Elizabeth Isham’s Everlasting Library: Memory and Self in Early Modern Autobiography

Abstract

Memory, in early modern usage, is a fundamental quality of the person. Renaissance scholars inherited from medieval psychology the theory of the “inward wits,” memory, understanding, and imagination (memoria, cogitatio, phantasia ).1 These three qualities constituted the human mind, establishing the self with its singular memories, intellects, and fancies; the loss of memory was thus in important ways a loss of the self. The phrase commonly used to describe someone as being of sound mind was “in perfect sense and memory”; to remember accurately was to grasp the underpinning narrative that held self together in time, and the loss of that narrative meant a collapse in self-awareness, to the point where a person no longer knew who they were. 2 A memory text can thus be seen as a primary assertion of selfhood; not, as was once thought, an expression of “Renaissance individualism,” but a manifestation of a self-reflective, communicative subjectivity. Nor was this only an intellectual model of the self. In spiritual terms, forgetfulness was repeatedly invoked as not merely a temporary mishap but a basic flaw, a loss of righteousness: the injunction to remember was reiterated from the Old Testament on, in a stream of devotional texts recommending the godly to remember and reflect on instances of God’s providence in their lives and elsewhere. 3 Memory was a means to spiritual growth; spiritual writing was saturated with the language of memory and forgetting. 4 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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