ABSTRACT
Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica are extraordinary commonplace books insofar as they unsettle rhetorical assumptions about forgetting. The early modern commonplace book renders visible the practice of the art of memory – rhetoric’s fourth canon – by embodying in print as well as writing what was popularly embodied in the individual. Like the architecture visualized by Cicero, it houses an artificial memory that the reader returns to for locating mnemonic content. The discourse of rhetoric in which the early modern commonplace book is situated assumes memory to be textual abundance and forgetting to be its privation. In this negative form, forgetting does not encroach upon memory, which vouchsafes to writer and reader imaginary selfmastery through accumulating commonplaces. Burton’s and Browne’s commonplace books, however, conceptualize forgetting as a material excess, not a privation, and thereby signal a crisis in early modern mnemonic culture: the overproduction of the printing press has made it impossible for humanist subjectivity to digest commonplaces into the self. Burton and Browne look toward modernity in registering an epistemological suspicion of textuality, even as they materialize their forgetting in characteristically early modern terms.
