The Feudal Art of Memory and the Treacherous Imagination: Coveting the Golden Phantasm in Mammon’s House of Trade

This chapter argues that Spenser warns readers against the threat that the mercantile environment poses to feudal remembering, the mental bulwark of a loyal courtier. Mammon’s commercial environment incites covetousness, which stimulates the faculty of imagination to seize control of image production, preventing the courtier from building a stable memory palace. Informed by cultural materialism, recent Spenser criticism on Book 2 has devoted disproportionate attention to studying memory, without contemplating its cognitive connections to the imagination. It is well known that the early modern period distrusted this faculty, which could corrupt or be corrupted by the emotions and the five senses, eventually unseating the governing faculty of reason. What is less well known is the imagination’s immediate menace to memory; in faculty psychology, the organs were adjacent to one another, so the imagination, normally collaborating with the memory, could commandeer the images that formed the basis of remembering, and, ultimately, all thought. The imagination’s insubordination worries Spenser no doubt because, as an inward-looking poet, he realizes that the double-edged sword of the image enables him to explore mental states and edify his readers, while inadvertently tempting them to indulge in lower order thinking that can potentially disrupt their cognitive equilibrium. In Book 2, Spenser assures readers that he uses the memory, not the imagination, to manage mental images, and at the same time cautions courtiers that the rise of commercialism—what has been characterized as the political-economic transition from feudalism to protocapitalism—may have staggering cognitive effects, replacing the mnemonic architecture of the stable manor house with that of the forgetful house of trade.