Veština pamćenja

The book is a groundbreaking study that shows how artificial memory (mnemonics) was essential before the invention of printing. It is based on a system of places (loci) and images (imagines) – the orator or scholar imagines a well-known architectural structure (house, theater, city) and places within it vivid, emotionally charged images that represent what needs to be remembered.

Yates traces the development of this technique from ancient Greece (the legend of Simonides of Ceos), through Roman rhetoricians (Cicero, Quintilian), medieval scholastics (Thomas Aquinas), and all the way to the Renaissance. Renaissance thinkers of particular note include Giulio Camillo with his Theatre of Memory, Ramon Llull and his system, and Giordano Bruno, who transformed mnemonics into an occult, hermetic, and magical system for achieving universal knowledge.

The book shows how the art of memory was far more than a simple rote learning technique – it profoundly influenced literature (Dante), theatre (Shakespeare's Globe), philosophy, science and occult traditions. Yates links the decline of this art with the emergence of the scientific method in the 17th century (Leibniz and others).

The work is written in an extremely readable manner, with rich erudition and original insights. It has become a classic that has opened a new field of research in cultural and intellectual history. It has influenced psychology, the history of science, literary theory and the contemporary interest in mnemonics (memory palace).

In the Croatian context, the book has attracted the attention of all those interested in the Renaissance, Hermeticism and the history of ideas. It represents a masterpiece of 20th-century intellectual history.