Yates 1966

Classical era

Metrodorus of Scepsis: 39ff.; played political and cultural role at court of Mithrodates; hist works on rhetoric are lose; linked places to zodiac signs; see Yates 40-2

Ad Herennium, 86-2BC

• compiles in Rome around 86-82BC
• goes thru five parts of rhetoric (INVENTIO, DISPOSITIO, ELOCUTIO, MEMORIA, PRONUNTIO)
  • MEMORIA: 2 kinds; natural, "that which is engrafted in our minds, "born simultaneously with thought"; and artificial, which is the art of memory that Yates is concered with (Yates 5)
• artificial memory:
  • "established from places and images (Constat igitur artificiosa memoria ex locis et imaginibus)" (Yates 6)
  • LOCUS: place easily grasped by the memory, such as a house"
  • IMAGES: "forms, marks, or simulacra" (Yates 6
  • quoted on Yates 6: "For the places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the delivery is like the reading."

Cicero's distinction between "words" and "things": "'things are thus the subejct omatter of the speech; 'words' are the language in which that subject matter is clother" (Yates 9)

• MEMORIA RERUM; memorizing the order of notions;
• MEMORIA VERBORUM; memorizing word-for-word in correct order

Ad Herennium author encourages students to rouse their memory by imagining very sharp, emotional images -- disturbing, violent (Yates 9-11)

De oratore, Cicero, 1C BC

"Beginning with the statement, introduced by the Simonides story that the art consist in places and images and is like an inner writing on wax, he goes on to discuss natural and artifical memory, with the usual conclusion that nature can be improved by art. Then follow rules for places and rules for images; then the discussion of memroy for things and memory or words. Though he agrees that memory for things is alone essential for the orator he has evidently put himself through a memory for words drill in which images for words move (?), change their cases (?), draw a whole sentence into one word image, in some extraordinary manner which he visualises within, as though it were the art of some consummate painter." (Yates 19)

Simonides, origins of ars mem.: at a party/banquet, roof caves in, everyone dies; Simonides is able to remember based on where everyone sat (Yates 1-3); story related in Cicero's De oratore

Institutio oratorio, Quintilian, 1C AD; also starts with the account of Simonides

"There is thus a very marked difference bw Quintilian's attitude to the artifical memory and that of the author of ad Herennium and of Cicero. Evidently the imagines agentes, fantastically [26] gesticulating from their places and arousing memory by their emotional appeal, seemed to him as cumbrous and useless for practical mnemonic purposes as they do to us. Has Roman society moved on into greater sophistication in which some intense, archaic, almost magical, immediate association of memory with images has been lost? Or is the difference a temperamental one?" (Yates 25-6)

Plato -- artificial memory as desecration

Plato also uses seal imprint metaphor in the Theaetetus "in which Socrates assumes that there is a block of wax in our souls -- of varying quality in different individuals -- and that this is 'the gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses'" (Yates 36)

for Plato, ideas in the mind must correspond to experiences of the real world; thus artificial memory is a perversion of the Ideas--> "It is clear that, from Plato's point of view, the artifical memory as used by a sophist would be anathema, a descreation of memory. It is indeed possible that some of PLato's satire on the sophists, for instance their senseless use of etymologies, might be explicable from the sophist memory treatise, with its use of such etymologies for memory for words. A Platonic memory would have to be organised, not in the trivial manner of such mnemotechnics, but in relation to the realities." (Yates 37)

memory as "written" to the mind -- wax tablet:

quoted on Yates 6: "For the places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the delivery is like the reading." (from Ad Herennium [?])

"The metaphor, used in all three of our Latin sources for the mnemonic, which compraes the inner writing or stamping of the memory images on the places with writing on a waxed tablet is obviously suggested by the contemporary use of the waxed tablet for writing. Nevertheless it also connects the mnemonic with ancient theor of memory, as Quintilian saw when, in his introduction to his treatment of the mnemonic, he remarked that he did not propose to dwell on the precise functions of memory, 'although [36] many hold the view that certain impressions are made on the mind, analogous to those which a signet ring makes on wax'."(Yates 35-6)

• for Aristotle, these imprints are the basis for all knowledge

Plato also uses seal imprint metaphor in the Theaetetus "in which Socrates assumes that there is a block of wax in our souls -- of varying quality in different individuals -- and that this is 'the gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses'" (Yates 36)

Yates 38 --> cites Plato's story of Theuth and the invention of letters/writing -- will cause forgetfulness

Medieval era

Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville, Venerable Bede -- none of them mention the art of memory in their treatises on education, etc. (Yates 53)

"It is of great importance to emphasise that the mediaeval artificial memory rested, so far as I know, entirely on the memory section of Ad Herennium studied without the assistance of the other two sources for the classical art." (Yates 55)

Thomas Aquinas

Albertus Magnus, De bono, "on the good," on ethics

"The core of the book is formed by the sections on the four cardinal virtues of Fortitude, Temperance, Justice, and Prudcence." (Yates 61)

Lullism (1235-1316)

based on Platonism

didn't come out of rhetoric, like classical examples of ars mem.; rather, comes from a philosophical tradition of Augustinian Platonism -- "claims o know first causes, called by Lull the Dignities of God" (Yates 175) -- "All Lull's artsare based on these Dignitates Dei, which are Divine Names or attributes, thought of as primordial causes as in the Neoplatonic system of Scotus Erigena by which Lull was influence." (Yates 175)

1) didn't come out of rhetoric, like classical examples of ars mem.; rather, comes from a philosophical tradition of Augustinian Platonism 2) no emotional/visceral "images" 3) "introduces movement into memory" (Yates 176)

"If the Lullian Art as memory consists in memorising the Art as intellect and will, then the Lullian ARt as memory consists in memorising the Art as a whole, in all its aspects and operations. And it is fairly clear from other passages that this was, in fact, what the LUllian Art as memory did mean." (Yates 184)

"memory in memorising such procedures is becoming a method of investigation, and a method of logical investigation. Here we have a point, and a very important one, in which Lullism as memory differs fundamentally from the classical art, which seeks only to memorise what is given." (Yates 185)

"We are led to the conviction that Lullian artificial memory consists in memorising the Lullian Art as voluntas and as intellectus. And we are further again led to the conviction that the images or 'corporeal similitudes' of classical memory of the rhetorical tradition are incompatible with what Lull calls 'artifical memory'." (Yates 194)

movement

"Lull introduces movement into memory. The figures of his Art, on which its concepts are set out in the letter notation, are not static but revolving. One of the figures consists of concentric circles, marked with the letter notations standing for the concepts, and when these wheels revolve, combinations of the concepts are obtained. In another revolving figure, triangles within a circle pick up related concepts. These are simple devices, but revolutionary in their attempt to represent movement in the psyche." (Yates 176)

"Think of the great mediaeval encyclopaedic schemes, with all knowledge arranged in static parts, made yet more static in the classical art by the memory buildings stocked with the images. And then think of Lullism, with its algebraic notations, breaking up the static schemata into new combinations on its revolving wheels. The first art is the more artistic, but the second is the more scientific." (Yates 176)

"The derivation from cosmological 'rotae' of the wheels of the ARt is obvious, and it becomes very apparent when Lull uses the figures of the Art to do a kind of astrological medicine, as he does in his Tractatus de astronomia. Moreover, the four elemnts in their various combinations enter very deeply into the structure of the Art, even into the kind of geometrical logic which it uses. The logical square of opposiition is identiied in Lull's mind with the square of the elements, hence his belief that he has found a 'natural' logic, based on reality and therefore greatly superior to scholastic logic." (Yates 178)

relationship to cabala:

based his art on a common notion of the names of God

"The Names of God are fundamental in Judaism, and particularly to the type of Jewish mysticism known as the Cabala. Spanish Jews contemporary with Lull were meditating with particular intensity on the Names of God under the influence of Cabala, the doctrinces of which were being propagated in Spain. A main text of the Cabala, the Zohar was written in Spain in Lull's time. The Sephiroth of the Cabala are really Divine Names as creative principles. The sacred Hebrew alphabet is, mystically speaking, supposed to contain all the Names of God. A form of Cabalist meditation particularly developed in Spain at this time consisted in meditating on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, combining them and recombining them to form the Names of God." (Yates 177)

"It is my opinion that there was a Cabalist element in Lullism from the start." (Yates 188)

Pico dell Mirandola the first to make an explicit association between Lullism and Cabalism (Yates 188) "When discussing Cabala in his Conclusions and Apology, Pico states that one type of Cabala is an ars combinandi, done with revolving alphabets, and he further states that this art is like 'that which is called amonst us the ars Raymundi,' that is, the ARt of Ramon, or Raymond Lull. Wherether rightly or wrongly, Pico therefore thought that the Cabalist art of letter combinations was like Lullism. The Renaissance followed him in this belief which gave rise to a work entitled the De auditu kabbalistico, the first editions of which were at Venic in 1518 and 1533.This work appears to be, and indeed is, doing the Lullian Art using the normal Lullian figures. But Lullism is now called Cabalism and B to K are more or less identified with Cabalist Sephiroth and associated with Cabalist angel names. ... It is now known who was the real author of this work, but the Renaissance firmly believed in its false attribution to Lull. Renaissance Lullists read the Pseudo-Lullian de auditu kabbalistico as a genuine work by Lull and it confirmed them in their belief that Lullism was a kind of Cabalism. In the eyes of Christian Cabalists it would have the advantage of being a Christian Cabala." (Yates 188-9)

triadic structure: "Here, then, or so I believe, is the major clue to the underlying [179]suppositions of the Lullian Art. The Divine Dignities form into triadic structures, reflected from them down through the whole creation; as causes they inform the whole creation through its elemental structure. An Art based on them constructs a method by which ascent can be made on the ladder of creation to the Trinity at its apex." (Yates 178-9)

• COMPARE TO I-CHING AND LEIBNIZ

• • represented through the traingulations of the relata wheel (triangles inscribed on circles) -- Yates 181-2

tree diagram, arbor scientiae

"There is a point at which Lull's conception of places verges rather closely on classical visualisation of places, namely in his fondness for diagrams in the form of trees. The tree, as he uses it, is a kind of place system. The most notable example of this is the Arbor scientiae in which the whole encyclopedia of knowledge is schematised as a forest of trees, the roots of which are B to K as principles and relata of his Art." (Yates 187)

pseudo-Lullian works; many works falsely attributed to him in the Renaissance (Yates 189-90)

"So we see the Rainssance Lull building up as a kind of Magus, versed in the Cabalist and Hermetic sciences cultivated in the occult tradition." (Yates 190)

Liber ad memoriam confirmandam, one small treatise Lull wrote on memory; done when he was an old man (Yates 191)

the belief in god-as-watchmaker could be, but not necessarily for me it all depends on how interventionist god is like, if a person believes that god intervenes a lot in a person's life, then that person can' be a deist

Renaissance era

"Thought the art of memory is still using places and images according to the rules, a radical change had come over the philosophy and psychology behind it, which is now no longer scholastic but Neoplatonic." (Yates 145) ---> influence of Ficino and the Corpus Hermeticum, believed to be the collected works of an Egyptian, Hermes Trismegistus

"Into the old bottles of the art of memory there has been poured the heady wine of the currents of Renaissance 'occult philosophy', running fresh and strong into sixteenth-century Venice from its springs in the movement inaugurated by Ficinno in Florence in the late fifteenth century." (Yates 145)

Hermetic and humanist opposed; "The meeting in the Theatre [of Camillo and Viglius] represents a conflict between two different types of mind which take up different sides of the Renaissance. The rational humanist is Erasmus - Viglius. The irrationalist, Camillo, descends from the Renaissance on its occult side. For the Erasmian type of humanist the art of memory was dying out, killed by the printed book, unfashionable because of its mediaeval associations, a cumbrous art which modern educators are dropping. It was in the occult tradition that the art of memory was taken up again, expanded into new forms, infused with a new life." (Yates 158)

"Thus it would appear that the older memory trad mingled with the new type of occult memory, that the thunders of a friar's sermon on rewards and punishments, or the warnings of the Divine Comedy, might still be heard echoing somehow together with, or below the surface of, the new style of oratory with its new style arrangement of memory, and that our discovery of Hell, Pergatory, and Paradise in Camillo's Theatre belongs into a general tmosphere in which old style memory merges iwth the new." (Yates 165)

spheres of the universe; Romberch; see figure on Yates 116

visual alphabet:

in Romberch;

"Visual alphabets are ways of representing letters of the alphabet by images. These are formed in various ways; for example with pictures of objects whose shape resemble letters of the alphabet, as compasses or a ladder for A; or a hoe for N. Another way is through pictures of animals or birds arranged in the order of the first leter of their names, as A for Anser, goose, B for Bubo, owl. Visual alphabets are very common in the memory treatises and they almost certainly come out of an old tradition. Boncompagno speaks of an 'imaginary alphabet' which is to be used for remembering names. Such alphabets are frequently described in the manuscript treatises. Publicius's is the first printed treatise to illustrate them; thereafter they are a normal feature of most printed memory treatises. Volkmann has reprodueced a number of them from various [119] treatises, but without discussing what their origin may be or for what purposes they were intended to be used. The visual alphabet probably comes out of endeavours to understand Ad Herennium on how proficients in artificial memory write in images in their memories. According to the general principles of artificial memory we should put everything that we want to fix in memory into an image. Applied to the letters of the alphabet, this would mean that they are better remembered if put into images. The notion as worked out in the visual alphabets is of infantile simplicity, like teaching a child to remember C through the picture of a Cat. Rossellius, apparently in perfect seriousness, suggests that we should remember the word AER through the images of an Ass, an Elephant, and a Rhinoceros!" (Yates 118-9)

---> IS SHE MISSING THE POINT HERE? Alphabets are not natural; they feel more arbitrary in some sense, since there's nothing connecting their form to what they represent, not even sound. So it seems to make sense to want to connect images to letters, to help "naturalize" them --> this is what Patricia Crain is talking about in The Story of A

"And whilst new influences are making themselves felt, there is at the same time a deterioration going on in the memory tradition. The memory rules become more and more detailed; alphabetical lists and visual alphabets encourage trivial elaborations. Memory, one often feels in reading the treatises, has degenerated into a kind of cross-word puzzle to beguile the long hours in the cloister; much of their advice can have had no practical utility; letters and images are turning into childish games. Yet this kind of elaboration may have been very congenial to Renaissance taste with its love of mystery. If we did not know the mnemonic explation of Romberch's Grammar, she might seem like some inscrutable emblem." (Yates 123)

"And whilst new influences are making themselves felt, there is at the same time a deterioration going on in the memory tradition. The memory rules become more and more detailed; alphabetical lists and visual alphabets encourage trivial elaborations. Memory, one often feels in reading the treatises, has degenerated into a kind of cross-word puzzle to beguile the long hours in the cloister; much of their advice can have had no practical utility; letters and images are turning into childish games. Yet this kind of elaboration may have been very congenial to Renaissance taste with its love of mystery. If we did not know the mnemonic explation of Romberch's Grammar, she might seem like some inscrutable emblem." (Yates 123)

"These treatises [of the Renaissance] cannot recapture the workings of the vast memories of the past, for the conditions of their world, in which the printed book has arrived, have destroyed the conditions which made such memories possible. The schematic layouts of manuscripts, designed for memorisation, the articulation of a summa into its ordered parts, all these are disappearing with the printed book which need not be memorised since copies are plentiful." (Yates 124)

--> example of Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, in which a scholar looks out his window at the cathedral, sees his first printed book, and says Ceci tuera cela, print will destroy the building (mentioned on Yates 124)

Guilio Camillo

never finished his great work on memory; no one knows what happened to the theatre

"Thus, following the custom in ancient theatres in which the most important people sat in the lowest seats, Camillo has placed in his lowest grade the seven essential measures on which, according to magico-mystical theor, all things here below depend, the seven planets. Once these have been organically grasped, imprinted on memory with their images and characters, the mind can move from this middle celestial world in either direction; up into the super-celestial world of the Ideas, the Sephiroth and the angels, entering Solomon's Temple of Wisdom, or down into the subcelestial and elemental world which will range itself in order on the upper grades of the Theatre (really the lower seats) in accordance with the astral influences." (Yates 138-9)

"Camillo's Theatre represents the universe expanding from First Causes through the stages of creation. First is the appearance of the simple elements from the waters on the Banquet grade; then the mixture of the elements in the Cave; then the creation of man's mens in the image of God on the grade of the Gorgon Sisters; then the union of man's soul and body on the grade of Pasiphe and the Bulle; then the whole world of man's activities; his natural activities on the grade of the Sandals of Mercury; his arts and sciences, religion and laws on the Prometheus grade. Though there are unorthodox elements (to be discussed later) in Camillo's system, his grades contain obvious reminiscences of the orthodox days of creation." (Yates 141)

under the images were drawers/boxes of some kind that contained papers containing speeches (based on Cicero) relating to the corresponding images (see Yates 144) --> "When one thinks of all these drawers or coffers in the Theatre it begins to look like a highly ornamental filing cabinet. But this is to lose sight of the grandeur of the Idea -- the Idea of a memory organically geared to the universe." (Yates 145)

Hermetic influence:

"Thought the art of memory is still using places and images according to the rules, a radical change had come over the philosophy and psychology behind it, which is now no longer scholastic but Neoplatonic." (Yates 145) ---> influence of Ficino and the Corpus Hermeticum, believed to be the collected works of an Egyptian, Hermes Trismegistus

"Into the old bottles of the art of memory there has been poured the heady wine of the currents of Renaissance 'occult philosophy', running fresh and strong into sixteenth-century Venice from its springs in the movement inaugurated by Ficinno in Florence in the late fifteenth century." (Yates 145)

Camillo is "christian Hermetic" -- see Yates 153

"That there is a strong Cabalist influence on the Theatre is obvious. The ten Sephiroth as divine measures in the supercelestial world corresponding to the ten spheres of the universe had been adopted by Pico from Cabalism. For camillo, it is the correspondence of the seven planetary measures of the celestial world with the supercelestial Sephiroth hich gives the Theatre its prolongation up into the supercelestial world, into the abyss of the divine wisdom and the mysteries of the Temple of Solomon. " however, he's moved around the normal arrangement (Yates 148; see 148-51)

Giordano Bruno, De umbris idearum (1582)

""The readers of Shadows immediately notices the several times repeated figure of a circle marked with thirty letters. In some of these figures, concentric circles, marked with the thirty letters, are shown. Paris in the 16c was the foremost European centre of Lullism, and no Parisian could have failed to recognize these circles as the famous combinatory wheels of the Lullian Art.

"The efforts towards finding a way of conciliated the classical art of memory, with its places and images, and Lullism with its moving figures and letters, had continued to grow in strength in the later sixteenth century. The problem must have excited a good deal of general interest, comparable to the popular interest in the mind machines of today." (Yates 208)

"We should expect to find that Bruno's Lull would be the Renaissance Lull, not the mediaeval Lull. His Lullian circl has more letters on it htan any genu8ine Lullian art, and a few Greek and Hebrew letters, which are never used in genuine Lullism. His wheel is closer to those to be seen in Pseudo-Lullian alchemical diagrams which also use some letters other than those of the Latin alphabet. And when listing Lull's works, Bruno includes the De auditu kabbalistico as one of them. These indications suggest that Lull, the alchemist, and Lull, the Cabalist, would come into Bruno's idea of Lullism. But Bruno's Lull is even more peculiar, and more remote from the medieval Lull, than in normal Renaissance Lullism. He told the librarian of the Abbey of St. Victor that he understood Lullism better than Lull himself had done, and there is certainly very much to appal the genuine Lullist in Bruno's ust of the art." (Yates 209-10)

"Bruno several times mentions in Shadows a work of his called Clavis magna, which either never existed or has not survived. The Great Key might have explained how to use Lullian wheels as conjuring for summoning the spirits of the air. For that is, I believe, a secret of the use of the Lullian wheels in Shadows. Just as he converts the images of the classical art of memory into magical images of the stars to be used for reaching the celestial world, so the Lullian wheels are turned into 'practical Cabala', or conjuring for reaching the demons, or angels, beyond the stars.

Bruno's brilliant achievement in finding a way of combining the classical art of memory with Lullism thus rested on an extreme 'occultising' of both the classical art and of Lullism. He put the images of the classical art on the Lullian combinatory wheels, but the images were magic images and the wheels were conjuring wheels.: (Yaes 211)

Ramism as art of memory: was the parallel to iconoclasm; stripped art of memory of its reliance on images and replaced them with tables/tabular structure; see Yates 238