Nathaniel, before everything else: great thanks for your elaboration.
I just finished reading France's Yates' _The Art of Memory_. Now this is,
by now, a fairly old book -- it came out in 1966 -- and although it was
then the first extensive treatment of the subject, it might be that it
has since been superseded by further research and different understandings.
But Yates' interpretation of the classical and Renaissance mnemonic
tradition seems to me to link it much more strongly with the "public"
problematic than the way you're casting it, and I am curious what you think
of her views.
So for example, you write:
> Originally memory was one of the
> five canons of memory and consisted mainly of techniques of memorizing
> material for later use in speeches, public discourse, and so on.
> Rhetoricians told their students to practice memory techniques like
> putting images in a building, then they could imagine themselves walking
> through the building and seeing the images, which would bring
> recollection of the things they wanted to say. Memory seen this way was a
> private practice, a gift or faculty of recalling things, and as such,
> psychological.
> Although memory gets treated a bit differently through the middle ages
> and the renaissaince, the main way they thought about it was as a
> psychologistic practice. A natural faculty which people could improve
> with practice (Cicero did say this earlier). Throught the rest of the
> centuries after that the work of memory has been seen just like that,
> individual recalls then shares with others, etc.
So already in your (and Yates') account of the classical art of memory as
part of rhetorics, the public sphere immediately enters. What was meant
to be remembered through the artificial memory were things that one needed
for public life: details of law suits one was arguing, of political events
one was participating in, virtues and vices that formed part of the public
ethical culture one was a spokesman for, and so on. It was not really
private things that one would commit to memory and then share with others,
but rather things that were already shared and that the individual needed
to keep in memory in order to effectively participate in the life of the
community. In fact, a major part of Yates' investigation has to do with
her perception that much of the material culture of the the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance -- religious art and architecture, texts like Dante's
"Divine Comedy" -- can be seen as a material embodiment of this memory
tradition. In the Renaissance, the "internal" memory techniques developed
in classical rhetorics become explicitly "externalized" in projects such
as Guilio Camillo's memory theatre or in the "global" memory architectures
developed by Ramon Lull, Giordano Bruno, Robert Fludd. Here, the art of
memory becomes a search for methods for apprehending, and communicating with,
the entire cosmos -- but it is the shared cosmos, and has very little to do
with individual psychology.
The account put forth in Yates' book seems to me, in some sense,
the reverse of what you are postulating: it gives the impression that what
is fairly recent is precisely the concern with memory as a matter
of individual psychology, and the separation of this "private" realm from
another realm, designated as "public". I wonder what you think of this.
-m
I just finished reading France's Yates' _The Art of Memory_. Now this is,
by now, a fairly old book -- it came out in 1966 -- and although it was
then the first extensive treatment of the subject, it might be that it
has since been superseded by further research and different understandings.
But Yates' interpretation of the classical and Renaissance mnemonic
tradition seems to me to link it much more strongly with the "public"
problematic than the way you're casting it, and I am curious what you think
of her views.
So for example, you write:
> Originally memory was one of the
> five canons of memory and consisted mainly of techniques of memorizing
> material for later use in speeches, public discourse, and so on.
> Rhetoricians told their students to practice memory techniques like
> putting images in a building, then they could imagine themselves walking
> through the building and seeing the images, which would bring
> recollection of the things they wanted to say. Memory seen this way was a
> private practice, a gift or faculty of recalling things, and as such,
> psychological.
> Although memory gets treated a bit differently through the middle ages
> and the renaissaince, the main way they thought about it was as a
> psychologistic practice. A natural faculty which people could improve
> with practice (Cicero did say this earlier). Throught the rest of the
> centuries after that the work of memory has been seen just like that,
> individual recalls then shares with others, etc.
So already in your (and Yates') account of the classical art of memory as
part of rhetorics, the public sphere immediately enters. What was meant
to be remembered through the artificial memory were things that one needed
for public life: details of law suits one was arguing, of political events
one was participating in, virtues and vices that formed part of the public
ethical culture one was a spokesman for, and so on. It was not really
private things that one would commit to memory and then share with others,
but rather things that were already shared and that the individual needed
to keep in memory in order to effectively participate in the life of the
community. In fact, a major part of Yates' investigation has to do with
her perception that much of the material culture of the the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance -- religious art and architecture, texts like Dante's
"Divine Comedy" -- can be seen as a material embodiment of this memory
tradition. In the Renaissance, the "internal" memory techniques developed
in classical rhetorics become explicitly "externalized" in projects such
as Guilio Camillo's memory theatre or in the "global" memory architectures
developed by Ramon Lull, Giordano Bruno, Robert Fludd. Here, the art of
memory becomes a search for methods for apprehending, and communicating with,
the entire cosmos -- but it is the shared cosmos, and has very little to do
with individual psychology.
The account put forth in Yates' book seems to me, in some sense,
the reverse of what you are postulating: it gives the impression that what
is fairly recent is precisely the concern with memory as a matter
of individual psychology, and the separation of this "private" realm from
another realm, designated as "public". I wonder what you think of this.
-m