Frances Yates Killed Memory
The arts of memory are among the arts of thinking, especially involved with fostering the qualities we now revere as imagination and creativity.
From The Craft of Thought:
All scholars who study the subject of rhetorical memory remain much indebted to Frances Yates. But for all its pioneering strengths, her work unfortunately does reinforce some common misconceptions about the possible cognitive uses of "the art of memory" . . . Yates herself believed that the goal of the art of memory was solely to repeat previously stored material: she characterized the medieval versions of the ancient art as "static," without movement, imprisoning thought. She could not have been more wrong. . . .
I repeat: the goal of rhetorical mnemotechnical craft was not to give students a prodigious memory for all the information they might be asked to repeat in an examination, but to give the orator the means and wherewithal to invent his material, both beforehand and—crucially—on the spot. Memoria is most usefully thought of as a compositional art. The arts of memory are among the arts of thinking, especially involved with fostering the qualities we now revere as "imagination" and "creativity."
