Memory as Literary Prescription in English Renaissance Homiletics

Amy K. Burnette

This paper investigates how image-producing aspects of the ars memoria informed structural and stylistic conventions of early seventeenth-century English homiletics. I focus on the sermons of Church of England clergyman Thomas Adams, who, since disappearing into obscurity after the early 1630s, has remained one of the more significant buried literary talents of the seventeenth century. Celebrated by Robert Southey as "the prose Shakespeare of Puritan theologians," Adams was highly visible in print from the 1610s through the late 1620s, during which he published eighteen individual sermons, five sermon collections, and a lengthy commentary on St. Peter's second epistle. This paper is concerned with "The Sinners Passing-Bell. Together with Physic from Heaven," the last in a group of four sermons published as The Devil's Banquet (1614), in which Adams uses the image of the apothecary's shop as a mnemonic device to explain how scripture can be stored in and called forth from memory to protect the soul and facilitate its ascent to heaven--that is, as a means of spiritual healing. 

Apothecaries appeared on the Renaissance stage in plays such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, but the apothecary’s shop itself was also a sort of theater in miniature, with its ornate jars, vials of colored waters and remedies, usually set out where passers-by could easily view them in windows and through doorways. Adams’s choice of provocative sermon titles such as The white deuill (preached at St. Paul’s in 1612, the year of the first performance of Webster’s play that bears the same title) suggests not only his awareness of the market in which his sermons competed for readership, but also of popular taste for the sensational apparent in contemporary drama. In "The Sinners Passing-Bell," Adams figures himself as a physician, referring to scripture as “balmes,” “drammes,” and “receits” meant to be stowed away in the apothecary’s “old store,” or memory. The metaphor of the apothecary’s shop is employed not only as a means of ordering the memory artificially, but it is also, I argue, the convention through which Adams’s sermon is able to achieve its intended effect: the striking image of the apothecary’s shop would have provided an easily recognizable, yet distinctive, mnemonic device for Adams’s wide array of readers and auditors. 

Selected Bibliography:

Bolzoni, Lina. The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001.

Clark, Stuart. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2007.

Hunt, Arnold. The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.

Pender, Stephen. "Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination in Early Modern England." Philosophy and Rhetoric 43.1 (2010): 54-85.

Wallis, Patrick. "Consumption, Retailing, and Medicine in Early-Modern London." Economic History Review 61.1 (2008): 26-53.

Bio:

Amy K. Burnette is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. She is currently at work on her dissertation, Praxis Memoriae: Memory as Aesthetic Technique in English Renaissance Literature, 1580-1630, which explores how ideas circulating about memory, principally within the context of the humanist revival of the classical ars memoria, supplied late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century authors with a theory and practice of literary invention. A version of her first chapter, titled "Bearing Death in The Winter's Tale," will appear in the second revised edition of Dympna Callaghan's A Feminist Companion To Shakespeare.