This discussion focuses upon the ways in which early modern and modern cultural debate examines memory both in terms of its functions and nature as human faculty and of its effects as a cultural phenomenon. It seeks to uncover some of the striking synergies as well as the contrary motions in the vigorous cultural debates surrounding the reflex to remember and its implications for various target audiences. Of particular interest will be the ways in which memory was and is pressed into service to forge critical narratives of origin and belonging at both a personal and collective level, notably with reference to Shakespeare’s history plays. Discussion ranges across a number of early modern textual genres (e.g. correspondence, drama, epic poetry, historiography, devotional writing) to probe the prevailing cultural expectations surrounding the exercise of recollection and the consequences of the failure to perform such duties.