International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2009 - Space/l'Espace
Abstract

Even if the exploration of traditional interrelations of stage and art in Middle Ages, which emerged at the beginning of XX century, has received a widespread scholarly attention, I argue that something has been neglected by Theatre historians: the role of the Art of memory as a “craft of thoughts” which influenced both the imagination and the visual representations in Middle Ages.

In fact, if the connection between visual art and mnemotechnics in medieval age and Reinaissance has been widely investigated, it seems peculiar that the same has not been done for theatre, even if well known, since the pionieristic researches of Frances Yates, how theatre has been important for artificial memory.

In the staging of Religious theatre, since the earliest dramatic ceremony for Holy Week, small scenic structures called mansions were used to illustrate the surroundings of a play. I’m conducting research about the system of mansions, that I believe strongly recalls (and depends upon) the method of loci, which, since the classical antiquity, has been practiced as the basis for memorizing things

Using a similar perspective, for example, it is possible to demonstrate – as I’ll try to do with the paper I’m proposing - that Hubert Cailleau’s  famous miniatures of the Valenciennes Passion Play are a document of a form of mnemotechnics.

I suggest that mnemology influences the production of the place (a system of places) for the representation, in order to create a system of imagines agentes and loci that reflects a special kind of knowledge associated with a highly developed sense of visualization and efficacity for the scene, and at one time, with the political nature of the ecclesia and its means of incorporating its members. The “commonality” of the mansion as loci, is created through a narrative mnemonic procedure. I am convinced that remembering is constructed in such representations by means of a communal walk-about (physical or virtual) among a set of ‘places’ made literally ‘common’.