International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2007 Abstracts

As a name that has endured without any identifiable historical persona behind it, Marie de France encapsulates at once a remembering and a forgetting.  Howard Bloch suggests that Marie’s “anonymity,” a dialectical knowing and not-knowing, obtains at the moment of her self-construction as a poet.  My paper argues that this dialectic in Marie’s work bases itself upon the interaction between memory and oblivion.  The mapping of memory and forgetfulness across the temporal distance between Marie and us also informs the structure of her Lais.  Studies of these poems have focused on their use of memorial objects – tombs, tokens, relics, mountains.  This paper demonstrates instead that memory functions as a process to structure narrative, an awareness of movement through space, rather than as a static object. 

In seeing memory in terms of space, I draw upon the work of Mary Carruthers and Suzanne Akbari, who describe medieval memory work in spatially sequential and kinetic terms.  These approaches have implications for the Lais, many of which turn on either preserving a memory or redressing an act of forgetting.  For instance, in Le Fresne, the cloth appears to function as a static mnemonic token.  It recalls the daughter to her mother: “li remembra de li.” But the reconstruction of memory and identity occurs through a serialized encounter with different images, as the daughter’s narrative moves through the features of her aventure.  Memory here is a perambulating trajectory, operating on the axes of time and space.  In this context, the lady’s journey in Yonec speaks to a fear of forgetting.  She follows “la trace del sanc,” both vestige and path, to ensure Muldumarec’s place in her memory. This tale elaborates further on recollection through the ring of forgetfulness.  Embedding this magic ring inside the anxious journey, Yonec suggests that the manipulation of memory is always shadowed by its uncontrollability.  In this way, Marie’s own remembered and forgotten status intersects with her tales.  In both cases, memory is a journey through artifice and self-construction, but is surrounded also by unmanageable oblivion.