British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
BA PDF Symposium 200626 April 2006 AbstractsDr Rhodri LewisMemory, mnemonics and knowledge in the Early Royal SocietyRobert Hooke's Micrographia (1665) stipulates that the improvement of the memory could be brought about just as the infirmities of human vision could be ameliorated through telescopes or microscopes. Many in the early Royal Society shared this view, reflecting the peculiar status of memory as something that was at once of the body (one of the so-called "inward senses"), and a part of the soul -- essential, for instance, to any notion of justice in the afterlife. I shall examine a number of competing ideas about the improvement of the human memory (based, loosely, around classical mnemotechnics) with a view to shedding some new light on how seventeenth-century natural philosophers viewed the memory, and why they thought it to be important Dr Rhodri Lewis is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He has just completed a book on the universal language movement in seventeenth-century England, and is currently at work on a study of classical mnemonics in early modern Europe.
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