This volume's chapters provide a broadly conceived and wide-ranging account of early modern memory within the extensive temporal parameters of European cultural history. Its intellectual scope is equally ambitious, reflecting the purpose of the multi-volume set to which it belongs: A Cultural History of Memory. This compilation is part of Bloomsbury's Cultural Histories Series, which oversees six-volume forays into the social construction of a given topic (such as animals, dress and fashion, and gardens), pursued throughout six distinct historical epochs: antiquity, the medieval age, the Renaissance, the age of Enlightenment, the age of empire, and the modern age. Focusing on a single epoch, each volume in a particular set covers the same themes from chapter to chapter in an effort to maintain a consistent treatment of the topic for all of the temporal periods and to enable readers to trace a theme throughout the arc of European history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six volumes. The print series ultimately dances to the tune of the publisher's impressive digital resource, Bloomsbury Cultural History (https://www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com), which archives cultural history reference surveys that are fully cross-searchable for scholars and students alike.
The identified themes for A Cultural History of Memory include “power and politics, media and technology, knowledge: science and education, time and space, ideas: philosophy, religion, and history, high and popular culture, the social: rituals, practices, and the everyday, and remembering and forgetting” (xiv). In volume three, a lineup of predominantly seasoned researchers handles the themes, making for individual contributions of high quality and considerable scholarly depth and discernment. As to be expected and as conceded by the general editors (xiv), the chapters readjust the thematic terms to their contributors’ own expertise and, as a result in some cases, potentially derail the promised continuity among the volumes. Chapter 5's focus on art pushes philosophy and religion to the margins, and chapter 6's concern with landscape minimizes the primary theme of high culture and popular culture.
This bending of the themes productively accommodates salient features of Renaissance memory, for who, after Francis Yates, can doubt the centrality of the Italian visual arts to the period? And yet it draws attention to a structural weakness inherent in the design of the Cultural Histories Series. Seeking to apply thematic continuity to cultural studies imposes a history-of-ideas scaffolding on a social-constructionist approach. The series at once announces culture's determining influence on values, practices, and knowledge and problematically undercuts that assumption by prioritizing transhistorical categories as a way of guiding readers through its contents. A Cultural History of Memory would have been better served by keeping the themes more elemental and much cleaner or, in a perfect world, by allowing each volume to generate questions that are relevant to its particular epoch.
Why does early modern memory studies need this volume? Quite simply put, it presents a much-valued macroscopic overview of a field that is becoming increasingly challenging to survey. As a topic of research, memory voraciously takes into its purview all things social and cultural, not just humanism's attitudes toward recovering the classical past and the natural process of remembering, along with its diverse and sundry artificial techniques, but symbols, images, and stereotypes, as well as a growing list of material artifacts, which constitute what Jan and Aleida Assmann, following Aby Warburg, have termed “cultural memory” (135). Memory according to this reasoning is congruent with culture, and culture is congruent with memory.
Volume 3 opens up a synoptic perspective on the ever-expanding terrain and, with its excellent introduction and bibliography, helps orient new students, teachers, and researchers to the prevailing historical concepts and methods of early modern memory studies. Each of the chapters offers an outstanding entry point into an area fertile for studying the social construction of memory: political anachronism, autobiography and narratives of personhood, commonplacing and notetaking, humanist and scientific education, fine art and its creators, custom and landscape, anniversaries and jubilees, and the Reformation as political forgetting. This volume will prove to be an indispensable reference guide for the bookshelves of scholars working within memory studies today.
