6

Theaters of Memory

Memory as Reference

On February 17, 2000, hundreds of people gathered in the Campo de’ Fiori (“the field of flowers”)—a large square, or piazza, in Rome beneath the statue of a man dressed in monk’s robes, the hood casting his face in eternal shadow.

The crowd, a motley collection of anarchists, atheists, freethinkers, and pantheists, quickly set up booths and speaking platforms, plugged in loudspeakers, and covered tables with pamphlets … and proceeded to denounce the Roman Catholic Church to whomever walked past.1

The crowd, different in their beliefs, but united in their common hatred, had gathered on this particular day to celebrate an event that had occurred four hundred years earlier: the public burning of a heretic. And the man of the hour on both occasions was the brooding figure on the nearby pedestal: the Dominican friar, theologian, philosopher, and scientist Giordano Bruno.

Passersby could be forgiven if they didn’t recognize the object of veneration. By the time he faced his auto-da-fé, Bruno was already almost a forgotten figure, having spent the previous seven years imprisoned in the center of the city in the Tower of Nona while he underwent a seemingly endless trial, conducted by Galileo’s inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine. In the end, he was found guilty of a long string of crimes against the Church including holding erroneous opinions about Christ, the Incarnation, the Trinity, Transubstantiation, and the Mass; a disbelief in the virginity of Mary; and, most uniquely, a belief “in a plurality of worlds and their eternity.”2

The same passersby might also be forgiven if they wondered what the fuss was all about in the year 2000: Not only were Bruno’s crimes not too far from the beliefs held by many modern Catholic theologians (and almost a prerequisite for becoming, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury), but just days before the demonstration the Vatican itself had publicly apologized for Bruno’s burning.

AN INDOMITABLE WOMAN

For most of those four hundred years that passed since Bruno’s ashes were dumped into the Tiber River, he was all but forgotten—one of those minor figures of the Renaissance who paid the ultimate price for being ahead of his time (and not too far ahead either: His was one of the last burnings of a heretic by the Church). And Giordano Bruno might have remained obscure had not a reader in Renaissance history at the University of London, the middle-class daughter of a shipyard engineer from Southsea, Portsmouth, decided to look deeper into Bruno’s newly rediscovered works on memory.

This was 1951. Just eleven years earlier, Bruno’s name had briefly resurfaced when the Vatican announced, in an academic paper, that it had discovered the long-lost transcripts of Bruno’s trial. Three years later, in 1943, the author of the article, a Cardinal Giovanni Mercati, publicly announced that based on those transcripts he believed that Bruno was indeed guilty of his accused crimes. But there was a war on and, moreover, Italy was the enemy, so interest in the story was slight and quickly forgotten.

Except by Frances Yates. In retrospect, it seems natural that this no-nonsense British scholar (she professed to never seeing much practical value in the mystical arts practiced by her subjects) might find a common ground across the centuries with this radical monk of the Italian Renaissance. Both were mavericks, staking out intellectual positions at odds with the common view. Both were also internationalists: Bruno spent years wandering about Europe, accepting shelter and sanctuary from any prince or university that would take him. Yates, who had seen her brother die in World War I and herself survived the Blitz in World War II, had grown bitter about the costs of nationalism and division—and began to devote her life and career to interdisciplinary studies and transnational politics.

Most of all, they were fearless. Bruno’s life was one long battle against the established order and its unchallenged beliefs, his horrible death the inevitable consequence. He might have survived with an early and carefully worded recantation. But instead, he forced the Inquisition to demand a full recantation … and refused to give it. When, at last, as his sentence was named, Bruno reportedly made a threatening gesture at his judges and then spit at them the words, “Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”3

The situation wouldn’t be life or death for Frances Yates as she began to dig deeper and deeper into the increasingly strange nature of Bruno’s writing. But what she encountered there—and its implications for the official history of the Renaissance—was so unsettling that to publish it risked giving her a reputation as a crank … and for a woman scholar in the early 1950s, that would have been a career killer.

But Yates didn’t hesitate. And in 1964, she published Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. She followed up two years later with the work for which she is best known, The Art of Memory.

The first book stunned the world of medieval historians. The second sent shock waves through the academic world and even lapped up against the mainstream reading audience. And what shocked these audiences was exactly what had unsettled Yates in the first place: the notion of a second, hidden history of human thought that was secretive, antirational, built upon magical thinking and a quest for godlike omniscience … and all constructed around the art of superpowered memory that had briefly surfaced with Cicero and the orators of the late Roman Republic.

It was an idea so fantastic that Yates herself had initially fought it. But the deeper she searched, the more the conclusion became inescapable, not least because it explained so many mysteries of medieval intellectual history. Wrote Yates:

I could not understand what happened to the art of memory in the Middle Ages. Why did Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas regard the use in memory of the places and images of “Tullius” [Cicero] a moral and religious duty?… Why, when the invention of printing seemed to have made the Great Gothic artificial memories of the Middle Ages no longer necessary, was there this recrudescence of the interest in the art of memory in the strange forms in which we find it in the Renaissance systems of [Giulio] Camillo, Bruno and [Robert] Fludd?4

For Yates, the biggest question of all was: How did a practical tool to help orators improve their rhetorical abilities become transformed—out of sight of the world—into a metaphysical and ethical system that got its practitioners burned at the stake for heresy?

The search for answers took Yates into the most unlikely historical back alleys. And, incredibly, the strangest of all turned out to be the most important: Hermeticism.

THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE

Hermeticism was an occult religion that first appeared in about the second century A.D.—but claimed to date back to ancient Egypt—as a sort of last-ditch attempt to salvage traditional pagan religion in the face of the growing influence of Christianity. There was a lot of this going around at the time; it’s no coincidence that this period also saw the rise of the equally heretical (and persistent) Gnosticism.

In its original incarnation, Hermeticism accepted some of the key tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition, notably the goodness and perfection of a single God and the need to purify oneself of sin … but after that, everything went very strange indeed. In particular, as the name suggests, Hermeticism used pagan rituals (notably image worship) to venerate a figure named Hermes Trimestigus—“trice-great Hermes”—who appears to have been a hybrid (a “syncretic”) of the Greek messenger god Hermes and the Egyptian god of intelligence Thoth (he’s the one with the head of an ibis or baboon). According to the tenets of Hermeticism, Hermes Trimestigus was the pathway to the great corpus of “secret” knowledge that included everything from alchemy to the secrets of the universe.

Unsurprisingly, one of the other characteristics of Hermeticism was its mistrust of rationality—not a bad position to hold when you are convinced you can know the mind of God. What is surprising to most modern readers is that almost all of us encounter the primary symbol of Hermeticism regularly in our daily lives. It is the caduceus, the two snakes winding around a winged pole that is the most common symbol for commercial health-care organizations in the Western world (and is itself the result of confusion with another snake-around-a-stick symbol, the Rod of Asclepius—it’s a complicated story). This same caduceus, with or without snakes, is traditionally seen in sculptures in Hermes’s hand.

Hermeticism is one of those classic pseudoscientific belief systems—the most famous being astrology—that arose before modern empirical science, and that have shown an amazing ability to survive in the face of it, often by going dormant and reappearing centuries later. In the case of Hermeticism, during its first century it managed to pop up in Syrian, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, and Byzantine Greek versions. Even Augustine took time to attack it. And then, after disappearing in Europe for the late Middle Ages, it reappeared during the Renaissance. Frances Yates was able to trace this reemergence pretty precisely to 1460 and an agent of a Tuscan ruler, the legendary patriarch of the de Medici dynasty, Cosimo.

Cosimo de Medici, like many of the rulers of the era, was on the hunt for ancient manuscripts, and he had sent out his agent, known only as “Leonardo” to search the old monasteries of Europe to find them. One of the prizes Leonardo returned with was the Corpus Hermeticum, the core text of Hermeticism—a reminder that medieval and Renaissance scholars, in preserving the past, saved both the good and the bad … and mistakenly venerated both.

From there, it was translated by a member of the de Medici court named Marsilio Ficino, who published it in 1471 as thirteen short treatises (“tractates”). And from there it fell into the hands of Giordano Bruno.

The great figures of the Renaissance always seem positioned at the confluence of multiple streams of memories flowing from a newly rediscovered past and as recipients of the latest discoveries coming from the emerging world of science. Think of Johannes Kepler and Galileo inheriting both the rediscovered works of Ptolemy and Aristotle’s On the Heavens, as well the theories of Copernicus and the research of Tyco Brahe. Or William Harvey, working from (and eventually disputing) Galen while drawing on the work of anatomists of the previous four centuries—from Ibn al-Nafis in the thirteenth century to Michael Servetus a few decades before—to discover the circulation of blood.

Giordano Bruno was no exception. Like a certain type of brilliant man or woman throughout history, Bruno was attracted to the notion of secret knowledge and the awesome power reputedly wielded by its practitioners. And Hermeticism was believed to be the deepest and oldest form of magic, drawn from the darkest corridors of memory dating back to the pyramids and the Sphinx. But Bruno was also a man of the cloth, a monk, charged to defend the Catholic faith, the church, and its tenets. And needless to say, the Holy See—and its enforcement arm, the Inquisition—did not look kindly upon practices such as alchemy and magic, and was willing to use the tools of torture and death to root it out of the population.

No fool, Bruno well understood that to even read the Corpus Hermeticum was heresy, and a possible death sentence. But being a maverick thinker, he couldn’t help but be drawn ever deeper into Hermeticism and other forbidden areas of knowledge, such as the anti-Trinitarian Arian Heresy and the humanistic Protestantism of Erasmus. And try as he might to hide these interests, in the close confines of the monastery they occasionally slipped out … and were noted. At different times he was caught throwing away images of saints or suggesting questionable readings to novices. Worst of all was the discovery—hidden in a privy—of his annotated copy of a book by Erasmus.5

Facing a hearing by the Church, Bruno fled Naples, and for the next seven years he was on the move—first throughout Italy, eventually resting in Venice, where he published a book, then on to France and ultimately the sanctuary city of Calvinist Geneva. There he abandoned his monk’s robes and took to wearing everyday clothes so as not to be recognized.

Throughout these journeys, Bruno did not dare carry any books or writings that might betray him to the local authorities. Instead, he carried a secret weapon in his head: the Art of Memory. This was the second ancient stream that had reached Giordano Bruno at a young age and changed his life forever. Even as a youth, Bruno had been noted for his powerful memory. But it was Ad Herennium, Quintilian, and Cicero’s De Oratore that fired Bruno’s ambition to become a master of the Art of Memory as great as the Roman orators.

But whereas the ancients had almost exclusively seen “synthetic” memory as a tool of their trade, Bruno (as was his way) saw something else … something mystical. After all, wasn’t the Art of Memory a means for mere mortals to access superhuman quantities of knowledge? And as they did so, might they draw parallels, connections, and distinctions far beyond those made in everyday life? And wasn’t this like the mind of God?

Even more than that, it wasn’t lost on Giordano Bruno that many of the disciplines of Hermeticism—notably astrology—were themselves kinds of memory “theaters” in which complex meanings were attached in a mnemonic way to a fixed system of symbols. It was Yates herself who noticed that, in a famous description from Ad Herennium, there are not just any testicles hanging from a statue’s cold stone hand, but a ram’s testicles—in other words, Aries, the very first sign of the Zodiac—suggesting a much older connection between the memory arts and astrology than previously thought.6

Such a connection between astrology and the Art of Memory seems natural, and no doubt Bruno saw it the same way. Now he could embed the secret knowledge of the universe into the familiar wheel of the Zodiac and store it all in his powerful brain where no one could find it. Or so he thought. So powerful was this new art that Bruno credited it with its own mystic powers. And since Hermeticism was a syncretic belief system—that is, one that readily absorbed new beliefs—it soon added the Art of Memory to its tradition.

It wasn’t long before the notion of memory theaters captured the imagination of progressive thinkers and mystics across Europe. Some of the more ambitious even decided to convert this mental technique into real physical structures. That is, actual private walk-in theaters of memory filled with all sorts of unusual structures and items on which to hang pieces of synthetic memory. There were probably two reasons for doing this: First, if the design was already memorable and painted with “blood,” it would make the memorization process easier by going halfway; and the process of memorizing forbidden, and potentially fatal, knowledge was not something you wanted to do in public.

MEMORY AS MAGIC

Probably the most famous (if only because Frances Yates devoted many pages to it) of these Renaissance physical memory theaters was built by the aforementioned Giulio Camillo in Padua in about 1530. It instantly made him one of the most celebrated figures on the continent. In a letter to Erasmus, a certain Viglius Zuichemas, after noting that everyone was talking about Camillo and his room crowded with images, said:

They say that this man has constructed a certain Amphitheatre, a work of wonderful skill, into which whoever is admitted as a spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero. I thought at first this was just a fable until I learned of the thing more fully from Baptista Egnatio. It is said that this Architect has drawn in certain places whatever about anything is found in Cicero … Certain orders or grades of figures are disposed … with stupendous labour and divine skill.7

The next time Zuichemas writes to Erasmus, it is after Camillo has given him a tour of the memory theater—and he can hardly contain his excitement at the experience. It is from this letter that history gets its first description of the structure.

The theater proves to be a small structure—perhaps the size of a small modern suburban bedroom, large enough to hold two visitors at a time. Organizationally, it is laid out in a series of rings, segmented into pie-shaped sections. Each of these sections corresponds to the known planets, and each ring corresponds to a common symbolic image from mythology, such as the sandals of Mercury or the Gorgon sisters. Then, within each of the forty-nine locations defined by ring and section can be found the memorable images themselves. For example:

The work is of wood, marked with many images, and full of little boxes; there are various orders and grades in it. He gives a place to each individual figure and ornament, and he showed me such a mass of papers that, though I always heard that Cicero was the fountain of richest eloquence, scarcely would I have thought that one author could contain so much or that so many volumes could be pieced together out of his writings … He stammers badly and speaks Latin with difficulty, excusing himself with the pretext that through continually using his pen he has nearly lost the use of speech …

He calls this theater of this by many names, saying now that it is built or constructed mind and soul, and now that it is a windowed one. He pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it a theater.8

The modern reader can imagine Erasmus—that very embodiment of reason and the great skewerer of human folly—laughing at all of this absurd gobbledygook. But perhaps he did not. We are, at the time of Giordano Bruno, still decades before Francis Bacon publishes The Advancement of Learning, enshrines the scientific method, and kicks off the revolution that defines the next 450 years. Moreover, it took a very long time for empirical research to bring light to all of the dark corners of superstition and mysticism. As late as the eighteenth century, Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest of all scientific minds, still secretly toyed with alchemy. So it is not surprising that here, in the middle of the “enlightened” Renaissance even the finest thinkers of the age might still have casually lumped magic and the dark arts in with the rest of the natural sciences.

And before we congratulate ourselves for having at last escaped this mumbo jumbo, one need only consider the influence of Bruno’s intellectual descendant, Aleister Crowley; the occult religion of theosophy; and the psychological writings of Carl Jung on twentieth-century art and culture. In one of the most famous modern short stories, “The Aleph,” Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges posits that hidden in a cellar is the ultimate memory theater: a single point that contains all other points, so that in peering in one can see the universe from every possible angle.

Meanwhile, most of us have spent a lot of our lives in modern “memory theaters” whose pedigrees have been obscured by the centuries. For example, as Yates noted, the most famous theater of the seventeenth century, London’s Globe, the home of many of Shakespeare’s play premieres, appears to have been designed along the lines of Camillo’s plan. How perfect: the world’s greatest memory plays performed in the world’s most famous memory theater! And that’s only half of the story. Remember all of those odd little “figures and ornaments” in boxes in the alcoves of the memory theater? They appear to have been the model for the popular “cabinets of curiosities” in the centuries to come and that would be the precursor of the modern museum.

CATHEDRALS OF MEMORY

Camillo’s memory theater simply electrified Italy. And from there the excitement spread to France, where King Francis I invited Camillo to visit him in Paris—and to bring along his theater. He did so, and only added to his celebrity by announcing that the king was the only other human being to whom he would impart the operation of the memory theater. Whether Francis I understood a word of what Camillo told him (the fact that he had a stutter suggests a more organic reason why Camillo had such a prodigious memory) is anyone’s guess; but the king sure wasn’t going to admit he didn’t get it.

So, why this universal excitement over such an arcane enterprise? The answer is probably that Camillo’s memory theater resonated with the Renaissance in a fundamental way that is largely lost to modern observers. That’s because, more than we can imagine, the people of that world had lived almost daily, and for centuries, with their own kind of memory theaters: cathedrals and churches.

We marvel today at the aesthetic power of the paintings, frescoes, and stained-glass windows of the great medieval Gothic cathedrals such as Notre Dame and Chartres, and Renaissance masterpieces such as the Sistine Chapel, but to the men and women of the time, their power seems to have lain just as much in their instructional power. In a largely illiterate age, the act of memorizing and remembering key stories of the Bible, important verses, and acts of the liturgy (such as the stations of the cross) would have been a difficult task using only spoken words. But to sit in one of the vast cathedrals during Mass and look up to see those stories and actions poised above you, illuminated by the sun and painted in the most vivid colors … that would have made learning and memorization a whole lot easier.

And this mnemonic tradition wasn’t only preserved in the great cathedrals. In the English country village of South Leigh, just a few miles from where Bodley 764 rests in the Bodleian Library, stands the little Church of St. James the Great. It is almost as old as the Norman Conquest. In 1869, when the church became a separate parish, its first vicar decided to inaugurate the new era with a general restoration. When he removed the whitewash from the walls, he was astounded to discover a collection of murals—several unique (including a Last Judgment)—dating to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

One of these paintings, of particular interest to this book, is found near the south doorway: The Virgin and St. Michael (see this book’s frontispiece). Dating from the fifteenth century—and overlaying a similar, smaller painting from a century before—it shows the archangel, in medieval armor and with great outspread wings, holding a huge sword in one hand and balance scales in the other. Kneeling in one scale pan is a tiny, newly dead soul, a frightened-looking man who is naked and praying for redemption. In the other sits a devil. The latter is anxiously motioning to his counterparts on the ground below to hop up to join him and help tip the scales in hell’s favor. One of these other devils blows a horn to call for further assistance.9

What is at stake in this soul-weighing is visible below: the open mouth of a giant monster, no doubt representing eternal damnation. Devils are already shoving doomed souls into its mouth; one of the devils is even armed with the classic trident flesh-fork.

All might seem lost for our dead soul but for the presence of the Virgin, who stands atop a crescent moon (as does Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe) beside the soul’s side of the scale. She has broken the strand of her rosary and is dropping the beads one by one into the dead soul’s pan for added weight. At the moment she is winning, but it remains a very close call on the dead soul’s fate.

To the illiterate medieval sinner sitting in the Church of St. James the Great, the message of this mural was as powerful as any given from the rostrum or in the unreadable pages of the Bible upon that rostrum: The wages of sin are death, and an eternal death of unbelievable horror awaits unless you turn to God, pray to the Holy Mother to intercede for you, and pray the rosary every chance you get—because your fate may balance on a single one of those prayers.

It is an image as complex, nuanced, and powerful as any devised by Marcus Tullius Cicero or Giulio Camillo. It serves as another kind of access key to the world of hidden knowledge—only in this case it is to the deeper meanings of the continent’s dominant religious faith.

This, perhaps more than anything else, explains why the Camillo memory theater was met with such acclaim. As do technological innovations today, it represented an appealing breakthrough in terms of cost, size, and performance—now you could build an entire Gothic cathedral in a matter of months in your country home or castle. It was even (comparatively) portable. And since its use was, presumably, for the greater glory of God—hadn’t Francis I placed his imprimatur upon it?—the Church was unofficially happy with it.

And that was only half the story. Modern historiography has pretty much erased (although not in textbooks) the myth of the Renaissance as being a radical turning point in human history, of the powers of light overcoming those of darkness. There was simply too much enlightened work going on in the late Middle Ages to see it as simply a low step before the leap into the Renaissance. The Middle Ages saw the rise of universities, scholasticism, the rediscovery and translation of classical works, invention, and even, in the cases of Ibn al-Haytham, Robert Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon, real modern scientific investigation. Friar Bacon, as much as anyone, by bringing science into the world of empiricism and the age of encyclopedias, set the stage for the early scientific researchers of the Renaissance such as Kepler and Galileo.

But if the “rebirth” myth of the Renaissance has been mostly debunked (it still represented a remarkable restoration of vitality and optimism to Europe after the nightmarish fourteenth century), one powerful new feature of that era has only been underscored by this new research. This was the rise of humanism—the shift away from filtering all knowledge and memory through the tenets of faith and theology and instead viewing them from the perspective of man and his new empirical tools. Scholars, scientists, and even theologians had long chafed at the restrictions placed on them by the institutions around them, even as they translated the much freer, more sophisticated, and more “natural” writings of their ancient predecessors.

We have seen this older, ecclesiastical view in works as diverse as the bestiaries and from the great scholastics like Aquinas. The Renaissance’s new anthropocentric world view is best exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of the Vitruvian Man, the man inside a perfect circle, itself a mnemonic for that universal genius’s belief that man was the cosmografia del minor mondo—the physical embodiment of the workings of the universe. The rise of perspective in art was another example of this new view: The artist no longer looked at the world through the eyes of faith—painting figures at sizes that represented their ranking to God—but rather sought to represent what was actually seen by the human eye.

So, too, did this new humanistic viewpoint induce others to study the nature of society without worrying about paying much more than lip service to a higher power. Thus came Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, and most durable of all, NiccolÒ Machiavelli’s The Prince.

But nowhere did this new intellectual freedom have a greater influence than in the world of scientific research. It is hard today to imagine how liberating—and psychologically comforting—it must have felt to scientists and scholars of science of the age to at last be able to reconcile what they saw to what they were “supposed” to see. Hundreds of years of counterfactual evidence—about the natural world, about the cosmos, about history—had accumulated and stymied the search for objective truth. Now, like dross on metal, it could be stripped away to allow the real shape of reality to shine through.

The celebrated result was one of the greatest periods of scientific discovery and innovation in human history, from Gutenberg’s commercialization of the printing press to the European discovery of the New World, from the microscope to the telescope, from Copernicus to Galileo.

With the “facts” of the past at last questionable, European scholars embarked on a second great round of translation, this time to see what the ancients really said, without the explicit (and self-imposed) censorship of the Church. This revisitation of the classics produced a few surprises, including a new appreciation of the Greek philosophers and growing doubts about Cicero’s authorship of Ad Herennium.

The first had the effect of raising interest in democracy, in individual conscience, and in the challenge of creating a perfect state. The second ultimately proved a major blow to the Art of Memory: If the great Master Tully hadn’t written this second book of memory, then all that was left of his writings on the subject were a few obscure paragraphs in De Oratore. So perhaps this Art of Memory business wasn’t all it was cracked up to be; maybe it wasn’t the key to re-creating the greatness of Rome. One can imagine this news came with considerable relief to the legions of scholars who had exhausted their brains trying to memorize entire books.

The death knell for the mass obsession with memory theaters and the Art of Memory came with the widespread availability of published books. As private libraries began to fill with volumes, the choice quickly became between spending weeks and months stuffing one book into one’s brain … or simply owning that book, thumbing through it when needed, and then going on to other texts. The answer was obvious and became even more inevitable as indexing became more accurate and common. The disappearance of the Art of Memory, only recently the toast of European universities and palaces, was so complete that it would be four centuries before Frances Yates would rediscover it as if it were a lost civilization.

THE DANGEROUS MONK

But there was one more act to the story of the Art of Memory: that of Giordano Bruno. The Dominican order in which Bruno was a monk never gave up on Cicero’s authorship of Ad Herennium (they might have been right), and thus it was still in place for Bruno to take it up as a tool in his larger quest. And that quest, which made Bruno one of the great heroes of the Renaissance, was to both free his own work in philosophy, science, and even religion, from all of the myths and false beliefs of the Catholic Church and at the same time, delve into the deep mysteries of occultism and the secret knowledge of the ancient world.

If this all seems contradictory to modern eyes, it is because Giordano Bruno was a deeply contradictory character—part genius and part fraud, part man of faith and part bomb-thrower against that faith. He heroically challenged the Holy See and its orthodoxy by publishing a series of controversial books, yet at the same time spent much of his fifty-two years on the run from angry hosts and papal authorities—from Venice to Padua to Lyon to Toulouse, often taking on teaching posts along the way.

Arriving in Paris in 1581, Bruno embarked on a series of thirty theological lectures that made him famous—not just for the brilliance of the lectures themselves but for the prodigious memory he showed in giving them. Eventually the acclaim reached King Henry III, who, like his grandfather before him, invited the reigning monarch of memory to his court. Wrote Bruno about the experience:

I got me such a name that King Henry III summoned me one day to discover from me if the memory which I possessed was natural or acquired by magic art. I satisfied him that it did not come from sorcery but from organized knowledge; and, following this, I got a book on memory printed, entitled “The Shadows of Ideas,” which I dedicated to His Majesty. Forthwith he gave me an Extraordinary Lectureship with a salary.10

This quote captures much about Bruno—his brilliance, his confidence, his fundamental intellect … and his general contempt for most other human beings. Next, armed with a letter of introduction from the French king, Bruno moved on to England. There he wrote some of his most important works, hung around with the Hermetic Circle there under John Dee, and again managed to create enemies with his sarcastic attitudes and controversial beliefs (such as the Earth revolving around the sun).

He returned to France, but after writing some controversial works against Aristotelian science, he moved on to Germany, where he spent the next five years. There, incredibly, given the war between Protestantism and the Catholic Church, Bruno still managed to get himself excommunicated by the Lutherans.

In 1592, having received an invitation to return to Venice and tutor a wealthy patrician, and apparently believing the Italian Inquisition had lost its teeth, he accepted. Within two months, when he announced he was leaving, Bruno had so angered his wealthy client that the man denounced him to the papal authorities.

For the next seven years, Bruno was imprisoned in Rome. His inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine, would gain notoriety for assuming the same duty twenty years later with Galileo. This connection, combined with some of the crimes for which Bruno was charged—including Copernican heliocentrism and the aforementioned belief in “a plurality of worlds and their eternity”—is what brought those crowds to his statue in the Campo de’ Fiori in 2000 and has made him a patron saint of maverick thinkers.

But Giordano Bruno was less a martyr to science and more a martyr to religious orthodoxy—a much more common, but also much less romantic, legacy. For example, while it is appealing to think of Bruno as running afoul of the Inquisition for his support, (like Galileo) of Copernicus, the fact is that at the time of the trial the Roman Catholic Church had established no official position on an earth-centered cosmology. What the Church challenged was Bruno’s belief (which we now suspect to be accurate) in an infinite universe of infinite worlds of infinite possibilities—including, by implication, infinite redemptions by an infinite number of Christs.

Indeed, they were very different trials, with very different results. Galileo, a scientist and a believer, was tried for being “vehemently suspect of heresy” for his astronomical writings and forced to renounce his publications and live under house arrest. Bruno was a cleric and a sworn member of the Church and he was properly accused of multiple counts of heresy, including expressing doubt in print about Christ’s divinity (he called him a “magician”), the Holy Mother’s virginity, the Trinity, the Mass, Transubstantiation, and the Incarnation—in other words, the absolute bedrock beliefs of Christianity itself. It is no wonder the Lutherans excommunicated him as well. This was true heresy. And while they were at it, the Inquisition threw in accusations of magic and divination. And the list of charges didn’t include some of Bruno’s more unsavory beliefs, such as a belief that the different human races descended from different sources, and thus weren’t the same species.

Bruno didn’t help his case by first refusing to make a full recantation and then by circumventing Bellarmine by taking his case (with only a partial recantation) to Pope Clement VIII. Once again, Bruno had managed to infuriate everyone with his contempt for both the people in authority and institutional protocol. And the partial-recantation proposal was, as usual, too clever by half. Rather than be moved by Bruno’s request, Clement VIII asked for the death penalty. It was as he was being read his sentence and realizing that there would be no escape this time that Bruno reportedly lunged at his judges and made his famous remark.

All that was left was the stake and bonfire.

As the decades passed and his books retreated into dusty libraries, Bruno’s beliefs were disproven and superseded, and his memory arts lost. Giordano Bruno became a curious, but minor, figure of the Renaissance. But he wasn’t entirely forgotten; rather, he was transformed into a kind of mystical cousin of Galileo, who alone had died in defense of modern science. Copernicus had published only after his death; Galileo had been contrite before the Inquisition; but Bruno had not only chosen death but thrown his conviction back into the face of his accusers.

It was this Giordano Bruno who was remembered, and the man who was honored in 1889 with the evocative statue in the Campo de’ Fiori—the result of an international commission that included author Victor Hugo, playwright Henrik Ibsen, and social biologist Herbert Spencer. Ironically, it was this mythical Bruno who survived into the middle twentieth century to be rediscovered and restored in full by Frances Yates.

If the Art of Memory didn’t survive the execution of Giordano Bruno, examples of prodigious acts of memory have continued to appear and be celebrated as superhuman achievements, right up to the present. There would always be prodigies of memory; men and women who could not only hold vast libraries of information in their brains but could also seemingly access any item in their memory at will, and with astonishing speed. In the eighteenth century they performed before kings and queens, in the nineteenth onstage before amazed crowds, and in the twentieth on television game shows. And though they might achieve these feats through some systematic and specific techniques for memorization, never again would memory be seen as an art form, available to everyone, and perfected by the best and brightest in society.

Rather, the usual assumption was that most of these prodigies had in fact been born with uniquely configured brains—what would eventually be medically classified as “Eidetic memory”—that seemed to feature a different interaction between the small quantities of usable short-term (what is now called “working”) memory and the immense, but much less accessible, long-term memory. It was also noted that this enhanced talent often came at considerable cost—autism, lack of creativity, even brain damage. And so while these memory prodigies were often the subject of awe for their powers, that awe was rarely accompanied by respect for their character or for any hard work in earning their gifts.

Still, in the centuries that followed the death of the Art of Memory, there were a few occasions where, often under duress, human beings not only exhibited prodigious memory but did so at the service of something even greater.

Perhaps the greatest of these took place just sixty years after the death of Bruno. The British poet John Milton, blind and reduced to poverty, composed and dictated to his daughters—day after day, mentally moving through the text to make revisions and edits—three of the greatest poems in the English language: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. He may have written these poems to, in his words, “Justify the ways of God to man,” but readers couldn’t help but see Milton himself in the blinded Samson, “Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.” It stands as one of the most remarkable feats of memory and creativity ever accomplished.

Two hundred fifty years later, just a few years after the raising of Bruno’s statue, a young Parisian, Marcel Proust, would embark on a work of literary memory almost the equal of Milton’s. Retreating to a cork-lined room, he would write À la recherche du temps perdu (the title taken from a Shakespearean sonnet: “in remembrance of things past”), a book that begins a half-century memory with the taste of a madeleine cookie—and famously ends, three thousand pages later, in the present, at a party in which the characters of the book appear, aged and doddering as if on stilts built from lifetimes of memories. The author/narrator decides at that moment to write the book we have just read. It is an act of memory restoration, and artistic transformation, without equal.

LOST MEMORY

The execution of Giordano Bruno may have signaled the end of the Art of Memory, but by then, the technique was almost obsolete anyway. It had proven too difficult, too much in the hands of strange characters with mystical and heretical beliefs. And too many people suspected that its successful implementation depended as much upon the innate abilities of its users—as well as a whole lot of traditional memorization by repetition—as it did upon any special tricks or dark arts.

But the real credit goes to Johannes Gutenberg. And to paper. In the war against the Art of Memory for the future of “synthetic”—what we’ll now call, modern phrasing superseding an old definition, “artificial”—memory, paper only emerged victorious because of printing. But printing also won because of paper.

By the fourteenth century, paper was a thousand-year-old technology in China, and production there was measured in the millions of sheets per year. Paper mills had been in use in Persia for seven hundred years, and in Europe—in Spain, at least—for four centuries.

Printing was even older. The Mesopotamians had pressed cylinder seals into their clay tablets as early 3500 B.C. Woodblock printing first appeared in China in the third century A.D. and in Egypt a century later. Moveable type, the great breakthrough that enabled the creation of different pages from a single print bed, is credited to Chinese printer Bi Sheng in A.D. 1040. His type, originally made of clay, was upgraded to carved wood and then, in Korea in 1230, to metal. In the meantime, the printing of imagery had evolved to a very high standard with the development of wood printing, lithography, and copper engraving and, in the hands of masters like the artists of China’s Sung dynasty and Germany’s Albrecht Dürer, into some of mankind’s greatest works of art.

The stage was now set in the mid-fifteenth century, in an almost unique historic moment, for what modern technologists might call a double, mutually beneficial tipping point.

Johannes Gutenberg was, by most accounts, a moderately successful metalworker who had eked out a living as a goldsmith and gem polisher. But after one particularly risky venture—selling polished metal mirrors to pilgrims to capture the holy light emitted by religious relics—Gutenberg found himself not only broke but being pressed by his investors. That’s when, in the classic misdirection move of a born entrepreneur, Gutenberg announced to those creditors that he had an even greater invention waiting in the wings.

It took him ten years, from 1440 to 1450, to finally roll out a full working version of this invention—the printing press. Portentously, one of the first print runs from this press was papal indulgences—the notorious documents by which people could buy their way into heaven.

In 1455, even as he was printing those indulgences, Gutenberg set to work on the project that marked one of history’s greatest turning points: the publication of the forty-two-line-per-page “Gutenberg” Bible. It was the first truly printed book edition—and today the surviving copies are the most valuable books in the world.

What often goes unnoticed about these first 180 Gutenberg Bibles is that the production was divided between versions on paper and on vellum. This mix of media signals a separate, but also important, moment of transition. It suggests that, with almost perfect timing and symbolism, the two adoption curves of paper and parchment have just crossed, with the latter trending toward oblivion and the former toward universal adoption.

In retrospect, if not at the time, this technological turnover seemed inevitable. Parchment had many wonderful qualities, not least its durability. But for every short stack of parchment sheets you had to slaughter a small herd of cows or sheep: and for vellum, calves. That would be an efficient use of animal flesh left over from butchering. However, that same flesh could also be converted into equally valuable leather. A modern economist would say that there is a high “opportunity cost” for choosing to turn animal flesh into parchment rather than leather.

But even if leather had never been invented, there is still a problem: Parchment production becomes inefficient very quickly should demand for this product exceed the demand for meat. Then you have a choice: Accept skyrocketing prices for parchment or start slaughtering your breeding herd (and the new generation, now calves) for short-term gains or put in new pasture for long-term reward. Whatever your choice, it is going to be costly, because (to use modern business terminology) parchment doesn’t effectively scale.

Now consider paper. Essentially made of weeds, old rags, and common chemicals, it can be formed in almost any size, including rolled sheets hundreds of yards long, and easily cut to order. As such it is one of the most scalable physical products ever devised. It may be more fragile than parchment, but that problem is easily solved by binding the entire manuscript in leather (rather than making the manuscript itself entirely of skin).

In other words, paper was destined to eventually triumph. But the printing press turned that “eventually” into “now.”

The advent of paper and printing also had a profound effect on literacy in Europe—though not just in the way it is usually taught. Unquestionably, the appearance of inexpensive printed textbooks and manuals transformed and expanded education. But there was another, less recognized, effect: It taught already-literate people, for the first time, to write.

WRITING ALOUD

We often think of people of the Middle Ages as being almost universally illiterate, both nobles and serfs, with the exception of a few ecclesiastical scholars. The truth was much different, says historian Michael Clanchy. As early as 1170, British king Henry II, in establishing a government bureaucracy, instituted a formal inquest into the financial dealings of his sheriffs and other officials:

Likewise inquiry is to be made concerning the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, vavasors, knights, citizens, burgesses and their stewards and ministers as to what and how much they have received throughout their lands from every one of their hundreds, every one of their villages and every one of their men—whether by judicial process or without judgment—and they are to write down individually all these exactions and their causes and occasions.11

The use of the phrase “write down” suggests a level of general literacy among individuals of authority in England far higher (and far earlier) than generally assumed. But as Clanchy reminds us, this isn’t exactly the case.12 As the quote above implies, the ability to read was much more common (and in demand) at this early date than we usually assume. But because we live in a world where reading and writing are considered two sides of the same coin, we take for granted that this has always been the case. But in the late Middle Ages it was not the case—and for a very interesting reason:

Because it was more difficult to write with a quill on parchment than it is with a modern ballpoint pen on paper, writing was considered a special skill in the Middle Ages which was not automatically coupled with the ability to read.13

In other words, when we speak of literacy in the three centuries before Gutenberg, the proper phrase isn’t “reading and writing” but “reading and dictation.” An uncounted number of people in authority in Europe, the Middle East, China, and Japan were able to read but were barely capable of writing much more than their own names. The result was the creation of a new class of professionals—scribes—who filled the gap between the nobleman’s words and the scratching of letters on parchment. An interesting secondary effect of this professionalization of writing was the development of a new, more efficient type of writing, cursive, that dominates handwriting to this day.

Then along comes paper, with its smooth surface and ever-cheaper price. And with it, slowly but inexorably, Europe and much of the rest of the world finally learned to write. Once again, the effect of this shift on mankind’s memory due to the resulting flood of personal letters, diaries, and notes is incalculable.

A MATTER OF SCALE

Paper made the medium of memory scalable for the first time; printing made the content of that medium scalable as well. Now an author could write one manuscript and it could be printed into one hundred, one thousand, or even one million copies—each at a very small per-unit cost rather than follow the old handwritten paradigm in which each new copy cost as much as the first.

The result was a revolution in the business of books. Booksellers quickly found that there was more money to be made in large sales of low-cost printed books than in high-priced single copies of handwritten books. Printers, in turn, had a financial incentive to improve their processes through innovation. And authors found that their writing could earn them not only a reputation but also an income. Once again, this didn’t occur overnight, but in time it would lead to an explosion in book production that would at last put texts in the hands of even the lower classes, fill uncounted numbers of private libraries, provoke the creation of public libraries … and ultimately lead to the turbulent, thrilling, and corrupt world of authors and booksellers, such as existed in Paris in the nineteenth century, immortalized by Balzac in Lost Illusions.

The one-two punch of scalability made possible by paper and printing—and the revolutionary new business model it established—in turn began to shift power across Europe and Asia, and eventually the New World. Martin Luther may have handwritten the original 95 Theses he nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1513, but it was in printed form that this document was disseminated throughout Germany and sparked the Protestant Reformation.

Indeed, the Protestant Reformation at its beginning can be seen as the battle between Gutenberg’s first printed product (the indulgences) and the second (posters and books). Protestant publications, produced by the hundreds of thousands, proselytized millions across the continent faster than the slow-moving old Catholic Church could respond. Not long afterward, these Protestant victories were made permanent with the appearance of new everyday-language (“vulgate”) versions of the Bible, including a German version by Luther and, most famously, the unfinished Tyndale English Bible (1525–1530), which was the unlikely antecedent of one of the greatest achievements of the Late Renaissance, the King James Bible (1611). “Unlikely” because Tyndale was executed for heresy in 1535, for creating that Bible. Reportedly, as he died, Tyndale shouted, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”14

His prayer was answered. And when Bibles began showing up not only on the altars of churches but in private homes, the monopoly of Roman Catholicism over everyday life in Europe and the New World was broken forever. But so, too, was the control of the new Protestant denominations over their own adherents.

Finally, as every businessperson knows, the search for profits inevitably leads to determining what the customer wants and what he or she will pay for it. And what printers and booksellers discovered then, and what remains true today, is that there is always a demand for compilations, collections, and surveys—both for entertainment and self-instruction.

This demand had underwritten the creation of books like Bodley 764 in the Middle Ages, and now, in the Renaissance, the demand was many times greater. And the ability to meet that demand, thanks to paper and printing, was greater as well. Moreover, this demand also dovetailed neatly with two intellectual trends that had only grown over the past centuries: scholasticism, and the ongoing effort to accurately organize all of human knowledge both past and present.

In the age of Aquinas, such works had been both written by hand and in very small volume—and they had also been filtered through the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church. In the Renaissance, the process was mechanical and produced in large volume. In addition, in an increasingly humanistic world, almost all of the earlier works and translations were under suspicion for inaccuracy and bias. Add to this an increasingly wealthy and literate audience hungry for access to learning and memory, and all of the ingredients were in place for a third, multigenerational boom in encyclopedias, books of natural history, atlases, dictionaries, glosses of religious texts, and instruction manuals.

The first of this new generation of encyclopedic texts, ranging from treatises on painting to books of engineering, began to appear in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most influential of these early works were bilingual dictionaries designed to assist travelers and diplomats.

Then in 1592, Richard Mulcaster, a teacher, compiled the Elementarie, a lexicon of eight thousand English terms to help his students remember the spelling of difficult words. Twelve years later, another teacher—Robert Cawdrey—published what is considered the first true English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall. In France, the effort would take another hundred years, but the result—Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française—would prove definitive right from the start. Similar efforts took place throughout Europe during this era. Even as far away as Japan, Jesuit missionaries produced in 1603 the Nippo Jisho—a bilingual Dutch-Japanese dictionary. Japan had already known dictionaries, derived from the Chinese, for hundreds of years, but the Nippo Jisho had the unexpected secondary effect of formalizing modern Japanese.

But the real explosion in what we now call reference books began in the eighteenth century, producing a number of works that, dozens of editions later, are still with us today. Among dictionaries, the most famous creation was A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), a work as brilliant and eccentric as its sole author, Samuel Johnson. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century and working for more than a quarter-century, Noah Webster created An American Dictionary of the English Language, which permanently established the differences between the two dialects. All of this work culminated in the final decades of the nineteenth century with the publication of two great multivolume dictionaries, both of them archiving the memories of their respective languages. They remain the standard today: The Oxford English Dictionary and the Larousse Grand Dictionnaire Universel.

Encyclopedias followed a similar trajectory. As already noted, encyclopedias, both general and subject-oriented, had been created in earnest during the high Middle Ages across the globe, most notably the gigantic fifteenth-century Yongle Encyclopedia of China’s Ming dynasty. During the Renaissance, feeding a hungry public armed with enough money to purchase a single all-encompassing book, encyclopedias were everywhere. But, as with dictionaries, encyclopedias took on their modern form during the Enlightenment—the last time in history (it is said) that a person might presume to know everything.

The three great encyclopedias that marked this era were products of creators who might be described as neo-scholastics. The first was Ephraim Chambers’s British Cyclopedia, published in 1728 and considered the first modern encyclopedia. Third was the 1796–1808 German Conversations-Lexikon mit vorzüglicher Rücksicht auf die gegenwärtigen Zeiten (Encyclopaedia with special regard for the present time), known today as the Brockhaus Enzyklopadie.

But the middle encyclopedia is today the most celebrated, the French Encyclopédie, edited by Jean le Rond d’Alembert and (famously) Denis Diderot in seventeen volumes, from 1751 to 1765. The Encylopédie is justly celebrated for its quality and its influence on French culture before the Revolution. It is also celebrated because Diderot and his fellow “encyclopedists” represented not just a publication team but a new and objective view toward human knowledge—in Diderot’s words, “to collect all the knowledge that now lies scattered over the face of the earth, to make known its general structure to the men among [whom] we live, and to transmit it to those who will come after us.”15

This new perspective, of making people not just smarter but better, would reach its zenith at the dawn of the nineteenth century with the work that would dominate reference libraries for the next two centuries: the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

OUT OF MIND

The zeal for classification during the High Middle Ages and early Renaissance didn’t just infect scholars, occultists, and ecclesiastics but also the first modern scientists. Speaking across the ages, the recovered Aristotle had called upon all scientists to look beyond what ought to be true to what really was true—that is, to observe the natural world.

The protoscientists of the Middle Ages, such as Roger Bacon and al-Haythem, took this process one step further from the pure deduction of Aristotelian science to the much more ambitious induction of the scientific method—a process codified by Francis Bacon and enshrined in institutions such as the Royal Society of London, the Academie Française, the Italian Accademia, and the German Academy—all founded in the seventeenth century and all dedicated to systematizing and improving scientific research.

The result was not only an exciting new era of scientific discovery but, behind all of those great discoveries, mountains of observational data and volumes of lesser discoveries. As these caches of information grew they posed their own problems, slowing new research and inhibiting dissemination. Needless to say, the field was ripe for organization—in particular, for classification schemes that not only put all of this knowledge in its place, free of superstition and prejudice, but also added to the overall understanding.

The names of the scientists who first took on the challenge of compiling, organizing, and classifying the accumulated knowledge in their disciplines are often honored today as the “pioneers” of their fields. Among the first were the physician Andreas Vesalius with his groundbreaking work (1543) on human anatomy and the physicist William Gilbert on electricity and magnetism (1600). Later classifiers included Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy (1735) and the man whose Systema Naturae gave a Latin designation to all species, living and extinct; Boyle and Lavoisier on chemistry; Dalton on atomic theory; Mendeleev with the periodic table of elements; Newton on classical mechanics; Charles Lyell on geology; and Alexander von Humboldt on geography. Even the pictorial works of John James Audubon are part of this tradition.

By the end of the eighteenth century, almost every scientific discipline had been given structure, oversight, and a system of classification. And these seminal scientific works—along with the encyclopedias, the natural histories, and ethnology picture books; the atlases, dictionaries, and biographies; the compiled speeches and national and military histories—had in their own unexpected way managed to accomplish what Bruno, Camillo, and even Cicero had failed to do: They had put all of human memory within reach of the average person, no matter what that person’s natural aptitude.

The Art of Memory had struggled to find a biological solution to the challenge of retaining massive amounts of memory inside the human brain. Its solution was to define a new kind of information retention, and come up with extremely complicated tools to supercharge it.

The High Middle Ages and the Renaissance, venerating the ancients, at first tried to revive the lost memory arts. But in the end, and facing a far greater memory challenge, it found instead a technological solution: printed books. This new type of memory, found outside the human body, was not as portable, but it was much more scalable and more universally useful. Just as important, it was transferrable.

And if, in the world of artificial memory, there were no bloody statues in elegantly rendered memory theaters, there were tables of contents and indexes, footnotes and bibliographies.

It had taken 1800 years, since Marcus Tullius Cicero first walked through a temple to memorize his first speech, for mankind to preserve the memory of everything it had known and learned. But that day had at last arrived.

Meanwhile, in the intervening centuries, mankind, as a result of this new knowledge, had also begun to populate its world with machines. These machines, from simple household tools to mammoth constructions, increasingly filled every corner of society. And for all of the benefits and bounty they delivered, their operation and maintenance consumed ever-greater portions of everyday life.

If human memory could be removed from the human brain and placed into books, charts, and tables … might it be possible to put this same artificial memory into machines as well?