Frances Yates

Frances Yates is the scholar who showed us what we had lost before we knew we had lost it. In her landmark 1966 study The Art of Memory, she recovered a tradition stretching from Simonides of Ceos in the fifth century BCE through the Roman rhetoricians, the medieval monasteries, and the extraordinary cosmological theaters of the Renaissance—and demonstrated that this tradition was not a peripheral mnemonic trick but a central organizing principle of Western thought, a cognitive technology that shaped how human beings stored, related, and generated knowledge for nearly two millennia. The memory palace, in Yates's account, was not a filing cabinet. It was a laboratory—a spatial architecture that produced new understanding through the spontaneous collision of its contents, that cultivated in its practitioners a distinctive disposition toward knowledge that she called, drawing on Mary Carruthers's complementary scholarship, the craft of thought. Her recovery of this tradition arrives at the present