The Memory Arts in Renaissance England

This is the first critical anthology of writings about memory in Renaissance England. Drawing together excerpts from more than seventy writers, poets, physicians, philosophers and preachers, and with over twenty illustrations, the anthology offers the reader a guided exploration of the arts of memory. The introduction outlines the context for the tradition of the memory arts from classical times to the Renaissance and is followed by extracts from writers on the art of memory in general, then by thematically arranged sections on rhetoric and poetry, education and science, history and philosophy, religion, and literature, featuring texts from canonical, non-canonical and little-known sources. Each excerpt is supported with notes about the author and about the text’s relationship to the memory arts, and includes suggestions for further reading. The book will appeal to students of the memory arts, Renaissance literature, the history of ideas, book history and art history.

Author Biography

William E. Engel is Nick B. Williams Professor of Literature at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. He is the author of several books, including Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe: Memory, Melancholy, and the Emblematic Tradition (2012). He is also on the editorial board of Renaissance Quarterly. Rory Loughnane is Assistant Research Professor in the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and Associate Editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare. He is the co-editor of Late Shakespeare, 1608–1613 (with Andrew J. Power, Cambridge, 2013), Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers (with Willy Maley, 2013) and Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England (with Edel Semple, 2013). Grant Williams is Associate Professor of English at Carleton University, Canada. He is the co-editor of Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe’s Legacies (with Christopher Ivic, 2004), Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture (with Donald Beecher, 2009) and Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature (with Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook and Andrew Wallace, 2015).