Hi Peter,

The book of memory touches on memory and architecture, and memory and design. It was the first in the series, although the recent revised edition (2008) extends on her early ideas.

The medieval craft of memory provides some of the visual and textual examples she drew on, as well as further exploration of the ideas. From the description in the myArmoury bookstore:

Quote:

The mixing of visual and verbal media was commonplace throughout medieval cultures: pictures contained visual puns, words were often verbal paintings, and both were used equally as tools for making thoughts. The ability to create pictures in one's own mind was essential to medieval cognitive technique and imagination, and the intensely pictorial and affective qualities of medieval art and literature were generative, creative devices in themselves.

The craft of thought deals with medieval thought more generally:

Quote:

The Craft of Thought examines medieval monastic meditation as a discipline for making thoughts, and discusses its influence on literature, art, and architecture, deriving examples from a variety of late antique and medieval sources, with excursions into modern architectural memorials. The study emphasizes meditation as an act of literary composition or invention, the techniques of which notably involved both words and making mental "pictures" for thinking and composing.

So, where to begin? The first book is the main text on medieval memory, so could be the best beginning point for the ideas. However, the second has more examples of source material. The third looks at thought more generally, and makes the connection to creative and design pursuits. Maybe the best option is to start with the first one and go from there.

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

Mark

I found this book by Frances Yates to be useful as well

http://www.myArmoury.com/books/item.0226950018.html

J

Another (to me) interesting correlation with something you mentioned Peter was this concept of "as above / so below" which was so common in many crafts at the time, from masonry to medicine. It was also an important principle in law.

You are probably familiar with the Sachsenspiegel, arguably the most important and ubiquitous legal text found throughout Northern and Central Europe. It was a book of common law (landrecht) and feudal law (lehnrecht) of which hundreds of copies were in use by magistrates all over the Holy Roman Empire and also in other regions such as Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Silesia, Sweden, and Lithuania. Four of the seven illustrated / illuminated versions of the book still survive today, shedding a lot of light on the legal practices of the day.

There were also other regional variants, such as the Schwabenspiegel in Swabia, the Księga Elbląska (aka Elbinger Rechtsbuch) in Poland, the Deutschenspiegel, and others. It remained a fundamental basis of German law until the late 18th Century.

Of course, Sachsenspiegel means literally, 'saxon mirror', Schwabenspiegel means 'swabian mirror', and so on. The meaning of the name was based on the notion of 'as above, so below". The law book was supposed to literally reflect the heavenly order. If nothing else it is testament to the ubiquity of the concept in the lives of people then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachsenspiegel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwabenspiegel

J

Hi all,

I thought it might be helpful for interested forumites to have direct access to the presentations at this forum directly in the thread. Both demonstrations are over one hour long, but I hope you will find it worth while.

EDIT: removed useless HTML code.

My mind is aflame!
I'd love to try this in balsa as an experiment, and I'm already looking forward to some steel projects and thinking about how to develop a geometrically coherent design from any given component since most of us have to work with off-the-shelf parts. Truly enlightening!

Sean, I am glad to hear that your brain is smoldering :-)

It can be like that sometimes, I know. At first it is pleasant. But when it does not want to go away it can become quite distracting after a while.

I hope you will find the ideas worthwhile. Please let me know what you think.

Jean, thanks for bringing up this interesting parallel with philosophy of legal matters. I had not thought about that, and am glad that you pointed it out. It is very useful in the discussion of these matters.

The symmetry of things, great and small is indeed an important element in medieval thinking.
It makes for ideas of sympathetic magic, mystic parabolas, social organization, aesthetic ideals and moral philosophy. Quite all encompassing. To us it might seem both strange and wonderfully enticing that the world can be described like this.

I have to share an experience I had today. I have been using a pretty basic 3d modelling program to visually “plan out” A sword I have been wanting to make out of some bar stock I bought a few years ago. My idea was to make a 15th century schiavonesca style blade with “Irish” fittings, more for fun rather than any attempt at historicity.
While I had a rough idea of what I wanted from this blade, I am a complete noob when it comes to anything practical (thank-you philosophy degree…), but after extensive tinkering, and about 50 revisions, I finally arrived at a model that “looks right” about a month ago. All the proportions appealed to me, and it seemed “balanced” to look at. After watching Peter’s talk a few times, I decided to see if any of the proportions matched up with Peter’s findings.
Well, once I had drawn out the blade length and plotted out the circles I dragged the model over to the sectioned diagram and started looking for these proportions, and they were everywhere. Not necessarily the same ones (for instance, Peter’s example had a pommel whose size was in line with the “f” module, whereas I found my sketch’s pommel was about ½ a millimetre away from the “e” module… but I was using an open ring pommel, so it needed a larger radius to “look right”)
What astounded me was that nearly everything in the design matched up with one of the proportions talked about in the video, the only thing that didn’t was the length of the fullers. I had used the golden ratio to set the original length of my fullers, and although they looked acceptable, they were the element of the design I was least happy with. When I changed the design so that the fullers terminated at the end of the 4th of 7 circles, the design looked much more balanced.
I am not making any claims here about the quality of my design, as it was very much the result of the 1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriters approach, and out of the many thousands of failed attempts there was one that looked o.k. (I was bound to get lucky eventually). What left me absolutely flabbergasted was that that reasons that that design was the one that looked o.k. was that it was the one that, by accident, closely resembled a sword built according to the principles Peter has proposed.
I am reminded of the ancient Greek word for truth, “Alathea”, which I believe translates literally as “un-hidden”. This seems like a good description of what Peter has come up with, a pattern that was hidden, that he has subsequently unearthed and brought to the attention of the rest of us

Peter, you've talking a little bit on here about when you believe these underlying design principles started coming together, but I was wondering, how long do you think they lasted? That is, at what point in European history do you think swords made according to these principles became aesthetically undesirable or unfashionable?