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HANNAH CHAPELLE WOJCIEHOWSKI, VITTORIO GALLESE, Introduction

linear. That narrative is complicated, moreover, by a variety of ob-
stacles to our ready remembering of story elements. These impedi-
ments include digressions, flashbacks, prolepses, complicated word-
play, moralizing intrusions by the narrator, and other disruptions of
Spenser’s not very linear storyline. Even Spenser forgot or confused
the names of his characters at various points in his poem, Lochman
reminds us. How, then, did early modern readers grab onto complex
romances like The Faerie Queene, published in 1590 and expanded
in 1596, and manage to hold them in memory — a seemingly epic
challenge?
In his elegantly argued essay, Lochman shows how Spenser’s
poem contains its own intratextual memory system that continually
prompts or enacts the memories of readers by means of repeated
key words, settings, and experiential episodes that elicit “embodied
noetic, affective, and kinetic response.” Drawing on experimental
neuroscientific research, theories of distributed cognition, and cog-
nitive narratology, Lochman reveals Spenser’s techniques for creat-
ing intratextual memory that enabled readers to follow and the
story.
Lochman also offers a new theory of literary allusion in this
essay, which he identifies as intertextual memory. He writes, “What
is imported into a text can be more than just a word, a se ing, or char-
acter type; the memory brought from another source can also be noet-
ic, affective, and/or kinetic; and its ability to move from text to text
would seem related to the intensity and familiarity of the repeated el-
ement.” In his innovative reading of The Faerie Queene in relation to
source texts such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Tasso’s Gersualemme
liberata, Lochman provides an original take on the art of memory in
Spenser’s great poem.

Literary historian Ellen Spolsky, another early adopter of cognitive lit-
erary theory and the author of several pioneering studies in the field,
offers a new take on the pastoral genre in her essay “ Sent Away from
the Garden? The Pastoral Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley,” the final
essay in this issue. The pastoral genre, whether featured in poetry,
drama, or the visual arts, is associated with leisure, pleasure, and sen-
suality. It is, moreover, all about escape — an escape to the country-

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