Memory and magic: magical images for improving memory in medieval image magic and in the 17th century manuscript Sloane 3663

Abstract

This article explores magical images for improving memory described in Latin textual sources of medieval magic. Memory is a rare theme in the sources. The images associated with memory are included in four sources that represent image magic and/or natural magic: De XV stellis, the Latin Picatrix and Liber Mercurii, the Latin forms of which derive from the 12th and 13th centuries, and in an anomymous text that appears in Rudolph Goclenius the Younger’s medico- magical work printed in 1608 and in the seventeenth century manuscript Sloane 3663 in the British Library, as entitle as Erectio siganturae Mercurii. This article argues that the concept of memory should be understood in the frameworks provided by each text and the tradition of learned magic, which differ from the viewpoints of mnemotechnic. In all cases the context of memory is intellectual: it is associated with mental capacities, intelligence, sciences and arts and with the planet Mercury, the ruler of sciences. The concept of memory is loosely connected to philosophical theories, but in practical level the procedures of fabricating images were dominated by approaches of natural magic and medicine.