Book review: Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory, by Logan E Whelan.

Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory, by Logan E Whelan.

Catholic University of America Press, 2008.

We usually come to the memory arts through Frances Yates’s pioneering book The Art of Memory, 1966. (Bodley Head, ISBN 1847922929.)

What she presents us with there are the fully developed Renaissance systems, great visual wonders of concept. Was the Renaissance theatre of memory a working model, or the ultimate aim?

It is the tracing back of these arts that is most fascinating. 
We come to Cicero’s writings on rhetoric as one main source. The Ad Herenniumanother important source, has not yet been decisively tied to Cicero as author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorica_ad_Herennium

The Hispanic author Quintilian, first century AD, has also ben included in sources for development of the rhetorical arts that include memory techniques. He was a devotee of Cicero’s work, and yet his legal writings focus on the use of figurative language, as memory figures.
And here we see two possibly distinct paths: Cicero’s use of visual elements: the classic positioning of objects in space to deliberately trigger recognition and selected memorized content, and the use of figurative images in language. It is tempting to say that one is designed for the speaker to navigate his/her argument, and the other for the hearer to remember an oration.
The Latin writers call back to Aristotle’s Poetics, also.

That is all very well, for Renaissance scholars. But when we come to eleventh and twelfth centuries in Europe (yes, I include Britain here) then these classical sources were not yet available.
What then?

I, like many, have presumed that there was a well-defined path of transmission of these rhetorical arts from the Latin writers onwards, to the Renaissance.

Logan E Whelan throws all my confident presumptions to the wind. And what falls with certainty, is… well, let’s see.

Logan E Whalen makes very convincing arguments that writers of these periods did use memory arts. It was a time of a flowering of the arts, illustrative as well as textual.

Chretien de Troyes works, as we have them, show many instances of memory techniques. As do the works of his near contemporary Marie de France. 

Throughout her Prologues and Epilogues to The Lais, Marie de France constantly calls on the need for memory and remembering. This is even more explicit in her more popular, that is, more plenteously recopied, Fables.

And so, what are their sources for memory arts, and what systems do they employ?

Logan E Whelan draws our attention to the wide a well-developed use of pictorial language of the period. Look at, he says at one point, the Bayeaux tapestry.
The skills and level of skill development tell of a long practice; and those skills and arts would continue in use for a great many generations to come. We find, then, also a well-developed knowledge of picture-reading. 
Similarly, with the recently burgeoning use of illustrative missals and psalm books. Earlier than these were monastic carvings and stained-glass windows. For the unlettered these were pictorial sermons writ large.

So much remains unknown about the person of Marie de France. Was she an abbess, as many suggest? And if so, at what part of her life? That is, before, during, or after producing her writing.
Nevertheless, this wide use of visual imagery to be read by congregations was a well-established practice. 

‘Throughout the Lais,’ writes Logan E Whelan, ‘Marie de France makes frequent use of vocabulary that supports a narrative program designed to call attention to certain textual elements.’ He gives an example of De Deus Enfanz where the introductory remarks constantly refer to the lai’s setting in Normandy.
‘It is clear…’ he continues after further investigation, ‘that Marie wanted her immediate audience to remember her story…’ He cites here the use of repetition. This is especially apparent in the lai, Lanval .
She also employs, he states, use of verbal, nonverbal, and quasi-verbal objects.  
‘These objects are more often than not the key to retention of the themes of the lai that contains them…. In other words, to memorise and remember the object and its attributes is to memorise and recall the lai as a whole.’ (page 77) 

I wrote an examination of two of the Lais of Marie de France in my Gifts of Gold and Ringsebook. 
Equitain, I found, is a very tightly structured work, based on ring-structure, and structural chiasmus.
But where did they learn such techniques?

Mary  Douglas, in her seminal book on ring-structure texts, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition (The Terry Lectures), suggested that the Bible, in particular the Old Testament, has been a rich source for such structuraltechniques. That is not something I have looked at; I cannot say more.

The pointed arch of window or door of the period is a lesson in itself of interdependence of relationships. The lock that holds the arch in place is the central keystone, on the pinnacle of the arch. Each arm of the arch is held by the side pillar and the keystone.
In the ring text the central event is the key to the whole piece. The build up of the tale to that point is mirrored in the second half, mirrored but changed by what occurs in the central part. Each arch/story arch ends where it began, but all has changed.
This is most clearly explicit in the structure of the lai of Equitain.

Her laisexalt chivalry and the role of honour. We can read here a valuing of balance, idealised relationships, behaviour. This relates back to the idealising of the Arthurian values that she explores in some lais, and that French writers were to work up into great webs of tales of traditional honour and chivalry. 
This all attempts to lift contemporary times out of its cold, hard, greed-and-grab practicality.
You could almost say the real and the idealised mirrored each other, in their antipathies.
And the keystone? 
The text.

This explains why the Chronicles of later writers became so valued: Froissart, Chastellain et al. They gave the gloss to petty, sordid, dealings.

They gave it memory. Value.

There is far more to this book than I have indicated here. His reasoning is admirable, sources varied, research deep as well as wide. It is altogether a book of admirable scholarship, and goes a long way to re-evaluating the wonderful work of Marie de France.

The Lais of Marie de France: Bisclavret

Of all The Lais of Marie de France, Bisclavret has aroused much controversy.

Bisclavret, an early werewolf story, has gained comments as a misogynistic tale.
In Bisclavret the married king Bisclavret regularly absents himself several days a week from his castle. Eventually his wife gets him to unveil his secret, in a time honoured fashion that goes at least back the Bible. He reveals that he turns into a wolf; that as long as his clothes remain he can change back. His wife then steals his clothes so he cannot change back, and once the king is declared missing, marries her new suitor.
The deception is unmasked, king restored, and wife and new suitor/king suitably done away with. 

How are we to read Bisclavret?
This is deception of the worst kind: the loving embrace that then reveals one’s vulnerabilities to the world, as it were.
Is this tale a prime example of the misogyny of the time, and especially of Church attitudes? We cannot read well the signs of older cultural models.
As Dutch historian Johan Huizinga asserts in an excellent essay in Men and Ideas, the marriage of convenience was very much the model for nobles and people of rank. Woman were commodities, because vehicles for succession through child-bearing; in the case of lack of issue, as we see in other tales, the man would be advised Put your wife aside, choose another to ensure an heir – because, of course, it was always the woman who could not conceive.
I do suspect it was well-known that it was as much the man’s inability; this would never be stated in public, or the public place of text. The flip-side to this is, if a woman is so positioned with a man with doubtful proclivities, as in Bisclavret, the woman could be just as likely to ‘Put the man aside’ and find a mate better suited. And with all the elements of supplanting that goes with this. 

One of the key writers on these topics, Johan Huizinga, also commented: It is manifest that the political and military history of the last centuries of the Middle Ages as described by Froissart, Monstrelet, Chastellain… reveals very little chivalry and a great deal of covetousness, cruelty, cold calculation, well-understood self-interest, and diplomatic subtlety. The reality of history seems constantly to disavow the fanciful ideal of chivalry (Chivalric Ideals in the Middle Ages). In Equitan the relationship of the seneschal and his wife perhaps fell under these last designations. That she is described in the text by Equitan, as a lady who needs love: the marriage, as most of the period was one of convenience and arrangement 

We cannot, I suspect, judge Bisclavret’s wife by any standards than what we know of those of the time. It probably was not actually accepted practice for the wife to do this, and hence its appearance in this tale: we glimpse something perhaps of Marie de France’s originality in her choice of content here. In this tale could we say then that the dynamic is in the discord between the reality of the mores of the time, and those of the chivalric mores some attempted to re-introduce? Is this the source of the dynamic of the Lais as a whole: discord and the search for harmony? We see the novelty and great success of Marie de France in writing about amour courtois against this background. This new perspective does seem to be the gestalt behind Marie de France writing-up, and presenting these Lais. 

If we apply Huizinga’s assertion we can perhaps see a more contemporaneous interpretation that gives an alternative reading.
We dabble here with intentionality: how can we gauge Marie de France’s intentionality in this tale? When we look again at Equitan we see how the writer valued romantic love above the mores of her time, we see in the central part of the tale, the ‘heart’ of the tale where the story was leading, and from where the consequences derive, how the constancy of the affair between Equitan and the seneschal’s wife was lauded: in all that time he neither took another lover nor neglected her, that he was willing to kill for her so they could take up an honourable relationship in marriage. But is there anything in here that shows her ‘bucking the trend’, rather than producing a romantic fantasy? In the tale of Equitan we hear the wife’s fears and doubts, and they are indeed given full expression: they match the king’s for intensity and responsible awareness. She is no member of the ‘lower orders’ struck dumb, abashed or overawed by being feted by the king; she is her own woman, and well aware of the responsibilities of her and, later we see, his position. So, yes, I think we do see here cause for reading intentionality in the Tales.