In his Arte of English Poesie (1589) George Puttenham left his reader in no doubt of the privileged status he wished to attribute to the resources of memory. From this perspective, the faculty enabled the human mind to engage with personal and collective histories of origination and belonging, to assimilate the fruits of others’ epistemological enquiries and to legitimise (through recourse to precedent) given paths of cultural interaction. In developing such arguments, Puttenham was following in the steps of generations of humanist scholars. Indeed, earlier in the century, during the reign of Henry VIII, Juan Luis Vives had stressed in De Tradendis Disciplinis (Antwerp, 1531) that the erudition of the ideal teacher should be ‘ample, accurate, diligent, [and] careful’ and that ‘His memory for words and things must be good and rich, and he must keep it sound by carefulness and constant devotion to learning’.

This chapter focuses upon some of the ways in which the promptings of memory, as articulated in Surrey’s poetry, may be perceived as belonging to a much larger matrix of cultural concerns with legacies of the past and the paradigms they might establish for present courses of action during what Greg Walker has persuasively described as ‘the gathering crisis of Henry’s latter years’. Assuming a host of different guises, the acts of memory evoked by Surrey can offer a complex lens through which both poetic voice and reader are invited to reflect upon the ideological pressures at work in Henrician England. Surrey refrains from soothing or reassuring his readers with beguiling appeals for nostalgia: he is most often found to deploy highly selective acts of memory as a tactical resource for cultural critique. Indeed, his poetry expresses an inexhaustible fascination with controlling our access to the past, with the production of the past, and nowhere is this more apparent than in his poetic anatomies of political and erotic desire.