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The Art of Memory
by
One of Modern Library's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century
In this classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page, Frances A. Yates traces the art of memory from its treatment by Greek orators, through its Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages, to the occult forms it took in the Renaissance ...more
In this classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page, Frances A. Yates traces the art of memory from its treatment by Greek orators, through its Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages, to the occult forms it took in the Renaissance ...more
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Paperback, 400 pages
Published
April 1st 2001
by University of Chicago Press
(first published 1966)
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One thing that is impossible to fully grasp about the past is the fact that hundreds of years ago people had significantly different mental worlds to our own. Popular histories tend to entirely sidestep this in favour of drawing parallels and contrasts with current habits of life, while more academic history often struggles with the unwieldiness of explaining it. ‘The Art of Memory’ confronts the issue head on by telling the story of memory techniques used in classical, Medieval, and Renaissance
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This is a fascinating history of the "art of memory"--an imaginary, spatio-visual technique for storing vast amounts of information before the printed page. Imagine a building with which you are intimately familiar, with plenty of space and a logical sequence to the rooms. Now put vivid, lurid statues (preferably "corporeal similitudes" but objects also work) representing the concepts (or specifics) you want to remember in the rooms at appropriate intervals. When you want to remember something,
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*Note: After re-reading this review, I am thoroughly unsatisfied with it. Try as I may, I cannot convey just how amazing this book is. Before reading it, I had no idea the depth and breadth of what I didn't know. It has changed the way I read classical and medieval history.
This book opened up to me an understanding of an entire discipline dedicated to memory, which I had never discovered previously. I had to re-read the first three chapters after going over them once because it took awhile to ad ...more
This book opened up to me an understanding of an entire discipline dedicated to memory, which I had never discovered previously. I had to re-read the first three chapters after going over them once because it took awhile to ad ...more

This is one of my favourite books of all time, which I have read three times by now. It tells the story of the now forgotten art of memory which was practised in ancient times from its beginnings in Ancient Greece up until round about the Enlightenment, when it fell into disuse amongst the educated elite, along with so much else of the wit and wisdom of times past. It is a great pity that we are not all taught this art of memory at school. This art of memory still forms the foundation of modern
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There are enough reviews here describing the contents and quality of this book. For me, the best part was the palpable sense of discovery the author conveyed as she began to see how Simonides's artificial memory permeated Renaissance culture and became a hidden strand connecting Thomas Aquinas's Method to Raymond Llull's Art to Giordano Bruno's enigmatic Shadows and Seals and on to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz's invention of infinitesimal calculus.
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The scope of this book is huge. One can only wonder at the years of work and study necessary to write it. From a practical stand point there is not much to be gained from this book. However, one can learn about the old way of learning without studying medieval Latin treatises or other similar things. And it contains some other incredible morsels like a reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe Theater, or the influence of the ars memorativa on Leibniz.
All in all, in my opinion, in ars memorativa the ...more
All in all, in my opinion, in ars memorativa the ...more

This review may be more autobiographical than a review, but in 2014 I was working for a summer in Kansas City and we were commuting to Topeka daily, which was about an hour and a half away. I had a lot of downtime and I came across a Wikipedia page (which I could not more highly recommend), The Method Of Loci. I was interested in how people memorized x number of digits of Pi and I got more than I bargained for. It was so fascinating to me, the idea of storing objects in a specific place in a bui
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One star is slightly misleading, but I couldn't justify the two. The topic of this book is endlessly intriguing, but in the hands of this author it became a Sisyphean battle. Finnegans Wake was a country stroll in comparison. Every single paragraph of the text oozes with this woman's blatant over-education. Not her fault, but neither is it mine to feel completely emotionless towards what she's trying to achieve.
If you're looking for a direction in which to go about pursuing the techniques discus ...more
If you're looking for a direction in which to go about pursuing the techniques discus ...more

Understanding memory has been one of man's greatest interest and achieving the little knowledge we know of our own mind is a great accomplishment as is.
Frances A. Yates explains the history of the 'art of memory' as she calls it, starting from the master of memory himself - Simonides and the unknown author of Ad Herenium. Giving detailed descriptions of how to go abaout honing one's memory/ I went into this book as a speculator - something in the title and cover drew me in - and came out with in ...more
Frances A. Yates explains the history of the 'art of memory' as she calls it, starting from the master of memory himself - Simonides and the unknown author of Ad Herenium. Giving detailed descriptions of how to go abaout honing one's memory/ I went into this book as a speculator - something in the title and cover drew me in - and came out with in ...more

Really cool subject matter, I would never have thought about this subject matter as a subject matter, and even cooler is at the center of the subject matter is a mystery, and so you aren't even sure what you are reading about exactly. The beginning of a study, so much untapped into, although also, rather anglo-centric. Maybe some new academic will expand (or maybe has?)this study to include african or asian systems of memory...
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This may have been one of the most dense reads I've ever journeyed into, but it was worth it. I've read several books in the time it took me to read this one, but that's only because the information in here cannot be easily consumed. The depth of detail that goes into each part of the history and it's separate founders all comes together so incredibly beautifully. I've learned so much more about historical figures I was aware of, and their influence into the mid centuries-Europe, and so many new
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I thought this book was just going to be about how the Greeks were good at remembering things, but boy howdy, the Art of Memory really went flying off the rails pretty quickly. The Renaissance was a wild time, I tell you what! This book is loads of fun - the author has plenty of personality and helps guide you through a strange and baffling history of occult magic systems and esoteric philosophy, all based on the ideas of a few Greeks who just wanted to memorize a speech or two.

Frances Yates is an extraordinary scholar with a dry and reserved sense of humor. This was a long slog for me but I was determined to get through it no matter how long it took. In terms of the depth of the material covered, it was like taking a 15 week doctoral course, so I treated it that way. No rushing through it; I would read a section, then re-read and underline, then re-read and summarize a paragraph or a page in the margin in my effort to retain as much as possible.
In addition to her car ...more
In addition to her car ...more

Dame France Yates' treatise starts off innocently enough: “Orderly arrangement is essential for good memory” (Yates 17). So the ancients thought. The ars memoria by itself is neutral. Yates advances the thesis that Renaissance thinkers used it as a vehicle for the Hermetic tradition. While the medieval tradition did little to develop the art of memory, it did set the stage for Renaissance Neoplatonism, which transformed the art of memory into a hermetic and occultic doctrine (134).
The memory sys ...more
The memory sys ...more

Pretty awesome book. It's not a how-to book, but a history of people who were quite memorious and how the techniques of memory changed over time. Before the printed word, people were valued for how much they could remember. So since the Greeks, they devised ever more clever ways to remember important things. I've always been fascinated by "Renaisance Men", polymaths, and encyclopedists, but I never understood how someone could hold such vast amounts of information in their heads. Now I know. If
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What a fascinating work. Groundbreaking history told with a lively voice. Yates pioneered work on the history of mnemonic techniques which were far more influential than was commonly supposed. Essentially a whole area of intellectual history had been ignored for the last three hundred years because its occult connections made it "disreputable" (it's interesting the blinders academics can wear, and always worth remembering).
This book has influenced several important writers of fiction in the deca ...more
This book has influenced several important writers of fiction in the deca ...more

This is a good introduction to the subject and how widespread the art of memory was up until Leibniz. I felt it lacked a certain context linking the pre-Enlightenment world to our world. For that missing context, try Paolo Rossi's Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language.
Feels kind of dumb to award it 4 stars, since the writing is far superior to most 21st century academic publications, but star ratings are always going to be a little arbitrary. ...more
Feels kind of dumb to award it 4 stars, since the writing is far superior to most 21st century academic publications, but star ratings are always going to be a little arbitrary. ...more

I found this book a while ago--- through the bibliography in Jonathan Spence's "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci", a book I loved (and used to assign to intro World History classes). Dame Frances Yates is a fine writer about the more esoteric side of late-Renaissance and Early Modern Europe (see her "The Rosicrucian Enlightenment"), and "The Art of Memory" is an intriguing account of both the mnemonic arts in 16th-c. Europe and of the way the era imagined ways to describe the world. A fascinati
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This amazing history of the Art of Memory, dating back into the Roman writings of an unknown writer most often associated with Cicero, was absolutely fascinating, and started me down the long and winding road of my love of Giordano Bruno (that John Crowley helped me with). This book has also led me to the wonderful works of Mary Carruthers on medieval memory.

I was pretty sure I saw a reference to Frances Yates in one of CS Lewis' monographs, but I haven't turned it up now that I tried to find it again, dearly as I would like to. My main reason for reading The Art of Memory, though, is that Pullman is quoted in Frost referring approvingly to Yates, and he puts it at the end of his list of reading recommendations. I'm pretty sure Yates is an influence on Crowley's Little, Big as well. Whether these are reasons you might like to read it or not, they ce
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To me, one of the most beautiful aspects of reading is that books can be the portal to aspects of the world and its history that are very unfamiliar to us. Unfortunately, a book that can teach us something new must not necessarily be easy or interesting to read. The Art of Memory definitely falls into this category for me; there was plenty to be learned for me but oftentimes reading was a very trying experience.
Some key things I've learned:
- I got a new understanding of the nature of the Middle ...more
Some key things I've learned:
- I got a new understanding of the nature of the Middle ...more

I did not expect to take such a liking to this book. It is both a detailed research and a pure joy to read. The history of the art of memory, from Aristotle to Leibniz, was fascinating. Yates kept my undivided attention throughout the entire book, even though her subject matter seems endless, and at time hermetic (pun intended). Nowhere did I find her insane erudition tiring - quite the contrary. I finished the book within ten days, and expect to return to it in the future for references.
Should ...more
Should ...more

This is a fascinating book -it is on one level a history of a particular mnemonic technique or suite of related mnemonic techniques, but at times seems more like a discussion of the politics surrounding said suite of techniques - from early writings, in which it is presented as a basic method frequently used for memorizing speeches, to the medieval period, in which it is inherently a method of meditating on virtue and sin, to the renaissance, where it is a component of esoteric and mystical thin
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It started off as a rather challenging read for me. English is not my first language and academic English is far from being second or even third. The first few chapters ended up being hard work where I had to check quite a few words in a dictionary and reread many paragraphs more than once, forcing my attention to do more than just sliding through the text. I did get a hang of it towards the middle of the book and by the end of it the reading process turned to be quite enjoyable. I guess it says
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It's mostly a history of the art of memory, rather than a book that deals with all the techniques and methods and, like, a step-by-step guide to the art. It does detail the memory place method, but as it moves forward, the author explains that she is unable to explain the methods in detail, which is understandable, due to the size of the literature available, and says that one who wishes to understand the authors, like Bruno and Camilio, must turn to their works. But she did a splendid job in th
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Yates attempts the impossible. His thorough research details that once artificial memory had been practiced. Unfortunately, only references exist to this process. It depended upon one’s imagination to create rooms wherein thoughts were stored from which one would enter and extract, verbatim, the information. From Simonides (b. 556 BC) through Cicero and subsequent orators and even to Thomas Aquinas a similar method was used. Then came book publishing. With print, man no longer needed his imagina
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This is an intriguing, vastly erudite, and fastidious history of the art of memory. Yates takes us through the muck at certain points with her innumerable references to arcane Italian, French, and Latin sources, but we emerge at the end with a fascinating notion: that the development of memory was, in and of itself, a method for gathering and storing universal knowledge, thus forming a precursor to the Enlightenment era and, eventually, the invention of computing. Yates is at times discursive, g
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The topic is really interesting but the presentation is poor. This would have made a nice ~150 pages book of general interest, but this reads more like a historical manuscript, with a lot of references which are probably of interest only to a very narrow circle of specialists.
Also it seems like the author is constantly trying to 'up' the perceived value of the book/its topic by constantly giving praise to some famous historical personality, trying to weave them in into the fabric of the book. Th ...more
Also it seems like the author is constantly trying to 'up' the perceived value of the book/its topic by constantly giving praise to some famous historical personality, trying to weave them in into the fabric of the book. Th ...more
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Dame Frances Amelia Yates DBE FBA was an English historian who focused on the study of the Renaissance. In an academic capacity, she taught at the Warburg Institute of the University of London for many years, and also wrote a number of seminal books on the subject of esoteric history.
Yates was born to a middle-class family in Portsmouth, and was largely self-educated, before attaining a BA and MA ...more
Yates was born to a middle-class family in Portsmouth, and was largely self-educated, before attaining a BA and MA ...more
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“Now nature herself teaches us what we should do. When we see in every day life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvellous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, that we are likely to remember for a long time.”
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“the soul never thinks without a mental picture’,13 ‘the thinking faculty thinks of its forms in mental pictures’,14 ‘no one could ever learn or understand anything, if he had not the faculty of perception; even when he thinks speculatively, he must have some mental picture with which to think.’15 For”
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