The Art of Memory
Metadata
- Author: Frances A Yates
- ASIN: B005TKD6UC
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B005TKD6UC
- Kindle link
Highlights
human figures representing ‘things’ which eventually developed into the imagines agentes. — location: 704
and it is indeed probable that the very word ‘topics’ as used in dialectics arose through the places of mnemonics. Topics are the ‘things’ or subject matter of dialectic which came to be known as topoi through the places in which they were stored. — location: 721
topics/topoi! never thought of that!
For a similar reason neither the very quick nor the very slow appear to have good — location: 762
It is clear that, from Plato’s point of view, the artificial memory as used by a sophist would be anathema, a desecration of memory. — location: 830
art mem dangerous innovation
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory. — location: 852
lol computers and spelling
produced by external characters which are not part of themselves will discourage the use of their own memory within them. — location: 853
You have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding; — location: 854
for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. — location: 855
flaubert’s hatred of journalism
Memory for things; memory for words! It is surely significant that the technical terms of the artificial memory come into the orator’s mind when, as philosopher, he is proving the divinity of the soul. That proof falls under the heads of the parts of rhetoric, memoria and inventio. The soul’s remarkable power of remembering things and words is a proof of its divinity; so also is its power of invention, not now in the sense of inventing the arguments or things of a speech, but in the general sense of invention or discovery. — location: 973
hard to getcthe argument: things and words are divine and our knowledge of them represents memory, which is therefore a channel between the human and divine ?
or
Or we may say that the Roman orator when he thinks of the divine powers of memory cannot but also be reminded of the orator’s trained memory, with its vast and roomy architecture of places on which the images of things and words are stored. — location: 983
argument by analogy tho?
When I enter there, I require instantly what I will to be brought forth, and something instantly comes; others must be longer sought after, which are fetched, as it were out of some inner receptacle; others rush out in troops, and while one thing is desired and required, they start forth, as who should say, ‘Is it perchance I?’ These I drive away and with the hand of my heart from the face of my remembrance; until what I wish for be unveiled, and appear in sight, out of its secret place. — location: 992
sherlock innit
Thou hast given this honour to my memory to reside in it; but in what quarter of it Thou residest, that I am considering. For in thinking on Thee, I have passed beyond such parts of it as the beasts also have, for I found — location: 1017
The personified liberal arts conform remarkably well to the rules for images in the artificial memory – strikingly ugly or beautiful, bearing with them secondary images to remind of their parts like the man in the lawsuit image. — location: 1090
memory method as allegory
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas certainly knew no other source for the rules than the work which they refer to as ‘the Second Rhetoric of Tullius’. That is to say, they know only the Ad Herennium on the artificial memory, and they saw it, through a tradition already well established in the earlier Middle Ages, in the context of the ‘First Rhetoric of Tullius’, the De inventione with its definitions of the four cardinal virtues and their parts. Hence it comes about that the scholastic ars memorativa treatises – those by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas – do not form part of a treatise on rhetoric, like the ancient sources. The artificial memory has moved over from rhetoric to ethics. — location: 1158
how association of texts ad herennium and de inventiones resulted in shift in placement of art of memory.
As is well known, in the earlier Middle Ages the classical rhetoric tradition took the form of the Ars dictaminis, an art of letter writing and of style to be used in administrative procedure. — location: 1169
administration!
In his study of Guido Faba, another member of the Bolognese school of dictamen of about the same period, E. Kantorowicz has drawn attention to the vein of mysticism which runs through the school, its tendency to place rhetoric in a cosmic setting, to raise it to a ‘sphere of quasi-holiness in order to compete with theology’.17 This tendency is very marked in the Rhetorica Novissima in which supernatural origins are suggested, for example, for persuasio which must exist in the heavens for without it Lucifer would not have been able to persuade the angels to fall with him. And metaphor, or transumptio, must without doubt have been invented in the Earthly Paradise. — location: 1173
mysticism and the Bologna school of admin. also see transumptio and metalepsis
Herennian’ rules in their progress through the Middle Ages. And the way would be open for an enterprising person to teach the art of memory in a new way, as a success technique. — location: 2080
Rossellius, apparently in perfect seriousness, suggests that we should remember the word A E R through the images of an Ass, an Elephant, and a Rhinoceros! — location: 2188
is there an element of leibniz perfext language here tho
In the Hermetric account of creation in the first treatise of the Corpus, called the Pimander, Camillo had read of how the demiurge fashioned ‘the Seven Governors who envelop with their circles the sensible world’. He quotes this passage, in Ficino’s Latin, stating that he is quoting ‘Mercurio Trismegisto nel Pimandro’, and adding this remark: — location: 2633
hermetic creation myth - pimander
the abyss of the divinity. — location: 2638
In the Theatre, the creation of man is in two stages. He is not created body and soul together as in Genesis. First there is the appearance of the ‘interior man’ on the grade of the Gorgon Sisters, the most notable of God’s creatures, made in his image and similitude. Then on the grade of Pasiphe and the Bull man takes on a body the parts of which are under the domination of the zodiac. This is what happens to man in the Pimander; the interior man, his mens, created divine and having the powers of the star-rulers, on falling into the body comes under the domination of the stars, whence he escapes in the Hermetic religious experience of ascent through the spheres to regain his divinity. — location: 2650
gorgon because three sisters had one eye between them. physical form of humans under dominion of the stars.
Oh Asclepius, what a great miracle is man, a being worthy of reverence and honour. For he goes into the nature of a god, as though he were himself a god; he is familiar with the race of demons, knowing that he is issued from the same origin; he despises that part of his nature which is only human, for he has put his hope in the divinity of the other part. — location: 2662
hamlet
This again affirms the divinity of man, and that he belongs to the same race as the creative star-demons. — location: 2666
Ficino therefore seeks to cultivate the sun and his therapeutic astral cult is a revival of sun worship. — location: 2733
meanings, the whole world vivified by the spirit of the stars, — location: 2745
also pneuma tho?
The reader may smile at Camillo’s lion, but he should not look too patronizingly at the great central Sun series in the Theatre. He should remember that Copernicus, when introducing the heliocentric hypothesis, quoted the words of Hermes Trismegistus in the Asclepius on the sun; — location: 2757
that the Hermetic view that the earth is not immobile because it is alive, — location: 2761
The Sun series of the Theatre shows within the mind and memory of a man of the Renaissance the Sun looming with a new importance, mystical, emotional, magical, the Sun becoming of central significance. It shows an inner movement of the imagination towards the Sun which must be taken into account as one of the factors in the heliocentric revolution. — location: 2763
science born of the complex play of classical, cabbalistic and hermetic sources. Renaissance man also interested in the mechanism by which he might improve himself.
The secret of this is, I believe, that the memory images were regarded as, so to speak, inner talismans. — location: 2778
find a most suitable vehicle for its use in the occult version of the art of memory. If the basic memory images used in such a memory system had, or were supposed to have, talismanic power, power to draw down the celestial influences and spiritus within the memory, such a memory would become that of the ‘divine’ man in intimate association with the divine powers of the cosmos. — location: 2801
Was such a view of memory seen as a total break with the older memory tradition, or was there any continuity between the old and the new? — location: 2869
Pico is of course here speaking of the world as a theatre only in a general sense, as — location: 2890
a well known topos. — location: 2890
Thus beneath the splendid Renaissance surface of the Theatre there still survives artificial memory of the Dantesque type. What — location: 2912
the problem with this approach is that a nexus of influence is likely to produce similar results in two “nodes” (memory theatre, Renaissance art) which cannot therefore then be seen as related in terms of specific provenance.
The Renaissance occult philosopher had a great gift for ignoring differences and seeing only resemblances. — location: 2959
Its author was Julius Caesar Scaliger, but this was not known at the time, and suspicion had fallen on Giulio Camillo as possibly the author. Viglius believed this, and the erroneous conviction that Camillo had attacked his famous friend is behind Viglius’s reports to Erasmus about the Theatre.14 — location: 2977