The Memory Palace Of Matteo Ricci

Ricci’s book on memory recall is very important as there are very few written examples of what the images in memory palaces were like. In Chapter 1 Spence introduces four images (two warriors grappling; a tribeswoman from the west; a peasant cutting grain; a maidservant holding a child in her arms) and four pictures (Christ and Peter at the Sea of Galilee; Christ and the two disciples at Emmaus; the men of Sodom falling blinded before the angel of the Lord; the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child). Spence uses these eight objects to structure his chapters. In Chapters 2 and 3 this structure becomes clear: Spence locates a key theme in the image or picture—in Chapters 2 and 3, the military and water—and uses the theme to consider broader historical context alongside biographical details.

Ricci’s memory palace is an argument for visual memory and spatial systems. Spence uses the analogy of a medical student who is preparing for an oral examination on bones, cells, and nerves. The student would enter her memory city, which is arranged in streets, wards, and buildings. During her exam, she would pass by the history ward, the geology ward, the chemistry ward. Instead, she would focus on the Physiology House in Body Lane, where each room contains images that she developed to align with her studies. In one of these rooms is a Canadian Mountie alongside a prisoner, from which she recalls the sentence “Some Criminals Have Underestimated Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the first letter of each word yielding the correct list of scapula, clavicle, humerus, ulna, radius, carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges” (7). Through this example, we see how every concept is assigned an image, and every image is assigned a location in the palace from where it can be retrieved by memory. The images are fixed in place, and they can be recalled through combinations of images and associations with ideas. Once set in the memory palace, the information can be instantly recalled.

The origins of the memory palace can be traced back to the Greek poet Simonides. After a tragedy where a crowd of people was suddenly killed, Simonides was able to recall the order that the people had been sitting in and, therefore, identify their mangled bodies. Ricci concludes that this system for remembering the order of things developed over centuries. Ricci’s training in the memory palace technique involved Cypriano Suarez’s De Arte Rhetorica, Pliny’s Natural History, the text Ad Herennium, and Quintilian’s book on oratory. Spence notes that by the time Ricci left Europe in 1578, the prominence of memory palaces was being challenged. For example, Cornelius Agrippa and Francis Bacon both critiqued artificial memory devices as being shallow forms of knowledge. However, they remained important to many Catholic theologians.

The memory palace technique made sense to Ricci, as this was how he was trained to develop his memory in the Jesuit College. However, Wangai’s sons found the structure overly complicated. While Wangai’s sons excelled in their exams, they did not use Ricci’s method but traditional Chinese methods of memory recall, often aided by mnemonic poems and rhyming jingles. This points to the complexities of cross-cultural knowledge exchange. Similarly, Ricci struggled to understand the role of the Chinese military, which remained subservient to civil bureaucrats. The military was treated without respect in society, which confused Ricci, as European societies had armies with considerable authority. Without understanding Chinese history, Ricci struggled to understand the context he was within.

Chapter 1 introduces Matteo Ricci as an individual, outlining his biography and training in the church. Spence situates Ricci’s career within Counter-Reformation Catholicism and its expansionist aims in the late 16th century. He also highlights the blurred connections between religion and magic, which date back to the pre-Renaissance context of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Spence draws in several examples that show varied understandings of memory and its powers in the Counter-Reformation. He concludes that Ricci was likely mindful “of the powers over man and nature that his European contemporaries ascribed to mnemonic arts” (22) as he tried to entice Chinese people toward Catholicism. The importance of images is further affirmed in the desire to document dramatic scenes from the Bible, which would then be fixed in the Chinese scholars’ minds. Ricci was a missionary, and his primary goal was conversion. The memory palace was one method he used to entice Chinese people to the Christian faith and to show the supposed superiority of Western knowledge systems.

Chapter 2 opens with a discussion of the symbol for war and uses this as a jumping off point to discuss the considerable impact of military campaigns on Ricci’s early life. Spence uses the image and the theme it introduces to situate Ricci within the military context of late 16th-century Italy. He references military history, papal politics, and feuding families. He concludes that Ricci understood war as a scientific operation requiring mathematical skills, but he was also aware of warfare’s destructive effect on human society. In Chapter 3 Spence focuses on water to examine how people traveled in this period and the unique dangers travel posed. Violence and death are a thematic link between Chapters 2 and 3, though Spence examines war driven by humans in the former and death caused by natural forces in the latter.

Spence quotes Ricci extensively in these chapters, framing his citations with analysis and occasionally speculation. For example, Spence writes, “it is difficult, perusing this passage, not to believe that Ricci had read some accounts of the terrible moment in Spain’s siege of Antwerp in 1585” (33). Throughout the book Spence uses speculation to connect Ricci to the larger context around him, such as when he suggests that “[e]ven if Ricci was kept at his lessons and did not see this exquisite figure of martial glory, he would have heard the artillery salvos and the trumpets that blared at the hero’s return, and would have seen the triumphal arches of Constantine and Titus decked out with fresh inscriptions” (36). Phrases like “even if” and “would have” signal that Spence is making assumptions about what is likely. This highlights the difficulty of writing biographies of historical figures with incomplete records.