The Jewel House of Art and Nature
Plat collected useful tricks and recipes, and was knighted for farming advice. His memory chapter passes on a method taught in London by Alexander Dickson, a follower of Giordano Bruno.
what it teaches
Choose a big building whose rooms you know. In each room fix ten subjects, spaced out, in groups of ten. The first is a man and the fifth a woman, so you can count.
Use active things: a soldier at the door, a fire at the head of the bed, a dunghill at the foot, a tub of water in the chimney, an ape on the cupboard, a ship in the window.
To remember a list, make each word act on the subject in its place: a cat claws the soldier's face, a lute burns in the fire, a hand rakes the dunghill.
More than ten items? Move on to the next decade of places.
He is blunt about it. Dickson charged a fortune and could not fill an hour with practice. It works for ten to forty things, and some pupils used it to cheat at cards.