usually been classed as mnemotechnics, which in modern times seems a rather unimportant branch of human activity. But in the ages before printing a trained memory was vitally important; and the manipulation of images in memory must always to some extent involve the psyche as a whole. Moreover an art which uses contemporary architecture for its memory places and contemporary imagery for its images will have its classical, Gothic, and Renaissance periods, like the other arts. Though the mnemotechnical side of the art is always present, both in antiquity and thereafter, and forms the factual basis for its investigation, the exploration of it must include more than the history of its techniques. Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses; the history of the training of this most fundamental and elusive of human powers will plunge us into deep waters.

My interest in the subject began about fifteen years ago when I hopefully set out to try to understand Giordano Bruno's works on memory. The memory system excavated from Bruno's Shadows (Pl. II) was first displayed in a lecture at the Warburg Institute in May, 1952. Two years later, in January, 1955, the plan of Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre (see Folder) was exhibited, also at a lecture at the Warburg Institute. I had realised by this time that there was some historical connection between Camillo's Theatre, Bruno's and Campanella's systems, and Robert Fludd's Theatre system, all of which were compared, very superficially, at this lecture. Encouraged by what seemed a slight progress, I began to write the history of the art of memory from Simonides onwards. This stage was reflected in an article on The Ciceronian Art of Memory which was published in Italy in the volume of studies in honour of Bruno Nardi (Medioevo e Rinascimento, Florence, 1955).

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The greatest problem of all remained, the problem of the Renaissance magical or occult memory systems. Why, when the invention of printing seemed to have made the great Gothic artificial memories of the Middle Ages no longer necessary, was there this recrudescence of the interest in the art of memory in the strange forms in which we find it in the Renaissance systems of Camillo, Bruno, and Fludd? I returned to the study of Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre and realised that the stimulus behind Renaissance occult memory was the Renaissance Hermetic tradition. It also became apparent that it would be necessary to write a book on this tradition before one could tackle the Renaissance memory systems. The Renaissance chapters in this book depend for their background on my Giordano Bruno amd the Hermetic Tradition (London and Chicago, 1964).

I had thought that it might have been possible to keep Lullism out of this book and treat it separately, but it soon became clear that this was impossible. Though Lullism does not come out of the rhetoric tradition, like the classical art of memory, and though its procedures are very different, yet it is, in one of its aspects, an art of memory and as such it becomes conflated and confused with the classical art at the Renaissance. The interpretation of Lullism given in Erigena,