After years of wanting to read Yates’ The Art of Memory but never getting down to it, I finally did so, and now have a fuller sense for the great draw, delight, and depth of her topic. Published in 1966, Yates’ wonderful book had (and still has) a kind of excitement attached to it. It was a book which investigated a topic that was relatively unexplored terrain. It was original, deeply inquisitive, and adventurous. It tackled very abstruse stuff while offering an outline of how it might all fit together. It was fruitful, one might say. Another admirable element of the book is that Yates never pretends to give the final word. Time and again she openly acknowledges that she has only scratched the surface of this or that particular topic, leaving it to, and encouraging, other scholars to delve deeper and help illuminate what she has brought to attention. In the fifty years since publication, much has been learned and improved on; but without a doubt Yates’ book remains an original and indispensable one for exploring the art of memory.
Her book spans from the ancient world, beginning with Simonides of Ceos (6th-5th century BC), all the way to Leibniz (17th cenury), whom Yates gives attention to in the final pages of her book. Given the vast timeline and the number of intellectual movements and figures she brings into play, naturally some are more fully discussed than others. Yates’ inquiry follows the art of memory over many centuries but her central aim is to explore the art of memory in the sixteenth century. The fact that Yates begins so far back and spends so much time on prior centuries shows the nature and spirit of her book. For Yates, in order to uncover the art of memory in the sixteenth century, we need first to understand how it evolved over the centuries. It is a journey that is incredibly fascinating and well illuminated by Yates.
But it should be pointed out that the travel is hard going and takes a considerable degree of effort. Even the expert Yates confesses that much of the terrain is very difficult, and that trying to comprehend fully the memory systems of Raymond Lull (13th century) and Giordano Bruno (16th century), for instance, is a mighty tall task. To give just some indication of the kind of material and thought we are dealing with, here is Yates speaking on Lull’s Liber ad memoriam confirmandam:
“The treatise opens with prayers to the divine Bonitas and other attributes, prayed to in association with the Virgin Mary and with the Holy Spirit. This is the Art of voluntas, its direction of the will. And in the rest of the treatise, the procedures of the Art as intellectus are alluded to, its mode of ascending and descending through the hierarchy of being, its power of making logical judgments through that part of memory which Lull calls discretio, through which the contents of memory are examined to reply to inquires as to whether things are true or certain.”
It can be heady stuff—and this is only the slightest taste—but the journey is coherent enough as long as the reader keeps in mind key texts and major strands of thought which underlie so much of the art of memory: whether we are dealing with the art of memory in the fourth century or the fourteenth century.
As Yates makes very clear, and begins her book with a discussion of, there are three Latin sources of immense value for understanding the classical art of memory: Cicero’s De Oratore, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, and the memory section of Rhetorica Ad Herrenium (wrongly attributed to Cicero for centuries; the author is unknown). The latter is especially valuable because, as Yates writes, “[it is] really the main source, and indeed the only complete source, for the classical art of memory both in the Greek and in the Latin world.” The Ad Herrenium is a text that not only Yates returns to time and again, but so do a number of the figures discussed in her book—though some much more than others. But without a doubt the ideas contained in the Ad Herrenium (1st century BC) maintained a very long life; and throughout the following centuries there is constant interaction with those ideas, either directly or indirectly.
One central notion expressed in the text is the division of memory into two kinds: natural and artificial. The former, says the author, is “embedded in our minds, born simultaneously with thought”; and the latter is “that memory which is strengthened by a kind of training and system of discipline.” (Yates uses the Loeb translation of Ad Herrenium, by Harry Caplan.) So much more is contained in the text — including the idea of the imagines agentes, or ‘striking image’, which is essential for facilitating memory. But suffice it to say that Ad Herrenium is a bedrock for later thinkers in how they approach (and alter) the art of memory. Indeed Yates writes that “It is of great importance to emphasize that the medieval 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.”
This does not mean, however, that the ideas from the Ad Herennium, including those on artificial memory, were stagnant. Those ideas were changed and tweaked, and the classical art of memory as a whole went through a kind of transformation in the hands of Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas (among others). But the classical art of memory is still quite recognizably present. As Yates eventually works her way to the Renaissance methods of the art of memory, this becomes much less obvious, especially on the surface. Indeed, in the Renaissance significant changes occur. Yates discusses the Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo to show an “example of [this] momentous change” and how “[Camillo] turns the classical art of memory into an occult art.” As I mentioned earlier, some of the material Yates deals with is very obscure, and the memory systems of the Renaissance (and their elements of the occult) perhaps illustrate this most clearly. A good deal of patience is therefore needed to make one’s way through these chapters.
But a good deal of fun can also be had as we work to uncover (along with Yates) the many transformations of the classical art — be it in the systems of Camillo or Lull or Bruno or any other figure. In fact, my experience of reading the book is that the more adventurous and playful one’s mindset is, the more pleasant and less daunting the material becomes (to a degree). I say this, in part, because there is a certain humor—though I don’t mean this is in an overly critical way of the thinkers—when juxtaposing the art of memory—which is designed primarily, one would think, to improve and better one’s memory—alongside the sometimes extraordinarily obscure and complex methods employed. In the cases of Lull and Bruno, for example, it can often seem as if no one but themselves could have understood what was going on in their respective systems and how, exactly, it all worked.
Be that as it may, it generally makes for exciting material, and Yates does a commendable job throughout the book elucidating the thought of these complex thinkers. From the Greek Simonides of the 6th/5th century to the classical Latin writers, to the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and beyond, Yates’ book covers a vast amount of territory and thought in a way that can be both admired and enjoyed.
Spectatio 