Walking through ideas: Memory and the body in the premodern memory palace

Early Modern Italian manuals for memorization present memory as deeply embodied, especially through the memory palace technique. Here, physical sensation, emotion, navigational skills, and personal experience, are all functional to intellectual learning. This article individuates these embodied tools through the analysis of three memorization manuals from 16th century Italy – a time, place, and religious context, in which the body could still be involved in mnemnonics: Dolce’s Dialogo del modo di accrescere e conservar la memoria (1562), Della Porta’s L’Arte del Ricordare (1566), and Gesualdo’s Plutosofia (1592). In these manuals, it is especially the loci, the architectures of the memory palace, which show sensory participation. Fundamental for place-navigation skills, these embodied techniques are a theoretical challenge for the manuals’ authors, tied to the period’s view of memory as a fundamentally abstract process. Their various approaches are reviewed, and organized along a spectrum, from claiming to denying the contribution of the described practices to a theory of memory and knowledge.