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Rebeca Helfer

University of California, Irvine, English, Faculty Member

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My research is on the art of memory as literary theory and praxis in early modern English writing. I am currently completing a book on this subject, Art of Memory in Early Modern England: Mnemonic Poetics-in-Practice, which explores the art of memory's expression as metapoetic fiction in the work of Sidney, Spenser, Nashe, Shakespeare, Donne, and Cavendish. This project on the art of memory builds upon my first book, Spenser's Ruins and the Art of Recollection (University of Toronto Press, 2012).

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Abdulhamit Arvas

University of Pennsylvania

Anna Hickey-Moody

University of New England - Australia

Valeria Cammarata

Jonathan Unglaub

Brandeis University

Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Katrina O'Loughlin

Brunel University

Marissa Greenberg

University of New Mexico

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Cornell University

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Papers by Rebeca Helfer

“A Work of Fancy”: World-Making Imagination as an Art of Memory in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World

Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Mark Kaethler, and Grant Williams, 2024

“A Work of Fancy”: World-Making Imagination as an Art of Memory in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World

Springer eBooks, 2024

Art of Memory and Shakespeare Studies

Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory, 2017

The State of the Art: Romeo and Juliet

*Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader,* ed. Julia Lupton (Bloomsbury, 2016), 2016

Where can the real Shakespeare be found? On the page-and if so, which version?-or in production-a... more Where can the real Shakespeare be found? On the page-and if so, which version?-or in production-and if so, how faithful must a performance be to the original text? These questions have absorbed Shakespeare scholars of the past generation, who have responded by dismantling the assumptions that underwrite these very questions, and by posing new questions that have inspired new answers. Romeo and Juliet has proved an important test case in debates about authenticity and authority, as Wendy Wall demonstrates in 'Editors in Love?: Performing Desire in Romeo and Juliet', which examines the intersection of page and performance in the context of such debates. Throughout the'90s, scholars increasingly challenged the conclusions of editors and bibliographers about earlier printed versions of Romeo and Juliet, particularly the so-called 'bad' quarto of 1597, Q1, which was thought to be a memorial reconstruction of a performance, and thus suspect. In so doing, scholars worked to reverse the assumption that the written text always precedes performance, rather than vice-versa, and therefore matters more, as well as the assumption that a unified text exists. 'Today we commonly think of performances as mutating, while the text remains stable', Wall writes, but argues that this is a 'fantasy of textual production … at odds with the realities of theatrical practice in the Renaissance'. Wall surveys this critical shift, based on the work of critics such as Stephen Orgel, Jonathan Goldberg, Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, who have disputed the primacy of the play text in the context of Romeo and Juliet. 'The written text … belatedly takes its meaning from theatre', Wall asserts and 'since the text is of a performance (rather than the other way around), the simple question "is a modern performance faithful to the text?" appears to be inadequate at best.' Wall's essay is indebted to Jonathan Goldberg's '"What? in a names that which we call a Rose": The Desired Texts of Romeo and Juliet', which reflects upon the differences between Q1 and Q2 Romeo and Juliet and the ways that editors and bibliographers have responded to them. Goldberg traces the editorial and bibliographic reception of Q1, deemed the 'bad' quarto in part because of its differences from Q2, versus that of Q2, deemed the 'good' quarto because it was thought to represent Shakespeare's 'foul papers' (or unedited draft) of the play. As Goldberg argues, however, this narrative reflects the desire of editors to 'clothe an interpretation with authority'. Instead of seeing Q1 as a performance text and Q2 as an authorial work, he contends that Q2 is 'an anthology of a number of productions of Romeo and Juliet', from which editors make their selections. Goldberg reconfigures the relation between page and performance, and in so doing exposes fantasies of authority as a product of our own desire.

Allegories of Love: Affect and the Art of Memory in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Memory and Affect in Shakespeare's England, 2023

A Little Love? Remembering the Amoretti, Forgetting The Faerie Queene

The Spenser Review, 2023

Did Spenser forget about The Faerie Queene for the Amoretti? 1 In sonnet 33, Spenser defends hims... more Did Spenser forget about The Faerie Queene for the Amoretti? 1 In sonnet 33, Spenser defends himself against this implicit charge (as much to readers as to friend and fellow poet, Lodowick Bryskett), even as he admits that he should be writing The Faerie Queene but is not: Great wrong I do, I can it not deny, to that most sacred Empresse my dear dred, not finishing her Queene of faery, that mote enlarge her living prayses dead: But lodwick, this of grace to me aread: doe ye not thinck th'accomplishment of it sufficient worke for one mans simple head, all were it as the rest but rudely writ. How then should I without another wit: thinck ever to endure so taedious toyle, sins that this one is tost with troublous fit of a proud love, that doth my spirite spoyle. Ceasse then, till she vouchsafe to grawnt me rest, or lend you me another living brest. 2

Falling into History: Trials of Empire in Spenser's Faerie Queene

Spenser's unfinished epic The Faerie Queene ends with a dramatic scene of trial: the Cantos of Mu... more Spenser's unfinished epic The Faerie Queene ends with a dramatic scene of trial: the Cantos of Mutability, where readers stand witness to Dame Mutability's case against Jove. Challenging his authority on several grounds, Mutability contends that Jove has usurped her rightful reign and rules over heaven and earth illegitimately, because she had had a prior claim on heaven's throne interrupted by Jove when he seized power from her ancestor Saturn. Moreover, she charges, Jove has thereby fashioned himself as a god presiding over endless empire. In doing so he has subsequently denied this fall into history, in effect rewriting history as a fiction. Mutability's prosecution of Jove thus goes beyond issues of eternity, entering into the realm of history. Indeed, Mutability's testimony implies that heaven can wait; in the end, her case concerns earthly matters. When Spenser puts the promise of permanence on trial in the Mutability Cantos, he is recalling earlier trials of history in Books II and III of The Faerie Queene, where England's history is told. Timelessness yields to time when we consider Mutability's case in the light of history-that is, when we see the fall of the Golden Age as both prehistory and antecedent to the fall of Troy. This essay moves from Mutability's day in court to the representation of English history in Books II and III, then to a brief view of Ireland, in order to observe Spenser's defense of Mutability's charges: that tales of endless empire make monarchs into gods, allowing them to rewrite history as fiction. Mutability's case, I argue, stands for The Faerie Queene's larger trial of English empire.

The State of The Art of Memory and Shakespeare Studies

Routledge eBooks, Aug 9, 2017

Remembering Sidney, Remembering Spenser: The Art of Memory and *The Ruines of Time*

Spenser studies, Jun 1, 2007

This article explores the art of memory in The Ruines of Time, especially in its memorial to Phil... more This article explores the art of memory in The Ruines of Time, especially in its memorial to Philip Sidney. The art of memory here represents not only the use of places and images as an aid to recollection, but also a story of history—a narrative about building upon the ruins of the past—drawn from the art’s origin as told in Cicero’s De oratore: the tale of the poet Simonides, which Cicero uses as a frame tale for his recollection of Rome’s ruin. Spenser’s poem marks his and Sidney’s dialogue about the Ciceronian art of memory and its relation to England’s collective memory, articulated in Sidney’s Defense of Poetry and its response to The Shepheardes Calender and then continued in The Ruines of Time.

The Art of Poetry and the Art of Memory: Philip Sidney’s Mnemonic Poetics

Renaissance and Reformation, Dec 1, 2022

This article explores the significance of the art of memory as a mnemonic poetics in Philip Sidne... more This article explores the significance of the art of memory as a mnemonic poetics in Philip Sidney's literary theory and practice. The art of memory is more than an ancient mnemonic method, I argue; rather, it constitutes a poetics that evolves from Plato to Petrarch as part of an interdisciplinary dialogue and debate about how the past is remembered (particularly through love stories) and remade in the present. This tradition of mnemonic poetics is central to Sidney's portrayal of the art of poetry as an art of memory in his Apology for Poetry, a tradition that Sidney remembers anew in his sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella. Sidney constructs his poem as a memory theatre in which he demonstrates and indeed dramatizes the art of memory indirectly and ironically: through a poetic persona, Astrophil, who longs for an "art of forgetting" in his pursuit of originality. Cet article s'intéresse à l'art de la mémoire comme une poétique mnémonique dans la théorie et la pratique littéraires de Philip Sidney. Nous avançons que, plus qu'une méthode mnémonique ancienne, l'art de la mémoire constitue une poétique qui évolue de Platon à Pétrarque au sein d'un dialogue et d'un débat interdisciplinaires sur la manière dont le passé est remémoré (notamment à travers les histoires d'amour) et réactivé dans le présent. Cette tradition d'une poétique mnémonique est centrale dans la représentation de l'art poétique comme art de la mémoire dans l'Apology for Poetry, tradition que Sidney fait renaître dans les sonnets d'Astrophil and Stella. Sidney construit son poème comme un théâtre de la mémoire dans lequel il représente et met en scène l'art de la mémoire de façon indirecte et ironique, soit à travers une persona poétique, Astrophil, qui aspire à un « art de l'oubli » dans sa quête d'originalité.

Spenser’s Golden Age Memories: Recollecting *The Ruines of Time* in *Prothalamion*

Spenser studies, 2020

This essay explores how Spenser’s late poem Prothalamion both reconstructs and deconstructs Golde... more This essay explores how Spenser’s late poem Prothalamion both reconstructs and deconstructs Golden Age myths of poetry and politics, through allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti as well as through the intertextual presence of Spenser’s early complaint The Ruines of Time. Although Golden Age memories of a time before a fall into time connect these two poems, Spenser nevertheless reveals Prothalamion to be a retrospective fiction constructed from The Ruines of Time, an intertextuality reflective of Spenser’s career-long poetics of ruin and recollection. As I argue, Spenser’s poetics relate to the art of memory, as dramatized by its origin story: the tale of the poet Simonides, who discovers locational memory by recollecting a ruined edifice. By remembering Prothalamion from The Ruines of Time, Spenser both recollects and reforms the memorial ruins of his own past and poetry, while challenging the myth of the Golden Age associated with Queen Elizabeth and his presumed role as England’s new Virgil.

Wit and The Art of Memory in Nashe’s *The Unfortunate Traveller*

English Literary Renaissance, Sep 1, 2017

This essay explores the importance of the art of memory in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. Nas... more This essay explores the importance of the art of memory in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. Nashe represents the art of memory not only as a rhetorical method (using places and images to construct a location for memory), but also as his own literary method. Nashe draws attention to his prose poetics of memory throughout the novella, particularly in its framing device: as the narrator Jack Wilton tells his tale at the local English pub, he constructs a memory theater of sorts, a building-cum-book of memory that recollects both his personal history and the history of the Renaissance. Jack delivers his story as though he is a courtier, an orator, and a poet-performer, roles linked in the mnemonic tradition—from Cicero’s On the Orator, to Castiglione’s The Courtier, to Sidney’s Apology for Poetry—that Nashe inherits and reforms. Beginning with Nashe’s earliest writing, I examine his career-long concern with the relationship of the art of memory to the art of concealing art, an expression of the ideal courtier’s wit, and an important concept in The Unfortunate Traveller. [R.H]

Death and the Art of Memory in Donne

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Oct 13, 2022

The Death of the ‘New Poete’: Virgilian Ruin and Ciceronian Recollection in Spenser’s *The Shepheardes Calender*

Renaissance Quarterly, 2003

This essay explores Virgl's influence in Renaissance poetry through the literature's most common ... more This essay explores Virgl's influence in Renaissance poetry through the literature's most common trope, that of ruin; specifically, it examines the complexity of Virgilian imitation in Spenser's *Shepheardes Calender* through an exploration of its introduction by his anonymous first critic, E.K. Through the topos of ruin, this essay reconsiders Virgil's legacy in the *Calender,* suggesting that critics have underestimated Spenser'ss criticism of Virgil's authorial pattern. Rather than reconstructing Virgil'ss model of cultural transmission — that of ruin and repair—Spenser presents the Ciceronian art of memory as a competing model for the architecture of immortality, for building upon the ruins of the past.

Spenser's Ruins and the Art of Recollection (University of Toronto Press, 2012) -- Preface

Spenser's Ruins and the Art of Recollection, 2012

What is the art of memory? Rebeca Helfer's intertextual study Spenser's Ruins and the Art of Reco... more What is the art of memory? Rebeca Helfer's intertextual study Spenser's Ruins and the Art of Recollection offers a fresh perspective on the significance of this ancient mnemonic technique to Edmund Spenser's writing and, through this lens, explores the art's complex historical and literary reception. Beginning with the origins of mnemonic strategies in epic tales, Helfer examines how the art of memory speaks to debates about poetry and its place in culture from Plato to Spenser's present day. As Helfer argues, ruins provide memorial spaces for an ongoing dialogue about how story relates to history, and how both relate to edification and empire-building. Through detailed, intertextual readings of The Shepheardes Calender, The Faerie Queene, the Complaints, and other Spenserian works, Helfer demonstrates how the art of memory shapes Spenser's theory and practice of poetry as well as his political view, throughout his career. More broadly, Spenser's Ruins and the Art of Recollection points to new ways of understanding the importance of this art within literary studies.

Arts of Recollection and Cultural Transmission

Translatio or the Transmission of Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 2009

“A Work of Fancy”: World-Making Imagination as an Art of Memory in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World

Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Mark Kaethler, and Grant Williams, 2024

“A Work of Fancy”: World-Making Imagination as an Art of Memory in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World

Springer eBooks, 2024

Art of Memory and Shakespeare Studies

Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory, 2017

The State of the Art: Romeo and Juliet

*Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader,* ed. Julia Lupton (Bloomsbury, 2016), 2016

Where can the real Shakespeare be found? On the page-and if so, which version?-or in production-a... more Where can the real Shakespeare be found? On the page-and if so, which version?-or in production-and if so, how faithful must a performance be to the original text? These questions have absorbed Shakespeare scholars of the past generation, who have responded by dismantling the assumptions that underwrite these very questions, and by posing new questions that have inspired new answers. Romeo and Juliet has proved an important test case in debates about authenticity and authority, as Wendy Wall demonstrates in 'Editors in Love?: Performing Desire in Romeo and Juliet', which examines the intersection of page and performance in the context of such debates. Throughout the'90s, scholars increasingly challenged the conclusions of editors and bibliographers about earlier printed versions of Romeo and Juliet, particularly the so-called 'bad' quarto of 1597, Q1, which was thought to be a memorial reconstruction of a performance, and thus suspect. In so doing, scholars worked to reverse the assumption that the written text always precedes performance, rather than vice-versa, and therefore matters more, as well as the assumption that a unified text exists. 'Today we commonly think of performances as mutating, while the text remains stable', Wall writes, but argues that this is a 'fantasy of textual production … at odds with the realities of theatrical practice in the Renaissance'. Wall surveys this critical shift, based on the work of critics such as Stephen Orgel, Jonathan Goldberg, Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, who have disputed the primacy of the play text in the context of Romeo and Juliet. 'The written text … belatedly takes its meaning from theatre', Wall asserts and 'since the text is of a performance (rather than the other way around), the simple question "is a modern performance faithful to the text?" appears to be inadequate at best.' Wall's essay is indebted to Jonathan Goldberg's '"What? in a names that which we call a Rose": The Desired Texts of Romeo and Juliet', which reflects upon the differences between Q1 and Q2 Romeo and Juliet and the ways that editors and bibliographers have responded to them. Goldberg traces the editorial and bibliographic reception of Q1, deemed the 'bad' quarto in part because of its differences from Q2, versus that of Q2, deemed the 'good' quarto because it was thought to represent Shakespeare's 'foul papers' (or unedited draft) of the play. As Goldberg argues, however, this narrative reflects the desire of editors to 'clothe an interpretation with authority'. Instead of seeing Q1 as a performance text and Q2 as an authorial work, he contends that Q2 is 'an anthology of a number of productions of Romeo and Juliet', from which editors make their selections. Goldberg reconfigures the relation between page and performance, and in so doing exposes fantasies of authority as a product of our own desire.

Allegories of Love: Affect and the Art of Memory in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Memory and Affect in Shakespeare's England, 2023

A Little Love? Remembering the Amoretti, Forgetting The Faerie Queene

The Spenser Review, 2023

Did Spenser forget about The Faerie Queene for the Amoretti? 1 In sonnet 33, Spenser defends hims... more Did Spenser forget about The Faerie Queene for the Amoretti? 1 In sonnet 33, Spenser defends himself against this implicit charge (as much to readers as to friend and fellow poet, Lodowick Bryskett), even as he admits that he should be writing The Faerie Queene but is not: Great wrong I do, I can it not deny, to that most sacred Empresse my dear dred, not finishing her Queene of faery, that mote enlarge her living prayses dead: But lodwick, this of grace to me aread: doe ye not thinck th'accomplishment of it sufficient worke for one mans simple head, all were it as the rest but rudely writ. How then should I without another wit: thinck ever to endure so taedious toyle, sins that this one is tost with troublous fit of a proud love, that doth my spirite spoyle. Ceasse then, till she vouchsafe to grawnt me rest, or lend you me another living brest. 2

Falling into History: Trials of Empire in Spenser's Faerie Queene

Spenser's unfinished epic The Faerie Queene ends with a dramatic scene of trial: the Cantos of Mu... more Spenser's unfinished epic The Faerie Queene ends with a dramatic scene of trial: the Cantos of Mutability, where readers stand witness to Dame Mutability's case against Jove. Challenging his authority on several grounds, Mutability contends that Jove has usurped her rightful reign and rules over heaven and earth illegitimately, because she had had a prior claim on heaven's throne interrupted by Jove when he seized power from her ancestor Saturn. Moreover, she charges, Jove has thereby fashioned himself as a god presiding over endless empire. In doing so he has subsequently denied this fall into history, in effect rewriting history as a fiction. Mutability's prosecution of Jove thus goes beyond issues of eternity, entering into the realm of history. Indeed, Mutability's testimony implies that heaven can wait; in the end, her case concerns earthly matters. When Spenser puts the promise of permanence on trial in the Mutability Cantos, he is recalling earlier trials of history in Books II and III of The Faerie Queene, where England's history is told. Timelessness yields to time when we consider Mutability's case in the light of history-that is, when we see the fall of the Golden Age as both prehistory and antecedent to the fall of Troy. This essay moves from Mutability's day in court to the representation of English history in Books II and III, then to a brief view of Ireland, in order to observe Spenser's defense of Mutability's charges: that tales of endless empire make monarchs into gods, allowing them to rewrite history as fiction. Mutability's case, I argue, stands for The Faerie Queene's larger trial of English empire.

The State of The Art of Memory and Shakespeare Studies

Routledge eBooks, Aug 9, 2017

Remembering Sidney, Remembering Spenser: The Art of Memory and *The Ruines of Time*

Spenser studies, Jun 1, 2007

This article explores the art of memory in The Ruines of Time, especially in its memorial to Phil... more This article explores the art of memory in The Ruines of Time, especially in its memorial to Philip Sidney. The art of memory here represents not only the use of places and images as an aid to recollection, but also a story of history—a narrative about building upon the ruins of the past—drawn from the art’s origin as told in Cicero’s De oratore: the tale of the poet Simonides, which Cicero uses as a frame tale for his recollection of Rome’s ruin. Spenser’s poem marks his and Sidney’s dialogue about the Ciceronian art of memory and its relation to England’s collective memory, articulated in Sidney’s Defense of Poetry and its response to The Shepheardes Calender and then continued in The Ruines of Time.

The Art of Poetry and the Art of Memory: Philip Sidney’s Mnemonic Poetics

Renaissance and Reformation, Dec 1, 2022

This article explores the significance of the art of memory as a mnemonic poetics in Philip Sidne... more This article explores the significance of the art of memory as a mnemonic poetics in Philip Sidney's literary theory and practice. The art of memory is more than an ancient mnemonic method, I argue; rather, it constitutes a poetics that evolves from Plato to Petrarch as part of an interdisciplinary dialogue and debate about how the past is remembered (particularly through love stories) and remade in the present. This tradition of mnemonic poetics is central to Sidney's portrayal of the art of poetry as an art of memory in his Apology for Poetry, a tradition that Sidney remembers anew in his sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella. Sidney constructs his poem as a memory theatre in which he demonstrates and indeed dramatizes the art of memory indirectly and ironically: through a poetic persona, Astrophil, who longs for an "art of forgetting" in his pursuit of originality. Cet article s'intéresse à l'art de la mémoire comme une poétique mnémonique dans la théorie et la pratique littéraires de Philip Sidney. Nous avançons que, plus qu'une méthode mnémonique ancienne, l'art de la mémoire constitue une poétique qui évolue de Platon à Pétrarque au sein d'un dialogue et d'un débat interdisciplinaires sur la manière dont le passé est remémoré (notamment à travers les histoires d'amour) et réactivé dans le présent. Cette tradition d'une poétique mnémonique est centrale dans la représentation de l'art poétique comme art de la mémoire dans l'Apology for Poetry, tradition que Sidney fait renaître dans les sonnets d'Astrophil and Stella. Sidney construit son poème comme un théâtre de la mémoire dans lequel il représente et met en scène l'art de la mémoire de façon indirecte et ironique, soit à travers une persona poétique, Astrophil, qui aspire à un « art de l'oubli » dans sa quête d'originalité.

Spenser’s Golden Age Memories: Recollecting *The Ruines of Time* in *Prothalamion*

Spenser studies, 2020

This essay explores how Spenser’s late poem Prothalamion both reconstructs and deconstructs Golde... more This essay explores how Spenser’s late poem Prothalamion both reconstructs and deconstructs Golden Age myths of poetry and politics, through allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti as well as through the intertextual presence of Spenser’s early complaint The Ruines of Time. Although Golden Age memories of a time before a fall into time connect these two poems, Spenser nevertheless reveals Prothalamion to be a retrospective fiction constructed from The Ruines of Time, an intertextuality reflective of Spenser’s career-long poetics of ruin and recollection. As I argue, Spenser’s poetics relate to the art of memory, as dramatized by its origin story: the tale of the poet Simonides, who discovers locational memory by recollecting a ruined edifice. By remembering Prothalamion from The Ruines of Time, Spenser both recollects and reforms the memorial ruins of his own past and poetry, while challenging the myth of the Golden Age associated with Queen Elizabeth and his presumed role as England’s new Virgil.

Wit and The Art of Memory in Nashe’s *The Unfortunate Traveller*

English Literary Renaissance, Sep 1, 2017

This essay explores the importance of the art of memory in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. Nas... more This essay explores the importance of the art of memory in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. Nashe represents the art of memory not only as a rhetorical method (using places and images to construct a location for memory), but also as his own literary method. Nashe draws attention to his prose poetics of memory throughout the novella, particularly in its framing device: as the narrator Jack Wilton tells his tale at the local English pub, he constructs a memory theater of sorts, a building-cum-book of memory that recollects both his personal history and the history of the Renaissance. Jack delivers his story as though he is a courtier, an orator, and a poet-performer, roles linked in the mnemonic tradition—from Cicero’s On the Orator, to Castiglione’s The Courtier, to Sidney’s Apology for Poetry—that Nashe inherits and reforms. Beginning with Nashe’s earliest writing, I examine his career-long concern with the relationship of the art of memory to the art of concealing art, an expression of the ideal courtier’s wit, and an important concept in The Unfortunate Traveller. [R.H]

Death and the Art of Memory in Donne

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Oct 13, 2022

The Death of the ‘New Poete’: Virgilian Ruin and Ciceronian Recollection in Spenser’s *The Shepheardes Calender*

Renaissance Quarterly, 2003

This essay explores Virgl's influence in Renaissance poetry through the literature's most common ... more This essay explores Virgl's influence in Renaissance poetry through the literature's most common trope, that of ruin; specifically, it examines the complexity of Virgilian imitation in Spenser's *Shepheardes Calender* through an exploration of its introduction by his anonymous first critic, E.K. Through the topos of ruin, this essay reconsiders Virgil's legacy in the *Calender,* suggesting that critics have underestimated Spenser'ss criticism of Virgil's authorial pattern. Rather than reconstructing Virgil'ss model of cultural transmission — that of ruin and repair—Spenser presents the Ciceronian art of memory as a competing model for the architecture of immortality, for building upon the ruins of the past.

Spenser's Ruins and the Art of Recollection (University of Toronto Press, 2012) -- Preface

Spenser's Ruins and the Art of Recollection, 2012

What is the art of memory? Rebeca Helfer's intertextual study Spenser's Ruins and the Art of Reco... more What is the art of memory? Rebeca Helfer's intertextual study Spenser's Ruins and the Art of Recollection offers a fresh perspective on the significance of this ancient mnemonic technique to Edmund Spenser's writing and, through this lens, explores the art's complex historical and literary reception. Beginning with the origins of mnemonic strategies in epic tales, Helfer examines how the art of memory speaks to debates about poetry and its place in culture from Plato to Spenser's present day. As Helfer argues, ruins provide memorial spaces for an ongoing dialogue about how story relates to history, and how both relate to edification and empire-building. Through detailed, intertextual readings of The Shepheardes Calender, The Faerie Queene, the Complaints, and other Spenserian works, Helfer demonstrates how the art of memory shapes Spenser's theory and practice of poetry as well as his political view, throughout his career. More broadly, Spenser's Ruins and the Art of Recollection points to new ways of understanding the importance of this art within literary studies.

Arts of Recollection and Cultural Transmission

Translatio or the Transmission of Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 2009