The Art of Memory, by Frances Yates

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 this 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 certainly shaped my approach to the book.

There are two main parts: everything up to Bruno, and everything after. In the former part, there's more historical context and more digestible information; in the latter, there's more of a sense of Yates' fascination with the material, which is complex and interesting, but which, perhaps by its esoteric nature, remains somewhat tentative and opaque. Yates' earlier book on Bruno is the next one I'll try to get a copy of. Even without more background on the Renaissance man of mystery, though, than some familiarity with his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, or perhaps the moving poem by Milosz, you get tantalizing hints in the second half of The Art of Memory of a whole obscure history of magic and idealism breathing from nearly forgotten books with titles like Shadows, Circe, and Seals, abbreviated translations of much longer titles in Latin.



Yates does an admirable job weaving this unruly and wondrous Renaissance material into a larger and if possible still more audacious project of tracing memory, its theory and practice, from the classical sources to its impact on Shakespeare's Globe Theater. "The vivid story of how Simonides invented the art of memory is told by Cicero in his De oratore"; besides this primary source, which opens the book with a bang, we see related passages in Quintilian about the use of the zodiac as a mnemonic structure. These fragmentary classical origins are developed through medieval transmission by Thomas Aquinas, who draws on Aristotle and the Bible to range memory under the virtue of Prudence, and Dante, whose circles and spheres fit the ancient rhetorical-pictorial tradition, and they flower in the Renaissance in the ornate but lost "Memory Theatre" of Giulio Camillo, who aspired to a total integration of human and divine knowledge with the aid of symbolic images. Bruno's hermetic explorations follow. The microcosm of the memory artist, still more amazingly, maps onto the Shakespearean theater, with its proportions and starry canopy reimagined by Yates through her reading of Fludd, and in a compelling conclusion the powers of scientific inquiry are linked back to the imaginative memory tradition in the work of the polymath Leibniz.

For Pullman, the rich atmosphere of images surrounding the Renaissance, incorporating perhaps the wheels of Lull or the living statues of Hermetic Egypt, contribute much to the speech of Dr Lanselius, the witch consul, in The Golden Compass. For the Platonist in Lewis, no doubt much of the shifting planetary systems came into his Space trilogy. Crowley's debt is obvious, in his magus Ariel Hawksquill in L,B and even a Bruno character in his Aegypt books. But beyond these influences, Yates' own storytelling is incredibly powerful as daring history and as intellectual fun.