International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2007 Abstracts

Many of Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian knights suffer bouts of amnesia.  Lancelot seeks Guinevere with such intensity that he forgets his own name and becomes, in fact, uncertain whether or not he truly exists.  Yvain forgets first his assignation with his lady and then, after she upbraids and rejects him, who he is and where he is from.  Perceval loses “his memory so totally that he no longer remembered God” (457), or his quest for that matter. These episodes of forgetfulness affect in turn these amnesiac knights’ ability to find the outward paths to fulfill their quests.  Lancelot’s amnesia springs from such pure focus on Guinevere that finding the road to her becomes a matter of effortless instinct. By contrast, when Yvain and Perceval forget their proper objects, they wander hopelessly in the forest until they happen upon the right reminders. Mary Carruthers has demonstrated that in the metaphors of classical and medieval memory theory, “the one who wanders through the pathless silva (meaning both ‘forest’ and ‘disordered material’) of an untrained memory is one who has either lost the footprints that should lead him through, or never laid them down in the first place” (247).  In light of Carruthers’s observation, Chrétien’s correlation between loss of memory and loss of one’s path suggests that his romances are on one level an allegory for the medieval art of memory. In order to understand why mnemotechnics should be so significant within Chrétien’s romance, I begin this essay by examining the moments when amnesia afflicts Chrétien’s knights.  I then show that Chrétien likens his knights’ journey through their outward landscape to the inner arts of memory.  Finally, I point out the differences between the objects of the romance quest and the typical objects for memorization within scholastic mnemotechnics, and distinguish the different ethical assumptions these objects imply.

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

Chrétien de Troyes. Arthurian Romances. Trans. William W. Kibler.  London: Penguin, 1991.