Emma Willard Publishes "The Temple of Time," a Memory Palace of Historical Facts

In 1846 American educator, women's rights activist, and cartographer Emma Willard published Willard's Map of Time in New York through A.S. Barnes & Co. The primary interest of the work was The Temple of Time, a two-sheet hand-colored lithograph meauring 25.5 x 36.75 inches plus margins. In the structure of a pagan temple Willard demarcated the flow of time by 59 pairs of Ionic columns each representing a century, back to creation according to the Usherian date of 4004 BCE. The flow diagram on the floor bore the names of kings, queens and emperors flanked by the major battles and other events of each period. Each column bore the names of “those sovereigns by which the age is chiefly distinguished;” and the ceiling listed the eminent statesmen, thinkers, theologians, artists and military figures of each age.

The explanatory printed on the chart beneath the drawing of the Temple revealed two core tenets of Willard’s educational philosophy: that facts must be connected to one another to be meaningful, and that only by making them visually manifest may they be retained. She wrote:

“The attempt to understand chronology by merely committing dates to memory, is not only painful, but it is as useless as to learn latitudes and longitudes, without the study of maps. As in geography, the relation of any place to all other places is what is important to know; so in chronology, the relation which any given event bears to others constitutes the only useful knowledge….

“By putting the course of time into perspective, the disconnected parts of a vast subject are united into one, and comprehended at a glance;–the poetic idea of “the vista of departed years” is made an object of sight; and when the eye is the medium, the picture will, by frequent inspection, be formed within, and forever remain, wrought into the living texture of the mind. If this be done by a design whose beauty and grandeur naturally attract attention, then the teacher or parent who shall place it before his pupils and children will find that they will insensibly become possesses of an inner “Temple” in which they may, through life, deposite[sic], in the proper order of time, the facts of history as they shall acquire them. This we repeat is as important to the student of time as maps are to the student of place.”

Willard’s intention was that, once committed by students to memory, the Temple would serve as a framework within which students could organize and store future knowledge for future retrieval. With this presentation she aligned herself with the ancient technique of the “Memory Palace,” advocated in Greek and Roman treatises on oratory and rediscovered in the Renaissance. (Rosenberg and Grafton, Cartographies of Time, pp. 202-203)