As suggested in the introduction, memory and forgetting are both physiological and cultural; they account not only for cognitive and somatic activity, but also for various kinds of social performance. Relatedly, memory and forgetting crop up in a wide variety of early modern discourses, with meanings not limited to (or even primarily defined by) cerebral function. This does not mean that when forgetting is described in, say, a religious tract, the “literal”/physiological gives way to the “metaphorical”/cultural. Instead, the physiological and cultural mutually inform one another (as in the association of memory with order discussed below), albeit to varying degrees at different moments. Thus, while this chapter begins with the physiology of memory and forgetting, that physiology should not be read as the materialist substrate for subsequent discussion of forgetting either here or in the rest of the book. Instead, physiological description provides specific conceptual resources through which to configure the relationship between (primarily male) “bodies and selves” in a range of discourses.

We will begin with a particular depiction of oblivion as a male body. From there, we will turn to some of the ways in which forgetfulness intersects with and shapes period understandings of lethargy and immoderate sleep.