Mental Libraries The Reception of the Arts of Memory in Literature and Culture

List of Contributors

Foreword: The Art of Memory and a New Season of Studies
LINA BOLZONI

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Mental Libraries. The Reception of the Arts of Memory in Literature and Culture

JULIA DOMÍNGUEZ

PART I

Crafting the Mental Library: Memory Systems and their Cultural Contexts

1.      The Use of Major and Minor Loci in the Liber Memoriae Artificialis by Bartolomeo da Mantova (1429)
VALENTINA CACOPARDO

2.      The Enchantment of Memory: Observations on Giordano Bruno’s Cantus Circaeus

TOMMASO GHEZZANI

3.      Pedagogy of Memory: Albertus Carrara’s De Omnibus Ingeniis Augendae Memoriae

MANUEL MAÑAS NÚÑEZ

4.      “Traduttore, traditore”? How Early Mnemonic Knowledge Is Shaped by Translations

CLÉMENT POUPARD

5.      The Body as a Mnemonic Aid for Learning Grammar

MARTA RAMOS GRANÉ

6.      Diagrammatizing the Art of Memory: Two Examples of Tree Diagrams in Mnemonic Treatises from the 15^th Century
NAÏS VIRENQUE

PART II

Reimagining the Mental Library: Cultural and Literary Transformations of Memory

7.      Encyclopedic Mnemonics in Diego Valadés’ Rhetorica Christiana

CÉSAR CHAPARRO GÓMEZ

8.      The Machiavellian Movement: Acquiring Virtues through the Body

LUCIA DELAINI

9.      Burton’s Mental Library: The Anatomy of Melancholy and the Art of Memory

REBECA HELFER

10.  Mnemotechnics, Vision, and Apocrypha. Sources of imagines agentes in Middle English Drama

LAURA ISEPPI DE FILIPPIS

11.    Memory in De sacris concionibus recte formandis (Rome, 1543) by Alfonso Zorrilla

LUIS MERINO JEREZ

12.  The Geography of Memory and Hispanic Poets of the Golden Age
LUCÍA TENA MORILLO

13.  Local Memory and Literary Landscape in Petrarch

ANDREA TORRE

Index

Biography

Julia Domínguez is a Professor of Spanish and the Director of the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program at the University of Delaware, where she also serves as a fellow in the ACHIEVE Program. She is the co-editor of the book series The Early Modern Exchange for the University of Delaware Press. Her work explores the intersections of literature, history, and memory, with a focus on the arts of memory, the history of science, and their impact on early modern culture. She is the author of Quixotic Memories: Cervantes and Memory in Early Modern Spain (2022), the editor of Cervantes in Perspective (2012), and the co‑editor of Hispanic Studies in Honor of Robert L. Fiore (2009). Her recent scholarship examines how mnemonic systems shaped literary and visual culture in early modern Spain and Latin America.

“Mental Libraries: The Reception of the Arts of Memory in Literature and Culture offers a rich sampling of essays on how early modern knowledge actively structured and accessed mnemonic practices and cultural production, while at the same time stressing that “memory” is not a relic of the past but a driving force in the continuum of human creativity, knowledge production, and cultural expression that continues to inform how we think, imagine, and create across time and space.”

 

--William E. Engel (Nick B. Williams Professor Literature), Sewanee: The University of the South