Place and Memory

Abstract

Despite the new mobility of early modern English society, practices of personal and shared remembering were still anchored in experienced place. Even as technologies and strategies for dealing with past and future altered, memory was richly scaffolded by landscapes, artefacts, architecture, and institutions which themselves bore traces of individual and cultural intervention. This chapter discusses historical variation in two forms of remembering: explicit memories of specific past events, and embodied memories enacted in routine and habitual or skilful action. It is motivated by recent historical scholarship, especially from Nicola Whyte and Andy Wood, on topographies of remembrance in early modern landscape. It connects this new cultural history to the focus on lived bodily experience which characterizes historical phenomenology. It shows personal memory and embodied or habitual memory in play together, interacting in coordinated or competing ways, and assesses the historical utility of the idea of distributed cognitive ecologies.