The elusive faculty of memory shapes individual and collective expressions, and the effort to overcome its lapses and distortions creates compositions ranging from the technical to the mystical. The aim of this volume is to present memory as an overarching principle in Renaissance thought and culture and to demonstrate how memory and its arts, along with the desire to order knowledge and strengthen remembering, can also influence culture, behavior, and identity.

Donald Beecher's introductory elaboration of the volume's objectives and content presents recent trends in Renaissance memory studies and locates the essays within a particular concept of memory and its arts. This includes not only mnemonic studies but also the content and context of various memorial expressions. Setting up the volume as an examination of the processes and progressions that take place in memory and memory studies, Beecher and Williams then organize the articles so as to present a perception that departs from classical notions of mnemonics.

The first section of essays retains relationships to traditional points of reference such as Cicero, Quintilian, and the Ad Herennium, and includes Brenda Dunn-Lardeau's examination of Jéhan Du Pré's Le Palais des nobles Dames, Andrea Torre's incisive study of the early modern mnemonic image, and Wolfgang Neuber's presentation of the legibility of early images of cannibalism and their link to architectural elements and memory. The second section treats various trends in the use of the art of memory, covering personal and social collections such as commonplace books. James Nelson Novoa skillfully comments on a Sephardic text from Iberia and includes a transcription and English translation of the manuscript. Kenneth R. Bartlett focuses on Thomas Hoby's travel journal as a reconstructed text that uses Italian and classical sources to create an enhanced autobiographical and cultural recollection. Victoria E. Burke then provides insight into English manuscript compilation and memory books. Next, three articles examine memory in a pedagogical context. The first, by Paul Nelles, explores Conrad Gessner and how print influenced and transformed notions of knowledge and memory. John Hunter treats Erasmus, memory, the humanist concept of the self, and the efficacy of the treasure storehouse image. Mary-Alice Belle follows with Johann Sturm's Nobilitas Literata, which encourages novel memorial exercises as a method for developing memory and judgment.

The fourth division presents specific literary instances of memory and ethics. Raymond B. Waddington looks at metaphorical expressions of memory and forgetting on a cosmic scale in Paradise Lost, while Andrew Wallace offers an original reading of Hamlet's speech with the First Player, in which private and shared memorization meet to create an interrogation on experience and communal consolation. Christopher Ivic compares Spenser's treatment of memory as restorative interpellation in The Fairie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland. The essays that follow analyze the importance of the ars reminiscendi in historical contexts such as Joseph Khoury's superior treatment of Machiavelli, terror, and history. Danièle Letocha adroitly offers contradictory elements in Conrad Celtis's promotional address Oratio, in which he advocates academic reformation and the creation of a German humanistic identity. The final division explores conflicts between natural and artificial memory as Grant Williams examines the material function of memory and its paradoxical dependence on both the soul and the senses, and Rhodri Lewis details challenges to memory and mnemonics found in the early Royal Society and Robert Hooke.

Beecher's postscript offers an overview of the concepts and contexts of memory and its arts and draws together the situation and scope of the volume's essays. This exposition offers readers not familiar with the traditions in memory studies a succinct summary of various transitions in scholarship. An index of authors completes the volume. Beecher and Williams expertly bring together complementary inquiries into text, memory, and identity; each contributor has created an individualized illustration of memory's discourse and cultural importance in the early modern period. Together, they constitute a substantial contribution to scholarship on memory and its myriad manifestations in imagery, pedagogy, literature, and history.