Robert Hooke, Monuments and Memory

Abstract

In June 1682, when Robert Hooke (1635–1703) delivered a lecture to the Royal Society on memory – his first and only excursion into human psychology – he had just witnessed a spectacularly public failure of memory when new texts were added to the Monument (1671–76), which he had designed with Christopher Wren. In a direct civic challenge to royal authority, these explained that the ‘Papists’ had set London's Great Fire of September 1666. This paper examines the tensions and accommodations between the City of London and Charles II that accompanied the Monument's erection; the column serves to dramatize the difficulties besetting would‐be memorializers in Restoration England. It is suggested that Hooke's memory lecture must be read, not only in the light of specific political anxieties then attached to memory, but against the other ways in which he grappled with forms of signification, here treated as forms of historical witness.

Movements, Memory, and Mixture: Aristotle, Confusion, and the Historicity of Memory

“…distinct; and therefore that not two of them can be in the same space, but that they are actually different and separate one from another. (Hooke 1682(Hooke /1705 Because these distinct stored 'bodies' have no intrinsic dynamics, Hooke argues that at all stages of the memory process they must be directed by a separate soul: 'no Idea can really be formed or stored up in this Repository without the Directive and Architectonical power of the Soul', which deploys its 'power' from 'the Center of the Repository ' (p.140, p.147;cf Sutton 1998, pp.129-144;Stevenson 2005;Lewis 2009).…”

Experiment, Theory, Representation: Robert Hooke’s Material Models

“…As historians of the built environment have shown, Royal Society Fellows like Hooke and Wren simply produced a huge body of visual work that was not pictorial. Central agents in the rebuilding of London after the fire of 1666, their collective endeavors like engineering the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral or designing telescopic observatories and mental hospitals are fascinating intersections of artistic and scientific endeavor; but they have little obvious relationship with the terms of pictorial representation (Cooper 2003, Stevenson 2005, Jardine 2003a. The second reason for reconsidering the interpretive appeal to painting is a matter of relative value.…”

Suburban Models, or Calvinism and Continuity in London’s Seventeenth-Century Church Architecture

“…This was particularly the case from 1671, when the Monument to the Great Fire was begun, Hooke acting for the City in a renegotiation of its relationship with the Crown. 124 The post-Restoration Church of England was keen, as before, to establish its independence from Rome through the adoption of early Christian precedent, that is through primitivism. 125 A primitivist cacophony gave rise to learned treatises, but this was not a new phenomenon.…”