Teaching a Habit: Business and Controversy around the Art of Memory in the Seventeenth Century

The focus of this paper is, on the one hand, on a prime example of the historical issues and practices related to the teaching of the habits involved in the art of artificial memory: on Lambert Schenckel, a didactic genius, possibly the most important teacher that the tradition of the art of memory ever saw; on Martin Sommer, his follower and betrayer; on the true history of the Gazophylacium artis memoriae. This, on the other hand, will allow us to highlight relevant aspects of the seventeenth-century reshaping of certain habits of the human mind, setting them on a background where the habit-forming practices on which the art of memory is based, and their teaching, can be seen not so much as a merely instrumental component, but rather as a relevant social phenomenon in themselves, that accompanies a seemingly contradictory transformation of individual and social needs.