Mental Libraries: The Reception of the Arts of Memory in Literature and Culture explores the enduring legacy of mnemonic systems across literature, visual arts, pedagogy, and cultural production.
Centered on the metaphor of the "mental library," this collection reveals how memory practices functioned as tools for knowledge storage as well as generative frameworks for creativity and invention. The 13 essays trace the reception, adaptation, and transformation of the ars memoriae from late medieval Europe to early modern Spain, Italy, France, and Latin America. Contributors examine canonical figures like Petrarch, Bruno, and Burton, alongside lesser-explored thinkers such as Bartolomeo da Mantova, Zorrilla, and Carrara. With insights from renowned scholars such as Lina Bolzoni and Luis Merino Jerez, the volume offers fresh perspectives on the cultural and intellectual impact of mnemonic systems.
Rich in visual content and interdisciplinary analysis, Mental Libraries bridges past and present, inviting readers to rethink the role of memory in shaping knowledge, literature, and culture.
List of Contributors; Foreword: The Art of Memory and a New Season of Studies; Introduction: Mental Libraries. The Reception of the Arts of Memory in Literature and Culture; PART I: Crafting the Mental Library: Memory Systems and their Cultural Contexts; 1. The Use of Major and Minor Loci in the Liber Memoriae Artificialis by Bartolomeo da Mantova (1429); 2. The Enchantment of Memory: Observations on Giordano Bruno’s Cantus Circaeus; 3. Pedagogy of Memory: Albertus Carrara’s De Omnibus Ingeniis Augendae Memoriae; 4. “Traduttore, traditore”? How Early Mnemonic Knowledge Is Shaped by Translations; 5. The Body as a Mnemonic Aid for Learning Grammar; 6. Diagrammatizing the Art of Memory: Two Examples of Tree Diagrams in Mnemonic Treatises from the 15th Century; PART II: Reimagining the Mental Library: Cultural and Literary Transformations of Memory; 7. Encyclopedic Mnemonics in Diego Valadés’ Rhetorica Christiana; 8. The Machiavellian Movement: Acquiring Virtues through the Body; 9. Burton’s Mental Library: The Anatomy of Melancholy and the Art of Memory; 10. Mnemotechnics, Vision, and Apocrypha. Sources of imagines agentes in Middle English Drama; 11. Memory in De sacris concionibus recte formandis (Rome, 1543) by Alfonso Zorrilla; 12. The Geography of Memory and Hispanic Poets of the Golden Age; 13. Local Memory and Literary Landscape in Petrarch; Index
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