The Phoenix
Peter was an Italian law professor whose memory book was printed in Venice in 1491 and quickly famous. The English version, by the London printer Robert Copland, is muddled, so the editors say it cannot have been the great source people once thought.
what it teaches
Four rules for places: windows, pillars and niches will do; not too close and not too far (about six feet); not in a busy place; not too high to reach.
He walks a church he knows, three or four times, and fixes a place every five or six feet. He boasts of a hundred thousand places in his youth.
Images should use friends who share the name of the thing, doing what they usually do. For lifeless things use things that move: a swarm of ants for one tiny ant.
An alphabet of people, one for each letter, handles names and words. He says beautiful young women make the strongest images.
Later chapters give tricks for lawyers: parts of the body for the cases of nouns, colour for volumes of law, fingers for hundreds.