Memory and Forgetting in Louis Le Roy's Presentation of the Androgyne

Renaissance learning made enormous and regular demands on memory, both artificial and natural. At the same time, memory of any kind is inevitably selective and, as Lina Bolzoni has helped us understand, the capacity for remembering needs to be accompanied by parallel skills at forgetting. ¹ Recognizing this, Renaissance treatises on memory also contain references to the companion ars oblivionis. ² In our effort to understand the past, much can be learned from noting what was remembered, in what guise, and what was forgotten. Here my focus will be on the reception of Plato’s Symposium, more specifically on Aristophanes’s account of the Androgyne (189C–193D) as it was offered to readers in mid-sixteenth-century France in the translation and commentary by Louis Le Roy (1510–77).