The revival of this ancient memory
technology traces back to Giordano Bruno’s “Art of Memory”, in which ideas,
people, and images are inserted into the context of a house or palace with many
rooms. This process was described and
elaborated in Frances A. Yates’ wonderful book, “Giordano Bruno and the
Hermetic Tradition”.
But the technique is of far more
ancient origin. Cicero and Aristotle
wrote of this technique, as did the famous Jesuit Matteo Ricci. They in turn provided the inspiration to
Bruno, whose ideas were again brought to current awareness by Yates’ scholarly
writings. And, as so often happens,
these ideas were again “invented” by the writers of Sherlock, who surely were
familiar with Bruno’s contribution, but who, in proof if their freedom from
stuffy academic conventions, passed them on to us free of scholarly
attribution.
This oversight is perhaps made more
understandable when we realize that the inscrutable Mycroft Holmes, in his assumed
persona of Mark Gatiss, is the producer and one of the writers of Sherlock. Surely he has some game afoot, if only we
knew what it was…
Perhaps all will become clear in
Season 4, if it ever materializes.
1 comment:
And earlier: Attic rhetoric, at least as far back as Hesiod, used formal devices, not just as embellishment and poetics, but as aides-memoire. There's some evidence that for the Greeks symmetry itself, and other formal devices, WERE art; the difference between a mere building and architecture was the latter's symmetry, and, in the same way, the difference between mere speech and a piece of rhetoric was the latter's formal rigor. Here ya go: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/68303.
Giordano and Aristotle in there, too.
Post a Comment