To memorize anything, distribute vivid, emotionally stirring imagined images around a piece of familiar architecture. This is the method of loci, or memory palace method, first developed in classical antiquity.

Giordano Bruno perfected the art in the late 16th Century. He published a series of books on the subject, beginning with De Umbris Idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas)

This volume presents new translations of Cause, Principle and Unity, in which he challenges Aristotelian accounts of causality and spells out the implications of Copernicanism for a new theory of an infinite universe, and of two essays on magic, On Magic and A General Account of Bonding, in which he interprets earlier theories about magical events in the light of the unusual powers of natural phenomena.

This unique and brilliant book is a history of human knowledge.Before the invention of printing, a trained memory was of vital importance. Based on a technique of impressing 'places' and 'images' on the mind, the ancient Greeks created an elaborate memory system which in turn was inherited by the Romans and passed into the European tradition, to be revived, in occult form, during the Renaissance.

With the publication of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Yates transformed Renaissance historiography. In it, she revealed the hermeticism with which the Renaissance was imbued, and the revived interest in mysticism, magic and Gnosticism of Late Antiquity that survived the Middle Ages.

The Guardian of All Things is a sweeping scientific history that takes us on a 10,000-year-old journey replete with incredible ideas, inventions, and transformations. From cave drawings to oral histories to libraries to the internet, The Guardian of All Things is the history of how humans have relentlessly pursued new ways to preserve and manage memory, both within the human brain and as a series of inventions external to it.

This volume shows how the concept of memory has been used and appropriated in different historical circumstances and how it has changed throughout the history of philosophy.

Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture.

The art of memory was most importantly associated in the Middle Ages with composition, and those who practiced the craft used it to make new prayers, sermons, pictures, and music.The ability to create pictures in one's own mind was essential to medieval cognitive technique and imagination, and the intensely pictorial and affective qualities of medieval art and literature were generative, creative devices in themselves.

A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture by Mary Carruthers

Offering a clear and succinct guide to one of the most important terms in contemporary theory, this volume is essential reading for anyone entering the field of Memory Studies, or seeking to understand current developments in Cultural and Literary Studies.