Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives ed. by Giulino Di Bacco and Yolanda Plumley (review)

Like its companion volume, 2011’s Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Text, Music, and Image from Machaut to Ariosto (University of Exeter Press), this collection of essays stems from two workshops (on citation in French lyrics and songs) and a conference on “Citation, Intertextuality, and Memory in the Middle Ages” at the University of Exeter. With such a thorough pedigree, it is no surprise that this volume continues the strong tradition of presenting numerous case studies that, taken together, illuminate the nuances of the “complex transitions between memorial and literate negotiations” of citation, quotation, and intertextuality in medieval and Renaissance literature, art, and music (2).

The first essay in the collection, Jenny Benham’s “Walter Map and Ralph Glaber: Intertextuality and the Construction of Memories of Peacemaking,” sets the pattern followed, for the most part, by the following essays: case studies that explore a particular aspect of memory and intertextuality, followed by a section that examines the larger ramifications of those case studies. As Benham explains, even two accounts of a historical meeting might not lead the modern scholar to an accurate understanding of what happens—instead, “it may only confirm the authors’ use of citation, allusion, and intertextuality” (16). The theme of the instability of memory-studies continues in Sjoerd Levelt’s sprightly essay “Citation and Misappropriation in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie and the Anglo-Latin Historiographical Tradition. Levelt addresse the tradition of Latinate British histories from Bede to Gerald of Wales to argue that each text in that tradition rewrites, with cheeky emendation, its predecessors in order to exploit gaps and, ultimately, speak to a divided audience of the unwitting public and the expert historiographer.

As those essays indicate, we are left with textual artifacts of citation, quotation, and intertextuality from which we must reconstruct mental processes and the representation of those processes. The three essays on musical citation explore precisely that theme, beginning with Anna Maria Busse Berger’s “Orality, Literacy and Quotation in Medieval Polyphony.” Berger examines how medieval musicians (specifically, Perotinus and Oswald von Wolkenstein) engaged their “memorial archive[s]” to conclude that orality and literacy—which we might call two forms of memory—affect medieval polyphonic composition (31). Helen Deeming’s “Music, Memory, and Mobility: Citation and Contrafactum in Thirteenth-Century Sequence Repertories” explores contrafactum, the practice of “substituting a new text to an existing song-melody,” which has the effect of associating the original text with the new one, creating a “virtual polyphony” in which both songs exist “simultaneously … in the mind … of the musician” (68, 69). Memory, citation, and identity are further explored in Jennifer Saltzstein’s “Intertextuality and Authorial Self-Representation in the Music of Adam de la Halle”; Adam’s self-citation—unusual in medieval musical refrains—creates an intertextual identity for the author.

But is an intertextual, constructed identity stable? Both R. Barton Palmer (“Centrifugal Allusion and the Centripetal Text: The Example of Guillaume de Machaut”) and Emma Cayley (“Coming Apart at the Seams? Citation as Transvestism in Fifteenth-Century Debate Poetry”) emphasize the instability of citation and memory, and how that instability can affect subjectivity. Cayley examines debate poetry and accompanying illustrations to argue that “citation in the Derridean sense and Butlerian gender performance trouble the reader through their erosion of any stable identity or subject position in the text” (66), while Palmer explores the “discontents of authorship and the drama of the self” in Machaut emphasize on the subjectivity of poetic existence (161).

Of course, to speak of memory and subjectivity without recourse to passion omits a vital component of existence. Both Lina Bolzoni (“The Impassioned Memory in Dante’s Divine Comedy”) and Naomi Howell (“Sepulchral Citations in Twelfth-Century Romance”) address the emotional effect of memory and intertextuality. Bolzoni links Dante’s engagement with mnemotechniques to the...