I.2 · printed 1527
The Mirror of the World
Laurence Andrewe
room 2
A medieval French verse encyclopedia, put into English by William Caxton in 1481. Andrewe's 1527 edition added a new section on rhetoric and the art of memory.
what it teaches
Natural memory is a gift from God. Artificial memory is the craft of writing a thing in the mind.
Places are like parchment and images are like the letters you write on it.
Pick a big house you know well and mark posts, corners and walls one way round, up to a hundred or two hundred places, about ten to twelve feet apart.
Images must be bodily and visible. Something with no body gets a stand-in: reading becomes a person looking at a book, walking becomes a pair of legs, wisdom an old man with a white head.
try it: Think of an idea with no shape, like patience or fairness. Give it a person doing something.
the first plain English recipe in print. ink and parchment is the whole picture.