The Canon of Memory in the Middle Ages Bibliography

     [Note: This bibliography was complied in 2002 ad has not been updated.] In “Memory Issues in Composition Studies,” John Frederick Reynolds argues for a reclaiming of the rhetorical canon of memory from the dustbin of history, a process that began with Peter Ramus and ended with current-traditional rhetoric. Memory's dismissal had been so effective that even Edward Corbett, in his Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, wrote it off as pure memorization and, therefore, unnecessary in the post-printing era (4-5). The contemporary study of rhetorical memory largely began with Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory, which gave one of the first and still most detailed accounts of the classical system of artificial memory as described in the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Yates demonstrated, he notes, that “Memory was the loci of the topoi for Aristotle (31), and the connection to the divinity of the soul for Plato (36, 37). Memory was the custodian of all the parts of rhetoric to the author of the Ad Herennium (5), proof of the soul’s divinity to Cicero (45), the source of oratory’s power to Quintilian (43), the ‘groundwork of the whole’ to Plato (37), and the key to invention to Aristotle (34)” (5-6). The middle ages, Reynolds notes, not only carried on but also expanded the classical tradition of memory.

     For the purposes of contemporary composition, Reynolds suggests we explore four aspects of rhetorical memory: memory as mnemonics, memory as memorableness, memory as databases, and memory as psychology (7-13). For the purposes of rhetorical theory, however, I, as well as others, suggest we expand our notion of memory even farther so that it includes memory as history and memory as culture. This bibliography, in an attempt to explore rhetorical memory in its myriad forms, is divided into four sections: 1) memory theory, which covers both primary and secondary studies of the theory of memory during the middle ages; 2) practices and uses of memory, which examines how memory and memory theory was used and practiced during the middle ages (unlike the first section, this includes both medieval and modern memory theory); 3) memory, orality, and literacy, which explores memory within the context of orality and literacy studies; and 4) ars memoria et ars poetica, which covers works that specifically discuss the intersection between (literate) poetic practice and artificial memory.

Memory Theory

Augustine. Confessions. Tr. R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961.

In Books X and XI of his Confessions, Augustine, who taught rhetoric professionally before his conversion, discusses memory. According to Augustine, memory is what we learn (it is not only what we experience, but what we hear from others), it is an active process (recall), it allows us to remember the past truly through words that are imprinted into our minds via images gathered through sensory experience, and it always exists in the present (memory works in the present as it accesses images of the past).

 

Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

The Book of Memory is, in many ways, the continued study of memoria that Francis Yates called for in her The Art of Memory. The Book of Memory is the study of medieval memory training and its relation to literacy. In it, Carruthers posits that medieval culture was itself a “memorial” culture, one that makes “present the voices of what is past, not to entomb either the past or the present, but to give them life in a place common to both in memory” (260). Carruthers argues that memory was the chief faculty of the mind, the primary canon of rhetoric, the most important branch of education, and the foundation of all composing. Moreover, she argues that memory was believed to be central to ethical living. The book considers medieval memory from a variety of perspectives: models for thinking about memory (wax tablets and storehouses); psychological and medical theories of memory, mnemonic systems used to train memory, memory arts in the tradition of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, memory and its role in composing and reading, memory and its role in education, and books as memorial objects. Carruthers also includes translations of three little known memory treatises Hugh of St. Victor’s “De Tribus Maximis Circumstantiis Gestorum,” Albertus Magnus’s De bono, Tractatus IV, Quaestio 11 “De Partibus Prudentia,” and Thomas Bradwardine’s “De Memoria Artificiali,” the third of which has already been translated by Beryl Rowland.

 

Coleman, Janet. Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Janet Coleman’s work on ancient and medieval memory, which she describes as a series of interrelated studies of “the range of views on memory and its uses during the middle ages” (3), is a study of memory as psychology and epistemology. This work, in which she argues that theories of remembering in the middle ages is in part theories of signs, of language, and the relationship of language to thinking, shows that many of the questions and answers we are struggling with today, are really just reformulations of medieval discussions. “Most of us,” she states, “remain unaware that modern science, some modern history and modern philosophy have inherited from the Renaissance a trivialization of over 1,000 years of previous history” (xvii).

Coleman’s study begins with Plato and culminates with John Duns Scotas and William of Ockham. Throughout much of the Middle Ages, the past was believed to be knowable, even “intelligible in light of the present” and the debate between Ockham and Scotas was not over whether the past was knowable, but whether it was “present and universal” or “past and particular” (464). This comprehensive study is divided into five sections: “The Critical Texts of Antiquity,” “The Practice of Memory During the Period of Transition from Classical Antiquity to the Christian Monastic Centuries,” “The Beginnings of the Scholastic Understanding of Memory,” “Aristotle Neo-Platonized: The Revival of Aristotle and the Development of the Scholastic Understanding of Memory,” and “Later Medieval Theories of Memory: The via antiqua and the via moderna.”

Rowland, Beryl. “The Artificial Memory, Chaucer, and Modern Scholars.” Poetica 37 (1993): 1-14.

Written as a response to Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory, Rowland briefly explains the term artificial memory as an architectural type of mnemonic system which makes use of images and places. Rowland notes that Francis Yates’s study was one of the earliest and the first in English, and is still the best starting point for anyone interested in the art of memory in the classical and medieval period. After Yates, Rowland says, one should then take up Mary Carruthers’s more recent study. While Rowland believes Carruthers’s work is both important and detailed, he is troubled by the modern scholarship, including his own which he goes into in some detail, which she has left out. Rowland then concludes that there is much left to learn about the art of memory and many treatises left untranscribed.

 

Wallis, Faith. “The Ambiguities of Medieval ‘Memoria’.” Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennes d’histoire 20 (1995): 77-83.

 

This essay examines and comments upon four works of scholarship: Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past by Janet Coleman, The Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers, Dreaming in the Middle Ages by Steven F. Kruger, and History and Memory by Jaques Le Geoff, which, respectively, explore memory as psychology and epistemology, memory training as a branch of pedagogy, memory imagery and its similarity to dream imagery, and memory in the service of history. In comparing these four works, Wallis demonstrates that medieval memoria is a complex concept that is made up of “a complex constellation of overlapping connotations, where fiction bleeds into fact, the personal into the public, the psychological into the pedagogical, and the past into the present” (83).

 

Yates, F.A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1966.

The first five chapters of Yates’s The Art of Memory, which was the first modern English work to tackle the subject, explains the classical and medieval practice of an architectural type of mnemonic system that makes use of places and images, of which the Rhetorica ad Herennium has the best know discussion. Yates’s study was so influential that when scholars refer to “artificial memory” or “the art of memory,” they are more often than not referring specifically to this system Yates describes, though recent work, particularly that of Mary Carruthers, is demonstrating that this system was but one subset of “locational” mnemonic systems. Despite this, for what it is, Yates’s work is still considered the best study of its kind and is highly recommended as a starting point for any study of artificial memory. For a further description of this work, see the introduction above.

Practices and Uses of Memory

Berlin, Gail Ivy. “Memorization in Anglo-Saxon England: Some Case Studies.” Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages. Ed. W.F.H. Nicolaisen. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 112. Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995. 97-113.

Berlin begins her study of memorization in Anglo-Saxon England by noting that after Christianization there would be at least two possible memory systems: that of the native oral tradition and that of literate monastic practice. Making use of written accounts, Berlin provides some case studies of both “lettered” and “unlettered” accounts of memorization. From the available evidence, Berlin makes the following observations: precision in memorization depended upon the purpose, that memorization often engaged both the eye and the ear, that some form of vocalization was used in memorizing, and that all accounts of memorization in Anglo-Saxon England included a written text as a first step towards memorizing.

 

 

Burke, Peter. “History as Social Memory.” Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind. Ed. T. Butler. Wolfson College Lectures 1988. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. 97-113.

This essay discusses how social memory functions in relation to history. Specifically, it looks at how social memory is transmitted, how social memory is used, and how social amnesia is used. Social memory is transmitted via: oral transmission; memoirs and other written records, which “are not innocent acts of memory, but rather attempts to persuade, to shape the memories of others” (101); images such as pictures, tombstones, statues, and medals; actions, in particular ritual actions which “are reenactments of the past, acts of memory, but they are also attempts to impose interpretations of the past, to shape memory” (101); and space (the Catholic church, for instance, would restructure the lay out of villages after they converted indigenous peoples). Social memory itself, Burke argues, is often consciously used by those who don’t have solid cultural roots. While the victors may write history, he suggests, they’re also the ones likely to forget it. He points to the Irish people’s continued grievances against events that took place during the Elizabethan period as one such example. Lastly, Burke notes that cultures forget, even destroy, documents that “become awkward and embarrassing” (110).

 

Coleman, Janet. “Late Scholastic memoria et reminiscentia; Its Uses and Abuses.” Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century Europe. Ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag 1986. 22-44.

Late scholastic thought as represented by John Duns Scotas, according to Coleman, believed that everything a mind could think of was part of memory, of memoria. To Scotas, memory was understanding, not recollection, reminiscentia, and, to him, perfect memory was not the recollection of individual experience but the understanding of what you know. In this essay, Coleman discusses the ramifications of memoria as understanding and uses Jean Froissart’s chronicle of the Hundred Years War as a case study. “Froissart,” she explains, “wants to retell rather than verify” (44). According to scholastic thought, Froissart, who relies heavily upon oral testimony as well as written documents, “is, like any knower, an omnipresent witness to the declarative knowledge which corresponds to perfect memory where what is hidden in our memories is actualized and revealed” (44).

 

Fentress, James, and Chris Wickham. Social Memory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

One of the best studies of social memory available, this work is written by two medievalists who, while not limiting themselves to medieval memory, do draw heavily upon medieval sources and scholarship throughout their work. Social memory, which Fentress and Wickham have renamed from Maurice Halbwach’s collective memory, is to differentiate it from both history and individual memory, is interested in commemoration and formal reenactment. Like individual memory, and unlike history, social memory is has no pretensions to objectivity or truth. It is what is “believed, at least at some level — for one should not neglect folk-tales, which are commemorations of the past as well, although they are often not even told as strictly believable” (xi). Chapter one is an excellent introduction to social memory and its relationship to history, myth, literature, and rhetoric, and chapter four deals specifically with social memory in the middle ages.

 

Geary, Patrick. J. Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.

In this study of the history of memory, Geary examines the three regions of the former Carolingian Empire during the Eleventh Century to examine how memory of the past was recollected, transformed, and used. Geary argues that scholars have put too much emphasis on the dichotomy between individual and social memory and on the differences between oral and written history because one individual could shape social memory just as much as social memory could shape the memory of one individual and that during this period many written documents came to be because of oral tradition. After presenting a series of case studies, Geary makes the following observations: our knowledge of the early Middle Ages was determined by people of the Eleventh Century found useful, what they wanted their contemporaries to know and not know; that these processes took place at local levels for specific purposes but had broad and long-lasting effects; that the “raw materials” of the past were either transformed to conform with the present or were lost when this was not possible; and that the shift to written records makes this period particularly important.

 

Mostert, Marco, ed. New Approaches to Medieval Communication. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 1. Turnhout: Brepolis: 1999.

Part I of this work provides a good survey of the state of Medieval communication scholarship. Part II contains five essays, my favorite of which, and the one which is most related to memory, is “’Send More Socks’: On Mentality and the Preservation Context of Medieval Letters” which tries to suggest what might have been lost based upon what has been found, such as wooden tablet birthday invitation found in British Roman ruins; a rune stick asking a husband to come home, found in the ruins of a Norwegian tavern; love letters written on wax tablets; and a birch bark “haven’t heard from you lately, please write and let me know how you’re doing” letter in Novgorad. Part III, which is the real important section of this work, is a 104-page bibliography on Medieval communication (divided into 16 sections and 75 subsections!), which includes “non-verbal communication,” “ritual,” and eight pages on “oral and written memory.” A most useful book indeed.

 

Rowland, Beryl. The Art of Memory and the Bestiary.” Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and its Legacy. Ed. Willene B. Clark and M.T. McMunn. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989. 12-25.

Bestiaries, Rowland argues, like stained-glass windows and medieval sermons, worked to provide moral and scriptural instruction through creating memorable images, thereby imprinting their lessons into the minds of even those without trained memories. To this end, bestiaries used both illustrations and text and often co-opted secular tradition to further their instructional aims. Among Rowland’s many examples of how bestiaries blending secular and religious/moral traditions is that of the beaver. Beavers, whose testicles were believed to be medicinal had the Latin name castor, derived from castrando so tradition tells us, because when it is chased by hunters, it will castrate itself and throw its testicles at its pursuers. The Christian message that regularly accompanies this entry tells us that we should live chastely and cast off our sins and throw them to the Devil.

 

Scherb, Victor I. “Setting and Cultural Memory in Part II of Beowulf.” English Studies. 79.2 (1998): 109-119.

Victor Scherb argues that the audience of Beowulf, as is common with all audiences of traditional oral poetry, was familiar with “Beowulf’s narratives” and, therefore, what they were interested in was not the plot but the way in which the poet could revive a “large number of dormant memorial strands” to quote Scherb quoting Wald Godzich (110). The Beowulf poet chief technique for doing this, Scherb argues, was in his use of setting and symbol to “evoke a large number of memoria” in such a way as to “comment upon the dynamics of cultural memory within Germanic society” (110). After discussing what has been previously said by others, Scherb examines the poem’s less studied second half, in particular, the poet’s juxtaposition of the dragon’s barrow and Beowulf’s mound, focusing on two symbolic functions. First, Scherb notes that while the dragon’s burrow symbolizes the conventionalized ruin, Beowulf’s burial mound serves as a beacon, as a marker. He notes that Anglo-Saxon roads made use of crosses and pre-existing burial mounds as signposts and comments: “Just as Anglo-Saxon road markers and crosses were employed to recall ‘wanders’ to the right path, so Beowulf’s monument serves as a similar orienting and memorial function” (115). Scherb then describes the dragon’s barrow as the antithesis of heroic Anglo-Saxon culture. The barrow is full of treasure and armor that lies unused. Absent from the barrow is heroism and human culture. Beowulf’s monument, on the other hand, Scherb argues, stands as a symbol of Beowulf’s heroism and his glory. Beowulf’s mound “will continue to evoke associations of uprightness, heroism, and enduring glory; conversely, the dragon’s mound will carry with it associations of physical destruction, hoarding, and absence” (119). The poet’s use of settings, Scherb concludes, is, in part mnemonic device, but also serves “to create an ‘idea-complex’ which addresses the issues of memory in an oral culture” (119).

Memory, Orality, and Literacy

Chaytor, H.J. “The Medieval Reader and Textual Criticism.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 26 (1941-1942): 49-56.

Chaytor argues that medieval scribes relied upon “auditory memory” rather than “visual memory” and suggests that “the difference between auditory and visual memory can be made a basis for emendation” (56).

 

 

Clanchy, M.T. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.

Clanchy argues that post-conquest England saw a rise in lay literacy that was driven by the bureaucracy instituted by the Normans and that bureaucracy’s desire for record keeping. By comparing pre- and post-conquest lay documents such as wills and charters, Clanchy traces a shift in reliance upon written documents. He notes that during the Anglo-Saxon period privileged memory and oral tradition to settle issues such as the ownership of property, wills, and transactions, even when written documents were created. The wording in these documents, he argues, suggests that they were regarded as a reminder, much like tying a string around a finger, rather than actual proof. Proof resided in the memory of witnesses. By 1307, however, the shift to written records as the primary form of legal proof had become so ingrained in English society that even serfs made use of written charters to transfer property.

 

---. “Remembering the Past and the Good Old Law.” History 55 (1970): 166-172.

In this study of how preliterate and literate societies remember the past, Clanchy focuses upon pre-literate and literate England’s relationship to the “good old law” —how precedent and tradition manifest themselves in practice. While preliterate societies, Clanchy argues are “primarily concerned with the needs of the present rather than the truth of the past” (172), literate societies are beholden to traditions they no longer understand. As England shifted from oral to written law, he notes, law “became more inflexible, more bizarre, and perhaps less equitable, than the old” (176). Extrapolating from this, Clanchy argues that in preliterate societies, knowledge of the past exists within people and, while unobjective, is “meaningful and valid to more people” and that in literate societies, while knowledge of the past is more objective, it exists outside of people and is “only immediately significant to historians” (176).

 

Fry, Donald K. “Old English Formulas and Systems.” English Studies 48 (1967): 195-204.

This essay is a response to H.L. Rogers’s response to Francis P. Magoun’s “The Oral-Formulaic Character of the Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry,” which was one of the earliest attempts at applying oral-formulaic theory to Old English verse. In it, Fry argues that oral formula need not be exact words repeated but a repetition of systems. Fry defines Old English formula systems as “a group of half-lines, usually loosely related metrically and semantically, which are related in form by the identical relative placement of two elements, on a variable word or element of compound usually supplying the alliteration, and the other a constant word or element of a compound, with approximately the same distribution of non-stressed elements” (203). For example, Fry argues that the half-lines heals-beaga mæst (Beowulf 1195b) and heall-ærna mæst (Beowulf 78a), both unique in the Old English corpus, are products of the same formula system of (noun) (noun) mæst. In other words, Fry argues that at least in Old English, oral formula operated on the level of half-line systems rather than as specific discrete word groupings.

 

Innes, Matthew. “Memory, Orality and Literacy in an Early Medieval Society.” Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 158 (1998): 3-36.

Using the example of Notker, a monk of St-Gallen and the abbey’s schoolmaster, and his literary works as a case study, Innes the interplay between myth, social memory, and history (6-7). Innes argues against what he calls the “strong” thesis of literacy which sees literacy as a technology that carries with it “inevitable implications” and argues for a “weak” thesis of literacy that sees literacy as a social practice that, interacting with other factors, brings with it a “gradual, often imperceptible, pace of change” (3). In studying Notker’s Gesta Karoli, his Deeds of Charlemange, Innes finds a complex matrix of orality and literacy at play. Not only does Notker uses both oral and written sources, his writing contains both oral and literate styles: “Oral traditions were colored by written models and were subject to literary interferences. This was a two-way process. Not only were oral traditions arranged according to literary models, but texts could also be understood with reference to oral tradition” (17). Innes concludes that is “correct to discuss literacy in its specific historical contexts” within the terms of the “weak” thesis, but that this does not contradict the “strong” thesis of literacy “so long as the latter is correctly stated as a set of possibilities and potentialities rather than the automatic consequences of writing or an inevitable pattern of teleological development” (34).

 

McGillivray, Murray. Memorization in the Transmission of the Middle English Romances. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1275 = The Albert Bates Lord Studies in Oral Tradition 5. New York: Garland, 1990.

To test the theory that manuscript variation in Middle English romances may be the result of memorial transfer — that the variation between manuscripts is the result of oral transmission, McGillivray studies four romances: Floris and Blauncheflur, King Horn, The Seege of Troye, and Sir Orfeo, each selected because they are short, they all exist in numerous manuscripts, and they have early dates. McGillivray notes first off that while oral transmission has been traditionally cited as a likely reason for the majority of manuscript variation, if new theories of scribal behavior that “focus on he psychological and creative aspects of copying” are correct, then this theory may no longer be plausible (4). Based upon the internal and external evidence of the four romances, McGillivray argues that the variation between texts is probably a combination of both variation in oral transmission and in scribal copying, made all the more murky by the possibility of minstrel-scribes possibly copying down their own texts as well as minstrels dictating to scribes and scribes copying from manuscripts. McGillivray concludes that what the evidence does suggest is that it no longer makes sense to discuss the reconstruction of a perfect text from extant versions, seeing how such a archetypal text may have never existed in the first place.

 

O’Brien O’Keefee, Katherine. Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 4. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

In this study of oral and visual mnemonic devises in Old English poetry, O’Brien O’Keefee compares manuscript layout and design and the role of both scribe and reader Old English and Latin verse in manuscripts written in Anglo-Saxon England, a period of “transitional literacy.” O’Brien O’Keefee notes that while for a long time Anglo-Saxon scribes of Latin verse make use of “lineation, capitalization, and punctuation” they did not do so when copying Old English verse (190). This suggests, she argues, “that a reader brought different kinds of knowledge to the reading of verse in the two languages” (190). Readers of Old English verse must have read “by applying oral techniques fro the reception of a message to the decoding of a written text” (191).

Ars Memoria et Ars Poetica

Buckmaster, Elizabeth. “Chaucer and John of Garland: Memory and Style in the First Fragment.” Medieval Perspectives 1.1 (1986): 31-40.

In this essay, Buckmaster discusses John of Garland’s Parisiana Poetria de Arte Prosaica, metrica, et Rithmica in which he, building upon “Cicero’s work” — probably actually the Rhetorica ad Herennium which medieval scholars believed was authored by Cicero, suggests that artificial memories be organized by social class (courtiers, city dwellers, and peasants) and that each social category should be accompanied by class appropriate objects, animals, and words. Garland’s developed this system specifically for poets and, Buckmaster argues, Chaucer made use of it in The Canterbury Tales. She notes, for instance, that the first three tales — “The Knight’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” and “The Reeve’s Tale” — are all three tales about love triangles, each told in a style appropriate to social class of their teller. The miller, she notes, as a city dweller, while much more physical than the knight’s tale, is much more artfully handled than that of the reeve’s tale and focuses not so much upon the sex but on the deceptions and revenges within the tale.

 

---. “Meditation and Memory in Chaucer’s House of Fame.” Modern Language Studies 16.3 (1986): 279-287.

Building upon Beryl Rowland’s work on the poem as an “externalization of the artificial memory process” in which each book creates a memory palace which the narrator explores, Bruckman discusses the poem’s structure, it’s three books, as a representation of the practice of Prudence, one of the cardinal virtues. According to Cicero, Prudence was the “knowledge of past, present, and future” and, according to Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, an artificial memory was necessary to its cultivation. Each book of the House of Fame does this, Buckmaster argues, by presenting Chaucer’s knowledge of the sciences, arts, and philosophy in the past, present, and future. Finally, Buckmaster suggests that the poem is an inner journey, an act of meditation in the tradition of Ignatus Loyola who tied the art of memory to meditation, which is ‘the composition of place as an effect ‘to see with the eyes of the imagination the corporal place’.”

 

Carruthers, Mary. “The Poet as Master Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages.” New Literary History 24 (1992-1993): 881-904.

Carruthers argues that the “locational memory” system described in the Rhetorica ad Herennium and made famous by Francis Yates is “only one subset of many ‘mnemontechniques’” (881). In this essay, her interest lies in a version of the locational memory used in monastic circles during the Middle Ages to compose prayers and sacra pagina. Carruthers argues that this form of mnemonic system was a composing technique, a technique which she says was inventional rather than informative. Carruthers provides multiple examples of writers referring to this system, using what she calls the “master builder” trope, and concludes that this form on mnemonic building was a composing technique that could be used for a variety of projects, “whether a poem, a prayer, a painting, or a building” (900).

 

Howard, Donald R. “The Canterbury Tales: Memory and Form.” ELH. 28.3 (1971): 319-328.

Howard, drawing upon Yates’ work on artificial memory, argues that the Prologue is the heart of The Canterbury Tales and that Chaucer made conscious use of memory in composing it. Howard notes that the Prologue is itself presented as a remembrance. Each pilgrim is introduced in such a way as to create a visual picture accompanied by interesting tidbits about them that can only have been learned over a period of time. Chaucer does this, Howard argues, so that we will remember each pilgrim when we read his or her specific tale. Howard also notes that the pilgrims themselves are introduced in order of natural groupings based upon estate and companions (knight, squire, and yeoman or the five guildsmen and their cook), the way one might list them when reciting from memory. Finally, Howard argues that it is fitting that The Canterbury Tales is fragmentary as it is supposed to be told from memory, which are themselves selective.

 

Rowland, Beryl. “The Art of Memory and the Art of Poetry in the House of Fame.” Revue de l’Universite d’Ottawa 51.2 (1981): 162-171.

Focusing upon Chaucer’s comment in Book II of the House of Fame that memory not only holds his dream but is responsible for turning it into art, Rowland argues that the poem is about the art of poetry itself, that it considers the kinds of material a poet would use, and that it demonstrates the role of artificial memory in the composition of poetry. According to Rowland, this process works as such: the poet takes words from books, makes them images in his or her mind, and then turns those images into new words, a new poem. Here, as elsewhere, Rowland notes, Chaucer considers books just one more kind of artificial memory.

 

---. “Bishop Bradwardine, the Artificial Memory, and the House of Fame.” Chaucer at Albany. Ed. Rossel Hope Robbins. New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1975. 41-62.

Rowland explains artificial memory and argues that the House of Fame “may be seen as an externalization of this memory process” and believes that Bishop Brandwardine’s De Memoria Artificiali influenced Chaucer. Rowland makes this claim based upon some significant differences between Brandwardine’s discussion of loci and those proscribed in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, such as Brandwardine’s suggestions that one make use of cultivated fields, and contrasting buildings by using different materials (such as roofs of straw) and different heights. Having drawn our attention to these differences, Rowland discusses examples within the poem, such as the House of Rumor, which is made of rushes and twigs, lying in a valley below the House of Fame. Included with the essay is Rowland’s translation of De Memoria Artificiali, based upon the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, MS 169, the shorter of the two extant versions of the treatise.

 

Schibanoff, Susan. “Prudence and Artificial Memory in Chaucer’s Troilus.” ELH 42 (1975): 507-517.

Examining the poem’s interest in place, on its connections between place and action, Schibanoff notes that the poem often emphasizes places over the actions that occur in them. This is most readily apparent, she argues, in book V during Troilus’s tour of Troy after Criseyde has left him. His tour serves as a catalog of the places where the two had been and as they are visited, they recall the actions and the events that had taken place in them. This “rather unusual use of physical setting,” she argues is rooted in the system of artificial memory (512). Schibanoff notes, however, that Chaucer creates a discordance between what the locations mean to Troilus and what they mean to the reader. She argues that Chaucer does this by creating a perspective of “omniscience” for the reader, which Schibanoff equates with the cardinal virtue of Prudence. Prudence, she notes, was made up of memory, intelligence, and foresight. Throughout the poem, she suggests, the audience reads the poem through a prudent, omniscient, view. We know how Troilus’s relationship with Criseyde will end. Knowing this, Schibanoff argues, means that the loci and images encountered during Troilus’s tour serve not just as artificial memory, but because it is “coupled” with foresight, it functions as “the moral memory of Prudence” (513).