Early Modern Memory

Edited by Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller, and Jasper van der Steen

Many students of memory assume that the practice of memory changed dramatically around 1800; this volume shows that there was much continuity as well as change. Premodern ways of negotiating memories of pain and loss, for instance, were indeed quite different to those in the modern West. Yet by examining memory practices and drawing on evidence from early modern England, France, Germany, Ireland, Hungary, the Low Countries and Ukraine, the case studies in this volume highlight the extent to which early modern memory was already a multimedia affair,
with many political uses, and affecting stakeholders at all levels of society.

Contributors include: Andreas Bähr, Philip Benedict, Susan Broomhall, Sarah Covington, Brecht Deseure, Sean Dunwoody, Marianne Eekhout, Gabriela Erdélyi, Dagmar Freist, Katharine Hodgkin, Jasmin Kilburn-Toppin, Erika Kuijpers, Johannes Müller, Ulrich Niggemann, Alexandr Osipian, Judith Pollmann, Benjamin Schmidt, Jasper van der Steen

Contemporary critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, often dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as inevitably ahistorical, as performing a retrograde version of anachronism. Arguing that our experience of time is inherently anachronistic and polytemporal, we draw on the frameworks of distributed cognition and extended mind to theorize cognition as itself distributed, cultural, and temporal. Intelligent, embodied action is a hybrid process, involving the coordination of disparate neural, affective, cognitive, interpersonal, ecological, technological, and cultural resources. Because the diverse elements of such coupled systems each have their own histories and dynamics, many distinctive or competing times are built in to the very mechanisms of remembering
and reasoning. We make this argument by means of two distinct case histories: a reading of the site-specific audio walk of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff; and an extended discussion of a famously anachronistic moment in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. These readings reveal the inherent poly-temporalities of human mental and social life.
To refigure anachronism as the mixing or effective confusion of times, rather than error or ignorance, an appropriately dynamic cognitive theory needs to be integrated into our historical and literary critical practices. The blending or interanimation of temporalities is intrinsic to human memory, in all its embodied, social, and affective complexity. Yet our critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as ahistorical. Whether projecting an originary interiority behind the text, or gesturing towards a transhistorical human nature, psychological criticism is often rejected as both universalizing and essentialist. But it is an over-reaction to such individualism to allow the mind to go missing entirely. In a more productive anachronism, we locate the polytemporality of experience in the richly situated nature of cognitive ecologies, context-sensitive systems or assemblages of material, cultural, and bodily resources. Remembering and skilful activity, on this view, involve the coordination of disparate internal and external resources, all with their own histories and dynamics, altering at distinctive or competing timescales. This allows us to put the mind back into time and history. We exemplify our claim that plural or anachronistic temporality is built in to memory and action by analysing both contemporary and historical artwork and performance, with a focus on the early modern English theatre, a new enterprise distributed across a loosely affiliated world of actors, spaces, material texts and objects, and audiences. We examine the polytemporality of the theatre in the specific case of the Fool’s prophecy in the Folio text of King Lear, and in the embodied skill of the player, probably Robert Armin, and the connections between his performances and those of the most famous of Elizabethan clowns, Richard Tarlton. This kind of cognitive history escapes both individualism and universalism, suggesting new ways to conceptualize relations between agents and technologies.

Historians generally consider centenaries in the nineteenth century as ‘invented traditions’
and in terms of scale and political motivation emphasise discontinuity with jubilees celebrated
in the early modern period. This article, however, contends that centennial jubilees were
organised and celebrated widely before the nineteenth century. Focusing on seventeenthcentury
commemorations of the Revolt of the Netherlands – both in the Dutch Republic and
the Habsburg Netherlands – the authors shed new light on why people celebrated centenaries
and what was at stake in doing so. People did not simply celebrate the passage of time, but
jubilees also served clear secondary purposes. Foreign invasions threatening the unity of the
Republic and the ongoing threat of Protestantism to South Nederlandish Catholicism motivated
people to organise centenaries, much in the same way that nationalism stimulated the
celebration of jubilees in the nineteenth century. A common feature of early modern centenaries
was that commemoration of the past often masked disunity and political uncertainty.