In Hamlet, the Ghost commands his son to “remember” him through an act of bloody vengeance. Hamlet responds, rather oddly, with a promise to wipe clean “the table of my memory” and inscribe the Ghost’s commandment “within the book and volume of my brain” (329). Where the Ghost demands remembrance, Hamlet resolves instead on memorization, employing images and techniques drawn from the classical ars memoria. This critical anthology, in which the well-known passage from Shakespeare nestles alongside more than seventy other excerpts from early modern texts, ends up telling us rather more about Hamlet’s memory practice than about the Ghost’s; this is to say, the main focus of most selections is on self-conscious acts of recollection, rather than the burdens of remembrance. Yet the two are closely intertwined, and this rich and varied collection offers unprecedented insight into the many meanings of memory in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

In their introduction, the editors lay stress on the aim of recapturing “the historical and cultural difference of premodernity,” a difference too often obscured in memory studies, “with its distinctly post-Enlightenment orientation around trauma, repression, and political protest” (10). This is a worthwhile endeavor, though the content of the anthology hardly leads to the conclusion that the preoccupations of post-Enlightenment (and post-Holocaust) memory studies are irrelevant to the early modern period. As many of the selections reveal, trauma, repression, and protest were central to the ways in which the arts of memory were received and employed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Robert Copland’s The Art of Memory (1548), a translation of a fifteenth-century treatise by Petrus Ravenna, provides a case in point. Petrus instructs his readers to base their memory palace on a familiar church or monastery, localizing their memories in the windows, niches, and high altar. What might Copland’s readers have made of this in the midst of the Edwardian Reformation, with its drastic reorganization of the church interior? How many memory palaces came tumbling down when the altars gave way to communion tables and the images were cast out of their niches? The near-incoherence of some passages in Copland’s translation, noted by the editors, may result in part from the inapplicability of Petrus’s examples to the contemporary English scene. Yet the innovation and iconoclasm of the Reformation gave rise to new memory practices as well. The anthology includes a selection from John Weever’s Ancient Funeral Monuments (1631) in which he describes the “mournful ruins” (207) of the monasteries as, in effect, accidental memorials.

Skulls feature prominently in this volume, including in the cover image (a still life by Peter Claesz), in emblems, and in the selected texts. The employment of the skull as memento mori brings out the sometimes-uncomfortable tension between remembrance and memorization. Can one simultaneously remember the dead and use their remains as reminders of one’s own mortality? Hamlet, with Yorick’s skull in his hand, wrestles with this question. John Skelton, in this anthology, makes no bones about it. In his remarkable poem “Upon a Dead Man’s Head,” the skull is not that of any particular dead man (at least, his identity does not seem to matter) but an image of Death himself: “With his worm-eaten maw, / And his ghastly jaw / Gasping aside, / Naked of hide” (281). Also included here is Thomas More’s sobering advice that not “all the dead heads in the charnel house” are as potent as the mental image of oneself on one’s death bed, “thy fingers fumbling, thy breath shorting, all thy strength fainting, thy life vanishing and thy death drawing on” (234–35).

The anthology is divided into six sections, focusing, respectively, on “The Art of Memory,” “Rhetoric and Poetics,” “Education and Science,” “History and Philosophy,” “Religion and Devotion,” and “Literature,” with ten excerpts in each section (twenty for literature). Each selection is prefaced by brief notes on the author, the text, and its relevance to the arts of memory. In each part, and in the volume as a whole, well-known works and authors feature alongside more obscure texts, many anthologized here for the first time. The anthology thus provides new contexts for reading and teaching major authors, while also demonstrating the extraordinary depth and range of the early modern memory arts.