L'arte della memoria

I was surprised at the readability of this. But, truthfully, I read it a few months ago and forgot most of what I think about it.

This is one of my favourite books of all time, which I have read three times by now. It tells the story of the now forgotten art of memory which was practised in ancient times from its beginnings in Ancient Greece up until round about the Enlightenment, when it fell into disuse amongst the educated

*Note: After re-reading this review, I am thoroughly unsatisfied with it. Try as I may, I cannot convey just how amazing this book is. Before reading it, I had no idea the depth and breadth of what I didn't know. It has changed the way I read classical and medieval history. This book opened up to me Leggi tutto

There are enough reviews here describing the contents and quality of this book. For me, the best part was the palpable sense of discovery the author conveyed as she began to see how Simonides's artificial memory permeated Renaissance culture and became a hidden strand connecting Thomas Aquinas's Met Leggi tutto

The first several chapters were really interesting. It became quite a slog once Bruno appeared, and took me several months to get through. The end was fairly interesting too, to see how the Globe theater was built on Classical and Hermetic principles mediating between man as microcosm and the univer Leggi tutto

This review may be more autobiographical than a review, but in 2014 I was working for a summer in Kansas City and we were commuting to Topeka daily, which was about an hour and a half away. I had a lot of downtime and I came across a Wikipedia page (which I could not more highly recommend), The Meth Leggi tutto

This may have been one of the most dense reads I've ever journeyed into, but it was worth it. I've read several books in the time it took me to read this one, but that's only because the information in here cannot be easily consumed. The depth of detail that goes into each part of the history and it Leggi tutto