Old painting of Matteo Ricci with unusual hat and long gray beard and moustache.

The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci

Wished for The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan D. SpenceJonathan D. Spence (amazon.com)
In 1577, the Jesuit Priest Matteo Ricci set out from Italy to bring Christian faith and Western thought to Ming dynasty China. To capture the complex emotional and religious drama of Ricci's extraordinary life, Jonathan Spence relates his subject's experiences with several images that Ricci himself created—four images derived from the events in the Bible and others from a book on the art of memory that Ricci wrote in Chinese and circulated among members of the Ming dynasty elite. A rich and compelling narrative about a fascinating life, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci is also a significant work of global history, juxtaposing the world of Counter-Reformation Europe with that of Ming China.
Something I’ve been meaning to buy and read for a while.

Published by

Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

3 thoughts on “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci”

  1. @jeherve, It would appear that that patch seems to take care of the issue. I ran a few quick tests on some variations on the settings and didn’t see the offending sharedaddy div appear after the patch was applied.
    Compare: http://boffosocko.com/2016/07/19/the-memory-palace-of-matteo-ricci/ and http://chrisaldrich.tumblr.com/post/147683457752/the-memory-palace-of-matteo-ricci
    I’ll test a few additional things over the next few days (I recall another social platform acting somewhat like Tumblr had, but don’t recall which at the moment), but otherwise this seems to fix things.
    @dshanske Perhaps these same types of checks (or the patch code mentioned) could serve as a template to prevent the similar issue within Syndication Links which shows “Syndicated to” on several platforms including Tumblr and Facebook. I’ll open an issue there as a reminder.

  2. If you’re mainly interested in the history of memory techniques, be warned: there is far less of that that you might expect. [It’s still good if you’re interested in the Jesuits, European-Chinese relations, etc]

    1. Thanks Daniel. After being disappointed by Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory, which seemed to have no working grasp of memory techniques at all, my hopes for this aren’t very high at all. I am, however interested in some of the tangential history which you mentioned, so it won’t be a complete loss.

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