The associative emblematic worldview prevalent prior to the seventeenth century began to disappear within Western culture as the rise of the early modern period and the beginning of the scientific revolution began to focus on more descriptive modes of thought and representation.

Have any researchers done specific work on this shift from emblematic to the descriptive? What examples do they show which support this shift? Any particular heavy influences?

This section cites:<br /> William B. Ashworth, Jr. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westfall, eds #books/wanttoread<br /> which could be a place to start.

Note that this same shift from associative and emblematic to descriptive and pedantic coincides not only with the rise of the scientific revolution but also with the effects of rising information overload in a post-Gutenberg world as well as the education reforms of Ramus (late 1500s) et al. as well as the beginning of the move away from scholasticism.

Is there any evidence to support claims that this worldview stemmed from pagan traditions and cultures and not solely the art of memory traditions from ancient Greece? Could it have been pagan traditions which held onto these and they were supplemented and reinforced by ecclesiastical forces which used the Greek traditions?

Examples of emblematic worldview: - particular colors of flowers meant specific things (red = love, yellow = friendship, etc.) We still have these or remants - Saints had their associative animals and objects - anniversary gifts had associative meanings (paper, silver, gold, etc.) We still have remnants of these things, though most are associated with wealth (gold, silver, platinum anniversaries). When did this tradition actually start? - what were the associative meanings of rabbits, turtles, and other animals which appear frequently in manuscript marginalia? (We have the example of the bee (Latin: apes) which where frequently used this way as being associated with the idea of imitation.) - other broad categories?

Following the invention of moveable type, the information overload created in the two centuries between 1550 and 1750, placed a major burden and impatience, particularly on academic scholars, on the use of the ancient arts of memory based on the use of imagination. In addition to the education reforms by those like Peter Ramus, this may have been a major motivating factor for forgetting this prior tradition of knowledge acquisition and management.

What is one to do when there's seemingly "too much to memorize"?

Religious and national divides were likely very important here as authority from above would have been even more important than in modern time. Related to this is the change in mnemonic traditions due to religious and political mores around the time of Peter Ramus.

What was the relationship, if any, between Johann Sturm, a Protestant pedagogue, and Petrus Ramus? Any link here in the offloading of memory into the commonplace book as a means of sidelining the ars memoria?

Bullet Journals certainly are informed by the commonplace tradition, but are an incredibly specialized version of lists for productivity.

Perhaps there's more influence by Peter Ramus' outlining tradition here as well?

I've seen a student's written version of the idea of a Bullet Journal technique which came out of a study habits manual in the 1990's. It didn't quite have the simplicity of the modern BuJo idea or the annotations, but in substance it was the same idea. I'll have to dig up a reference for this.

Seth Long takes a closer look at the number of memory treatises from 1550-1650 to come up with a more concrete reason for the disappearance of mnemonic imagery (and the method of loci) in English rhetoric and pedagogic traditions. Some writers have attributed it to the rise of more writing and publishing. Long extends Frances Yates' idea of its decline to the rise of Ramism by presenting some general data about the number and quality of memory treatises published during the time period in question. Comparison of this data with European continental publications helps to draw some more concrete conclusions.

In particular, he highlights an example of a Ramist sympathizer re-writing a previous treatise and specifically removing the rhetorical imagery from the piece.

It would be interesting to note other authors who found value in both Ramus and Bruno.

@MMScotofGlasgow, Hopefully it's not too late...

Francis Yates discusses Petrus Ramus as an educational reformer in Chapter 10 and onward in The Art of Memory. There she outlines Ramus' crusade against images (based in part on the admonition from 4 Deuteronomy about graven images) and on their prurient use (sex, violence, etc.) which were meant to make things more memorable. Ramism caught on in the late 1500's and essentially removed memory by the root from the subject of rhetoric of which it had been an integral part. Ramus felt that structure and rote memorization would suffice in its stead. As a result the method of loci decreased in prominence in schools and disappeared from the scene based on educational reform which was primarily pushed by Huguenot/Protestants. I've not read anywhere that the practice was ever banned, it just fell out of fashion due to these reforms.

I'm sure it didn't help that printed books became ever cheaper during/after this time and so the prior need to memorize for those reasons wasn't helped either.

I'm sure another confounding factor was Erasmus' Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style (1512) which dramatically popularized the keeping and use of commonplace books by the learned and literate. These became a regular place in which people collected and kept their thoughts and ideas rather than memorizing them as they may have done in the past.

How can something like this that so many people find worthwhile be so neglected by any school, much less a medical school?

Our educational system is really failing our students.

Damn you Peter Ramus!

Just making note of the fact that Petrus Ramus was the advisor of Theodor Zwinger and apparently influcnced Jean Bodin, about whom Ann M. Blair writes about in Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age.

I suspect these influences may impinge on my work on the history of memory and its downfall due to Ramism since the late 1500s and which impacts the history of information.

This was essentially the logical memory method espoused by Peter Ramus in the mid-1500's. He's a major source of the reason we don't use a broader number of methods within the art of memory in modern society. We need to remedy this error. I feel like the authors are woefully unaware of a lot of history and psychology here.

Perhaps it was this craft and the idea of making an ethical product that forced Peter Ramus and others to suspend the arts and crafts of memory since many early practitioners encouraged violent, sexual, and other absurd images as a means of maintaining them. This certainly may not have sat well with Puritans using these mnemotechniques to memorize portions of the Bible and their catechisms.

Quick summary: Ramus separates thought from language, aka Reason and Speech. Dialectic describes Reason, while grammar and rhetoric describe speech. Grammar and rhetoric become "cosmetic arts" while reason becomes an art of its own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrus_Ramus

Ramus... ramifications ha-ha-ha

Peter Ramus haunts us here.