Jonathan D. Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984) is a biography of 16th-century Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci. Spence is a former professor of history at Yale University and a specialist in Chinese history. The biography is a study of cross-cultural exchange between Ming China and Counter-Reformation Europe. It charts Ricci’s attempts to teach a mnemonic device called the memory palace to scholarly elites in Ming China and his experiences as a missionary in China.

Ricci was born in Macerata, Italy, in 1552, and he was trained as a Jesuit priest in Rome. After his initial training in Rome, he continued his studies in Lisbon, Portugal; Goa, India; and Macao (also spelled Macau) before being posted to China in 1583. He spent 27 years working in China until his death in 1610. He was well-known in China for his skill with the Chinese language and his scholarly knowledge. He used this reputation to try to convert China’s scholarly class to Catholicism. He translated religious texts into Chinese and wrote a short book on mnemonic devices called “Treatise on Mnemonic Arts” in 1596. Ricci was the first Westerner permitted entrance into the Forbidden City, the Imperial Center of Beijing.

The book does not follow a chronological timeline but is structured around a series of images that highlight the memory palace technique. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the memory palace and documents how Ricci used the technique to draw interest in Catholicism and advance the church’s aims. The following chapters are structured around four memory palace images and four illustrations that Ricci chose to be reproduced in the Ink Garden of the Cheng Family (1606), a book of woodblock print illustrations catalogued by Cheng Dayue and his brother. Chapter 2 uses the first memory palace image of two grappling warriors to introduce war and violence as a theme. Chapter 3 presents the first Ink Garden illustration, depicting Christ and Peter at the Sea of Galilee, and discusses water travel. In Chapter 4 the second memory palace image, a tribeswoman from the west, is contextualized within the contested religious framework of the Counter-Reformation.

Chapter 5, highlighting an illustration of Christ and the two disciples at Emmaus, describes the realities of missionary work, Jesuit education, and conversion. Chapter 6, featuring the third memory palace image of a peasant cutting grain, centers on profit, wealth, and poverty. Chapter 7, which depicts the men of Sodom falling blinded before the angel of the Lord, discusses morality and vice. In Chapter 8 the final memory palace image of a maidservant holding a child in her arms is read alongside the fourth illustration of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child; the chapter explores the significance of Marian imagery in Ricci’s life and the Catholic faith. Chapter 9 concludes the book with a short description of Ricci in his memory palace.