The Art of Memory

Fülszöveg

History of Culture
The Art of Memory
Frances A. Yates
"Once in a very great while, historical scholarship produces a book which makes one immediately begin re-thinking many of his major suppositions about the thought systems of the past. Professor Yates has given us such a book." —Norman D. Hinton, The Modern Schoolman
Hundreds of years before the invention of movable type made possible the widespread reproduction of written records, the Greeks devised a system of "artificial memory" to retain vast stores of knowledge without the help of the printed page. In this work Frances A. Yates traces the art of memory from its use by the orators of antiquity, through its moralized and Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages, to the occult forms it took in the Renaissance, and finally to its use in the seventeenth century by the scientific philosophers.
Professor Yates returns to the subject of her highly praised Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, and examines Bruno's... Tovább

Fülszöveg

History of Culture
The Art of Memory
Frances A. Yates
"Once in a very great while, historical scholarship produces a book which makes one immediately begin re-thinking many of his major suppositions about the thought systems of the past. Professor Yates has given us such a book." —Norman D. Hinton, The Modern Schoolman
Hundreds of years before the invention of movable type made possible the widespread reproduction of written records, the Greeks devised a system of "artificial memory" to retain vast stores of knowledge without the help of the printed page. In this work Frances A. Yates traces the art of memory from its use by the orators of antiquity, through its moralized and Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages, to the occult forms it took in the Renaissance, and finally to its use in the seventeenth century by the scientific philosophers.
Professor Yates returns to the subject of her highly praised Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, and examines Bruno's Hermetic art of memory and the impact that it made in Elizabethan England. Bruno's memory systems were based on associative principles linked to astrological systems, mixing Lullist combinations and cabalistic magic. Another enlightening chapter on Robert Fludd's "Memory Theatre"
suggests that Shakespeare's Globe was an adaptation of the classical theater with cosmological proportions.
This work is the first to relate the art of memory to the history of culture as a whole. Historians of philosophy and psychology, of art and literature, and of the emergence of the scientific method will welcome this important study.
"Few books could rival this for span of disciplines mastered and brilliance of insights ."—Classical Philology
"From any book Miss Yates writes the student learns more than he ever dared bargain for; to that rule this book is no exception.' -Rosalie L. Colie, Comparative Literature
FRANCES A. YATES was Reader in the History of the Renaissance at the University of London Her other books include Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press Vissza