🔖 The use of the geometrical playing-cards, as also A discourse of the mechanick powers. By Monsi. Des-Cartes. | Beineke Library

Bookmarked The use of the geometrical playing-cards, as also A discourse of the mechanick powers. By Monsi. Des-Cartes. Translated from his own manuscript copy. (brbl-dl.library.yale.edu)

Call Number:

K8 D44 Rg697 (Request the physical item to view in our reading room)

Creator: | Descartes, René, 1596-1650

Language:

English

Date: | 1697.
Publisher: | Printed and sold by J. Moxon at the Atlas in Warwicklane,

Subjects:

Geometry--Early works to 1800

Mechanics--Early works to 1800

Card games

Playing cards

Moxon, Joseph, 1627-1691

Genre:

Playing cards

Type of Resource:

text

Description:

Signatures: [A]¹B-F⁸G³.

The wrapper for the cards has title: Geometre and the mechanick powers represented in a pack of playing cards, made and sold by J Moxon att the Attlas in Warwick lane London.

First part (p. 1-53) probably written by Joseph Moxon.

BEIN K8 D44 Rg697: Imperfect: t.p. and p. 85 badly mutilated and mounted; wrapper frayed and mounted.

Physical Description:

1 p.l., 85 p. ; 17 cm. and 52 cards (in engr. wrapper) 9 x 6 cm.

Rights:

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Curatorial Area: | Beinecke Library

Catalog Record:

A record for this resource appears in Orbis, the Yale University Library catalog

Source Digital Format:

High Resolution (image/tiff)

Object ID: | 11529500

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h/t Dan Cohen via Humane Ingenuity 8: Ebooks: It’s Complicated

This was probably a great memory exercise for Monsi. Des-Cartes in simply making these. But on first blush, I have to think that he’s also creating a memory palace of sorts for the information itself! Because the deck of cards can be a predetermined path of sorts, going through the deck in the prescribed order he’s laid out allows it to be a journey to which he’s attaching the images on the cards as well as encoding the information within the text by which to memorize it. To me this is very reminiscent of the “Sermon on the Six Wings of the Seraph” described as:

The earliest of the four preachers’ arts is the so-called sermon on the six wings of the seraph, using as the organizing figure the six-winged creature described in Isaiah 6. Ascribed to the late twelfth-century Parisian master Alan of Lille, it became quickly popular as one of the model sermons of his ‘‘art of preaching.’’ But it is not a sermon. It is instead an art for preachers needing to invent sermons. It describes how to use sets of five themes on each of six basic subjects, or res, all keyed to a memorable organizing ‘‘picture.’’ Only the first of these themes is developed as an actual sermon might be, evidently to serve as a model. The work as a whole provides a fine example of memoria rerum and is related, through centuries of (mostly orally disseminated) classroom tradition, to the picture-like example of the technique of memoria rerum used in a courtroom setting, which is described at the beginning of the first century B.C.E. in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (3.20.33).
— The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Edited by Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)

Color copy of an illuminated manuscript featuring a six winged seraph with memory prompts written on individual feathers via the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University from The tower of virtues and the orchard of spiritual grace MS 416, fol. 8r.