Matteo Ricci & the Memory Palace
- Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi (徐光啟) (right) in the Chinese edition of Euclid's Elements (幾何原本) published in 1607.
I'm reading/listening to two new audio books from the library ....
One is Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hiilenbrand, which was ranked #1 on the New York Times best seller list for 42 weeks (there are 628 customer reviews at Amazon! :). The writing is very good and the author has been published in magazines like the The New Yorker .... one of her essays in that magazine is about her continuing battle with chronic fatigue syndrome - A Sudden Illness -- How My Life Changed.
The other is another FBI Special Agent Pendergast novel from Preston and Child - Still Life With Crows. I don't think this one won awards and I'm not sure I'd recommend it to the faint of heart ..... it's about grisly serial murders in a small town in Kansas .... but Agent Pendergast is, as always, interesting. In this book, we see him practicing a mental exercise known of as "the memory palace of Simonides of Ceos". I looked that up and was interested to find it connected to a famous Jesuit, Matteo Ricci, who spent some time in China in the late 1500s, early 1600s. Here's a little of what Wikipedia has on the memory palace (Method of loci) ....
****************************
The Method of Loci or Ars memoriae (art of memory in Latin) or Mnemotechnics is a technique for memorizing many things and has been practiced since classical antiquity ...... In ancient advice, loci were physical locations, usually in a familiar large public building, such as a market or a temple. To utilize this method, one walked through the building several times, viewing distinct places within it, in the same order each time. After a few repetitions of this, one should be able to remember and visualize each of the places in order reliably. To memorize a speech, one breaks it up into pieces, each of which is symbolized by vividly imagined objects or symbols. In the mind's eye, one then places each of these images into different loci. They can then be recalled in order by imagining that one is walking through the building again, visiting each of the loci in order, and viewing each of the images that were placed in the loci, thereby recalling each piece of memory or speech in order ......
It was used in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as is sometimes mistakenly attributed to Cicero himself as Cicero describes it in his work De Oratore. (Yates 1966) According to De Oratore, the method was invented by Simonides of Ceos. As the story goes, Simonides was attending a dinner with a number of notable Greeks, after which he had stepped outside. Suddenly, the roof of the building collapsed, killing everyone inside. During the excavation of the rubble, Simonides was called upon to identify each guest killed. He managed to do so by correlating their identities to their positions (loci) at the table before his departure .....
Saint Thomas Aquinas was an important influence in promoting the method when he defined it as a part of Prudence and recommended its use to meditate on the virtues and to improve one's piety. In scholasticism artificial memory came to be used as a method of how to remember the whole universe and the roads to Heaven and Hell (Carruthers, Ziolkowski 2002). The Dominicans were particularly important in promoting its uses (Bolzoni 2004), see for example Cosmos Rossellius. The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who from 1582 until his death in 1610, worked to introduce Christianity to China, described the memory palace technique in his work, A Treatise On Mnemonics, but he advanced it only as an aid to passing examinations (a kind of rote) rather than as an instrument of new composition, though it had traditionally been taught, both in dialectics and in rhetoric, as an instrument of composition. Ricci was trying to gain favour with the Chinese imperial service, which required a notoriously difficult entry examination (Spence 1984) .....
*************************
- Matteo Ricci's grave in Beijing
posted by crystal | 11:23 PM
6 Comments:
You know, William was talking about the Kentucky Deby the other day, and it reminded me that I have a copy of Seabiscuit lying around that I need to get around to. I saw a great show on PBS about Seabiscuit a couple of years ago. The hard-luck story of the half-blind jockey was more intriguing to me than the story of the horse himself.
Matteo Ricci was a fascinating guy. Who knows what might have happened if the Jesuits had allowed him to continue to evangelize in China the way that he wanted to.
I think we under-appreciate how important memorization and oral traditions were in the days before mass media. I remember hearing an interview with John Dominic Crossan once, in which he described taking long country walks into town with his father as he was growing up, and how his father insisted upon him memorizing long passages of verse, and reciting it back to him.
Makes me think of Farenheit 451, when people memorize entire books, and basically become that book, so it doesn't get lost.
Interesting post, Crystal. Thanks.
Jeff, both the book and movie Seabiscuit are good, largely because the story interweaves all these stories of brokenness - the horse, the jockey, the trainer, the owner, and the country during the Depression.
William,
Yeah, I was intrigued when the author pointed out in the book's intro that Seabiscuit got more inches of newspaper space in 1938 than anyone or anything else, and when you consider all that was going on in 1938, that's really saying something.
Is that Seabiscuit in your logo?
Hi you guys. Sorry, I've spent all day trying to figure out an old Word for Macs program.
I read that article in the New Yorker. It was very good and very harrowing. I didn't realize how bad chronic fatigue syndrome could be -- I thought it was more like just being a grad student.
I have a copy of a book about Matteo Ricci and the Palace of memory that I have on the pile of "to-read-when-I-have-some-time." Francis Yates wrote a book on the Art of Memory and Maryanne Carruthers wrote on on medieval memory techniques that are also on my to-read list.
Liam,
Yep, Agent Pendergast creates a mental construct of his childhood home in New orleans, I make one of my grandparents' house. It's kind of comforting, but I haven't tried using it to help me memorize yet.
When the Seabiscuit book first came out, I saw an article about it Newsweek (I think) and it had another about the author and her CFS, but I only just saw that New Yorker article. It does saound really awful. Fr. Marsh has CFS.
Post a Comment
<< Home