Palacios De La Memoria

THE ART
OF MEMORY
by
FRANCES A. YATES

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 66-22770
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, London
© I¢6 by Frances A. Yates. All rights reserved
Published I¢6

Printed in Great Britain

CONTENTS
Preface
page xi
I. The Three Latin Sources for the Classical Art
of MemoryI
II. The Art of Memory in Greece: Memory and
27
the Soul
III. The Art of Memory in the Middle Ages
50
IV. Mediaeval Memory and the Formation of
Imagery
V. The Memory Treatises

82
l0S

VI. Renaissance Memory: The Memory Theatre of
Giulio Camillo
129
VII. Camillo's Theatre and the Venetian Renaissance
VIII. Lullism as an Art of Memory
IX. Giordano Bruno: The Secret of Shadows
X.Ramism as an Art of Memory
XI. Giordano Bruno: The Secret of Seals
XII. Conflict between Brunian and Ramist Memory
XIII. Giordano Bruno: Last Works on Memory

160

173
199
231
243

266
287

XIV. The Art of Memory and Bruno's Italian
308
Dialogues
XV. The Theatre Memory System of Robert Fludd 320
XVI. Fludd's Memory Theatre and the Globe
Theatre
342
XVII. The Art of Memoryand the Growth of Scientific Method
368
Index

390

v

Chapter I

THE THREE LATIN SOURCES
FOR THE CLASSICAL
ART OF MEMORY I

a banquet given by a nobleman of Thessaly named
Scopas, the poet Simonides of Ceos chanted a lyric
poem in honour of his host but including a passage in
praise of Castor and Pollux. Scopas meanly told the
poet that he would only pay him half the sum agreedupon for the
panegyric and that he must obtain the balance from the twin gods
to whom he had devoted half the poem. A little later, a message was
brought in to Simonides that two young men were waiting outside
who wished to see him. He rose from the banquet and went out but
could find no one. During his absence the roof of the banqueting
hall fell in, crushing Scopas and all the guests todeath beneath the
ruins; the corpses were so mangled that the relatives who came to

it

I The English translations of the three Latin sources used are those in
the Loeb edition of the classics: the Ad Herennium is translated by H.
Caplan; the De oratore by E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham; Quintilian's
Institutio oratoria by H. E. Butler. When quoting from these translations
I have sometimesmodified them in the direction of literalness, particularly in repeating the actual terminology of the mnemonic rather than in
using periphrases of the terms.
The best account known to me of the art of memory in antiquity is
that given by H. Hajdu, Das Mnemotechnische Schriftum des Mittelalters,
Vienna, 1936. I attempted a brief sketch of it in my article 'The Ciceronian Art of Memory' inMedioeve e Rinascimento, Studi in onore di Bruno
Nardi, Florence, 1955, II, pp. 871 ff. On the whole, the subject has been
curiously neglected.

C-A.O.M.

I

THREE LA TIN SOURCES FOR THE CLASSICAL ART OF MEMORY

take them away for burial were unable to identify them. But
Simonides remembered the places at which they had been sitting
at the table and was therefore able to indicate to therelatives which
were their dead. The invisible callers, Castor and Pollux, had
handsomely paid for their share in the panegyric by drawing
Simonides away from the banquet just before the crash. And this
experience suggested to the poet the principles of the art of memory
of which he is said to have been the inventor. Noting that it was
through his memory of the places at which the guests hadbeen
sitting that he had been able to identify the bodies, he realised that
orderly arrangement is essential for good memory.
He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory)
must select places and form mental images of the things they wish
to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order
of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images...