A decorative woodcut border consisting of repeating floral scrollwork and symmetrical motifs spans the top of the page.

On the Tables of the Art of Memory

of the Famous Man

Mr. Adamus Brux, Doctor of Medicine

The text area contains faint background woodcut illustrations representing mnemonic concepts (loci and imagines): a scale or scientific instrument at the top left, a central rectangular frame with grid lines, a cylindrical scroll or column on the right, and various other geometric and emblematic shapes behind the poem.

Bruxi, what do you dare? What new-old

desire touches you, to dedicate yourself

to the sacred rites of Mnemosyne the Muse of memory, and to enter

into a shrine filled with various

forms of things, and teeming with places

that should not be neglected; that is, so that you, rich in your

store of words,

may accumulate them in the theater of the brain?

This matter is to be believed by few; to the many

it is vain, and one which wears down the tribunal

of the mind, by occupying

a thousand places and a thousand marks.

Book 3, various readings, chapter 1.

Muretus even before pondered these things

with himself in his mind, nor did Seneca

give faith until he had drunk in the proof

himself with eyes and ears.

But O, the wonder! Behold, Corsicus, lifted high

in faith, without hesitating in the least,

speaks Latin, Greek, things vain in sense,

and things animated by the sense of words.