# Medieval art as mnemonic **URL:** \ **Category:** General Memory Chat\ **Created:** [January 10, 2014, 2:36pm UTC](https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/medieval-art-as-mnemonic/29027 "2014-01-10T14:36:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 18
**Author:** ![LynneKelly](https://forum.artofmemory.com/user_avatar/forum.artofmemory.com/lynnekelly/32/385_2.png) [@LynneKelly](https://forum.artofmemory.com/u/LynneKelly)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2014, 1:44pm UTC](https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/medieval-art-as-mnemonic/29027/18 "2014-10-11T13:44:05Z")
> [@Diagoras](#): > > This is an amazing feat! I am nowhere close to that. > > I decided not to put everything on the same timeline, as I have a greater interest in certain periods and certain aspects of them and I wanted to be able to zoom in and see more detailed data. I also find that this kind of mega-list might not be as useful for someone looking at processes rather than events. For example I am not sure it would be economic to put a person’s birth at the entrance to the park and his death a few steps away by the bench with all his contributions in between. It would make more sense to have the person standing with representations of all the relevant info on him and interacting with other figures that related to him. But this would be difficult if all the leaders, warlords, philosophers, saints, volcanic eruptions, plagues, technological advancements and works of literature would have to fit that space. A REALLY important point. I am finding it hard to explain what happens in my head. That is why I yelled the REALLY. I am implementing my mnemonics more along the lines of the indigenous cultures I am studying than the less complex methods of the Greeks and modern memory champions. Indigenous cultures use a complex of integrated methods which is so far from linear that it is impossible to describe in writing. Or in linear speech. The difficulties I am having explaining to you reflects what one of my Aboriginal colleagues told me when we were talking about how this works for his people. I understand his frustration! Thank you! In the history block, I would only have one date per person. I only want the general idea. So if it is a ruler, I’m only going to put in the date of the start of their reign. The end will be indicated by the start of the next. I won’t put in births and deaths. If I want more complexity, then it may be that I use another device in association, or a longer story or a song. As I walk the history block, I would not reel off everything stored or I would end up walking at a crawl and my mind gets overwhelmed. I select. I now understand things said by indigenous people about recalling. We ask them questions our way: what do you know about kangaroos? They then extract from all sorts of sources to answer. The answer will often include performance. Australian Aboriginal people work more by space, so they will tell you all the knowledge associated with one location in Country. They extract the information they need at any given time. It would not be everything they need on a given animal, say. So if I happen to be really interested in Jane Austen, then my knowledge of her will be in the History walk, but also associated with other systems I have going, including sets of cards representing characters, like the mythological characters which form the stories of indigenous cultures. I then would add layer upon layer to my Jane Austen character. She might also be in England in the country walk. So I have linked her the set of steps which is the UK. I don’t extract all of the Brits every time I go past the steps, but if I want to know where Jane Austen lived, I get the steps from the Jane Austen character mnemonics and then that gives me England. I have no idea if this makes any sense at all. It has all become so complicated because all my different systems interlink. I need to do it this way to try and understand the way indigenous cultures work and thus the application to archaeology. It sounds complex, but I don’t have any system about what I memorise on any day. I have lots of little bits of paper with all the different things I want to commit to memory and do whatever suits my daily activities. If something comes up on the news about a country I know little about which gets my attention then I already have the hook for that country so I’ll add the news item and then possibly look it up and add more about the country to that location. My general knowledge used to be appallingly bad, but I am adding so much as part of ordinary life because of all the mnemonic technologies I now have in play. I will lose things which don’t get repeated. That is very much the way oral tradition works - important information is repeated, that which loses relevance is lost, new information is added, interpretations are adjusted to the current social needs. > [@Diagoras](#): > > I am not sure if I am clear (English is not my mother language either). I am less interested in history as a string of dates (usually battles) - which is the way we all learn history in school. I am interested in the way it is taught and learned in university - as a more organic representation of many many subject matters and their evolution (economics, philosophy and ideas, wars, but also literature etc.) I need to see trends rather than parallelisms` and I should probably also note that I don’t feel a great need for one mega-list (which would reveal the parallelisms between subjects) because I generally have a good feel for what came before what, which is good enough for my current needs. . I would never have suspected English was not your first language. Everything you are saying makes very good sense. I think that I am seeing trends and parallelisms, but not as much as I would like. My background is not history, or even Arts, but engineering and mathematics / science teaching, IT and so on. I moved into the humanities for my PhD as a science writer. So I haven’t been thinking about these ideas for long enough yet. What you are saying is really intriguing and will take a lot more thinking before I can give a meaningful reply. > [@Diagoras](#): > > I thus divided my memory palace into subjects. For example I have a philosophers’-scientists’ list (loci) that includes not only their dates of birth and death, but also their major works, their main contribution and the way they effected each other. I have 148 persona in that list at the moment (not including the info on each). This is hardly a great feat considering the stuff people in this forum are capable of, but I am a beginner in mnemonics. I’m impressed! Like me, you don’t seem to be going for speed or competitiveness but permanent memory of stuff you will use. > [@Diagoras](#): > > Technically I too can see the eruption of Vesuvius by going to Pliny (both the young and old), but this is more of an intellectual history list (so it has technological and scientific advances thrown in). I also placed stone pillars for the CE centuries for easy navigation (the list is strictly chronological by year of birth). > I find the journey is useful for the memorization (retention) of the material, but that when I need to extract info that I have direct access to whatever info I need not matter where it is and its all there. Usually I need the info of a certain person - this means I don’t have to mentally walk the part of the park where all the details of his life are spread - they are already piled with him in his single distinct locus. I am not sure this is the best system for what I need - but I decided to start with it and see if it works. I do enjoy adding wings (military history, religious history etc) to it. What you describe resonates with what I think I am doing, but I am also new to mnemonics - well, about 6 years of research into indigenous methods, but I have only been implementing it for about two years. I am also still experimenting. I am using decks of cards as characters, much as you have loci for your 148. I am struggling with 52! I am using a tarot deck for archaeological sites, which then cross references to the prehistory and history walks, but it is all done only partly, some barely started, so I am only glimpsing what might be possible. I’d love to spend more time on it! I need to read what you have written a good few more times and adjust my methods from that too! > [@Lynne Kelly](#): > > My academic interest is in primary orality … I also use handheld mnemonic devices like the African lukasa or the Australian churinga, but that’s another whole story. > [@Diagoras](#): > > This sounds awesome. How do the lukasa and churinga work? And please let me know when your book is published. Lukasa is a wooden board with carving or beads on it used by the Luba people in Central Africa. > **[Lukasa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukasa_(Luba))** > > Lukasa, "the long hand" (or claw), is a memory device that was created, manipulated and protected by the Bambudye, a once powerful secret society of the Luba. Lukasa are examples of Luba art. > The story of the lukasa is closely associated with the history of the Luba kingdom, which dominated most of northern Shaba during the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. No candidate for political office could receive his title without first becoming a member of the Bambudye soc... The churinga serves the same purpose in some Australian cultures: > **[Tjurunga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tjurunga)** > > A Tjurunga, also spelt Churinga and Tjuringa, is an object considered to be of religious significance by Central Australian Aboriginal people of the Arrernte (Aranda, Arunta) groups. The word derives from the Arrernte word Tywerenge which means sacred or precious. Tjurunga often had a wide and indeterminate native significance. They may be used variously in sacred ceremonies, as bullroarers, in sacred ground paintings, in ceremonial poles, in ceremonial headgear, in sacred chants and in sacred... The churinga should not be photographed for cultural reasons, but is an incised wooden or stone object, usually larger than a lukasa but still easily portable and hand held. I think of them as miniature memory spaces, miniature memory palaces. In both cases they are held and the user points to a location on then, singing or reciting the information associated with the location. I use a lukasa-like memory board with 100 or so beads on it which encodes the 405 birds found in my state, Victoria. The beads represent the 82 families, and their scientific names, I then use songs or stories to recall the birds in each family. If there are more than four, then I also use a set of physical loci to remember the birds in the family. There are 36 honeyeaters, for example, so I have encoded them into the set of loci around the house which also holds countries and 20th century history. It is just all woven in together, but still works fine. I know my lukasa so well that I can reel off all the birds without it physically in my hand, just by imagining it. I am now adding more data about each of the birds to the stories linked to each bead. Interestingly, as I get to know the bird species I am getting a funny kind of morphing happening in my mind between the bird and the human characters in the stories. It is amazingly like so many indigenous stories and just happened naturally. The book will be published by Cambridge University Press as “Knowledge and power in prehistoric societies: orality, memory and the transmission of culture” in Fall (US) 2015. We have just gone into the production phase. Thank you for giving me so much to think about and for forcing me to try and explain what I am doing. It helps my writing! Lynne --- _[View the full topic](https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/medieval-art-as-mnemonic/29027)._