Memoria technica, or: the art of retention in the long eighteenth century

In the Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau muses on one of his daily habits in the 1740s. "Every morning, at ten o'clock," he writes, "I went to walk in the Luxembourg with a Virgil and a Rousseau in my pocket, and there, until the hour of dinner, I passed away the time in restoring to my memory a sacred ode or a bucolic, without being discouraged by forgetting, by the study of the morning, what I had learned the evening before." The passage testifies to the enduring importance of the 'art of memory' (ars memoriæ) in the Enlightenment. Although many philosophes attempted to break down the hegemony of mnemotechnics (which, after all, were rendered obsolete by the printed book), the art of retention kept much of its prestige as the guardian of one's 'storehouse of ideas' – witness the fact that, in d'Alembert's Système figuré des connaissances humaines (1751), 'mémoire' figures as distinct category of reason and the 'art de retenir' as a faculty of logic. This panel invites papers dealing with the myriad aids through which eighteenth-century scholars and artists developed and expanded their memories so as to facilitate the conception and arrangement of their knowledge or artistry