Excavating the Memory Palace: An Account of the Disappearance of Mnemonic Imagery from English Rhetoric, 1550–1650

Rhetoric Review Apr 2017

Excavating the Memory Palace: An Account of the Disappearance of Mnemonic Imagery from English Rhetoric, 1550–1650

Seth Long University of Nebraska at Kearney

Abstract

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the visual precepts of rhetoric’s fourth canon found themselves at odds with the iconoclasm of England’s Protestant elite. Under this negative influence, mnemonic imagery disappeared from rhetorical theory. Interest in the fourth canon declined, replaced with a Ramist conception of memory grounded in abstract (and imageless) order. A general outline of this history has been offered by several scholars—most notably, Frances Yates—but new bibliographic data along with recently digitized archives can verify its accuracy. Print, written culture, or “modernist” ideologies alone cannot explain the historical marginalization of the canon of memory.

Journal: Rhetoric Review
Published: 2017-04-03
DOI: 10.1080/07350198.2017.1281691
Open Access: Closed
Topics: multimodality

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

Pâquet (2020)

A Rhetoric of Walking and Reading: Immersion in Environmental Ambient Literature

Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Obermark (2019)

“Assurance that the world holds far more good than bad”:The Pedagogy of Memory …

Rhetoric Review

Cites in this index (1)

Pruchnic et al. (2011)

The Future of Forgetting: Rhetoric, Memory, Affect

Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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