This book note was published in the Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, Vol.
81, No. 1, pp. 151–152; March 2003
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This translation of a classic and original work of intellectual
history
is beautifully done. Rossi’s book
Clavis Universalis was first published
in Italian in 1960, but Clucas
translates the second, revised edition of 1983. The book is about
Renaissance and 17th-century
encyclopedism,
hieroglyphics and cryptography, the techniques of artificial memory,
the history of
rhetoric, changes in views about logic and method in the
scientific revolution, and new ideas about how
language and images might reflect or capture reality. Frances Yates’s
brilliant The Art of
Memory,
published in 1966, has so far had much more influence in the
English-speaking world. Despite warm
citations and many points of contact with
Yates’s work, Rossi is less interested in uncovering
hidden occult traditions, and more focussed on the way major
17th-century thinkers’ work
must be
understood against the rich background of schemes for universal grammar
and local memory. He shows
that scholars working on
Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz miss key references to this intellectual
heritage. Half of the book [152] introduces relevant mnemonic,
rhetorical,
linguistic, medical, and
occult writings. Rossi includes illuminating discussions not only of
Ramon Lull, Petrus Ramus,
Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano
Bruno, and all, but also of fascinating minor writers like Guglielmo
Gratorolo
who systematized advice on medical aids to memory in the mid-16th
century, and the wonderful
Johannes Spangerbergius, who classified various forms of amnesia in
1570. He then argues that
polemic against the arts
of memory in both Bacon and Descartes coexisted with intense interest
on their
part in the supplementing of weak powers of natural memory by
various artificial aids and objects
outside the boundaries of skull and skin. Rossi tells the strange
stories of the great 17th-century
encyclopedists
and universal language schemers—Alsted, Comenius, Wilkins,
Dalgarno—making important
connections between Wilkins’s scheme and worries
about methods for botanical classification
in the early Royal Society. The final chapter is a tour de force on
‘the sources of Leibniz’s
universal
character’, placing him (as Clucas neatly puts it) ‘at the “end” of a
Renaissance intellectual
tradition rather than reading him “forwards” as an
innovative precursor of modern formal logic’.
Historians of science, linguistics, and philosophy have built on many
aspects of Rossi’s work since
1983, and
Clucas contributes an outstanding introduction which summarizes key
strands of recent
scholarship.
John Sutton
Macquarie University
Updated 15 May 2009.