The Arts of Mnemosyne: Expressions of Mnemonic Culture in the Renaissance

This event has passed.

Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L160
@ 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Image Description: This is an image of Julia Domínquez. She is standing in front of a whiteboard and smiling.Julia Domínguez

Ciplijauskaité Fellow (2021-2022)

World Languages and Cultures; Iowa State University

Once upon a time, the notion of training and cultivating a disciplined memory was paramount in most people’s lives. There was a time when people laboriously invested in their memories to furnish and perfect their minds, in creating mental libraries. Abundant references to these mental libraries in various aesthetic artifacts during the Renaissance signal a cultural awareness and relevance to memory and mnemonic practices, and confirm the significance of the art of memory as a global phenomenon. Also called artificial memory, ars memorativa, ars memoriae, or local memory, the art of memory was an expanding compendium of techniques and strategies used to effectively improve one’s memory. For centuries the practitioners of the art of memory would associate words and ideas with images and mentally locate them in an architectural setting divided into compartments, so that later they could revisit the setting and retrieve those images. Early modern individuals were quite accustomed to exercising their memory and generating mental spaces—in the style of virtual ones today—which drew on the power of visual imagination. Scattered in libraries, the abundant treatises on the art of memory claim my attention beyond their texts. I study the art of memory not as a discipline or a set of techniques but as a way of interacting with mental schemes and attitudes of the period, and the ways in which its multiple applications are reflected in literary works. Through the lens of the art of memory, literary works become memory palaces, mental libraries, galleries of memory and architectures of knowledge.

Julia Domínguez is Associate Professor of Spanish at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on early modern Spanish literature from the standpoint of the rise of science and speculative thought in the Renaissance with a focus on Cervantes’ works. She is interested in how authors of the period reflected the individual’s relationship to their body, mind (specifically memory), and environment as a result of scientific and philosophical discourses and the impact of new technologies. Her latest book, Quixotic Memories: Cervantes and Memory in Early Modern Spain (U Toronto P, 2022), explores the plurality and complexity of memory’s cultural scope through the lens of Cervantes. She also is the editor of Cervantes in Perspective and co-editor of the volume Hispanic Studies in Honor of Robert L. Fiore. Domínguez has also published in journals and edited volumes on early modern Spanish literature, the picaresque, film, and Cervantes. She has served as a member of the Executive Board of the Cervantes Society of America, and in 2020 she was given the national University Teacher Award by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AASPT).