A gifted linguist, [Bruno] learned Hebrew, as many other Christian scholars did.  Unlike the rest of them, though, Bruno gave a brilliant public demonstration of his skill in Rome, where he recited a poem in Hebrew, first forward and then backward.  What enabled Bruno to do this was his mastery of one of the most fashionable arts of the time, the art of memory:  the formal art, created in ancient Greece and developed by ancient rhetoricians for use by orators, of learning long series of words (or anything else) by heart.  Memory artists began by memorizing the facade of a building, or a group of buildings, window by window and plinth by plinth.  In order to commit a text to memory, the artist imagined himself walking by the facade, and placed each word, in turn, in an appropriate niche.  To recite his text, he returned to the facade and read off the component words.

 

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, more than one original thinker made a name by his power of recall.  A century before Bruno, the brilliant philosopher Pico della Mirandola impressed his contemporaries, not only by his penetration and his learning, but also by his ability to repeat forward and backward poems that he had heard once – exactly as Bruno did with his Hebrew psalm.  Marc-Antoine Muret, a prominent French scholar who taught at Padua, told his readers with astonishment about a Corsican memory performer to whom he dictated “words in Latin, words in Greek, barbarous words, words that mean something, words that mean nothing, so varied, with so little coherence, and so many that I became exhausted just dictating them, and so did the boy who was deputed to take them down.”  The Corsican remained daisy-fresh as he repeated this random list, forward and backward, again and again.  One of his listeners, a young man from a prominent Venetian family, immediately became his pupil, and soon demonstrated his own prowess in public.

 

To readers who spend their days in from of computer screens, the art of memory sounds not just archaic, but antediluvian – the kind of thing that might be used in a carnival performances, rather than as a feat to astonish the learned.  In Bruno’s world, however, memory mattered...  Scholars had to master the classics so they could quote and imitate them, as Bruno himself regularly did; statesmen and merchants wanted tools with which to control, master, and evaluate the flood of texts that poured from Europe’s printing presses, offering information about lands that might be conquered, converted, or at least traded with.  Readers of many kinds worked pen in hand, decorating the margins of their books with content summaries; often they copied out excerpts and stored them under topical headings in notebooks (card systems were developed in the seventeenth century).  As shelves groaned and notebooks swelled to bursting, memory remained the only thread that could lead one back through paper labyrinths to the facts and data that mattered.

 

Bruno’s ability to stand before the public and muster all the facts clearly impressed people who spent most of their lives watching spectacles of one sort or another – Henri III of France, for example, who asked if Bruno achieved his effects by science or magic.  And his art of memory offered more than access to known texts and facts.  Just as we live in a swirl of new technologies and programs, sixteenth-century thinkers lived in a swirl of projects designed to manipulate and transform words – sometimes into hieroglyphs, images dense with meaning; sometimes into ciphers, to conceal political plans from enemies.

 

The thirteenth century thinker Ramon Llull had devised a complex series of wheels, inscribed with letters and technical terms, designed to bring out the connections and differences between particular qualities and things.  In place of static facades, Bruno adapted these wheels in his art of memory.  Like Llull’s art, Bruno supposedly created new knowledge by combining existing elements in new ways.  From the start of his career, in other words, Bruno was out to make a living by selling highly visible, widely valued techniques to potential pupils.  By doing so he astonished academic audiences and won the interest of kings and patricians across Europe.