ABSTRACT

That an understanding of Giordano Bruno’s writings on the art of memory is essential to an adequate understanding of his philosophical project is today considered indisputable.1 That this is the case is largely due to the pioneering work of Frances Yates, who in The Art of Memory and Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition pursued a sustained and serious investigation of Brunian mnemonics which had, up to that point, received scant attention from intellectual historians despite the publication of Tocco’s monumental edition of the Latin works in the 1880s.2