Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory

Conclusion

175 Conclusion � Marie de France’s use of descriptio and her concern with memory reveal a proficient training in the medieval arts of poetry and prose. Descriptio and memoria, two essential elements of topical invention, entered medieval instruction in literary composition through the study of authorities on rhetoric and grammar from antiquity, such as Cicero, the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium , and Priscian.The art of inventio that developed in the Middle Ages honed the ability to find preexisting materia, commit that material to memory, and later arrange the disparate parts into a new whole that displayed the author’s ingenium. Marie de France’s implementation of inventio, while not neglecting the use of rhetorical devices like captatio benevolentiae and ordo, privileges descriptio and memoria over other aspects of the process.We have seen how she combines these elements to construct an architecture of memory built upon vivid descriptions that impart a visual dimension to the narrative. Her literary plan consistently reminds the audience of the importance of remembering the story she treats, whether a moral fable, an adventurous lai, or a hagiographic tale that celebrates the life of a venerated saint.To facilitate the future recall of this material she embellishes her sources with descriptive detail, imparting energy to the episode in question and making it visible to the mind’s eye and easy to register in the faculty of memory. While Marie’s narratives draw from the past, they also ensure its preservation through translatio studii, the transfer of knowledge from one culture to another or from one generation to the next. Her method of literary composition reflects the rhetorical practices of authorities from antiquity and helps to keep that tradition alive for her own period and for posterity. Likewise, her discov- 176 ery of material in preexisting sources and its subsequent reshaping into a work that accommodates the interests of her audience guarantees the preservation of literature that might otherwise have disappeared. In Marie’s case, translatio applies not only to textual material but also to the survival of a medium: Marie puts the mostly oral tradition of the lyrical Breton lai into written narrative form, a genre that the authors of the lais anonymes continue in the thirteenth century. But as much as Marie’s corpus ensures the memory of past literature for her twelfth-century courtly audience, it also looks forward to works, both literary and scholastic, in the two centuries that follow. I have shown that she was writing just before the development of treatises devoted solely to the art of memory.Yet her narratives clearly reveal that she operated with the same concern for memory that characterizes these later treatises. I hope that further research will establish exactly how Marie was able to make a connection between the descriptive narration of literary texts and the medieval principles of memory years before they were actually codified in the writings of such authors as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Bradwardine. In light of the evidence presented here, I am convinced that Marie’s synthesis of this mnemonic narrative architecture and her mentally visual descriptions surpassed the basic instruction she would have received from rhetorical and grammatical training in the arts of poetry and prose of the mid- to late twelfth century. Indeed, she may have been at least partly guided by the same sources that ultimately led to the development of the artes memorativae not long after she wrote. She was in all probability influenced to some degree by the various artistic media prevalent in her own culture, to which she would have been exposed through her association with the court in England.These included stained glass windows, frescoes, statues carved on churches and cathedrals , and manuscript illuminations, and they represented images , often in narrative sequence, that had the power to preserve in the minds of their public important secular and religious events. The same type of relationship that Marie noticed and developed between vivid narrative descriptions and their benefits to Conclusion 177 the faculty of memory was quickly passed on from memory treatises to literary texts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, not only in France but in other European countries as well. Approximately fifty years after she translated the Espurgatoire seint Patriz and La vie seinte Audree, Richard de Fournival made a significant connection,similar to Marie’s,between the written word and the image it could produce in the imagination...