A translation of this classic account of the art of memory and the logic of linkage and combination, the two traditions deriving from the Classical world and the late medieval period, and becoming intertwined in the 16th Century. From this intertwining emerged a tradition, a grandiose project for an 'alphabet of the world' or 'Clavis Universalis'.

Translator's Introduction; Preface; Preface to the second edition; I The Power of Images and the Places of Memory; II Encyclopaedism and Combinatoria in the Sixteenth Century; III Theatres of the World; IV The Imaginative Logic of Giordano Bruno; V Artificial Memory and the New Scientific Method: Ramus, Bacon, Descartes; VI Encyclopaedism and pansophia; VII The Construction of a Universal Language; VIII The Sources of Leibniz's Universal Character; Appendices; I The Liber ad memoriam confirmandam of Ramon Lull; II An anonymous vernacular treatise of the fourteenth century; III Two fifteenth-century manuscripts on the ars memorativa; IV Documents on the activities of Pietro da Ravenna; V Three late sixteenth-century manuscripts on the ars memorativa; VI Petrarch as teacher of the art of memory; VII An unpublished text by Giulio Camillo. VIII memory exercises in seventeenth-century Germany; IX The article on 'L'art mnemonique' from Diderot's encyclopaedia; X D'Alembert and 'real characters'; Notes; Index.

The Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers series offers authoritative texts from the most important and influential thinkers at work in Continental Philosophy this century. The series ranges across the full spectrum of Continental thought, covering the fields of philosophy, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and critical theory, and includes key theorists such as Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Serres, Nuno Nabais, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Deleuze, Guattari and Alain Badiou. Titles in the series are ideal for students in upper-undergraduate and graduate years but also scholars seeking access to the works of seminal Continental thinkers.