International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2007 Abstracts

In a well-known fragment of his Bestiaire d’Amour, Richard de Fournival conceived image and text as parallel “ways which lead to the two doors of memory, sight and hearing”. Fournival exemplified his assertion with a description of the effect produced in an audience by the equally vivid visual and recited narratives from an illuminated manuscript devoted to the Trojan War. These words have been insightfully commented by several authors—Huot, Carruthers, Buettner—, who insist upon the role that images exert not only as emotional triggers but also as mediators in visualizing and fixing a determinate idea of past, sometimes even in a dialectic interplay with texts.

However, my aim is to point at the process by which images, as intertextual rapports, quote other images inside a given iconographic tradition. Regarding Trojan imagery, this phenomenon can be framed through the comparative analysis of the earliest illuminated manuscripts of the Roman de Troie and the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (Trojan section of this historical compilation). The iconographic cycles which come with these texts—studied, respectively, by Elisabeth Morrison and Doris Oltrogge—display striking differences in their length and in the selection of episodes to be depicted. Nevertheless, there are common points—key episodes, rigid iconographic formulae, repeated symbols or metonymic allusions—which involve some kind of interdependence between them. Certain coincidences can be explained by textual correlations or by shared artistic practices in contemporary ateliers, but others are intended citations which reinforce the sense of tradition (providing visual marks for identifying the Matière de Troie) and shape a concrete perception of the story (the authorized account of the Trojan origins of French dynasty). Thus, it could be argued that the process of diegesis accomplished by the reader—or hearer—presupposed a varying degree of acquaintance with the whole tradition, both visual and textual, to the extent that s/he might be able to complete one visual narrative with elements remembered from other visual versions of the legend. Moreover, s/he might be able also to recognize canonical narratives as well as subversions of these received materials.

These divergent movements—canonization/subversion—invite us to think about the corpus a as a network of visual and textual references underlying the generation of artificial memory, that is, an adaptable repertoire that varies according to social class, gender, genre—romance or chronicle in the chosen examples—, political agenda or personal preferences. The result is a polyphony of memories created by the superposition of semantic layers.