Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

This fellowship project is dedicated to revising my doctoral manuscript for publication. Building on Frances Yates’s observation that architectural models were central to mnemonic systems, I examine how 13th to 16th century mendicant mnemonic practices in France and Italy also employed trees as mental structures. Adopting a interdisciplinary framework — art history, iconology, literature, and history of sciences — I integrate textual and visual sources from Antiquity to early modernity, and apply contemporary theories, notably from narratology and philosophy of technology, to articulate the structuring of thought and the material visualization of mental processes.

[Caption:Tree of the Ages of Life and the Liberal Arts (arbor sapientiae), Master of Fauvel (attributed by Richard Rouse), first half of the 14th century, French origin, provenance unknown. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, MS Ars. 1037, fol. 5v.]