Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England

Engel’s “map of mortality” traces life and death as they were configured in the Renaissance through the realms of memory and metaphor—each informing the other, Engel thinks, because metaphor was primarily remembered (mnemonic and emblematic), and memory was something apart from itself and hence metaphoric or metomymic in some fundamental way. Engel believes that this conjunction of memory and metaphor conspired to focus, if not actually define, mortality in a milieu racked by Certain Death, and to shape the versions of melancholy that racked it. Hence all the magisterial m’s—melancholy, memory, metaphor, mortality—are yoked in this ingenious approach to the historical period more imaginatively studied in our generation than is any other, the Renaissance.

Engel partly grounds these mnemonic relationships, literal and metaphoric, in the work of contemporary French theorists, thereby endowing the relationships with higher valence for the contemporary academic. Having been theorized, the m’s enjoy an elevated internal coherence. Parts of the book, however, are constructed apart from theoretical underpinning. Hence memory is traced as a form of communication of knowledge from “Giotto to Broadsides,” and melancholy is traced from “Montaigne and Florio” without the prop of modern theory. But Milton is coupled to Derrida (for the Miltonic Death’s différance); Cervantes to Baudrillard (for life as the simulacrum or copy); and Sir Thomas Browne to Heiddeger (not for Heiddeger the brilliant phenomenologist of time, but for his sense of Being and Being There: dasein)—this on the analogous grounds that the work of these theorists enables greater understanding of the memory systems of the main Renaissance figures identified: Montaigne, Florio, Milton, Cervantes, Browne.

The strength of Engel’s approach lies in its preoccupation with mortality and, by implication, death. It is easy to forget that everywhere in that Hamletian world, unlike our more narcissistic one, mortality was being revealed to men great and small—and women, too—as proof that the only life worth living was the eternal one where the soul triumphed. Engel extends himself enough to argue for an aesthetics of mortality based on these mnemonic arrangements (unlike later sentimental novelists, the Sternes and Austens and Walter Scotts of Old Mortality, who transformed the whole notion into something silly and quaint). Engel implies that an aesthetics of mortality lurked below the surface of the skin, so to speak, in that fierce world in which the death of the literal body was life’s greatest certainty. This may not be a Protestant aesthetics, but it existed nonetheless.

The book configures memory differently from the late Frances Yates, to whose pioneering work it might have indicated greater indebtedness and from which it might have charted its differences. Medicine figures not at all, neither in the Renaissance’s medicalized memory systems nor in the crucial sections on melancholy. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is briefly discussed, but not the Renaissance “melancholy doctors”: the Thomas Elyots, Andreas Laurentiuses, and Timothy Brights who medicalized melancholy into the Renaissance mindset it has been ever since (think no further than Alzheimer’s disease). Engel vastly underplays the medical doctors to his peril. He also diminishes mimesis and rhetoric and theology in favor of an invoked mnemonics on which melancholy will (in Engel’s strain) necessarily “persist.”

If the approach has a weakness it lies in the author’s dream to do too much. Memory and melancholy are vast categories of the Renaissance landscape, let alone the other m’s incorporated here. Some readers will close Engel’s last page thinking they know rather little about a large terrain, especially the discursive emplotments of these mnemonic aesthetics, rather than having witnessed the cementing of melancholy and mortality to memory. Still, as Engel reminds us in his concluding paragraph, echoing the paradoxical Browne: “knowledge is not easy to attain, because we acquire it in bits and pieces, anamnestically” (p. 234). If...