Authors: Alex Wright
Wherever the printing press took hold, conflict seemed to follow. Shlain argues that the introduction of printed books seems to have triggered a kind of mass social pathology that may have stemmed from the jarring introduction of a linear, left-brained communications mode of thought into what had previously been a predominantly oral and visual right-brained culture. Leonard Shlain believes this cognitive disruption explains why printing and literacy seem to have spread in almost perfect lockstep with the rise of witch-burning. As printers brought the left-brained modality of the written word into contact with the old right-brained values of folk traditions and feminine-centered wisdom (as exemplified in the flourishing cult of Mary), masculine values came into open and violent conflict with feminine values. Countless women paid a tragic price. “It was in Germany,” as Shlain points out, “the birthplace of the printing press and home to the fastest rise in literacy rates, that the witch craze assumed its most monstrous proportions.”
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In one town 133 witches were executed in one day. In the two villages surrounding Trier, the witch
hunters were so successful that only one woman was left alive. Between 1623 and 1631 the bishop of Würzburg (home of the great monastic library) executed 41 girls ages 7 to 11.
The sudden shift from an oral, visually symbolic culture to an increasingly left-brained world of linear written texts may have triggered a deep shift in the European psyche that led, for a time, to a kind of mass psychosis. Paradoxically, when the book first emerged in the latter days of the Roman empire, it had represented a new, more open kind of technology—a kind of analog hypertext—that freed readers from the unidirectional constraints of ancient scrolls. The days of the Irish scribe perusing classical texts were long past, however. Now books were turning into commodities, and the insistent logic of automated production gave them an increasingly linear character. Page numbers appeared, while illustrations dwindled. Unlike the handmade, carefully illustrated manuscripts of the monasteries, the printed book seemed to insist on forward progress.
As the printing press took root amid a series of larger social, political, and religious transformations, newly literate Europe started acting out. “The eerie conjunction of the printing press, steeply rising literacy rates, religious wars and the witch craze seems significant.”
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The sudden rise of alphabetic literacy seems to have accompanied a deep conflict in the collective social brain: a war between left- and right-brained values, in which left-brained values, for a time, emerged victorious after a violent struggle.
The explosion of printing had wreaked havoc with the old institutional hierarchies. Europe was headed into a period of bloody upheaval. Those disruptions echoed in the more pacific world of scholarship as well. No longer could books be easily classified into the simple old Vatican systems of secular and sacred knowledge. There were simply too many books; moreover, an explosion of facts and printed knowledge was taxing the underlying ontologies of knowledge that had guided Western European understanding of the phenomenal world. Disciplinary boundaries were blurring, and the sheer volume of knowledge demanded a more methodical system for organizing humanity’s burgeoning intellectual output. The old monastic scriptoria would soon die out; but as the era of printing dawned, the old scholastic ways would enjoy one final flourish.
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain.
Shakespeare,
Hamlet
In 1532 an Italian fellow named Viglius wrote to his friend Erasmus about his upcoming trip to Venice. He was looking forward to seeing a new invention that had been causing a stir among the town’s cognoscenti: a so-called Theater of Memory. Viglius was not entirely sure what the thing was, but he had heard that it was “a work of wonderful skill, into which whoever is admitted as spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero.”
Returning from Venice a few weeks later, Viglius wrote again to tell his friend what he had seen. “The work is of wood,” he wrote, “marked with many images, and full of little boxes.” The theater turned out to be a contraption the size of a small room, housing a complicated apparatus with tiyo gears that opened and closed windows to reveal words and images printed inside. By manipulating the windows a visitor could retrieve nuggets of information on any number of topics: the seven virtues and vices, the teachings of Solomon, the orientation of celestial bodies, and all manner of other medieval factoids. It was a kind of sixteenth-century Rube Goldberg hypertext machine. Step inside, click open a window or two, and presto: the wisdom of the ancients revealed. Viglius reported that the theater’s inventor, Giulio Camillo, “calls this theatre of his by many names,
saying now that it is a built or constructed mind and soul, and now that it is a windowed one.”
For the newly literate Venetian audience, Camillo’s contraption must have seemed nothing short of a technological marvel. It was also a perfect metaphor for a dawning era of post-Renaissance information technology. The spread of popular literacy and the erosion of monastic power had created a fertile environment for a new breed of maverick scholars to emerge. Freed of the intellectual confines of the monastic system, a few pioneering thinkers began to experiment with new ways of structuring access to human knowledge: from encyclopedic contraptions like Camillo’s to mystical memory wheels, universal classification schemes and artificial languages. Many of these ambitious efforts would meet unfortunate ends, with their progenitors ending up in bankruptcy, burned at the stake, or the butt of famous literary jokes. But ultimately, the Renaissance information technologists paved the way for the emergence of the scientific method and a new secular approach to information systems that still reverberates today.
No one knows exactly what Camillo’s theater looked like—no drawings have survived—but Camillo once described the design as follows:
The Theatre rests basically upon seven pillars, the seven pillars of Solomon’s House of Wisdom. Solomon in the ninth chapter of Proverbs says that wisdom has built herself a house and has founded it on seven pillars. By these columns, signifying most stable eternity, we are to understand the seven Sephiroth of the super-celestial world, which are the seven measures of the fabric of the celestial and inferior worlds, in which are contained the Ideas of all things in the celestial and in the inferior worlds.
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The machine worked by allowing users to tunnel their way through a series of nested conceptual hierarchies, proceeding from the gross physical plane of the theater to the metaphorical House of Wisdom, then on through successive layers of abstraction, finally ascending to the realm of divine truths to pierce the innermost secrets of the arts. This grand scheme was not Camillo’s own. It actually rep
resented a cheap facsimile of an ancient scholastic practice that had flourished in Europe’s medieval monasteries for centuries: the art of memory. Camillo, himself a former monk, had left the cloisters several years earlier to seek his fortune in the town squares of Europe. Determined to make something of himself, he hit on the idea of taking a few tricks he had learned in the monastery and turning them into a public attraction. He even came up with a catchy tagline: turning “scholars into spectators.”
The original monastic art of memory was a far cry from Camillo’s version. In medieval monasteries, generations of monks had perfected a demanding mental regimen that enabled them to memorize long tracts of scripture and other information through years of difficult training. The technique traced its roots to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, who in the fifth century BC described a method for improving one’s memory by visualizing a series of
loci
(places) in a particular order, then associating a meaningful image with each place, as an aid to reminiscence. Aristotle later picked up on Simonides’s work, incorporating the technique into his discussion of memory in his
De memoria et reminiscentia
(“On memory and recollection”), in which he described the act of memorization as a visual practice that invoked the “inner eye” of memory to summon
phantasmata
(images) stored in the “sensitive soul” and making them available to the “intellectual soul” of the logical mind. Aristotle’s description of the technique eventually found its way to Rome, where Cicero, Quintilian, and other rhetoricians embraced the art of memory as an aid to practicing the great Roman art of oratory, using the technique to command vast arrays of facts, quotations, ideas, and topics that they could pull together extemporaneously while delivering orations.
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The classical art of memory faded with the decline of Rome, and Aristotle’s seminal work on the subject fell into obscurity until the thirteenth century, when European scholars rediscovered
De memoria et reminscentia
. Thomas Aquinas, in particular, wrote a series of commentaries on Aristotle’s work that helped popularize the technique among medieval scholastics, celebrating the technique as a remedy for the inherent frailties of the human mind. Aquinas pointed out that while the mind was well equipped to recollect the gross de
tails of physical experience, it was ill suited for remembering “subtle and spiritual things” (a limitation stemming from man’s fallen condition). The art of memory, as he saw it, offered monks a powerful tool for harnessing their physical and spatial memory as a means for internalizing God’s word. “It is the image making part of the soul which makes the work of the higher processes of thought possible,” Aquinas explained. “Hence ‘the soul never thinks without a mental picture.’”
3
Aquinas described the art as relying on two essential facilities: association (the ability to relate one concept to another) and order (the ability to arrange spatial memories into nested categories)—in other words, networks and hierarchies.
In its medieval incarnation, the art became a spiritual regimen, requiring years of contemplation and devotion in the quiet of a monastery. Cloistered monks, with no shortage of time on their hands, passed their days memorizing scriptures, religious commentaries, and assorted classical works. At first, monastic practitioners seem to have viewed the art as a kind of practical information technology. One monk, John Willis, postulated that memory “so far as it is strictly taken for the common receptacle of Memorandums, is merely passive … in the same manner as Paper preserveth words written therein.” He goes on to caution, however, that just as “it is the office of a Scribe, not of Paper, to write and read things written; so to dispose Idea’s in Memory, and aptly to use them, is work of Understanding, not of Memory.”
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Memorization, in other words, is no substitute for true learning.
The monastic version of the technique worked something like this: A monk would apprentice himself to a master of the Art, who would teach him to visualize a series of metaphorical images. These might include buildings, palaces, cities, wax tablets, chains, or writing. For example, a monk might learn to memorize a room in a house, containing a series of symbolic objects tied to a particular theme. The theology room might house (surprise) a theologian, his head tattooed with the words
cognitio
,
amor
,
fruitio
; his limbs with the words
essentia divina
,
actus
,
forma
,
relatio
,
articula
,
precepta
,
sacramenta
; and so on.
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The trainee would commit the contents of each room to memory, slowly mastering the painstaking journey from room to room.
Despite the volume of published writing on such a highly visual technique, illustrated depictions are surprisingly rare. The art was largely handed down through direct oral transmission, without external visual aids. One of the few tangible glimpses survives in a Florentine convent, where a fresco depicts Thomas Aquinas seated on a throne amid flying figures representing the seven virtues; to each side sit the saints and patriarchs; beneath his feet lie vanquished heretics; farther down, seven female figures represent the seven liberal arts; then another seven represent the theological disciplines.
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The fresco provides one of the few physical manifestations of a technique that otherwise resided—and expired—only within its practitioners’ minds.
The practice took years to master, but those who succeeded reported astonishing mnemonic feats. One practitioner, Peter of Ravenna, claimed to have memorized more than 100,000 rooms, enabling him to recall from memory the entire canon law, including every related commentary, the full text of 200 complete speeches by Cicero, 300 philosophical sayings, 20,000 legal points, and more.
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Another enthusiast, Johannes Romberch, in 1533 published a widely read grammar that laid out an elaborate system for memorizing the entirety of theology, metaphysics, law, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, music, logic, rhetoric, and grammar.
From the late fifteenth century onward, numerous scholastic writers penned treatises on the technique, including Giovanni de Carrara’s
De omnibus ingeniis augendae memoriae
(1481), Peter of Ravenna’s
Phoenix, sive artificiosa memorabilia
, Guigliemo Gratoroli’s
De memoria
(1553), Cosimo Rosselli’s
Thesaurus artificiosae memoriae
(1579), and William Fulwood’s
The Castle of Memorie
(1562). As European scholastics embraced the art in growing numbers, the practice became increasingly esoteric, eventually devolving into what historian Frances A. Yates calls “a kind of cross-word puzzle to beguile the long hours in the cloister.” Often, the monks found themselves turning these memory puzzles into intricate and time-consuming diversions that “can have had no practical utility; letters and images are turning into childish games.”
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Memorization became a kind of monastic fad, often at the expense of learning.