DescriptionThis dissertation explores the prehistory of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Without a word like "aesthetics" to unite a range of discourses beginning to theorize the role of art in early modern culture, I argue that Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, and Bacon turn instead to the concept of the image, which served as the basis for early modern understandings of representation and the representational arts. To understand why early moderns thought of poetry as speaking painting and painting as silent poetry, I focus on the underlying discourse which made such analogies possible: the art of memory, which helped create a distinction between vision and visualization. Histories of the book, reading, and theater have tended to overemphasize the role of seeing in early modern culture, neglecting the complex and historically specific ways that poets, playwrights, and their audiences sought to address the phenomenological experience of seeing-as-what early poets called the inner "sight of the soul." By demonstrating how visualization or seeing-as shaped notions of form in poetry, allegory, theater, and science, I show how theories of visual cognition in the arts of memory form an important but neglected historical framework for aesthetic discourse before the eighteenth century.