Spenserπs Trace: Cultural Memory and Cognition

Spenser's Trace: Cultural Memory and Cognition

Oona Frawley

Edmund Spenser has become a rather iconic figure, beleaguered by some critics who deem him to be a willing and active representative of the worst of English colonial aspirations, and defended by others who see him as a humanist poet caught in the closing jaws of an imperial mission. This vacillation of opinion is clearly seen in the responses of Irish writers -- both creative and critical -- to Spenser over time. From Geoffrey Keating to Peter Walsh, from Sarah Butler to Maria Edgeworth, from Yeats to Frank McGuinness, Irish writers display a preoccupation with Spenser that appears to differ profoundly from their preoccupation with other significant English authors like, say, Shakespeare. Because the 'story' of Spenser with which Irish writers have concerned themselves has changed in various ways over a four hundred year period, Spenser appears as a kind of narrative within Irish literature, and one that has the potential to inform us about cultural memory. This 'Spenser narrative' raises many questions for me: are Irish writers haunted by Spenser's ghost more than other English authors because of Spenser's colonial associations? Does Harold Bloom's theory of the 'anxiety of influence' need to be reformulated when one discusses colonial and post-colonial writing? Is Spenser genuinely haunting the Irish literary tradition, or is Spenser a fiction, a symbol, an icon that now needs to be barricaded behind quotation marks in an Irish context?

Such questions huddle under the umbrella of a larger, far more significant question that has only recently begun to be considered by literary critics, concerning the relationship between cultural memory and cognitive processes of memory. My current book project, for which this paper serves as a sketch, examines critical and creative responses to Spenser, but also uses interdisciplinary material on individual and cultural memory to analyse literary transmission trends. Cognitive processes of memory, I believe, can illuminate our study of literature, cultural narratives and cultural memory not merely by analogy. Recent anthropological work has argued that cultural memory necessarily corresponds to memory processes of the individual mind. Harvey Whitehouse, whose work is exemplary in this respect, writes that

At the heart of many studies is the question of who controls the representations of the past, and to what ends. The central thrust of my argument goes in the opposite direction. Instead of asking how political organization and ideology help to mould people's memories, I am asking whether universal features of human memory, activated in different ways, might be said to mould political organization and ideology. The former question is both obvious and valid and has deservedly become a fashionable topic for debate. The question with which I am concerned is less obvious, but the two questions, and the divergent approaches which they imply, are by no means incompatible. (Arguments and Icons 5).

I would go one step further than this and suggest that the two questions in fact need to be asked -- and, if at all possible, answered -- together. My own work thus begins from the premise that the phenomena of memory in culture must reflect the phenomena of memory in mind.

Memory is crucial to cognition, 'the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used'.[1] For cognitive scientists, just as for writers and thinkers from William James and Bergson to Proust and Beckett, 'memory' comes in many different forms: semantic memory, or memory for facts, for example, is quite different to episodic, or autobiographical, memory. What we would typically think of as 'remembering' is now deemed to involve 'explicit' or 'declarative' memory, which is contrasted with 'implicit' memory, which term covers motor memory, for example, 'and other sorts of nondeclarative memory that are expressed in the absence of conscious recollection of their origin'.[2]

The earliest significant cognitive scientific work on memory was carried out by Hermann Ebbinghaus, who studied the accuracy and duration of retention for varying strings of nonsense syllables. Later studies furthered Ebbinghaus's work by studying the capacity for memory in more natural contexts. In his classic 1932 study on Remembering, which effectively marks the beginnings of modern cognitive science, Bartlett examined human ability to remember narratives and images over different periods of time. Humans, he concluded, engage in a 'fundamental process of connecting a given pattern with some setting or scheme'. Bartlett called this process 'effort after meaning'[3], and described memory itself as 'effortful'. While philosophers and thinkers had long believed the memory to be a record that replicated exactly our experiences -- a belief seen in our metaphors for memory as a wax tablet, a computer, and so on -- Bartlett found that our memories are not, in fact, reproductive, but wholly constructive. 'Remembering', he writes, 'is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or constructionä'.[4] Bartlett found that people often recall 'not the presented [narrative] material directly, but a judgment which they made about this material when they saw it originally'.[5] And over time, Bartlett found, humans seemed to streamline and justify a given detailed narrative, constructing their own and retaining only traces of the original.

Bartlett's theory argued that traces in memory are linked together into a 'schemata'; and this theory of cognition has, to a certain degree, been borne out by neuroscientific research. Karl Lashley's 1950 paper proposed that what he called the engram was the physical change or neuronal trace in the brain engrained and later triggered by sensory signals -- visual, auditory, and so on. More recent research has confirmed that there are indeed physical changes left in the brain by learning as neural synapses flood receptor neurons with various chemicals and so do, in fact, leave a kind of 'trace': Bartlett's cognitive model and Lashley's biological one were close to truth.

Studies of memory suggest that information is initially registered in a temporary form and then consolidated (this theory appears to offer an explanation for people who receive a blow to the head and cannot remember the moments immediately preceding the accident). This idea of 'trace consolidation' has led to distinctions being drawn between working, short and long term memory, and, incredibly, these distinctions can now be studied by neuroscientists. PET (positron emission tomography) scans can provide information as to what types of memories involve what parts of the brain, for example, while EEGs can gauge wave forms known as 'event related potentials' (ERPs), which measure neural-activity at the scalp.[6] Such research has allowed for a more detailed knowledge of the brain to emerge, so that, for example, the amygdala and hippocampus are believed to be crucial to long-term memory, with the amygdala seeming to play a role in emotional and particularly fear and trauma based long-term memory. The aims of these physiological experiments are mirrored in models of cognition such as Antonio Damasio's, which demonstrates how 'convergence' -- the re-gathering, in effect, of fragmentary records in the brain -- might work. Recent neuroscience thus contributes to our understanding of memory in an acute way; in demonstrating the distributed quality of memory in the brain, and in providing insight into the ways in which emotion affects our long-term storage of memory.

And this neurosceintific research shares many concerns with cognitive science, which has also been preoccupied with the role of emotion in memory. Out of this concern came the concept of 'flashbulb memory', which theorized that events evoking tremendous surprise and which were, broadly speaking, traumatic, were encoded as 'unforgettable'; flashbulb memories, some argue, derive from repeated rehearsals -- our conversations with others -- that explain how an individual learned a piece of news, thus inserting that individual into the flow of historical events. One influential researcher also argues that 'memories become flashbulbs primarily through the significance that is attached to them afterwards'[7]; this judging of the importance of an event Neisser refers to as 'metacognition'[8]. Typical examples of flashbulb phenomenon would be 9/ll or JFK's assassination, which provided the case study for the original 1977 theorizing of flashbulb memory.[9] Possibly related to this are recent studies demonstrating that 'central details of emotional events are retained better than corresponding details in nonemotional events, whereas the reverse pattern is seen for peripheral details'; the authors of this study refer to the phenomenon of focusing on critical objects at the loss of other information as 'weapon focusing'.[10] What we might think of as emotional encoding, studies of flashbulbs and weapon focusing demonstrate, contributes to the formation of long-term memory.

Extremely emotional or traumatic events that are believed to initiate such phenomenon are, of course, relatively rare. At the other extreme from the flashbulb moment lies what is called a 'script', 'a representation of a stereotypical sequence of actions that are temporally ordered'.[11] A script, in other words, draws upon our memory knowledge of what happens when, for example, we go to a restaurant: we know that this includes waiting to be seated, looking at a menu, ordering our food, and so on. If asked, we might remember the first or last time we went to a restaurant, but it is unlikely that our memories will distinguish between each particular episode that is our experience of restaurants. Repeated exposure, in other words, creates a different type of memory; and the differences between these types of memories have, I believe, implications for the study of cultural memory.

Because I am concerned with literary texts as containers for cultural memory, I would like to highlight a few studies that provide specific examples of ways in which cognitive scientific research can contribute directly to our understanding of the effects of memory on narrative and narrative transmission. In one groundbreaking study, Paivio studied what he called the 'concrete' ratings of nouns, finding that the more concrete the noun, the more it produces a visual image, and the more likely it was to be subsequently recalled (the 'idea' vs. 'the house'). We know too, for example, that there is a general correlation between 'ease of learning and the frequency of occurrence of a word in the English language'[12]; common words appear to be processed more quickly in short-term memory stores. Interestingly, though, rare and unusual words are more easily recognized. Other studies of textual verbal memory tell us that intentional -- as opposed to incidental -- memorization affects the ability to recall, as does the depth of encoding: studies in which participants were asked to think abstractly about a series of words' definitions as opposed to alphabetizing those same words found that the abstract thinking, or depth encoding, was far more effective for memory.[13]

Such studies have implications for the study of memory in culture, suggesting that, just as in the individual mind, certain scripts might develop within culture, and in relation to cultural narratives. More common words, for example, might be retained in cultural narratives than more unusual ones; and cultural narratives might tend to contain a high level of concrete nouns meant to encourage visualisation and remembrance. These small, seemingly incidental findings, in other words, might have application to the study of the ways in which we retain cultural narratives as first described by Bartlett. The work of researchers like Jean Mandler confirms Bartlett's earlier findings, and furthers them, in fact -- she concludes that not only do our retellings of narrative become streamlined and free of detail as Bartlett suggested, but that they conform to what she terms 'pre-established structural knowledge (that is, a schema) to fill in gaps inä memory'.[14] Her work raises the question of whether narratives are shaped as much by the requirements of our memories as the matter of our cultures and timeframes. Mark Turner's work has similar significance for questions of narrative and cultural memory; Turner points out that we recognize stories through 'image schemas' and 'pattern completion'.[15] To illustrate this phenomenon, Turner uses a simple example: we duck, he points out, if an object is thrown towards us, because 'we recognize the beginning sequence of a small spatial story, imagine the rest, and respond. Narrative imagining is our fundamental form of predicting'.[16]

Cognitive science offers the literary critic and the cultural historian new ways of considering the role of memory in the shaping of literary and cultural narratives, by, for example, offering physiological and psychological evidence to analyse the repetitive presence of a figure like Spenser in Irish literature. If findings of cognitive science are taken beyond the bounds of the individual and into the realm of a given culture, what we have is a mass of information that might reveal ways of interpreting cultural narrative transmission over time as it appears in literature. The various reactions to Edmund Spenser over four hundred years provide a case study of this process of cultural memory transmission. Each time Spenser is picked up by another author and that memory trace is reinterpreted, reimagined, the trace is inevitably changed or added to: each author leaves his or her stamp on Spenser, as well as that of his or her cultural moment, and in turn transmits this trace. While there is not, of course, a straightforward narrative of traces -- Spenser read by Keating read by Walsh read by Butler read by Edgeworth and so on -- it seems that, as is the proven case with the physiology of individual memory, cultural memory is somehow constructed anew by each reactivation of a given trace, with the eventual result that a schema based on those traces is put in place. This schema, I believe, develops and changes in the way that Bartlett's 1932 study demonstrated that narrative does when in transmission from individual to individual: patterns are established, details highlighted or done away with, major changes occasionally introduced, and the narrative reduced and tightened over time so that a form of (semantic) schema takes shape. Through the examination of such a network as that which stems from Spenser, then, it might become possible to analyse the ways in which cultural memories are formed, transmitted, and constantly transformed in the Irish literary context.

In recent decades there has been renewed interest in examining Spenser's 'Irish experience'. While this interest has produced some fascinating work (and is itself a sign of some movement in cultural memory), it has extended only rarely towards an examination of Spenser's influence on the generations of Irish writers who followed him. The poet who penned what has been considered the ultimate Elizabethan epic while residing in Ireland also wrote A View of the Present State of Ireland, one of the most infamous prose tracts of the period in the eyes of some scholars. The most influential pastoral and epic poet of the age was thus also one of the ultimate poets of empire, and these dual and duelling identities have exerted a ghostly fascination for Irish writers, who have struggled to reconcile the sheer beauty of Spenser's pastoral poesy with his political position and his attitudes towards the Irish people as barbaric and inhuman. The recurrence of Spenser as a figure in Irish literature is, I would argue, an indication of issues of cultural memory. Because of a peculiar set of facts that set him up as both canonical poet and colonial servant, Spenser acts as the perfect foil, scapegoat or mere backdrop -- depending upon one's ideological position -- against which to view the process of what I will call literary cultural memory, and, more specifically, Irish literary cultural memory.

Nietzsche compares the dead metaphor to a coin whose raised head has been worn away and so is reduced to its literal meaning. Spenser, I am suggesting, by dint of being reinterpreted and reconstructed over a period of several hundred years, becomes rather like Nietzsche's coin, a metaphor in Irish culture, passed from hand to hand, a form of literary currency. But like Nietzsche's coin, this metaphor of Spenser has become worn, so that it is no longer clear what it was he was a metaphor for. The very ideas that Spenser might once have represented have been displaced over time, forgotten, represented now by very different sets of ideas. Freud describes the process by which we lose the most significant of our early memories and are left with what he calls 'screen memories', which are connected to the significant memories only by association. As a recurrent literary event in Ireland, Spenser, it seems to me, has some of this character; there is a sense that Spenser does not mean merely what he appears to, that he is a disabled metaphor or screen memory for something else.

From Spenser's day on, Irish writers have responded and replied to the charges laid out in the English poet's work. The first to claim Spenser as an opponent in a forum that was consciously attempting to shape Irish identity, Geoffrey Keating -- a learned and prolific Jesuit priest -- refuted Spenser and other 'planters'' descriptions of Ireland in the 1630s. By the start of the twentieth century, what I call the 'Spenser narrative' had undergone a major overhaul, largely under the pen of Yeats. Not only was Yeats' early poetry profoundly influenced by Spenserian poetics and aesthetics; Yeats also wrote an essay 'On Edmund Spenser' and, of course, selected and published a volume of Spenser's poetry. Despite his admiration for Spenserian poetics, Yeats was troubled by Spenser. Spenser, Yeats concluded,

the first poet struck with remorse, the first poet who gave his heart to the State, saw nothing but disorder, where the mouths that have spoken all the fables of the poets had not yet become silent. All about him were shepherds and shepherdesses still living the lives that made Theocritus and Virgil think of shepherd and poet as the one thing; but though he dreamed of Virgil's shepherds he wrote a book to advise, among many things, the harrying of all that followed flocks upon the hills, and of all the 'wandering companies that keep the wood'.

Yeats comes to see Spenser as not merely a national poet but a poet whose loyalties extended too far; Yeats himself was to attempt to become a national poet 'Bound neither to Cause nor to State' ('The Tower' III.9) -- and, indeed, the attempt was begun long before there was officially an Irish state to which to give one's heart.

In our own time, about half a dozen Irish writers of note -- Ciaran Carson, Seamus Heaney, Frank McGuinness, John Montague and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill -- have engaged with Spenser, picking up this trace of cultural memory and weaving it into their own work, often touching the same notes that Keating and Yeats did. Among recent literary dealings with Spenser, Seamus Heaney's are, for me, among the most interesting, since they pick up where Yeats left off, turning to this question of Spenser's loyalties and, by implication, to his own.

A poet laureate in much the same way that Spenser was, Heaney returns time and time again to Spenser. Much of Heaney's poetry seems to me to be informed by something of Spenser: not necessarily by the poetics, but in tone, mood. There is something of Elizabethan Ireland in the landscapes that Heaney paints, something that haunts him, something that he can sense, perhaps, but not see: the forests that surround Kilcolman Castle, the forests that are the site of the legendary bird-man Sweeney's fluid, air-propped asylum, the forests through which Heaney wanders when he moves to Wicklow, the forests that Spenser recommended be cut down, levelled for ships and safer passage for English travellers -- these forests, Heaney's own wandering woods, weave in and out of his poetry like apparitions, and are themselves peopled by apparitions: the hunted, ravaged Irish of the day, by Raleigh, and by Spenser himself, almost visible to the poet's eye in the present day. 'I sometimes', Heaney writes, 'see Edmund Spenser'.

Where is this place, then, that Heaney sees Spenser? This might seem a peculiar question: it would be difficult for most of us to begin to believe that Spenser is actually spied among rack and ruined forests by Heaney. Indeed, it might seem daft to search for a 'place' where Spenser is spied. But what I would argue is that there is, in fact, a specific site at which Spenser is present, ever-present, for Heaney and for many other Irish writers, and that site is a repository for cultural memory, and, more specifically, literary cultural memory.

Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence was predicated on an argument that, at the time, might have seemed acceptable: literary writers must come to terms with a heritage of other great writers, must overthrow or be subsumed by their literary forefathers. By the rules of this theory, Shelley must come to terms with Shakespeare, Pynchon with Emerson, and so on. But what happens when these formulaic pairings of authors as fathers-sons are disrupted with new questions: beyond those of gender and sex -- themselves necessary disruptors to Bloom's theory -- and towards the edges of nationality and identity? What happens, in other words, if, instead of wondering how Shelley comes to terms with Shakespeare, we wonder how Conrad, or Rushdie, or Byatt, or Albee does? Suddenly the anxiety of influence must stretch to consider the influx of colonialist thought, of modern migration, of women's changed position in the literary (and greater) world, of changed attitudes towards sexuality.

The anxiety of influence, while still an elementally interesting theory, fails to consider such issues. But too it fails to take account of anything beyond the Freudian psychoanalytic approach that is its driving force: influence might well be, to a certain extent, the result of choice and chance encounters, but equally it might well be a matter of physiology, a matter of cognition. My research proposes to examine the ways in which a far more sophisticated form of the anxiety of influence may function between Spenser and a series of Irish writers, ranging from his near-contemporary Keating to our own contemporaries such as Nuala NÌ Dhomhnaill and Frank McGuinness. How do colonial and post-colonial writers respond to the spectre of a great poet, also a colonial servant, amongst them? How does the space of literary cultural memory shape itself over several centuries? Does 'influence' have as much to do with cultural memory, and with cognitive processes of memory, as an individual author's interests? How does memory, in other words, shape the narratives that occur and recur in our cultures, and in our literature?

Within the many variations of the 'Spenser narrative', there appear to be common denominators, basic elements employed by Irish writers, critics and cultural historians: Spenser comes to Ireland as a colonial civil servant; lives in a property which he purchases but which is not his in the eyes of some; writes an epic poem dedicated to Elizabeth I; writes a prose tract on Ireland outlining his views of the Irish and of England's best aims in the country; is eventually burned out by the returning clan; and, finally, returns to England, where he soon dies. These narrative building blocks -- the 'facts', we might call them for now -- remain fairly solid over the centuries. Certain 'facts' might gain in importance while others transform, but, broadly, the external, physical 'facts' of the 'story' of Spenser's life remain stable: the cultural memory of Spenser continues to form around a core of events.

What has gone unexplored are the ways in which variations are constructed given the same building blocks, and what does not remain stable is the emotional ambiance with which cultural memory imbues such narratives. Cognitive science has paid increasing attention to the effect of emotion on memory, and the ways in which a highly emotional moment might construct a trace in the brain that is then stored in long-term memory and can prove remarkably durable. Even 'facts' of a narrative can direct our emotions towards a specific end: the above list of Spenser 'facts' might, depending on such small factors as even one adverb, incline us to particular interpretations. If we add to the narrative 'facts' the one famously penned by Johnson, the narrative changes considerably: Spenser, he tells us, loses a child in the fire that sends him back to London, where he dies 'for lack of bread'. One person might conclude that the narrative arc of Spenser's life was one of pathos and feel sympathy for him (because of the loss of a child); another might feel that the narrative represents a logical tragedy and that Spenser got what he deserved (because in occupying a property that others considered theirs he brought about his own downfall). Can we, based on adverbs, the ordering of sentences, the addition of one 'fact', predict such different interpretations? And is there one of these narrative interpretations that has privileges over the other -- is there, in other words, what has been called a 'cognitive bias' towards one or the other that makes it more memorable in a way that is physiological, tangible, measurable? Does a narrative's intimacy with parable influence its remembrance? Is familiarity with a narrative structure important? How does cultural background make a difference? What do we retain: the 'facts' only, or an emotional response as well? Do 'facts' or 'emotion' mark our memory one more than the other? Do the versions of 'Spenser' that are remembered bear resemblance to universal story motifs, and what effect does this have upon their memorablity? If there are enabling conditions for narrative transmission, what might discourage transmission? These are the types of questions raised for me by the 'Spenser narrative', and these questions cannot be answered solely by recourse to literary and cultural theory. In order to shape answers to such questions, it is vital to open the boundaries of literary studies to the work of cognitive scientists. Cognitive science, I believe, can help us to disentangle the many strands that contribute to cultural memory.

In an Irish context, memory has long been a significant theme of study. As a word, 'memory' is heard frequently in the discourse of Irish Studies, necessary for discussions of the oldest literary traditions and to analyses of contemporary events in Northern Ireland fuelled by past grievances. Courses introducing students to Irish literature emphasise the 'presence of the past' in Irish culture; historical and anthropological studies assess 'tradition' and 'the hold of the past' on the Irish present. Such work does not always make explicit that in order for the past to be present, in order for tradition to continue and to transform, memory has to be at work. The memories of many minds somehow -- somehow -- shape the present, add up to form what we might tentatively call an Irish cultural memory. When I use this phrase I am using it in quotation marks, as it were: 'Irish cultural memory' is not something solid and graspable, but an idea that is itself phantasmagoric, illusive, in part because it seems so simple. To speak of 'Irish cultural memory', however, is also to walk dangerously near to a cliff edge overlooking the crashing waves that are ideas of cultural hegemony and cultural nationalism. The phrase can suggest that, beyond a national cultural memory, there is also such a thing as a national character, national norm, and so on, in the manner of 18^th and 19^th century tracts like those by Burke and Kant: we experience tremors at such ideas now, worried by the prospect of identifying a culture so specifically as to inter an exclusive and possibly racist ideology within the nation that will be used to delimit against some other. However risky such cliff-edge projects are, they can, as Terry Eagleton has pointed out, be useful all the same, if one walks carefully enough, does not go too near the drop: truth can be uncovered in stereotypes, and use found for studies whose parameters are set by the idea of the nation. While this project is not concerned with either stereotypes or nationalism as such, its focus does skim against both ideas at times, as well as related ones. Thus I wish to lay out, at this early stage, some working definition of 'Irish cultural memory'.

Irish cultural memory, if we allow ourselves to imagine such a thing, seems to have an unwieldy shape that bursts beyond the borders of the mind: it is extensive, unforgiving -- begrudging, even, as the stereotype goes -- and also precocious, sustaining; yet it can be as blank as the raw slate of the cliffs on certain subjects. Irish cultural memory retains names of physical sites long since disappeared, genealogical histories of particular parishes, reverence for land even in the face of overwhelming modernisation and urbanity. Too it can retain mighty hatreds for individuals or for groups, and it can fortify itself with the illusion of forgetting major traumas such as battle failures, famines, religious violence, bombings. We hear these things: the stereotypes of what Irish memory contains or dispossesses, the words spoken or written in an attempt to describe a cultural condition of being that otherwise eludes us. I would suggest that these words are not enough, that we need a good deal more language, much more serious analysis, in order to approach an understanding of how memory functions in Irish culture. After all, each example I have named above can be used to describe another culture's memory, another culture's experience: memory of place, family, or invasion is hardly specific to Ireland. And yet, I would argue, it is valid to attempt, anyway, a discussion of Irish cultural memory. It would seem, in part, to be the specific combination of memory events -- as well as forgetting events -- that come together to form a particular cultural memory. Individual life memories might be punctuated on the surface by similar episodes and events -- births, unions, deaths, wars, elections, travels, etc. -- but nonetheless our memories remain distinct at the level of the individual; the same would seem to apply to cultural memory. Irish cultural memory might have many, or all, theoretically, of the same elements of English cultural memory, or Japanese, or New Guinean; it is in part through the combination, order and weighting of these elements that a specific cultural memory is shaped. Cognitive science has also repeatedly shown us that processes of cognition differ from culture to culture: some cultures display a visual acuity that others do not; some cultures display a remarkable capacity for oral narrative; and so on. Our culture, in fact, goes far in explaining the ways in which our cognitive processes work.

While these are relatively simple things to say, it is a certain impossibility that we might, like school children, plot various possible permutations and combinations and discover how exactly a cultural memory takes shape, or how a cognitive process is shaped by a given culture. A darkness hangs about the process by which we communally combine our memories, by which memory works, in a cultural context. In focussing on the 'work' and 'function' of memory in Irish culture, I am following developments in cognitive science that seek to assess the ways in which memory is used in our everyday lives. After a period of separation, the science and psychology of mind, in other words, have rejoined, thanks to a cognitive science that can unite the neurochemist and the psychologist, the engineer and the social worker, and which leaves plenty of scope for the literary critic.

If I have seemed to propose more questions than answers, I believe strongly that this is an indication not merely of my own ignorance -- although that is always a factor -- but also an indication of the gaps and silences in knowledge of cultural memorial practices more generally. Such questions are, I propose, a first stage, a necessary platform from which to begin research, and need, I believe, to be asked by those of us whose work touches on memory, working in different disciplines and across so many time periods. Memory -- and cultural memory -- operates beneath the surface of all we do, leaving ghostly traces like those I have attempted to outline here with regard to Edmund Spenser and Irish cultural memory.