"The aura of later quotations is already proper to the original scene of
mnemonics as early as the story of Simonides (...): this Simonides, (...) who
is said to have invented the ars memoria, survives the collapse of a
banquet hall, in which he has just presented a poem in honor of the day.
Because the host and his relatives are unrecognizably disfigured, it becomes
necessary to identify them. The separate burials of the dead ... is the
profound occasion for a mnemonic exercise, which only the poet knows how to
achieve, because of his routine in memorizing texts. He is the only one able to
recall the seating order - a banal achievement, it would seem, and Cicero's
Antonius recounts it merely because of the point that rhetorical memoria
depends mostly on the order of the things."[5]
The cultural revolution following the establishment of book printing in
early modern Europe places the history of cultural storage technologies on a
new basis and contributes to a broader dissemination of information knowledge.
Literature is no longer constituently related to the knowledge deposited in
archives, but rather: in every thick book there is a thinner one that wants
to get out. In other words, knowledge becomes a crafted-industrial and
generally accessible scientific practice:
[5] Recounted according to: Anselm Haverkamp:
Auswendigkeit. Das Gedächtnis der Rhetorik, in: Anselm Haverkamp &
Renate Lachmann: Gedächtniskunst. Raum - Bild - Schrift. Studien zur
Mnemotechnik, Frankfurt a.M. 1991, pp. 25-52, here pp. 25-26
A slightly more detailed version, along with various links, is also included
in:
Greer, John Michael: Simonedes - ARS MEMORATIVA. An Introduction To The Hermetic Art Of Memory