If in England the art of memory does not receive the extensive theoretical treatment that it did on the continent, English literature is definitely the field where it flourishes in the period. But the art's greatest literary inroads do not always announce themselves as such. Authors rather unobtrusively – sometimes unwittingly – yet ingeniously weave its methodology into the very warp and weft of their textual creations. Literature formalises the art's preoccupation with visualisation, spatialisation and rumination, particularly with respect to cunningly constructed imagery and places. English poets carve figurative statuary in a workshop long established by the Ad Herennium and the Ars poetica, expanded by medieval iconography, and renovated by Renaissance visual art and emblematics. Honed in this atelier, Milton's craftsmanship (VI.10) labours to imprint the monstrous image of Sin on the sinner's natural memory. English authors also conceive of their texts spatially. For example, the title page of The Works of Ben Jonson (1616) depicts the façade of a monument or temple adorned with statues as though the reader were entering a grand edifice. Like many of the period's sermons (Donne (V.8) and Playfere (V.3)), literary texts led readers through a series of loci, for a place could be devoted to an idea, topic, or argument (commonplace and topos); a description of an actual location (topographia); a description of an imaginary location (topothesia); a description of a nation (chorographia), etc. These settings – landscapes, cities, architecture and rooms – were storehouses designed to collect and recollect their occupants – denizens, strangers and monsters. In the topographical narratives of Bunyan (VI.20) and Spenser (VI.2), the degree of compatibility between image and place requires mindful parsing by readers, for it reveals an episode's mnemonic, metaphysical and theological commitments.

Some of the selected entries also show how texts may explicitly refer to the art of memory. Excerpts from Nashe (VI.11), Webster (VI.13) and Jones (VI.17) are representative of the ways in which authors mock the artificial memory for its inefficacy and its abuses, reproducing humanist suspicions of Simonides's invention while acknowledging its intellectual legacy. Notwithstanding any bad press, the art's guiding principles can be easily seen operating in the period's prose and drama.