John Florio, Renaissance England, and Art of Memory: New Video

General Memory Chat
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Reading about Giordano Bruno in recent years, I’ve started to learn more about John Florio, and Italian-English man who was a friend of Bruno’s during his years in London, and a great translator, a poet, and an Italian language tutor to many of the nobility, royalty, and great writers of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

He was greatly influenced by Giordano Bruno, and was in turn an influence on Bruno, and practiced the art of memory himself.

This youtube video is the first in a series on John Florio, Bruno, Shakespeare and the Art of Memory:

It will include details on how Bruno’s memory system worked, and how it influenced others in Elizabethan England.

Florio is a fascinating figure in many ways. His wikipedia page lists him as having contributed the third most new words to the English language of any individual, coming in after only Chaucer and Shakespeare. He translated Montaigne’s Essays into English, and was a great proponent on the art of translation in the Renaissance. He tutored writers like John Lyly who were very influential on the plays of Shakespeare. His patron for a time was Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who Shakespeare’s lyric poems were dedicated to. He was a close friend of Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, and many others.

Interestingly, one of Frances Yates’s books was on John Florio: John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England - Frances Amelia Yates - Google Books

Yates also wrote a book on Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, and thought that John Florio was closely related to the issues and events alluded to in that play.

Anyways, I just thought this was a fascinating detail in the history of the art of memory and of Giordano Bruno, thought it might be of interest to people here.

The creator of that youtube channel also has a website on the topic: JOHN FLORIO - Official Website (resolutejohnflorio.com)

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Very interesting. Thanks for sharing and for the links.

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Thank you for sharing this

Its kinda rare!

Stefos

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The second video in the series is up, giving a short overview of Bruno’s system of concentric wheels of letters:

The next one will be about John Florio’s & Shakespeare’s use of the art of memory.

I’m not sure what this entails; I’ve done some research on the poet Ted Hughes’s speculation that Shakespeare’s plays show evidence of mnemonic system may have been employed, specifically one that used visual emblems or “hieroglyphic tokens” to encapsulate the root meaning of various words.

With John Florio being a known influence on the plays, who had Henry Wriothsley, Earl of Southampton as his patron (the man who Shakespeare’s narrative poems were dedicated to, and the sonnets may well have been addressed to) as well as being a close friend of Giordano Bruno’s, it does start to seem somewhat plausible to me!

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The next video in the series is up. This one goes more into how Florio used the art of memory, which he learned from Bruno and other sources, in his work of compiling words for his dictionaries & language dialogues, and how Shakespeare used the art in his creative process.

Apparently the play that has the most references to Bruno and the art of memory is Hamlet. (I’m getting the idea that wherever phrases like “the tables in my brain” are mentioned, we can suspect that the art of memory is being alluded to!)

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