Iacobus Publicius’s Ars memorativa: An Approach to the History of the (Printed) Text

Three stages can be distinguished in the history of the printed text of Iacobus Publicius’s Ars memorativa. The first one comprises two volumes published in Toulouse and Paris, around 1477. The same stage in the composition of the text is also to be found in a later edition (around 1489). Two versions have been preserved of the second stage of the text: the version that is possibly earlier in time (around 1481) lacks tituli and even omits the author’s name. It also contains several engravings, all of them with moving parts, representing the combination of imagines and literae reales. The second version of this second stage was published in Venice in 1482 at the Ratdolt printing press. The Ars memorativa was associated with two rhetorical treatises (Institutiones oratoriae and Ars epistolandi), and the resulting volume was published under the generic title Oratoriae artis epitomata. This version includes a mnemonic alphabet that largely coincides with the one presented in the 1481 version, although now almost all images are fixed. Regarding the text, the main novelty is a profound rearrangement of the contents throughout all the books. The last stage (1485, by Ratdolt) wants to achieve two aims: put the three books on the same level despite having been clearly in favour of the first one before, and homogenize the content of each of the three books. The result is a well-balanced work from a doctrinal point of view and an interesting one from the editorial, which both surely explain much of its success.