Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references and index
1 - Construing the trace of memory : Giotto to broadsides - Mnemonic emblems and the organization of pictorial space -- - Graphic itineraries and renaissance metaphorics -- - The place of melancholy in "The map of mortalitie" -- - 2 - Imagining the shadow of death : Milton and Derrida - Portraying death as the other -- - Recognizing representation's limits -- - The seed of death and metaphor's end -- - 3 - Embodying the seed of melancholy : Montaigne and Florio - The site of writing -- - The cite of memory -- - The sight of death -- - 4 - Plotting the passage of death : Cervantes and Baudrillard - Visual parables of frames and margins -- - Macabre reflection, ingenious reversal, and graphic inversion -- - Ludic and specular aspects of death unmasked -- - Interlude - Janus and the ring -- - 5 - Transfiguring hieroglyphics : Browne and Heidegger - Mystical designs and patterns of melancholy -- - Urn burial and Garden of Cyrus read as a memento mori diptych -- - Reviewing models of representing the unviewable
This book is a cultural study of the ways men and women in early modern England confronted, accommodated, and paid tribute to mortal life and certain death. Drawing on prose and poetry, painting and statuary, social practices and religious rites, William Engel reopens central questions about Renaissance habits of thought. He explores how the metaphorics of that period signaled and enacted a continual revelation of mortality: the death of the body (figured as a kind of vehicle) and the eternality of the soul (that which was to be transported). Engel argues that early modern metaphorics was essentially mnemonic and emblematic, grounding itself in the relation of body and soul. Building on the work of Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Eliade, the book provides contemporary readers with a key for recovering and understanding the critical assumptions underlying a mnemonically oriented principle of aesthetics
