The Introduction makes a case for reuniting memory studies and affect studies: like twins separated at birth, these two vibrant fields of in the study of Renaissance literature and culture have existed alongside each other, in spite of their conceptual entanglement, since antiquity. An overview of recent developments in contemporary theorizations of memory and affect is followed by an investigation of how they might be connected in the historical frameworks of early modern faculty psychology, Galenic humoralism, and, to use a modern term, distributed cognition.

In the widespread affective turn, with all its diverse claims for distributed cognition, embodiment, emergence, emotion, feeling, connectedness and shared animality or companionship with non-humans, there would seem to be one point of consensus: we are not Cartesian. We are not minds contingently or unfortunately housed in bodies; we are not brains in a vat, or ghosts in a body that is nothing more than a machine. If there is any ‘we’ or unity today it is perhaps defined by one point of consensus; there is no such thing as mind that is not an emergent property of a broader milieu of affect. In this chapter I want to make three claims. This broad consensus derives from Heidegger’s criticism of Descartes, and his argument that logic and subjectivity are effects of a comportment to the world. Second, what has not been so well discussed is that Heidegger’s criticism of Descartes nevertheless argues that there is a certain Cartesian comportment, or mood. Finally, it is the sense of loss of this Cartesian comportment – the fragility of Cartesian feeling – that typifies many twenty-first-century expressions of preliminary post-human mourning.