We know, from the first generation of users,55:26 a person like Frances Yates,55:27 who have been writing about and speaking about later on,55:32 how much the structure of the library55:35 has helped them in defining their topics,55:38 and basically in their research,55:40 and how inspirational it was,
Frances Yates has apparently indicated how influential Aby Warburg's library and its structure was on her work and research.
direct reference for this?
In §§ 4–5, I examine the socio-evolutionary circumstances under which a closed combinatory, such as the one triggered by the Llullian art, was replaced by an open-ended combinatory, such as the one triggered by a card index based on removable entries. In early modernity, improvement in abstraction compelled scholars to abandon the idea that the order of knowledge should mirror the order of nature. This development also implied giving up the use of space as a type of externalization and as the main rule for checking consis-tency.
F*ck! I've been scooped!
Apparently I'm not the only one who has noticed this, though I notice that he doesn't cite Frances A. Yates, which would have certainly been the place for having come up with this historical background (at least that's where I found it.)
The Llullian arts can be more easily practiced with ideas placed on moveable index cards than they might be with ideas stored in one's own memory. Thus the index card as a tool significantly decreases the overhead and provides an easier user interface for permuting one's ideas and combining them. This decrease in mental work appearing at a time of information overload also puts specific pressure on the older use of the art of memory to put it out of fashion.
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.
Todate, however, no scholar has taken advantage of bibliographic resources to verify whether or notmemory treatises did in fact decline in England in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenthcenturies, a period that coincides with the continuing influence of iconoclasm and the risinginfluence of English Ramism. In this article I provide such bibliographic evidence, demonstratingthat the publication of memory treatises abated in England following Henry VIII’s reforms andduring the English Civil War
When reading Yates and thinking about the disappearance of these traditions in the West, I've wanted to delve into this exact question!
Glad to see the work has already been done for me.
The Art of Memory. Frances Yates. University of Chicago Press, 1966.
I wonder if he really referenced this at all? To my knowledge there isn't anything from her text written here.