Excavating the Memory Palace: An Account of the Disappearance of Mnemonic Imagery from English Rhetoric, 1550–1650

Abstract

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the visual precepts of rhetoric’s fourth canon found themselves at odds with the iconoclasm of England’s Protestant elite. Under this negative influence, mnemonic imagery disappeared from rhetorical theory. Interest in the fourth canon declined, replaced with a Ramist conception of memory grounded in abstract (and imageless) order. A general outline of this history has been offered by several scholars—most notably, Frances Yates—but new bibliographic data along with recently digitized archives can verify its accuracy. Print, written culture, or “modernist” ideologies alone cannot explain the historical marginalization of the canon of memory.

Notes

¹ Many thanks to RR reviewers James J. Murphy and Fred Reynolds for their invaluable feedback. Cheers also to Krista Kennedy for her early guidance and advice.

² Green and Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric; Plett, English Renaissance; Middleton, Memory Systems; British Library, Incunabula Short Title Catalogue. Green and Murphy were the primary source. Middleton and Plett, who compiled memory treatises as a distinct category, allowed me to add extra titles to Green and Murphy’s listings. An Excel file containing the 266 early modern treatises graphed here can be emailed upon request.

³ Ramism was a force in Germany, but iconoclasm less so. A “dissolution” of religious iconography was never state policy, as in England, and Martin Luther early condemned the violent tendencies of iconoclasm, taking a generally tolerant attitude toward religious imagery (for Luther’s and Lutheran views on images, see Leroux 73–95; also Bremmer 15–16). Thus one finds in German rhetoric a fondness for Ramism but not a coinciding antipathy toward imagery. Indeed, in the early 1600s, the encyclopedist Johann Heinrich Alsted, a Calvinist, published treatises on both Ramus and Giordano Bruno, whose mnemonic system utilized zodiac imagery. To my knowledge, there is no English equivalent of a scholar who found value in both Ramus and Bruno. (In fact, Bruno and his imaginative memory arts were roundly rejected by English Protestants—see Weiner, “Expelling”). Melanchthon provides another case in point. Although he elects not to treat of artificial memory in his rhetorical handbooks, he makes room for the emotional power of imagery in his treatment of style. In a commentary on Cicero, Melanchthon writes that “rational and useful things” must be “clothed with circumstantial details, in which pictures, which rush into our eyes, carry force to the eyes” and thus have a greater rhetorical effect; he then provides a particularly violent example of intense word-imagery from Virgil (qtd. in Mack 121; for more on imagery and emotion in Melanchthon’s rhetorics, see Mack 116–21).

⁴ Ramus cites Quintilian as a classical authority who sanctions the removal of imagery and the association of memory with arrangement. Quintilian is skeptical of the art of memory. His preferred scheme is to divide words on the page into small, memorizable chunks, each subdivision serving as a sort of locus in page-space. Indeed, Quintilian even suggests that the best mnemonic image one can construct is simply an image of the tablet or papyrus on which one wrote (11.2.27–32).

⁵ For bibliographic information on this strange memory image, see Bouchot (13).

⁶ Maximilian II, Habsburg King of Bohemia, though Catholic, was famously tolerant of Protestantism, promoted religious freedom, and sought (but failed) to give priests the right to marry. His relationship with the Elizabethan court was generally cordial.

⁷ In Roman mythology, Cacus stole cattle from Hercules.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seth Long

Seth Long is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. His research focuses on the use of book histories and other quantitative methods to study rhetorical history. His writing has appeared in Computers and Composition and the edited collection Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities. He can be contacted at [email protected] or via Twitter@SethLargo.