John Willis, mnemonician and stenographer, was a pragmatist rather than a philosopher. In his work on both memory and shorthand, he sought to create simple, practical methods to replace the complicated systems associated with these skills. His work on shorthand proved successful: The Art of Stenographie (1602) went through eight editions in the twenty-three years between its first publication and Willis's death, and several posthumous editions followed. His work on memory, however, did not go into even a second edition during the author's lifetime because, although his attempt to devise a useful mnemonic system resembled his practical approach to stenography, the topic of artificial memory had long been a controversial subject. Throughout the sixteenth century, interest in the classical art of memory with its use of places and images had been steadily decreasing because Protestants and humanists associated this art with the symbol-laden, superstitious practices of their scholastic predecessors...