Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture ed. by Donald A. Beecher, Grant Williams (review)

REVIEWS 229 Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture, ed. Donald A. Beecher and Grant Williams (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies 2009) 440 pp. The Western textual tradition of the ars memoriae, or art of memory, begins as advice for the rhetorician. Three classical treatises well-known in the Middle Ages described the practice of mentally organizing and recalling imagery in the service of oratory: De inventione by Cicero, Institutio oratoria by Quintilian, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium by an unknown author (formerly attributed to Cicero). Medieval treatises, however, were less likely to associate the memory arts with speechmaking than with ethics; Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) wrote of developing the art of memory as a religious duty. The Renaissance witnessed a proliferation of ars memoriae texts, by Jacobus Publicius (fl. 1462–1470), Giulio Camillo (1480–1554), Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Robert Fludd (1574–1637), and many others, several of whom developed “systems of memory” that were connected to hermeticism or the occult. In 1929 Ludwig Volkmann (“Ars memorativa”) described the complexity of this rich and unusual literary tradition , which was brought to the attention of a new generation of scholars with the publication of Paolo Rossi’s Clavis universalis: Arti mnemoniche e logica combinatoria de Lullo a Leibniz (1960) and to numerous English-speaking scholars with Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966). In the last decades, several important studies related to the ars memoriae include: Herwig Blum’s Die antike Mnemotechnik (1969), Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984), Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990), Janet Coleman’s Ancient and Medieval Memories. Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (1992), and Lina Bolzoni’s The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press (2001). This impressive collection of sixteen essays edited by Donald Beecher and Grant Williams takes for its topic Renaissance memory. As Beecher observes in his introduction and postscript, the subjects of recent studies on Renaissance memory have been limited neither to ars memoriae treatises nor to mnemonic devices such as the memory palace. Rather, scholars have broadened their research to include: memory in connection with literary forms, such as travel writing, memoir, commonplaces, ricordanze, diary, and autobiography; memory as a faculty of cognition described by philosophers and physicians; memory in relation to personal, collective, and cultural identity; the significance of the printed book and the development of the library on memory; and social memorializing . Hence Beecher and Grant have organized their volume thematically into six sections of two or three essays: “Revisioning the Classical Art of Memory”; “Manuscripts, Commonplace Books, and Personal Recollection”; “Learning, Rhetoric, and the Humanist Challenge”; “Ethics and Memory in English Literature”; “Nations, Historiography, and Cultural Identity”; and “Natural Memory vs. Artificial Recollection.” The essays can only briefly be described here. In the first section, Brenda Dunn-Lardeau investigates the mnemonic architecture and the organization of images of exempla in loci memoriae in Jehan Du Pré’s Le Palias des nobles Dames (1534), a text in the tradition of the defense of illustrious women. An- REVIEWS 230 drea Torre illustrates how early modern mnemonic imagery might influence other arts by relating patterns of imago memoriae in two anonymous fifteenthcentury ars memoriae manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (MSS 3368 and 2521) to emblems located in the wooden choir of St. Giustina’s church in Padua and to the panegyric Il memoriale by Emanuele Tesaura (1592–1675). Wolfgang Neuber examines the creation, reception, and dissemination of early modern printed images of cannibalism, especially those involving depictions of New World natives, in order to consider how cultures employ mnemonic imagery when constructing their own collective memory. The second section includes essays by James Nelson Novoa, who transcribes from aljamiado (Castilian written in Hebrew letters), translates, and analyzes the Arte a la memoria, a unique Sephardic text. Kenneth R Bartlett contemplates why Sir Thomas Hoby (1530–1566), the English ambassador to France and pioneering translator of Castiglione’s Il Libro del cortegiano (1561), copied into his travel journal, The Travail and Lief of...