old notes: printing old books, memory & new ideas; June 2007

June 27, 2007

mention of printing in The House of the Medici in the late 15th cent. in comparison to the costliness and quality of handwritten books. In the flood of new handwritten luxury items that were bought, sold, traded, dedicated and disseminated, these items were coveted by the descriminating well-to-do. [p. 169]

copyists at monasteries, convents, abbeys and colleges continued everywhere at their labors. Presses began running in Naples in 1465. This was followed by Rome in 1467, Venice and Milan in 1469, Verona, Paris and Nuremburg in 1470, William Caxton at Westminster Abbey in 1476 and Florence in 1477. ~ from The Rise and Fall of The Medieval Monastery.

Frances A Yates unwinds a bit more of the tale with respect to memory and its uses in The Art of Memory. This twentieth century classic gathers up and recounts the progress of the various threads of the transmission of memory techniques from ancient times to the enlightenment period. As late as 1482, one Oratoriae Artis Epitome by Jacopus Publicius could be published at Venice. It did so well it's 2nd edition came in 1485. But this book was known years before it was printed. An English monk, Thomas Swatwell, probably in Durham, Yates tells us, made a beautiful version of that text with illustrations, and which now sits in the British Museum. [see page 111 in above link to Yates' book on pdf]. 

Still earlier, Poggio Bracciolini had found classical counterparts in Quintillian, and as early as 1416. By the 1480's the idea had caught on that, if you possessed a skill that could be learned and which might improve your station in life, then you could be better off by learning that skill. This too had to be learned, whether by peasant, guildsman, burgher or, all too commonly, the poorer nobleman from a good line. If memory itself could be mastered then there might be no limit to the skills one could excel in. So the theory went and this seemed a new idea, again. But as with many things called new there were also different opinions, different sources, and different receptions.

Yates reminds us this 'first published treatise' on memory printed in 1482 reflected past images and techniques, forms that we would see as 'medieval'. The Oratoriae Artis Epitome of Jacopus Publicius of 1482 used a picturesque symbol, of one's own imagination, to trigger or conjure memories as distinct as abstract nouns like virtues and vices.  

"Far from introducing us to a modern world of revived classical rhetoric, Publicius' memory section seems rather to transport us back into a Dantesque world in which Hell, Purgatory and Paradise are remembered on the spheres of the universe, a Giottoesque world with its sharpened expressiveness of virtue and vice memory figures .... In short, this first printed memory treatise is not a symptom of the revival of the classical art of memory as part of the Renaissance revival of rhetoric; it comes straight out of the mediaeval tradition." [pp. 110-1]

This story of the publishing of Publicius and his memory methods, is set before the continuing story told in Yates of the textual transmission of Quintillian. This was found by Braccioloini and given its first edition in 1470, with multiple editions thereafter. But the Quintillian method would be soon contrasted with and found more popular than the more traditional methods found in Ad Herenniam and De Inventione. These had long been the source for clerical luminaries like Aquinas, & Albertus Magnus and while, ascribed to 'Tullius' were studied as basic necessity for any student of rhetoric in the medieval and rennaissance periods.

There followed another subsequent famous teacher of rhetoric, Peter Tommai of Ravenna who published in 1491 (also in Venice) his version of the Quintillian method. This also found multiple editions and lived for several audiences well into the seventeenth century. But it was the wide dissemination of his text, coupled with his advocacy of its methods, and his application of making rhetoric and these mnemonic methods practical for lay users, that made his edition so poular.  Rather than anything really new about the methods, based on Quintillian, Yates says, it was the author selling them tirelessly that allowed them to spread so widely and thus sustain their popularity. 

Jacob Burckhardt saw the trend as coming earlier. Even with regard to books of the ancient world, it was their dissemination that became the real impetus.

"Great as was the influence of the old writers on the Italian mind in the fourteenth century and before, yet that influence was due rather to the wide diffusion of what had long been known, than to the discovery of much that was new." [Civilisation of the Renaissance In Italy, iii, 3; p. 145]

Books as luxury items had become a trend for the upper classes. That in turn gave birth to the search for them and of their acquisition by more and more people over time, and only then, the basic assimilation of the ideas found in them could take flight.

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