Confronting Imagination in Langland, Spenser, and Bacon

Beginning with the Renaissance analogical commonplace of poesy corresponding to the imagination, this chapter concerns how imagination is disclosed—or “unconcealed,” to use an ontologically driven notion developed by Martin Heidegger—through the operations associated with constructed memory palaces. Both Heidegger and Bacon deliberately and self-consciously draw poesy into the sphere of their respective philosophical concerns and insist on memory’s role in imaginative thinking, a fundamentally Aristotelian theme deeply embedded in scholastic faculty psychology. Such an understanding of poesy offers a ready-way to approach both the personification of imagination in Langland’s Piers Plowman and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Bacon’s privileging of imagination as a reflective and generative process in New Atlantis—each example representing a telling and transitional “moment” in the development of premodern instantiations of the embodied imagination.