Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe's Legacies (review)

As Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams indicate in their Introduction to this collection of essays, forgetting is indissociable from remembering. Interrelated, problematic, and central to perception and cultural formations, memory and forgetting have troubled thinking for as long as humans have addressed notions of being, time, experience, and history. As soon as we concede, with a nod to poststructuralism as well as to Freud, that history is variously selective, ideological, constructed, and not the whole story, we acknowledge this dialectic. Whatever the discipline, all histories negotiate the interrelationship, though such studies as Frances Yates's seminal work The Art of Memory (1966), Mary Caruthers's focus on medieval culture in The Book of Memory (1990), Maurice Halbwachs's On Collective Memory (1992), Jacques Le Goff's History and Memory (1992), Patrick Hutton's History as an Art of Memory (1993), and much of the Holocaust writing of the past three decades make it their special focus. The editors of this volume distinguish it from trauma studies and from those works by Marxists, feminists, and postcolonialists with their interests in class, gender, and race that seek to fill history's gaps. In such instances, forgetting is seen predominantly as violence or as ideologically inscribed and negative, whereas in Lethe's Legacies it is regarded as "the silent yet active partner of memory in the social sphere" (3). Addressed in the early modern archive in discourses that are variously medical, psychological, theological, political, and literary, located ambiguously with respect to the Renaissance's recollections of classical antiquity and its associated emphasis upon rebirth and newness, it is the theme for the eleven essays of this collection. They are organized into four parts: embodiments, signs, narratives, and localities.

In "The Decay of Memory," William Engel begins with Cicero and Barthes to consider the place of images in memory. Distinguishing between forgetting and oblivion, and considering strategies for remembering, he analyzes their iconographic representation in Queen Elizabeth's Prayer Book and in paintings of the period. As he points out, the dead are held to speak gibberish, a view that he explores in Shakespeare and in early modern translations of Homer. This study of verbal and visual references to the fear of forgetting indeed serves to bring Oblivion out from the wings and closer to centre stage with respect to appreciation of Renaissance memory. Garrett Sullivan discusses forgetfulness and lethar-gy, and notions of oblivion, and reminds us of the plays upon memory and forgetting in Hamlet. The final essay in Part I is Elizabeth Harvey's effective analysis of links between procreative pleasure and erotic amnesia, and between birth and forgetting. Beginning with Crooke's anatomical treatise Microcosmographia, and invoking Freud on memory and forgetting, she concentrates on examples in Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

In the first essay of Part II, Grant Williams presents a sharp analysis of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, two commonplace books that challenge assumptions about forgetting when they "conceptualize forgetting as material excess, not a privation" (67) brought about the overproduction of the printing press and the impossibility for an individual of ingesting such a diet. From a postmodern perspective, we appreciate the dilemma. Stockpiling crudities to the point of indigestion, Burton and Browne "materialize forgetting" (74) by making it a function not of absence but of excess. Of course, there is a paradox involved and it is summarized with a flourish in Williams's final sentence: "Even as they announce the obsolescence of the commonplace book for advancing learning, Browne, the bulimic, and Burton, the sybaritic glutton, are kept from entering modernity by the jouissance of oblivion" (81). In the other essay in Part II, Amanda Wilson presents an effective consideration of early modern views on rhyme and its links with memory and forgetfulness.

The three essays of Part III "Narratives" focus on identity formation, which necessarily involves processes of erasure and rewriting. In "Reassuring Fratricide in I Henry...