Reception and Memory: A Cognitive Approach to the 'Chansons de geste' (review)

This impressive book thoroughly revaluates the context of reception of the chansons de geste, first highlighting their links to monasteries and ecclesiastical sites, and suggesting that Bédier's famous theory relating the origins of the genre to pilgrimage routes be rethought as a theory of dissemination and distribution. Second, Paula Leverage stresses the fact that noble families owned epics: the texts thus had the same 'courtly' audience as romance. She thereby neatly accounts for the learned nature of the genre and its religious emphasis, as well as for frequent references to reading within the texts and the fact that their authors and narrators claim authenticity and cite antiquated written sources for the tales. The thrust of the book, however, is a critique of scholarship focusing on so-called traces of oral performance, and its major contention is that the repetitive and formulaic nature of the chansons de geste has nought to do with orality, working instead as a means of stimulating the audience's memory. Inspiration comes in the main from modern cognitive psychology arguing that equivalences, connections, and gestalts in literary texts draw on memory associations. Sometimes this material remains incompletely digested: summaries run a little too long and needed more rigorous editing to produce a more compact book. However, surprising parallels with medieval mnemonics arise: the ideas of Hugh of St Victor and St Augustine, among others, which conceive of memory in terms of division, collation, visualization, and auralization, come strikingly close to contemporary cognitive concepts. Medieval and modern models then combine powerfully in Leverage's smart, original, and astute readings of a number of important chansons de geste, notably Renaut de Montauban, Raoul de Cambrai, and Ami et Amile. Continual attempts on the part of narrators to elicit the audience's emotional involvement in the action are convincingly glossed as the fostering of the creation of memory images, and the process of dividing and organizing the stories into laisses is illuminated anew. Moreover, verbal echoes creating links between episodes separated by thousands of lines of text are discovered, revealing a series of contrapuntal narratives. The stated aim of salvaging the genre from formalist readings seems somewhat outdated — most recent critical accounts of the chansons de geste have in fact sought political, ethical, and social themes — but the book works effectively to reset the texts within the medieval cultural and institutional context that they share with memory theory privileging the interpretative and creative reception of stories over dumb passivity. Indeed, it is argued, the moral and instructive value of the genre depends on the active formulation of analogies, and the discernment of recurrent phrases and scenarios allows otherwise chaotic narratives to take on shape and meaning. Finally, it is pleasing to witness Leverage reach beyond textual criticism of the chansons de geste to venture comments, related to the hard-wiring of mental processes of comparison and identification, on the question of why human beings, medieval and modern, find pleasure and stimulation in reading literature.