International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2007 Abstracts

Descriptions of one’s beloved in late medieval dream visions are notoriously bland and interchangeable.  Memory in these texts functions as a trope rather than as a exercise of  accurate recall.  (Either that, or all beloveds look identical.)  The trope of literary description from “memory” serves a variety of functions, but whatever its function it replaces historically specific detail with idealized spectacle or static image. The differences between attitudes toward description from memory between modern models, influenced by the heavy reliance on narrative in the novel and medieval dream visions, which blend the narrative with the lyrical, points to a shift in the role of literary memory.  Looking at Guillaume de Machaut’s jugement  poems, the focus of reminiscence is to draw together the male characters in the poem and create a bond of desire between the poet and his male readers.  In Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, the remembered lady is likewise an image for exchange for the Man in Black and Chaucer the dreamer, whose image must be simultaneously re-membered and then dis-membered for the bereaved lover to move back into narrative time.  In each poem memory is part of the guarantee of the female image as commodity.  Both the physical attributes of the lady and the lover’s memory of those elements are devices that point to the literariness, rather than literalness, of the description. The use of “memory” as a literary device, rather than as either a tool for mental retention of knowledge or reconstruction of accurate details, figures the female form as a part of cultural currency rather than as individualized portraits of women with historical specificity.  The dream vision, in particular, provides a fertile ground for examining this medieval intersection of memory, description, and desire.