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MEMORY
PALACE
OF
MATTEO
RICCI
JONATHAN
D.
SPENCE
ELISABETH
SIFTON
BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
ELISABETHSIFTONBOOKS• PENGUINBOOKS
Viking Penguin Inc.,40West 23rdStreet,New York,NewYork 10010, U.S.A.
Penguin BooksLtd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex,England
Penguin BooksAustralia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books CanadaLimited, 2801John Street, Markham,Ontario,CanadaL3R 1B4
PenguinBooks (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190Wairau Road, Auckland 10,NewZealand
FirstpublishedintheUnitedStatesofAmericabyViking PenguinInc. 1984
Firstpublished inGreat Britain by Faber&Faber Ltd, 1984
Published in Penguin Books 1985
Reprinted 1986
Copyright
©
TheJonathan D. SpenceChildren's Trust, 1983, 1984All rightsreserved
Aportionofthisbookappearedoriginally in The Yale Review underthetitle"Ricci."
LIBRARYOF CONGRESS CATALOGINGINPUBLICATIONDATA
Spence,Jonathan D.
The memory palaceofMatteo Ricci.
Reprint. Originally published: NewYork,N.Y. : VikingPenguin, 1984.
"Elisabeth Sifton books." Includes index.
1. Ricci, Matteo, 1552-1610. 2.Jesuits
—
MissionsChina. 3-Missionaries
—
China—
Biography.4.Missionaries
—
Italy—
Biography. 5.China—
History-MingDynasty, 1368-1644. I. Title.
BV3427.R46S66 1985 266'2'0924 [B] 85-6584
ISBN 14 00.8098 8
Grateful acknowledgment is made tothe following forpermission to reprintcopyrighted
material:
Columbia UniversityPress:Selections from Dictionary ofMing Biography, L. C. Goodrich
and C. Y. Fan,eds.Copyright
©
1976 byColumbia UniversityPress.HarvardUniversityPress: Excerpts from: Institutio Oraloria, by Quintilian, translated by
H.E.Butler, vol. IV, 1936;AdHerennium (Anon),translatedbyHarryCaplan, 1968;
Epit-omeofRomanHistory, by LuciusAnnaeusFlorus,translatedbyE. S. Forster, 1929.
LoyolaUniversityPress:Excerptsfrom TheSpiritualExercises, by Ignatius of Loyola, trans-latedby LouisJ. Puhl,S.J., Loyola UniversityPress, 1951.
Penguin Books Ltd: Excerpt from Rabelais, Gargantua &Pantagruel, translated byJ. M.
Cohen (Penguin Classics 1955),p. 658.Copyright 1955 byJ. M. Cohen.
RandomHouse,Inc.:From TheAeneid,byVirgil, translatedbyRobertFitzgerald.
Transla-tioncopyright
©
1980, 1982, 1983 by RobertFitzgerald.Universitat Salzburg, InstitutfurEnglischeSpracheundLiteratur: Excerpt from The Vita
Christtof Ludolph of Saxony, by Charles AlbertConway, fromAnalecta Cartusiana34 (editor:
Dr.JamesHogg, Universityof Salzburg), 1976.
Mapsby DavidLindroth
CalligraphybyWangFang-Yu andWangSum Wai
Printed in theUnitedStatesofAmericaby
R.R. Donnelley&SonsCompany, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Set inGaramond
Exceptin theUnited Statesof America, thisbook is soldsubject to thecondition that it
shall not,bywayoftradeor otherwise, be lent, re-sold,hired out,orotherwisecirculated
without thepublisher's priorconsent in any form of bindingor coverother than thatin
which it ispublished andwithout asimilarcondition includingthiscondition being
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
owe
thanks tomany
people for helpingme
with this book. Ibadgered
numerous
members
oftheYale history department,at
some
time or other, with requests for information,and
they all responded cheerfully and helpfully.
Without
my
naming them
all individually, I
hope
they will accept this collectivemention
ofgrati-tude.
The
same
was true for those in theWhitney
Humanities
Centerat Yale,
where
the first draft was written. Iwould
like to thank all thefellows there for their guidance and encouragement.
Among
the scores of peoplefrom
other departments at Yalewho
also helped with advice, I
am
especially grateful to Herbert Marks,Wayne
Meeks
andThomas
Greene
formaking
what
turned out to becrucial suggestions at the right times. For helping
me
trackdown
Ricci's four prints, I
am
grateful to EgbertHaverkamp-Begemann
andJennifer Kilian, as well as to the staffofthe
Department
ofPrintsand
Photographs at the Metropolitan
Museum
ofArt inNew
York, underwhose
guidance I at last heldtwo
of the originals inmy
hands. LeoSteinberg gave help with interpretations. Charles Boxer, at a
I
would
also like to acknowledge the constant help ofthe staffin theBeinecke Rare
Book
Library, the Divinity School Library, the ArtLi-brary, and the Sterling
Memorial
Library, all at Yale.My
thanks, too, tothose
who
provided copies of rare materials from Berkeley, Chicago,Cornell, and Harvard, from
Cambridge
University Library, and fromthe Biblioteca
Comunale
at Macerata,where
Aldo
Adversi and PieroCorradini were ofkey assistance.
At
theChina
Jesuit History Project in Los Gatos,where
I spent aval-uable
week
early in 1983, kind hospitality was offered by the rector,Fa-therJoseph Costa, S.J., and the librarian, Father Carrol O'Sullivan, SJ.
Theodore
Foss and Brother Michael Grace in Chicago, as well as the Jesuit fathersGeorge
Ganss, Christopher Spalatin, PeterHu,
andWil-liam
Spohn
all gaveme
useful advice, and so—
repeatedly andgra-ciously
—
did FatherEdward
Malatesta, S.J.For help with translations from Portuguese, Italian, Latin and
Chi-nese, I particularly thank Carla Freccero, Claudia Brodsky,
Cheng
Pei-kai,
K'ang
Le, Ch'enJo-shui, SylviaYu
andYu
Ying-shih.Those
who
struggled in turn to decipher
my
opaque
and troubled drafts were many, butmy
special thanks to the typistswho
suffered themost
andthe longest, Katrin van derVaart with the firstdraft and Elna
Godburn
with the second.
The
calligraphy for Ricci's fourmemory
images was written ex-pressly for thisbook
byChang
Ch'ung-ho, andmy
thanks to her forherskill and sensitivity.
Time
towork
out the basicscheme
ofthebook
and undertake the initial research was provided by a
John Simon
Gug-genheim Memorial
Fellowship, forwhich
I thank the trustees. Helpfulreadings of the first draft were offered by Michael Cooke, Father
Mala-testa, S.J., and Jeanne
Bloom,
and of the second by HaroldBloom,
Robert Fitzgerald,
Hans
Frei, andJohn
Hollander, to all ofwhom
my
thanks. Elisabeth Sifton, as twice before, provided the careful readingof
everything at all stages
which
encouragedme
to keep trying. Iam
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
vii
MATTEO
RICCI:A
CHRONOLOGY
xiii
ONE
BUILDING
THE
PALACE
1
TWO
THE
FIRST
IMAGE:
THE
WARRIORS
24
THREE
THE
FIRST
PICTURE:
THE
APOSTLE
IN
THE
WAVES
FOUR
THE SECOND
IMAGE:
THE
HUIHUI
93 FIVE
THE
SECOND
PICTURE:
THE
ROAD
TO EMMAUS
128
SIX
THE THIRD
IMAGE:
PROFIT
AND
HARVEST
162
SEVEN
THE THIRD
PICTURE:
THE
MEN
OF
SODOM
201
EIGHT
THE
FOURTH
IMAGE:
THE
FOURTH
PICTURE
232
NINE
INSIDE
THE
PALACE
266
ABBREVIATIONS
269NOTES
270BIBLIOGRAPHY
319INDEX
339Illustrations appear onpages 25, 61, 94, 129, 163, 202, 263, 264.
MATTEO
RICO:
A
CHRONOLOGY
1552, October6 Born in Macerata, Italy, in the papal
domain
1561 Becomes pupil in Jesuit school, Macerata.
1568
To
Rome,
to study law.1571, August 15 Enters St. Andrew's Quirinale in
Rome,
asnovice in the Society ofJesus.
1572-1573 Studies atJesuit college, Florence. 1573, September- Studies atJesuit college in
Rome.
1577,May
1577,
Summer
To
Coimbra, Portugal. Studies Portuguese.1578,
March
Audience withKing
Sebastian.—
—
,March
24 Leaves Lisbon on the 5"/. Louis., September 13 Reaches Goa. Studies theology, teaches Latin
and Greek.
1580 Lives in Cochin. Ordained priest, lateJuly.
1581 Returns to Goa.
1582, April 26 Departs
Goa
by sea. , June In Malacca.1583, September 10 October 1589 August 3 August 26 1591
December
1592 July 1594November
1595 April 18 mid-May June 28November
1596 Spring 1597 August 1598 September7-November
5 1599 February 6 1600November
1601 January 24 FebruaryMay
28 1602 August 1603 Autumn-Winter 1604 mid-August 1606 JanuaryMay
January-February Autumn-Winter September 8May
11Settles in Zhaoqing, China, with Michele
Ruggieri.
Unauthorized copies ofhis world
map
areprinted in Zhaoqing.
Expelled from Zhaoqing by hostile mandarins.
Settles in Shaozhou.
Begins draft translation ofChinese classical
Four Books.
Shaozhou residence attacked. Ricci injures foot.
Jesuits change to Chinese literati dress.
Leaves Shaozhou for Nanjing.
Shipwreck and drowning of Barradas.
Settles in Nanchang.
Composes
Treatise on Friendship.Composes
draft of Treatiseon Mnemonic Arts.Named
superior ofChina mission.First trip to Peking; residence not permitted.
Settles in Nanjing.
Eunuch
Ma
Tang
seizes crucifix.Enters Peking for second time.
Composes
eight songs for emperor's court.Peking residence permitted.
Publishes revised version ofworld map.
Publishes True Meaning ofthe Lordof
Heaven.
Plantin polyglot Bible reaches Peking.
Gives four prints and commentaries to
ink-maker
Cheng
Dayue.Publishes translation offirst six books of
Euclid's Elements ofGeometry.
Publishes Ten Discourses by a Paradoxical
Man.
Starts to write his Historia.
First Marian sodality founded in Peking.
CHINA
NanchangRJk
Boyang ZHEJIANGJ>
Easfchma
Sea
FORMOSA
MEMORY
PALACE
OF
BUILDING
THE
PALACE
In
1596Matteo
Ricci taught the Chinesehow
to build amemory
palace.He
toldthem
that the size of the palacewould depend on
how
much
theywanted
to remember: themost
ambitious constructionwould
consist of severalhundred
build-ings ofall shapes and sizes; "themore
there are the better it will be,"said Ricci,
though
he added thatone
did not have to buildon
a grandi-ose scale right away.One
could createmodest
palaces, orone
couldbuild less dramatic structures such as a temple
compound,
a cluster ofgovernment
offices, a public hostel, or a merchants' meeting lodge. Ifone wished to begin
on
a still smaller scale, thenone
could erect asim-ple reception hall, a pavilion, or a studio.
And
ifone wanted
aninti-mate
spaceone
could use just the corner ofa pavilion, or an altar in atemple, or even such a
homely
object as a wardrobe or a divan.1 Insummarizing
thismemory
system, he explained that these palaces,pavilions, divans were mental structures to be kept in one's head, not
solid objects to be literally constructed out of "real" materials. Ricci
suggested that there were three
main
options for suchmemory
loca-tions. First, they could bedrawn from
reality—
that is,from
buildingsthat
one
had been in or from objects thatone
had seen with one'sown
eyes and recalled in one'smemory.
Second, they could be totally fictive,products ofthe imagination conjured
up
in anyshape or size.Or
third,they could be halfreal and halffictive, as in the case ofa building
one
knew
well and through the back wall ofwhich one
broke an imaginarydoor as a shortcut to
new
spaces, or in the middle ofwhich one
createda mental staircase that
would
leadone up
to higher floors that had notexisted before.
The
real purpose ofall these mental constructs was to providestor-age spaces for the myriad concepts that
make
up
thesum
ofourhuman
knowledge.To
everything thatwe
wish to remember, wrote Ricci,we
should give an image; and to every
one
ofthese imageswe
shouldas-sign a position
where
it can repose peacefully untilwe
are ready tore-claim it by an act of
memory.
Since this entirememory
system canwork
only ifthe images stay in the assigned positions and ifwe
canin-stantly
remember where
we
stored them, obviously itwould seem
eas-iest to relyon
real locationswhich
we
know
so well thatwe
cannotever forget them.
But
thatwould
be a mistake, thought Ricci. For it isby expanding the
number
oflocations and the correspondingnumber
of images that can be stored in
them
thatwe
increase and strengthenour
memory.
Therefore the Chinese should struggle with the difficulttask ofcreating fictive places, or
mixing
the fictive with the real, fixingthem
permanently in theirminds
by constant practice and review sothat at last the fictive spaces
become
"as if real, and can never beerased."
How
on
earth had such a system first evolved, the Chinesemight
well have asked, and Ricci anticipated the question by
summarizing
the ancientWestern
tradition that ascribed the idea ofmemory
trainingthrough precise placement to the
Greek
poet Simonides.As
Ricciex-plained (giving the nearest approximation he could provide in Chinese
for the poet's name):
Long
ago a Western poet, the noble Xi-mo-ni-de, was gathered withdense crowd ofguests.
When
he left the crowd for amoment
to step outside, the great hallcame
tumblingdown
in a sudden mighty wind.All the other revelers were crushed to death, their bodies were
man-gledand torn apart, not even their
own
families could recognize them.Xi-mo-ni-de, however, could remember the exact order in which his
relatives and friends had been sitting, and as he recalled
them
one byone their bodies could be identified.
From
thiswe
can see the birth ofthe
mnemonic method
that was transmitted to later ages.3It was this general facility for
remembering
the order of things thathad been elaborated into a system over the succeeding centuries; by
Ricci's time it had
become
away
for ordering all one'sknowledge
ofsecular and religious subjects, and since he himself
was
a Catholic mis-sionary Riccihoped
that once the Chinese learned to value hismne-monic
powers theywould
bedrawn
to askhim
about the religion thatmade
suchwonders
possible.Matteo Ricci had traveled a long road in order to
win
this chance to present hismnemonics
to a scholarly Chinese audience.An
Italian,born in the hill
town
of Macerata in 1552, Riccibecame
a novice in theJesuit order in
Rome
in 1571 and, after extensive training in theology, humanities, and science, followed by a five-year apprenticeship in Indiaand Macao, entered
China
in 1583 to undertake mission work. In 1595,by
which
time he hadbecome
fluent in the Chinese language, he tookup
residence in the prosperous administrativeand
commercial center ofNanchang,
in the eastern province ofJiangxi.At
the veryend
of 1595he gave expression to his
newfound
confidence in hisown
languageskills by writing out, in Chinese ideographs, a
book
ofmaxims
on
friendship
drawn from
various classical authors andfrom
the churchfathers.
He
presented this manuscript to a prince of theMing
rul-ing house
who
was living inNanchang
and had frequently invitedhim
to his palace for drinking parties.3
At
thesame
time hewas
begin-ning to discuss his theories
on
memory
with local Chinese scholarsand to give lessons in
mnemonic
techniques.6 His description of thememory
palace can be found in a shortbook on
the art ofmemory
to the governor ofJiangxi,
Lu Wangai,
and toGovernor
Lu's threesons.
7
The
family that Ricci was seeking to instruct inmnemonic
skillsstood at the apex of Chinese society.
Governor
Lu
himselfwas anin-telligent and wealthy scholar
who
had served in a wide variety ofpostsin the
Ming
dynasty bureaucracy.He
knew
the country well, for he had been stationed at various times in the far southwest,on
the east coast,and in the north, and he had performed with distinction in each ofthe
main
areas ofChineseadministration: the judicial, thefinancial, and themilitary.
Now
he had reached the peak ofhis career, as a provincialgov-ernor, and was preparing his three sons for the advanced
government
examinations; he himself had passed these
exams
with distinctiontwenty-eight years before, and
knew
along with all his contemporariesthat success in the
exams
was the surest route to fame and fortune inthe imperial Chinese state.
Thus
we
can be almost certain that Ricciwas offering to teach the governor's sons advanced
memory
techniquesso that they
would
have a better chance to pass the exams, andwould
then in gratitude use their newly
won
prestige to advance the cause ofthe Catholic church.
In the event, however,
though
the governor's children did extremelywell in the exams, this does not
seem
to have been because of Ricci'smnemonic
methods
but rather because of diligent study alongtradi-tional Chinese lines of repetition and recitation, aided perhaps by the
mnemonic poems
andrhyming
jingles that were part of current Chi-nesememory
practice.9As
Ricci wrote later thatsame
year to thegen-eral of theJesuit order, Claudio Acquaviva, the governor's eldest son had read the
memory
book
with care, but had remarked toone
ofhisconfidants that
"though
the precepts are the true rules ofmemory, one
has to have a remarkably fine
memory
tomake
any useofthem."And
in a letter to a friend in Italy with
whom
he had first written out therules for building
memory
palaces, Ricci observed that, although theChinese in
Nanchang
"all admired the subtlety ofthe system, not all ofthem
were willing to take the trouble to learnhow
to use it."1
memory
palaces.He
hadgrown
up
with them, together with awhole
range of other techniques for fixing the subjects ofone's schooling in
the
memory.
Moreover, these skills were a fundamental part ofthecur-riculum that Ricci had studied in his classes
on
rhetoric and ethics atthe Jesuit College in
Rome.
Ricci was probably introduced to the ideaof
memory
palaces byway
ofthe scholar Cypriano Soarez,whose
text-book on
the basic lessons of rhetoric andgrammar,
theDe
ArteRhe-torka, was required reading for Jesuit students in the 1570s.1 After leading his readers through the fundamentals of classical usage and
sentencestructure, and giving
them
examples of tropes and metaphors,metonymy,
onomatopoeia, and metalepsis, allegory, irony, andhyper-bole, Soarez introduced
them
to the art ofmemory
placement,which
he ascribed to Simonides and called the root of all eloquence, the
"the-saurus eloquentiae."
He
notedhow
the system heldwords
in order aswell as things, and could be used for an "infinite progression" ofterms.
The
students shouldpractice creating dramatic images ofvarious kinds,and designing locations for them: palatial buildings or spacious churches
would
beamong
the best.13But
such vague suggestionswould
hardly giveone
the full range ofmemory
techniques, or even the principles behind them. Ricciwould
have learned the details
from
several other authors.One
would
have been Pliny,whose
NaturalHistory Ricci also read in school,and
whose
passage
on
the greatmemory
experts ofthe past he translated into Chi-nese in his 1596memory
book. Otherswould
have been severalwrit-ers ofthe first century B.C. and the first century A.D., such as the author
ofa Latin
work
on
rhetoric calledAd
Herennium, or Quintilian,who
wrote about
memory
in hishandbook
on
oratory.These
books
gavedetailed information
on
how
to constructmemory
buildingsand
theimages
one
would
place in them.As
the author ofAd
Herenniumex-plained:
We
ought, then, to set up images ofa kind that can adhere longest inthe memory.
And we
shall do so ifwe
establish likenesses as striking assomething; if
we
assign to them exceptional beauty or singularugli-ness; if
we
dresssome
of them with crowns or purple cloaks, forex-ample, so that the likeness
may
be more distinct to us; or ifwe
somehow
disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood orsoiled with
mud
or smeared with red paint, so that its form is morestriking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that,
too, will ensure our remembering them
more
readily.15
Such a description carried particular force, since throughout the Middle Ages the authorof
Ad
Herennium was believed to be the revered Cicerohimself.
Quintilian elaborated
on
thesame
topic by explainingwhat
sort ofplaces
one would
use to store the imagesone
had chosen:The
first thought is placed, as it were, in the forecourt; thesecond, letus say, in the living room: the remainder are placed in due order all
round the tmpluvium and entrusted not merely to bedrooms and
par-lours, but even to thecare ofstatues and thelike. This done, as soon as
the
memory
ofthe facts requires to be revived, all these places arevis-ited in turn and the various deposits are
demanded
from theircusto-dians, as the sight ofeach recalls the respective details. Consequently,
however large the
number
ofthese which it is required to remember,all arelinked one to theother like dancers hand in hand, and there can be no mistake since they join what precedes to what follows, no trou-ble being required except the preliminary labour of committing the various points to memory.
What
I have spoken ofas being done in ahouse, can equally well be donein connection with publicbuildings, a
long journey, the ramparts ofa city, oreven pictures.
Or we may
even imagine such places to ourselves.Despite these attempts at explanation, the system sounds elusive and
abstract to readers today.
But
ifwe
digress amoment
toprovide amod-ern focus and context, perhaps
we
can sharpen our view ofhow
Riccisought to interest the Chinese in his
memory
theories by creatingideas or a specific
mnemonic
rulewould
in turn yield, instantly, are-quired piece ofinformation. Let us imagine a
modern
medical studentfacing an oral examination that reviews her
work
on
bones, cells, andnerves.
The
student has in her head awhole
memory
city, neatly laidout in wards, streets, lanes, houses, containing all the
knowledge
shehas acquired so far in her schooling; but facing the examiners she pays
no
attention to the wards of history, geology, poetry, chemistry, andmechanics.
Her
energy is concentratedon
the three-story PhysiologyHouse
inBody
Lane, where, in separate rooms, the disparate, powerful,evocative images she has been creating in each evening ofstudy are in
place
—
around the walls,between
thewindows,
on
chairs, beds, tables.Three questions are fired at her: she
must
name
the bones ofthe upperlimbs, the stages of cell division in meiosis, and the order of nerves passing through the superior orbital tissue in the skull.
Her
mind
racesto the
Upper
Body Bone
Room,
at the top of the stairson
the secondfloor, where, in the third position
from
the door, a CanadianMountie
in a brilliant scarlet jacket sits
on
his horse with a manacled, distraughtfigure tied to the horse's crupper:
from
there it takes her only a fractionofa second to glide to the Cell
Room
in thebasement
where, near thefurnace, a magnificent but savagely scarred African warrior is standing,
a look ofineffable
boredom
on
his face, despite the fact that he graspswith each
huge hand
the upperarm
of a beautiful African girl;and
as swiftly the student's thoughtswing
to the topfloor SkullRoom
where,reclining
on
a bedspread patternedon
the stripes and colors ofthe flagofFrance, a voluptuous naked
woman
reclines, her little fist clutching acrumpled stack ofdollar bills.
The
student's answers to the three ques-tionscome
quickly.The
image
of theMountie
and his captive has atonce given her the sentence
5ome
CriminalsHave
Underestimated/toyal Canadian
Mounted
Police, the first letter ofeachword
yielding the correct list ofscapula, clavicle, humerus, ulna, radius, carpals,meta-carpals, and phalanges.
The
second image, of the LazyZulu
PursuingDark
Damosels, gives the student the stages ofcell division in meiosisimage, the Lazy French Tart
Lying
Naked
In Anticipation, yields the order ofnerves in the skull's upper orbital tissues, to wit, the lacrimal, frontal, trochlear, lateral, nasociliary, internal, and abducens.17In a medieval or late Renaissance world similar techniques
would
have had a different focus, and the images
would
have been appropriateto the times.
As
early as the fifth century a.d.one
finds thephilosopherMartianus Capella writing that Psyche, at her birth, had been given the
most
lovely presents, including "a vehicle with swift wheels"—
the giftwas Mercury's idea
—
"inwhich
she could travel at an astonishingspeed, although
Memory
bound
it andweighed
itdown
with goldenchains." These were the chains of
memory
that stood for the stabilizingforce of intellect and imagination
on
thehuman
soul; they were notmeant
to be ametaphor
for any idea ofstasis. 18And
how
sharp still,more
than a millennium later,must
have been for Ricci and his con-temporaries thememory
image
of Rhetoric as Capellapainted her, thatwoman
with "so rich awealth ofdiction, so vast a store ofmemory
andrecollection,"
who
heldmemory
in her domain.Here
was fifth-century Rhetoric:A
woman
of the tallest stature and abounding self-confidence, awoman
of outstanding beauty; she wore a helmet, and her head was wreathed with royal grandeur; in her hands the weapons which she used either to defend herselfor towound
herenemies, shone with the brightnessoflightning.The
garment under her arms was covered by arobe
wound
about her shoulders in the Latin fashion; this robe wasadorned with the light ofall kinds ofdevices and showed the figures
of them all, while she had a belt under her breast adorned with the
rarest colors ofjewels.
Each decoration of her robe
—
light, devices, figures, colors, jewels—
re-ferred to aspects ofrhetorical
ornament
andwould
be retained foreverby the student
who
kept her in his head.19And how
perfect was thecontrast between this
glowing
figure ofRhetoric and the terrible figuremythologist Fulgentius and then updated into a Latin
mnemonic
jin-gle by the fourteenth-century
monk
Ridevall. For Idolatry was depictedas a prostitute, a trumpet blaring above her head to give notice to all of
her condition.
Summoning
up
this figurefrom
her resting placewhen
the topic ofidolatry had to be broached,one
would
at once recall thesalient points of theological argument: she
was
a harlot because theunfaithful have
abandoned
God
and fornicated with idols; she wasblind and deaf because Fulgentius had taught that the first idol had been a dead son's likeness
made
by slaves to lessen the grief of thechild's father, and she was blind and deafto the true belief that should have banished such superstitions.
How
many
such images couldone
or didone
seek to retain in thememory
palaces of one'smind?
Ricci wrote quite casually in 1595 of running through a list of four to fivehundred
random
Chineseideo-grams and then repeating the list in reverse order, while Chinese friends described
him
as being able to recitevolumes
of the Chinese classics after scanningthem
only once.But
such feats were not particularlystartling: Francesco Panigarola, an older contemporary
who
may
havetaught Ricci
memory
arts either inRome
or in Macerata—
themanu-script draft of Panigarola's little tract
on
memory
method
still reposesin the Macerata library
—
was described by acquaintances in Florence asbeing able to
roam
across ahundred
thousandmemory
images, eachin its
own
fixed space.As
Ricci, echoing the pastbooks
on
memory,
told
Governor
Lu
Wangai,
itwas
the order and sequence of the places ready for images inside each building that were crucial to themne-monic
art:Once
yourplaces are allfixed in order, then you can walk through thedoor and
make
your start.Turn
to the right and proceed from there.As with the practice ofcalligraphy, in which you
move
from thebe-ginning to theend, as with fish
who
swim
alongin ordered schools, sois everything arranged in your brain, and all the images are ready for
whateveryou seek to remember. Ifyou are going to use a great
many
extent; ifyou only want a few, then take a single reception hall and
just divide it up by its corners.23
In her wonderfully eruditeand comprehensive
work
on
medieval andRenaissance
mnemonic
theory, The Art of Memory, Frances Yatesmused
over"what
a Christianized artificialmemory
might
have beenlike" and regretted the fact that "an Ars memorativa treatise,
though
itwill always give the rules, rarely gives any concrete application of the
rules, that is to say it rarely sets out a system of
mnemonic
imageson
their places."
Matteo
Ricci's Chinese version of amemory
systemcannot totally fill these lacunae, but it does give us a sense of
how
thetraditional
memory
system could be adhered toon
the far side of theglobe.
Furthermore, Ricci has left us, in his Chinese
book on memory, one
explicit
group
of images, each fixed in itsown
place and described insequence.
The
firstimage
wastwo
warriors grappling, the second atribeswoman from the west, the third a peasant cutting grain, the fourth a maidservant holding a child in her arms.
True
to hisown
in-junctions about a simple
way
tobegin amemory
system, Ricci chose to place these images in the four corners ofone
specific room. Thisroom
was a reception hall, a fairly large formal space supported by pillars,
which
I take to be the entryway
to thememory
palace proper.Gover-nor
Lu
or any beginnerwho
was reading Ricci could followhim
with-out difficulty
on
this first mentalmemory
stroll;we
can seethem
walking together to the door, entering the hall, and, turning to their right, perusing the images
one
by one.25Once
one grew
familiar with the methodology, however,one
did not have the solechoice ofbuilding ever larger and larger clusters ofrooms
and chambers.
One
could increase the content of given structures byplacing ever
more
images within them.The
only danger here was that the spacemight
become
too cluttered for themind
toseize easilyon
allthe images it contained.
But
with thatone
cautionone
could introducegold or jade
upon
occasional tables, and paint the walls themselves inglittering colors.
26
One
could also use specific "pictures" to evoke theimages, wrote Ricci, just as Quintilian had urged in the first century
a.d., or as Ludovico
Dolce
had inmind
in 1562when
he suggested asan example that certain
works
ofTitian beremembered
in all theirin-tricate details by students interested in classical mythology. Ricci
clearly
knew
themnemonic
effect of vivid illustrations, and his lettersshow
that he was not only aware of religiousbooks
likeJeronimo
Nadal's Commentaries on the Gospels, copiously illustrated with
wood-cuts,
which
theJesuits were publishing with theaim
ofmaking
everyimportant
moment
in Christ's life fresh and vivid in theviewer's mind, but he even had hisown
copy ofNadal
withhim
inChina and
wroteto friends in Italy that he
found
it invaluable.Just as Ricci leftfour
memory
images for his reception hall, so he leftfour religious pictures, each with a caption in his calligraphy
and
threeof
them
embellished with hisown
commentaries: these were ofChristand Peter at the Sea of Galilee, of Christ and the
two
disciples atEmmaus,
of themen
ofSodom
falling blinded before the angel of theLord, and of the Virgin
Mary
holding the Christ Child.That
these pic-tureshave been preserved isdue
to Ricci's friendship with the publisherand inkstone connoisseur
Cheng
Dayue,who
was
introduced tohim
by a
mutual
friend in Peking in 1605.Cheng,
who
was
about topub-lish a collection ofChinese calligraphy and graphics under the title of
"The
Ink Garden," was eager to include samples ofWestern
art andhandwriting, and requested Ricci to contribute some.
Though
Ricci,elaborately self-deprecating, confessed to
Cheng
that only"one
ten-thousandth part" of
Western
culture could be of any interest to theerudite Chinese, he nevertheless consented, with the result that the
fol-lowing year his four pictures appeared along with his commentaries in
Cheng's elegant volume.29
Such
religious pictures could be confidently expected to fix in Chineseminds
the details ofdramatic passagesfrom
the Bible, whether these were
from
moments
in Christ's life orfrom
like the
memory
images, they could be used to supplement the storageand retrieval
mechanisms
of thememory
palace itself.Despite Ricci's apparent self-confidence about the value ofhis
memory
system, such structures were beginning tobe challenged in
Europe
well before he sailed to the East in 1578. In the 1530s Cornelius Agrippa,despite his interest in magic and in scientific alchemy, wrote in his
book
Of
the Vanitieand
Uncertaintie ofArtesand
Sciences that he felt thenatural
memory
ofmen
was dulled by the"monstrous
images" con-cocted inmnemonic
arts; the attempt to overload themind
withinfi-nite pieces of information often "caused madness and frenzy instead of
profound and sure
memory."
Agrippa saw a kind of puerileexhibi-tionism in this flaunting of knowledge. In the English translation of
his
work
that appeared in 1569, this disgustcomes
through strongly: "It is a shameful thinge, and a shamelessemannes
propertie to set outin al
mens
sighte, the readings ofmany
thinges, like as Marchantesdo
theire wares: whereas in the
meane
while thehowse
is emptie."Reli-gious thinkers like
Erasmus
andMelanchthon
saw thesememory
systems as
going
back to an earlier age ofmonkish
superstition and feltthat the systems were of
no
practical use.31 Rabelais, also in the 1530s,had used his marvelous powers of
mockery
further to discredit thememory
arts.He
describedhow
Gargantua
was taught by his tutorHolofernes to
memorize
themost
abstruse grammaticalworks
of histime, along with their full panoply of learned commentaries by such
scholars as Bangbreeze, Scallywag, and Claptrap.
The
upshot, wroteRabelais gravely, was that
though Gargantua
could indeed repeat thebooks he had learned "backwards by heart," and
"became
as wise as anyman
baked in an oven,"when
one
wanted
intelligentcommentary
from
him
"it wasno
more
possible todraw
aword
from
him
than a fartfrom a dead donkey."32
By
theend
of the century Francis Bacon, de-spite his fascination with thepower
of naturalmemory
to organize andanalyze data, had developed a definitivecritique ofthe artificial
memory
that could be attained with
memory
training, callingthem
"of ostenta-tion prodigious,"Bacon
concluded that the systems werefundamen-tally "barren." "I
make
no
more
estimation ofrepeating agreatnumber
of
names
or wordsupon
once hearing," he wrote, "than Ido
of thetricks of tumblers, funamboloes, baladines: the
one
being thesame
inthe
mind
that the other is in the body, matters ofstrangeness withoutworthiness."33
But most
Catholic theologians of Ricci's time, like Ricci himself,were not dissuaded by these dismissive arguments.
They
concentratedon
the positive aspects of the system, ignoring thegrowing body
ofscholarship
which
proved that the key early texton
memory
systems,Ad
Herennium, had in fact not been written by Cicero at alland
con-tinuing tomake
it a fundamental part of their curriculum.3 Itwas
Thomas
Aquinas himselfwho
had firmly implanted the idea thatsys-tems of
memory
were a part ofethics rather than merely an aspect ofrhetoric, as they had usually been considered previously. In his
com-mentaries
on
Aristotle,Aquinas
described the importance of"corporealsimilitudes"
—
ormemory
images in bodilyform
—
in preventing"sub-tle and spiritual things" falling
away from
the soul.Oddly
enough, Aquinas strengthened his arguments for use of memory-place systemsby pointing out that Cicero in
Ad
Herennium had saidwe
need "solid-*
tude" for our
memory
images;Aquinas
interpreted this asmeaning
we
should "cleave with affection" to our
memory
images, and thusmade
itpossible to apply
mnemonic
images to devotional and scriptural uses.The
fact thatAd
Herennium had saidwe
need "solitude" to pick out ourmemory
images, not "solicitude," was not noted forcenturies.And
Aquinas's slip
—
ironically, he hadprobably beenquotingfrom
memory
in any case
—
led to the strengthening of a Christianmnemonic
tradi-tion that focused
on
memory
arts as themeans
to marshal "spiritualintentions."
Such
an interpretation spread widely. For instance, the idea thatmemory
systems were used to"remember
Heaven and
Hell" canexplain
much
ofthe iconography ofGiotto's paintings or the structureand detail ofDante's Inferno, and was
commonplace
in scores ofbooks
In the time ofAquinas, and in the following
two
centuries, therede-veloped a
whole
tradition oftexts that sought to sharpen Christiande-votion through evoking theimagination ofbelievers,
some
ofthemost
important of which, like
William
of Paris's twelfth-century Rhetorica Divina, reached back to Quintilian for inspiration.36 Ludolfus ofSax-ony, a fourteenth-century devotional writer
whom
Ignatius of Loyolawas later to read with fascination, used language of exceptional force.
Ludolfus compelled his Christian readers to be present at the
Crucifix-ion,
pounding
hiswords
into the reader's ears as the nailspounded
through Christ: "After all the nerves and veins had been strained, and
the bones and joints dislocated by the violent extension, he was
fas-tened to tne cross. His hands and feet were rudely pierced and
wounded
by coarse, heavy nails that injured skin and flesh, nerves and veins, and
also the ligaments ofthe bones."37 In such
moods,
where
"gospel timeis
made
to suffuse present time," Ludolfus could tell the believer toproceed "with a certain devout curiosity, feeling your way, [and] touching each of the
wounds
of your Saviour,who
has thus died foryou"
—
wounds
of which, according to Bridget ofSweden,whose
work
Ludolfus
drew
on, there were 5,490.38
Ludolfus, a Carthusian
Monk,
urged that the active imagination
must
at all times be applied to Christ, "in walking along and in standing still, in sittingdown
and inlying
down,
in eating and in drinking, in talking and in keeping silent,when
alone andwhen
with others."39By
the middle of the fifteenthcentury, the author of a
book
of devotions for girlswas
urgingthem
to give to characters in the Bible
—
not excluding Christ himself—
thefaces offriends and acquaintances, so that they
would
be fixed in theirmemories.
He
told hisyoung
audience to place these figures in theirown
mental Jerusalem, "taking for this purpose a city that iswell-known
to you." Thereafter, "alone and solitary" in her chamber, eachgirl could undertake her devotions, reliving the Bible storyby
"moving
slowly from episode to episode."
This vivid restructuring of
memory
was
also a fundamentalcompo-nent of the edifice of discipline and religious training that the con-verted Spanish soldier Ignatius of Loyola developed for the
members
ofBUILDING
THE
PALACEthe SocietyofJesus,
which
he founded in 1540; he had been marshalinghis arguments in writing the early drafts of the Spiritual Exercises,
which
was to be published in its finalform
eight years later. In orderthat his followers
might
live the biblical narrative in all its force,Igna-tius instructed
them
to apply their five senses to those scripturalpas-sages that they were contemplating.
At
the simplest level, thosepracticing the exercises
would
call tomind
the physical setting inwhich
a given event took place, orwhat
Ignatius called "animagina-tive representation" ofthe place:
l
for example, the road
from
BethanytoJerusalem
on which
Christ traveled toward his passion, theroom
inwhich
he held his last supper, the garden inwhich
he was betrayed, thehousein
which
Mary
hismother
waited after the Crucifixion.Within
these contexts, said Ignatius,
one
could thenmove
to a sharper pictureby adding the sense of hearing: "Listen to
what
is being said by the peopleon
the earth's surface, talking to each other, swearing andblas-pheming."
Contrast with this thewords
of the three divine persons ofthe Trinity, and listen to
them
as they say, "Let us bring about there-demption
ofmankind."
After seeing and listening,one
can proceedto involve the rest of the five senses in the act of
memory:
"Smell theindescribable fragrance and taste the boundless sweetness of the
divin-ity.
Touch
by kissing and clinging to the placeswhere
these personswalk or sit, always trying to profit thereby."
3
If the five senses evoke
the past in its diversity and bring it
—
contextually primed, as it wereinto the present, it is the three faculties of
memory,
reason,and
willthat have the burden of deepening the significance of
what
is beingcontemplated, especially
when
the subject matter is notsomething
visi-ble in a conventional sense, as in the case of an awareness ofsin. Here,
said Ignatius, the "picture will be the idea, produced by an effort ofthe imagination, that
my
soul is a prisoner in this corruptiblebody
andthat"
my
whole
self,body
and soul, iscondemned
to liveamongst
ani-mals
on
this earth, likesomeone
in a foreign land."(Though
thiswas
not written expressly for missionaries,
one
can guess the force thepas-sage
must
havegained for Ricci as he lived out his life in China,phrased it, each of the three faculties could be
employed
in turn, withmemory
leading the way:By an effortof
my
memory, I will recall the firstsin, thatoftheangels;next, I will use
my
reason to think about it; thenmy
will, striving toremember and think about all this in order to develop in myself a
sense ofutter shame, as I compare
my
numerous sins with the angels'onesin: thatonesin brought them to Hell:
how
often have I deservedit for all
my
sins.The
memory's part is to recallhow
the angels werecreated in grace, but refused to
make
the most of their free-will inhonoring and obeying their Creator and Lord: they fell victims to pride, and their state ofgrace was perverted to oneofevil will, as they
were plunged from Heaven into hell. Using
my
reason in the sameway, I will think about all this in greater detail: by
my
will I try toevoke the proper sentiments.
As
each person practicing the exercises reflectedon
hisown
sins byplacing
them
in themost
domestic and intimate of contexts—
seeing himselfin the houseswhere
he had lived at different times, thinking ofall his personal relations with others, and reflecting
on
the variouspo-sitions ofservice or authority he had held
—
so he couldmove
from thecontemplation ofthe angels' first sin to a panoramic vision ofthe great
spiritual battle that pitted Christ and his forces against the armies of
the devil.4
The
urgent calls ofLudolfus and Ignatius that the faithful Christianshould incorporate these
"memories"
of an unlived past into thespir-itual present echoed not only
Thomas
Aquinas but also the ConfessionsofAugustine, written eleven
hundred
years before Ricci was born, forit was Augustine
who
had said: "Perchance itmight
be properly said,'there be three times; a present of things past, a present of things
present, and apresent ofthings future.' "
Yet
Ignatius'sown
Catholic contemporaries worried that he or his followersmight
begoing
too farin their invocation ofclaims to special insight into the divine realm.
The
bishop of Valencia complained that the Spiritual Exercises wasin-fluence of Illuminist ideas prevalent at the time. Six priests
who
claimed, in 1548, that through the exercises they could obtain a "di-rect"
communication
withGod
were called for examination by the In-quisition: the inquisitors were worried by the priests' claim that "theHoly
Spiritmight
come upon them
as he once didupon
theapos-tles." 48
Some
Dominicans, in 1553,went
so far as to suggest thatIgna-tius was "notoriously a heretic," charges that
prompted
Ignatius's friendNadal
(author of the Contemplations that Ricci introduced toChina) to insist that Ignatius
drew
his ideasfrom
Scripture, notfrom
direct channels.49 Conscious ofthese controversies, Claudio Acquaviva,
as general of the order during Ricci's
China
service, was todownplay
Ignatius's views ofthe "application of the senses"
and
refer tothem
as a "very easymode,"
not to becompared
tomore
complex
forms of contemplation and prayer.The
precise line between religious experiences and so-called magicalpowers has always been a difficult
one
to draw.Some
scholars havere-cently suggested that interconnections between religion and
magic
al-ways lay in the
words
and incantations of theMass
itself, and in the music, the lights, the wine, the transformations that lie at its heart. Ricci's experiences inChina
show
that there was, in the public mind, anatural presupposition that his skills derived
from
magical sources.On
October 13, 1596, he wrote
from
the city ofNanchang
to GeneralAc-quaviva in
Rome.
After recounting briefly the difficult negotiations he had followed in order togetpermission not only to reside inNanchang
but also to
buy
a house there, Ricci described the crowds ofdistin-guished Chinese literati
who
werenow
flocking to his house tocon-gratulate him. Ricci listed the three major motives that he believed the
Chinese had for thesevisits: their conviction that theJesuits could turn
mercury into pure silver; their desire to study
Western
mathematics; and their eagerness to learn hismnemonic
system.52The
list iscom-pletely believable in the context of the
European
intellectual andreli-gious life of Ricci's time,
when memory
systems werecombined
with numerological skills and the arcane semiscientific world ofalchemy tocon-ventional religion.
We
must
remember
that ifatone
level Ricci's careermakes
sense only in the context ofan aggressive Counter-ReformationCatholicism, as part ofan "expansion ofEurope" in the later sixteenth
century that took place under the
guns
of Spanish and Portuguesemen-of-war, it also
makes
sense only in a far older context,pre-Renais-sance in
many
aspects, a context reaching back through the MiddleAges
to classical antiquity, to worldswhere
the priests ofthe Christianreligion shared the tasks of consoling
mankind
with the"cunning
men"
who
dealt in magic, alchemy, cosmography, and astrology.53The
protracted andcomplex
debates held by order of the Papacy atthe Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563
may
have solvedsome
ofthe
most
difficult problems raised by the leaders of the Catholic church,who
were responding both to their personal awareness of the church'sinternal decay and to the searching questions of their Protestant
oppo-nents, but these "solutions" reached only a fraction of the people.
Others continued to hold their
own
idiosyncratic interpretations: thusGod
hademerged
from a state ofchaos inwhich
the four elements ofearth, water, fire, and air were already present, according to
one
North
Italian miller questioned by the Inquisition in 1584.
"Who
moves
the chaos?" the inquisitor asked, and the miller responded, "Itmoves
byitself."
54
"My
mind
was
lofty and wished for anew
world," said thesame
miller, explaining thatmuch
ofhis disquietcame
from the visionof other lands and peoples that he had absorbed from
John
Mande-ville's tales ofhis travels in Africa and Cathay.55
The
millercan stand asone
humble
exemplar of all thosemen
andwomen
in the sixteenthcentury
who
continued to search formeanings
on
theirown
becauseneither Protestant nor Catholic reformers had succeeded in convincing
them
that they could explain either the ultimate mysteries of the world's origins or such localized yet bafflingphenomena
as intensemental depression, catastrophic sudden death of
humans
and animals,the loss of cherished possessions, or the failures of the harvest.
And
so the lines between aspects ofmagic and religion continued towhere
God
became
the air, Christ the earth, and theHoly
Spirit thewater, while the fire raged everywhere
on
itsown.
57His poorer con-temporaries
dreamed
ofa universe inwhich
rivers were shoredup
withembankments
of ricotta cheese while the heavens raineddown
ravioliand marzipan.58 Ricci and his friends, even if they denied any magical
force to the objects, tossed tiny talismans
made
of thewax
from
thepaschal candles of
Rome
into the stormy seas as theyrounded
theCape
of
Good Hope
in 1578, and outside the walls of Peking in 1601 Riccikept always with
him some
grains of soilfrom
theHoly Land
and a tinycross made, he believed,from
fragments ofthe true crosson which
Christ had died.59
And
in ostensibly "reformed" England, sonumerous
were the magic practitioners that in
one
county during the reign ofQueen
Elizabeth it has been proved thatno one
livedmore
than ten milesaway
fromsome
"cunning man."
In a world used to looking carefully at the sky, each phase of
plane-tary motion, each
waxing
of themoon,
each stellar appearancewas
carefully tracked, and as carefully analyzed for possible significance
on
human
fate. Educatedmen
andwomen
could be devoutmembers
ofthe Catholic church while still keeping
room
in theirminds
forwhat
one
historian has called the alternative systems of "undiscovered occultinfluences" that "pulsated" in their Neoplatonic universes.
Within
many
ofthese systems it was a truism that special strengths accrued to the individualwho
could fuse the forces of thecosmos
with themne-monic
prowess ofhisown
brain.Quite
a strong level ofmemory,
evenamong
the poor and uneducated, was still taken for granted in acul-ture that remained largely oral. Montaigne, for instance,
on
his Italianjourney of 1581, described a
group
of peasants in the fields nearFlorence, their girl friends at their sides, reciting lengthy passages of
Ariosto as they
strummed
on
their lutes.62Yet
at thesame
time, pos-session of too strong amemory
could swiftly lead one's neighbors to suspectone
of having magical powers, ashappened
withArnaud
du
Tilh in southern France during the midsixteenth century.63 For
to use
memory
andhow
to strengthen it.When
Ophelia, afterHamlet
has killed her father, walks in front of her brother, Laertes, and cries,
"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you, love, remember,"
she is not simply mad; she is also steeling Laertes for an act of
ven-geance by invoking the widely held belief, carried in
many mnemonic
treatises of the day, that rosemary was the sovereign herb for
strength-ening the
memory.
While
Ricci was a schoolboy, several charges of practicing blackmagic were brought against the clergy of his
hometown
of Macerata,and these
might
have been connected tosome
misuse ofmnemonic
arts,
though
we
don't have the details ofwhat
the practitioners weretrying to accomplish.'
What
we
do
know
is that all through thesix-teenth century "astrologically centered
mnemonic
systems" were beingconstructed with extraordinary care in such cities as Venice and Naples
and not only used at
home
but also exported by their eager creators toFrance and England,
among
other countries. These systems organizedthe forces ofthe universe into
"memory
theaters," concentric diagrams, or imaginary cities in such away
that those forces could be consulteddirectly and
drawn
upon,making
the practitioner of the art a "solarmagus"
of potentially great power.The
"theater" created by there-markable Italian scholar Camillo in the 1540s suggests the range: in the
foreground were piles oflittle boxes, intricately arranged and
jammed
with all the
works
ofCicero; risingaway
into the distance were arraysof cosmic images designed to
show
the "universe expandingfrom
FirstCauses through the stages of creation," so that the theater master
would
be like aman
gazingdown
upon
a forestfrom
a high hill, ableat last to understand both the individual trees and the shape of the whole.
As
Camillo explained, "This high and incomparableplacing notonly performs the office ofconserving for us the things,
words
and actswhich
we
confide to it, so thatwe
may
findthem
at oncewhenever
we
need them, but also gives us truewisdom."
Nor
was suchwisdom
confined to the world ofwords
or thestage. ItRenais-sance architecture,
where
the "hidden lines" that dictated the perfect spaces could givemeaning
to a building by expressing ideas ofgravityor love, and
where
the perfect proportions of thehuman
figure couldbe transposed with cosmic force into stone. It lay at the heart of
Re-naissance music,
which
had inherited a process bywhich
mnemonic
strength, first manifested in the alphabet and rhyme, was fixed firmly in
the melodic line and in
which
thetwo
attributes of music—
asnum-ber-mysticism and as science
—
could flow, in theminds
of serioustheorists, either into realms of sexual force and regeneration or into
those ofa specific international discourse. So Kepler, at the
same
timethat he was
making
his remarkable discoverieson
planetary orbits andimmersing
himself in thework
of alchemists atEmperor
Rudolph'scourt, could develop an interpretation that had the interval of the
major third in a given piece of music representing male sexual
fulfill-ment
while theminor
third stood for the receptive female; whereas Nicolo Vicentino, in a treatise of 1555on
hisnew
six-manualharpsi-chord, the archkembalo, could write that his
new
instrumentwould
beable to produce the sounds of
German,
French, Spanish, Hungarian, and Turkish."The
inflections and intervals that all nations of theworld use in their native speech
do
not proceed only inwhole
and halftones, but also in quarter tones
and
even smaller intervals, so that withthe division of our harpsichord
we
canaccommodate
all the nations ofthe world." 9 Ricci,
on
first seeing Chinese ideographs inMacao
in1582, was to be similarly struck by their incredible potentiality for
serving as universal forms that could transcend the differences in
pro-nunciation that inhered in language.70
Disparate
though
these images and examples are, they can serve tounderline the fundamental variety of thoughts about
memory
and itsliteral and transformative powers that coexisted in
what
is looselycalled the Counter-Reformation period.
They
make
it hard to believethat, as Ricci used his
mnemonic
methodologies alongside hisWestern
scientific learning and his profound theological training to
woo
theand Taoism, he was
unmindful
ofthepowers overman
and nature thathis European contemporaries ascribed to
mnemonic
arts.The
fourmemory
images that have survived in Ricci's treatise are but atantalizing hint of the riches stored in his
memory
palace, just as hisfour religious pictures represent but a fraction of the Catholic iconog-raphy at the heart ofthe religion to
which
he tried to convert theChi-nese.
But
since it is so astonishing that even thismuch
has beenpreserved, and since Ricci chose with care the images and pictures that
have
come
down
to us, I have chosen inmy
turn to build thisbook
around these eight distant fragments. Ricci told
Cheng Dayue
in 1606,"the
whole
point of writingsomething
down
is that your voice willthen carry for thousands of miles, whereas in direct conversation it
fades at a
hundred
paces."He
was right, and it is through theseacci-dental survivals that
we
can enter his past.We
can be confident that Ricciwould
approve this procedure, for as he also said toCheng
Dayue:
Those
who
will live onehundred generations afterusare not yet born,and I cannot tell what sort ofpeople they will be. Yet thanks to the existence of written culture even those living ten thousand
genera-tions hence will be able to enter into
my
mind
as ifwe
werecontem-poraries. As for those worthy figures
who
lived a hundred generationsago, although they too aregone, yet thanks to the books they left
be-hind
we
who
come
after can hear theirmodes
of discourse, observetheir grand demeanor, and understand both the
good
order and thechaos of their times, exactly as if
we
were livingamong
them.71To
late Renaissance humanists, themen
who
had lived in the greatdays ofthe
Roman
Empire
were the models for this discourse andde-meanor.
Those
were the days inwhich
Quintilian had written hiswords
on memory,
and there is a gentle echo ofthat familiarity in thefact that Ricci's cycles of