Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and The House of Fame

Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and The House of Fame Ruth Evans Cardiff University Let us imagine Chaucer sitting at his desk in his house over Aldgate in front of his PC. It is 1379. On the screen is the poem he is currently working on, The House of Fame (1379–80).1 Behind this he has opened a number of windows, on which are copies of Latin, French, and Italian texts he has downloaded from the Internet, texts he intends to use as sources: Macrobius’s discussion of dream classification in his commentary on the Somnium Scipionis, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Ovid’s Heroides, Metamorphoses, and Ars amatoria. On Chaucer’s hard disk are yet more sources: commentaries on Ovid (the Ovide moralisé; Pierre Bersuire’s commentary); collections of quotations from the Bible; French love poetry by Machaut and Froissart; most of the Roman de la rose. Also on his hard disk are copies of texts in Middle English—though Chaucer chooses not to own up to using them.2 Piers Plowman (Bversion , ca. 1379)3 and the famous Auchinleck manuscript (National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ MS 19.2.1, ca. 1330–40), containing vernacular romances and religious verse.4 He has bookmarks to his fa1 All citations of Chaucer’s work are from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Line numbers are cited parenthetically in the text. 2 See Nicholas Watson, ‘‘The Politics of Middle English Writing,’’ in Jocelyn WoganBrowne , Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 346. For Chaucer’s debt to English vernacular writing, see W. A. Davenport, Chaucer and His English Contemporaries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). 3 Frank Grady, ‘‘Chaucer Reading Langland: The House of Fame,’’ SAC 18 (1996): 3–23. 4 Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford and Cambridge , Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 73–77; Wogan-Browne et al., eds., Idea of the Vernacular, pp. 354–56. 43 ................. 8972$$ $CH3 11-01-10 12:19:41 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER vorite Web sites, including an archive of Lollard material with information on the Wycliffite translation project. And he can also access the virtual libraries constituted by manuscript anthologies produced in London , such as Auchinleck or Cambridge University Library MS Ii.iii.21, which contains Boethius’s text of the Consolation of Philosophy, together with its Latin commentaries and his own English translation of the work.5 As the articulation of a vast memory, the computer is the latest in a procession of mnemonic aids and archival technologies that, I will argue, can be traced back to the future. The computer analogy is helpful in understanding The House of Fame because it is itself a poem that is obsessed by late medieval technologies of memory and archiving. Part comic, part anxious, it projects a series of powerful imaginative visions of types of recording apparatus and their nightmarish others: the engravings in Venus’s temple, the ice-rock foundation, Fame’s rumbling House, the fantastic whirling twiggy structure that stands below it. And it probes the interrelations between these memorial and recording technologies and Chaucer’s own production as an embodied subject: a man of letters haunted by auctorite.6 Chaucer did not, of course, have access to electronic writing machines , databases, or search engines. The existence of numerous medieval artificial memory systems signals that Chaucer’s access to knowledge is different from our own, since Chaucer, like many other medieval writers , tends to remember his quotations rather than check them accurately against standardized texts, a practice that is expected of modern authors in an age of copyright and authorial responsibility. And despite the claims that are sometimes made that computer technologies represent a return to medieval production, insofar as they are not bound by the linear structure of the printed book, such claims are quite simply anachronistic . The proliferation of knowledge and information among today’s most highly developed computer-age societies has brought about a rift in...