Abstract
Abstract One of the attributes of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was his prodigious memory. The humanistic education received at the Roman College enabled him to master the classical art of memory. In China, Ricci discovered that memorization was essential to the learning process required for the civil service examinations to hold posts within the empire, and so he composed the Xiguo Jifa (1596) (Occidental Method of Memory), based on one of the commonest mnemonic systems—the architectural type—to help candidates memorize contents for these examinations. Ricci chose Chinese characters as mnemonic images to be placed in mental structures. This article aims to show how Ricci’s choice of Chinese characters as mnemonic images in China deviated from one of the main functions of an art of memory: to mediate between words and images, creating bridges and modes of translation from one another, thus rendering those images “untranslatable.”
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