Customer Reviews

Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England (Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture)

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This book, to borrow from the jacket blurb by Arthur Kinney (series editor and founder of Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies), combines the history of ideas with the history of consciousness in early modern Europe. "Engel has produced a groundbreaking study that is boldly original, richly penetrating, and revolutionary in its implications. No student of early modern culture can afford to overlook this extraordinary work."

This "rich and varied work," so termed by Tom Conley (Harvard University, Professor of Romance Languages), makes use of the critical work of Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Eliade, to uncover subtleties of design in works ranging from Elizabethan broadsides, to Milton's epic poetry, to the essays of Thomas Browne. And yet, as the Review of English Studies noted, neither the wide range of topics nor the conjunction of old texts and modern critics should be read as merely fashionable gestures towards current academic obsession, "for the closely argued thesis has an overall cogency and a local subtlety."

Basically the book argues that early modern "metaphorics" was essentially mnemonic and emblematic.

George Rousseau in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine wrote: "Engel implies that an aesthetic of mortality lurked beneath 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."

Advancead students working in Renaissance literature, especially English (though there is a chapter on Montainge, and a glance at Cervantes) will find the information quite helpful. The final chapter on Browne is particularly memorable. The theme of an aesthetic of anamnesis (drawing on Neoplatonic understandings of knowledge being predicated on memory)are presented "performatively," in a lively way that mirrors the content being discussed, thus involving the reader in the Baroque flow of ideas. The author serves as a tour guide in the hall of mirrors reflecting the other side of being.