The Art of Memory
D'Assigny was a teacher and translator who wrote for university students. His little book closes Part I, pulling together what the earlier writers said without naming them all.
what it teaches
Artificial memory is an imagined arrangement of sensible things, like a wax tablet with writing on it.
Some use a fair building with coloured pillars. Others use beasts for the letters of the alphabet and parts of a body, to get 115 places.
Better still, use a place you know: your own town, entering by the gate and walking its streets, churches and friends' houses; or a big empty house with rooms numbered by distance from the door.
Make images remarkable and moving. Show a person by likeness or contrast: Galen by another physician, Ovid by a big nose, Plato by broad shoulders.
Eight rules: read the thing three or four times first; choose well-known figures; give them action; stir the passions; use natural figures that fit the place; nothing too low or too grand; never reuse an image; recall them often in order, especially on lying down to sleep.
He admits it is cumbersome, not for everyone, and not for speeches. It is for names, sentences and passages.