Download PDF | Margaret Cotter-Lynch, Brad Herzog (eds.) - Reading Memory and Identity in the Texts of Medieval European Holy Women-Palgrave Macmillan US (2012).
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CONTRIBUTORS
Claire Barbetti received her PhD from Duquesne University. In 1998 she cofounded the interdisciplinary journal Janus Head and worked as coeditor for five years. A working poet, she has published her work in Cimarron Review, How2, and The Drunken Boat, among others. Palgrave Macmillan published her book-length study on medieval visions and ekphrasis, Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Interarts Theory in the New Middle Ages Series in 2011. Margaret Cotter-Lynch is an associate professor in the Department of English, Humanities, and Languages at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. Her research focuses on the representation of gender in early medieval hagiography. Her current book project is entitled Mother, Gladiator, Saint: The Transformations of St. Perpetua across the Middle Ages .
Cheryl Glenn is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarly work focuses on histories of women’s rhetorics and writing practices, inclusionary rhetorical practices and theories, and contexts and processes for the teaching of writing. Her scholarly publications include Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance; Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence; Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts; Rhetorical Education in America; The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing; The Writer’s Harbrace Handbook; Making Sense: A Real-World Rhetorical Reader; The Harbrace Guide for College Writers; and numerous articles, chapters, and essays. She and J. Michael Hogan coedit “Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation,” a Pennsylvania State University Press series. With Shirley Wilson Logan, she coedits the Southern Illinois University Press series Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms. Glenn’s rhetorical scholarship has earned her three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and book awards from Choice and from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.
Elissa Hansen is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on ideas about time in fourteenth-century English contemplative literature at the University of Minnesota, where she holds the university’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2011–2012). Her research interests include visionary and contemplative spirituality, religious identity and community formation, and intersections between literature and natural philosophy.
Brad Herzog is an associate professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan. His publications and recent national and international conference presentations address the role of memory arts in the composition of Julian of Norwich’s Showings and The Book of Margery Kempe . Ella Johnson is an assistant professor of Systematic Theology at St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry in Rochester, New York. Her research and publications focus on theology and anthropology in the writings of medieval women monastics.
Catherine Keene recently completed her PhD at Central European University in Budapest. She is currently preparing her dissertation, a biography of Saint Margaret, Queen of the Scots, for publication. Ana Maria Machado is a professor of Portuguese Medieval Literature at the University of Coimbra and a member of the Centre of Portuguese Literature. She has published several articles on Portuguese and Latin hagiographies, and she is preparing an edition of the Portuguese Flos Sanctorum (1513). Helene Scheck is an associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany. She is the author of Reform and Resistance: Forms of Female Subjectivity in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Culture and coeditor of Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach and Rhetorics of Plague, Early and Late. Her current work focuses on women’s intellectual culture in the early Middle Ages.
Barbara Zimbalist is a PhD candidate at the University of California– Davis, where she is completing a dissertation titled “Talking with God: Christ’s Speech in Medieval Women’s Visionary Texts.” She has recently held fellowships through the Bancroft Library, the Fulbright Commission, and the Belgian American Educational Foundation. In addition to an essay on early modern prose romance, she has published on Middle English devotional literature and works on the intersection of women’s visionary texts, lyric poetry, and devotional prose in England and the Low Countries.
INTRODUCTION
Margaret Cotter-Lynch and Brad Herzog I f you have seen the mosaics of Antioch, you know of their intricate beauty: the majesty of the Striding Lion, the brilliance of Oceanus. Elaborate borders and detailed figures are fashioned from collected fragments of rock and glass. Like mosaics formed of pebbles and glass, medieval memory networks were constructed with readily available materials—cultural commonplaces, tropes, examples, scriptures, and authorities. For the western European Middle Ages, memory networks informed the production of texts, communities, and personal identities. While each text, person, and community was distinct, the materials used to construct them were picked up from the past. Combined together, these inherited fragments of memory were reconfigured to the purposes of particular people, places, and cultures, even as the pieces themselves remained individually discernable.
Thus, each new creation was concretely built with shards of the past, selected and reorganized yet still recognizable to all who shared the common cultural traditions of Western medieval Christianity. The centrality of memory networks to the production of medieval identities informs every chapter in this collection. The texts discussed range geographically and chronologically from the court of Charlemagne to Margery Kempe’s England. All the chapters, however, argue that an examination of the gender-specific ways in which memory networks were constructed can help us to better understand medieval texts. Medieval memory has been the focus of numerous studies over the past two decades, since the 1990 publication of the first edition of Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory instigated the modern scholarly reevaluation of the ways in which the concept of memory is culturally contingent and the ways in which a medieval Christian understanding of the nature and uses of memory might help us to better read the texts of far-removed cultures.
In The Book of Memory and The Craft of Thought, Carruthers eloquently explains that, for western European religious culture in the Middle Ages, memory arts were integral to reading, meditation, composition, and character formation. The process of “memorative composition” is revealed through the etymological overlap of the words “invention” and “inventory,” as it is through the double sense of the word “recollection.” 1 The formation of memory inventories through reading, meditation, and experience was itself a rhetorical process, as “memories are not tossed into storage at random, they ‘are put in’ their ‘places’ there, ‘colored’ in ways that are partly personal, partly emotional, partly rational, and mostly cultural.” 2 Reading was central to the construction of memory inventories; these memory inventories then provided the basis for compositions: texts, prayers, and lived identities were all formed through “memorative composition.” Rhetoric thus informed two stages of medieval composition. First, memory inventories were formed and categorized according to rhetorical principles. Second, texts and identities were both invented rhetorically, through the deployment of memory inventories. 3 Identity and character were thus understood as rhetorical inventions employing the arts of memory.
As Carruthers points out, from the perspective of medieval memory arts, you are what you read. You are only considered to have read what you remember, by incorporating the “res” of what you read into your individual memory inventory. Your memory stores are then the material basis of your ethical actions. By extension, reading and memory constitute individual and collective identities, for individuals shape their identities through ethical actions as expressions of memory—and communities fashion collective identities through common attitudes and ideas reflected in shared memory structures. A careful consideration of medieval memory can thus lead us to a better understanding of both writing and reading: how texts were produced and the uses they served in identity formation. 4
This collection examines how women were remembered in medieval texts and how this commemoration shaped individual and communal identities. We extend Carruthers’s claims by illustrating how conceptions of gender informed and were informed by memory networks. The texts examined here show how the textual applications of memory arts defined ideas about gender identity for the individuals and communities that read them. The chapters in this book—by interrogating how women, in particular, were remembered in medieval texts—offer new perspectives on gender formulations in the medieval Christian West through attention to the textual interplay between reading, memory, and identity. In the range of memorial texts here discussed, a few broad categories emerge for thinking about gender and memory in medieval religious texts. In the first section of this introduction, we will discuss the active, rather than passive, nature of remembering and the construction of memory inventories. Next, we will examine how individual identities were shaped through the formation and application of memory inventories. Third, we will show how communities were formed and defined through shared memory networks. Finally, we will look at cases of the gender-specific application of the memory arts, as exemplified in the chapters in this collection.
Active Memory To remember is always an active choice, not a passive state. Every act of remembering involves a conscious or subconscious decision about what is worth remembering and how it is worth categorizing within one’s memory stores. These decisions are necessarily informed not only by personal choice but also by cultural context: what one has been taught as worth remembering and how one has been taught to structure one’s understanding of the world. Conversely, examining what we forget can help us to better understand what, why, and how we remember. As Carruthers explains, “Communal forgetting” was effected in medieval communities “not through some variety of amnesia, but by applying carefully the mnemotechnical principles of blocking one pattern of memories by another through ‘crowding’ or overlay, and by intentional mnemonic replacement.” 5
For example, the Christians in Rome used the technique of “overlay” to appropriate significant pagan sites and procession routes. In the seventh century, they dedicated the Pantheon as a Christian church, and they appropriated the route and date of the Roman procession of Robigalia for the “Christian procession of the Great Liturgy.” 6 By overlaying pagan sites, routes, and festivals with their own memory networks, Christians drew on the symbolic and cultural power of these underlying sites while blocking much of their pagan meaning and appropriating them for Christian purposes. 7 A similar dynamic worked in the reading and reinterpreting of texts, as a classical poem such as Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue was reinterpreted and remembered according to a Christian hermeneutic. 8 Utility, rather than accuracy, was generally privileged as the basis for making these mnemonic decisions for the Christian Middle Ages. In their chapters, both Margaret Cotter-Lynch and Claire Barbetti build upon Carruthers’s assertion that “the matters memory presents are used to persuade and motivate, to create emotion and stir the will. And the ‘accuracy’ or ‘authenticity’ of these memories—their simulation of an actual past—is of far less importance . . . than their use to motivate the present and to affect the future.” 9
This emphasis upon utility rather than accuracy in turn makes memory malleable—as a culture’s needs change, so the memories it keeps will change to fulfill current uses. As Patrick Geary explains in Phantoms of Remembrance, “A society that explicitly found its identity, its norms, and its values from the inheritance of the past, that venerated tradition and drew its religious and political ideologies from precedent, was nevertheless actively engaged in producing that tradition through a complex process of transmission, suppression, and re-creation.” 10
As an example of this dynamic, Barbara Zimbalist’s chapter discusses how the relationship between author and audience is privileged over the specificity of the hagiographic subject in Clemence of Barking’s Life of St. Catherine. Clemence’s concern is less with Catherine herself—the accurate, or not, commemoration of the early Christian martyr—than with the uses Catherine’s story could serve for her twelfth-century audience. Similarly, Claire Barbetti says of Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias , “What matters is not whether what is reported is real, but, as Carruthers suggests, how the case of these images resonate with a social narrative.” 11 According to Ana Maria Machado, in her chapter on the Portuguese reception of the Vitae Patrum, it is the remembered images of women, as distinct from real women, that pose the primary danger to the desert monks. This emphasis upon mental images demonstrates the preoccupation with the uses of memory within hagiographic texts. All of the chapters in this volume interrogate the ways in which particular events, ideas, and texts were remembered and forgotten by particular authors in particular compositions. These authors, in writing about holy women, at once adopt (and sometimes omit) previous tradition and refashion it by adjusting the structures of memory networks for individuals and communities, thus shaping their identities.
Memory and Individual Identity Whereas Quintilian asserted the virtuosity of virtue (the rhetorical efficaciousness of “the good man speaking well”), medieval authorities inverted the relationship. For them, the rhetorical art of memory, applied in meditation, served as a means to reach the end of fashioning a virtuous character. This personal approach to memory work and character building corresponds to the tropological and anagogical levels of reading: the act of “digestive meditation” constitutes “the ethical activity of making one’s reading one’s own.” 12 Medieval scholars and religious used reading and meditation to construct memory networks that had moral and ethical value. For medieval authorities, the activity of shaping a memory network was the “activity” of shaping a “character” or “temperament.” 13 Describing how the classical era’s canon of memory transformed into medieval memory arts, Frances Yates explains that medieval authorities reinterpreted the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero’s De inventione, shifting the use of memory arts from civic discourse in the classical era to private meditation, moral edification, and religious education in the Middle Ages. 14
While affirming this basic shift in focus and purpose, Mary Carruthers contends that religious men and women in the Middle Ages developed their own craft of memory arts, or sancta memoria, which functioned as a form of rhetorical invention for devotional texts, exercises, and individual character. 15 Medieval memory arts also incorporated diverse aspects of reading and interpretation. As a result, Carruthers argues, reading, memory, rhetorical invention, and identity were intimately intertwined for medieval authors and audiences. Helene Scheck and Elissa Hansen, in their contributions to this collection, assert that female authors demonstrate gender-specific reading and writing practices.
These practices participate in the process of identity formation that Carruthers describes. As Carruthers states, “One’s first relationship with a text is not to encounter another mind (or subdue it, as one suspects sometimes) or to understand it on its own terms, but to use it as a source of communally experienced wisdom for one’s own life, gained by memorizing from it however much and in whatever fashion one is able or willing to do.” 16 Reading here is an essentially personal experience, integral to the process of identity formation. One’s reading experience— what one takes from a text—is necessarily determined by the identity of the reader. Simultaneously, the reading helps to further shape that identity: “And this memorized chorus of voices, this ever-present florilegium built up plank by plank continuously through one’s lifetime, formed not only one’s opinions but one’s moral character as well. Character indeed results from one’s experiences, but that includes the experiences of others, often epitomized in ethical commonplaces, and made one’s own by constant recollection.” 17
The formation of both one’s memory network and one’s identity is inherently rhetorical; reading and remembering a text necessarily involves a transformation of both the individual and the text: We read rhetorically, memory makes our reading into our own ethical equipment (“stamps our character”) and we express that character in situations that are also rhetorical in nature, in the expressive gestures and performances which we construct from our remembered experience, and which, in turn, are intended to impress and give value to others’ memories of a particular occasion. 18 As an example, Ella Johnson’s chapter demonstrates how Gertrud of Helfta rhetorically deploys recalled tropes in her Exercitia spiritualia in order to incorporate women into a religious context shared with men, thereby stretching conventional conceptions of appropriate female behavior. Since Gertrud believed that traditional gender roles, expectations, and behaviors interfered with women’s progress toward God, she constructed spiritual exercises that encouraged readers to reject restrictive conventions regarding gender. Moreover, Gertrud employed memory inventories in her exercises to “invent a new way of being female,” a way that consisted in calling “women to be Christians first.” 19
Like Johnson, all of the authors in this collection, explicitly or implicitly, address questions of how reading and memory might—or might not—function differently for medieval women than for medieval men. For instance, do women assimilate (read remember) texts differently than men? If we follow Carruthers’s argument that one’s reading is shaped by one’s experiences, then women’s reading must have differed from men’s, since lived experiences differ by gender.
If the shapes of shared memories, and the structures of memory inventories, are deeply influenced by culture, then we can expect women to be remembered differently than men, as the categories according to which memories are inventoried function differently for different genders. If, as Carruthers asserts, memory is deployed into ethical action, again we should expect a difference, as the arenas of expected and acceptable action were circumscribed differently for men and women. Finally, as medieval memory arts function on the cusp of, and to some degree mediate, the separation between the public and private spheres, we should again expect a difference between men and women in the deployment of memory arts, as men and women were expected to relate differently to the public and private spheres. Women such as Gertrud of Helfta, Hildegard of Bingen, Clemence of Barking, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe deployed gender- inflected memory networks to compose texts, claim authority, and appeal to audiences of women and men. Male authors likewise deployed gender-inflected memory networks in the textual commemoration of women such as Perpetua, Margaret of Scotland, and Sara in order to shape individual and communal identities around shared understandings of gender categories.
Memory and Community Carruthers emphasizes the shaping of character as a process of private meditation through the deployment of memory arts while simultaneously demonstrating the ways in which authors used similar applications of memory arts to construct characters and shape identities in written texts. In this collection, we examine how men and women authorized their texts by encouraging their public readership to locate the texts’ female characters, subjects, or personas within strategic memory networks. Medieval memory arts supported public discourse as well as private meditations. As Catherine Cubitt has noted, “Remembering is an inherently social activity.” 20 As Claire Barbetti, Margaret Cotter-Lynch, Brad Herzog, and Catherine Keene demonstrate in their chapters, the structures imposed upon memory can define a community. Individuals can be initiated into a community by acquiring a defined memory base, whereas individuals themselves can be identified as community members by adopting, recognizing, or demonstrating salient features of the community’s memory structures. For example, capital criminals in medieval England could escape hanging for a less painful death if they could recite a verse from the Bible, thus situating themselves within a particular memory network as members of the clerical class who were “immune from hanging by legal custom.” 21
Medieval Christian communities, in particular, were defined by their remembrance of a shared religious heritage. The liturgy, as the center of all medieval Christian religious practice, is at its essence memorial, as discussed in Ella Johnson’s chapter, “In mei memoriam facietis” (do this in memory of me). Barbara Zimbalist draws on Karl Uitti’s work to argue that “hagiography’s ultimate function is to link the narrator, the subject, and the reader together as a Christian community through a shared participation in the memorialization of the Christian saint.” 22 Similarly, Claire Barbetti writes, concerning Hildegard, “The verbal translation of a vision is not merely a mimetic activity; it uses the tools of the memory arts to place elements in such a way as to engender a culturally agreed upon meaning.” 23 These chapters all contend that the construction of shared memory networks, and thus of community, is a primary function of the texts they examine.
These shared networks are in part constituted according to particular conceptions of gender. Medieval religious communities were deeply identified by their memorial functions. The daily activities of professional religious were defined by commemoration: the liturgy, the veneration of the saints, praying for the dead, reading, meditation, and the copying of texts. Indeed, the essence of the holy life— imitatio Christi—consisted in modeling one’s own identity on the remembered Christ. Medieval religious authors selfconsciously placed themselves, their texts, and their audiences within specific memory networks in order to shape the understanding of the text and the identities of both author and audience. Illustrating this point, Brad Herzog notes that Margery Kempe creatively fills in the “gaps” in biblical and devotional accounts 24
by imagining herself in places of prominence—caring for the Christ child and grieving at Christ’s death. 25 Placing images (even of oneself, as Kempe does) in commonplace settings (loci or topoi) is a clear strategy of memory arts. Kempe also invites her audiences to resituate themselves within strategic memory networks. As this example shows, memory arts can serve as significant resources for rhetorical invention. Using memory arts for composition (including invention), medieval authors established their authority through calling upon and rearranging their audience’s memory stores. As Margaret Cotter-Lynch describes in her chapter, an author’s “message, then, comes not from introducing new material, but rather from selecting, juxtaposing, and arranging information and images already at the readers’ disposal” in their memory stores. 26 Carruthers writes, “Such adaptive freedom is enabled by complete familiarity with the text, the shared memory of it on the part of both audience and author, and hence a delight both in recognizing the familiar words and in the skill with which they have been adapted to a new context.” 27 Memory is a collective project in communities, which define both their purposes and their identities through shared memory networks.
Commemorating Women and Constructing Texts The chapters collected in this volume all examine the interconnected ways in which gender, identity, and memory function in medieval texts about holy women. While they address a wide variety of texts, temporally and stylistically, composed by both men and women for a variety of audiences, all of the chapters examine the common concerns of female authority and individual and community identities in texts that commemorate women. Helene Scheck’s chapter begins the discussion by asking what commemorating Dido, the Virgin Mary, and the women attached to court alongside Charlemagne might tell us about women’s literary production in ninth-century Francia. Specifically, Scheck suggests that, for the canonical Carolingian text Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa, “Anonymous” might well have been a woman. The fragmentary text purports to remember Charlemagne and in particular the 799 visit of Pope Leo to the king at Paderborn and the court of Aachen. The poem, which survives only in a fragment, has long been regarded as anonymous and anomalous within the body of surviving literature of the period. Scheck argues that this anomaly—including the emphasis upon remembering women in the text—may suggest female authorship and indeed a stronger role than has previously been assumed for women in the literary milieu at Aachen. A second Carolingian poem commemorating women, “In Natale Sanctarum Feminarum,” serves as the subject of the second chapter in the collection. In “Mnemonic Sanctity and the Ladder of Reading,” Margaret Cotter-Lynch provides a reading of Notker’s poem that demonstrates the shaping of individual and communal identities through the deployment of memory arts. Notker refashions his audience’s memory of the martyr Perpetua in order to establish a shared community around a particular understanding of the category of “holy women.”
Catherine Keene similarly examines the commemoration of a female saint employed to shape communal identity in her examination of the miracle collection of Saint Margaret of Scotland. Intrigued by the unusually high concentration of dreams and visions within this miracle collection, Keene determines that the authors of the text consciously enlisted both local literary and Roman Catholic ecclesiastical traditions in presenting Saint Margaret as a unifying figure, at once native and Catholic, supporting the dynastic claims of her descendants. Hildegard of Bingen offers us an opportunity to examine the uses of commemoration for establishing community, identity, and authority in a text written by an identifiable woman. In her study of Hildegard’s Scivias, Claire Barbetti argues that the twelfth-century abbess used the techniques of ekphrasis to bridge the divide between the public and private spheres for both her audience and herself, simultaneously carving out a societal space for her voice as an authoritative woman. Clemence of Barking’s twelfth-century version of the Life of St. Catherine provides Barbara Zimbalist the opportunity to examine how a female author writing about a female subject for a female audience constructs the process of remembering.
Zimbalist shows how Clemence structures her text in order to rhetorically interpolate her readers into an ethical system. By thus engaging her audience’s memory networks, Clemence produces a story that functions as moral instruction. Ana Maria Machado, in her chapter, examines how women were remembered in medieval Portuguese translations of the Vitae patrum. By tracing which women get named as individuals, versus which women are represented only as images or types, Machado demonstrates the preoccupation of Portuguese translators with the dangers of remembered images of women, as distinct from the praised actions of real, identifiable women. Machado also examines how Portuguese translators helped readers of the Vitae patrum recall memories of evangelists who were repentant sinners in ways that created new gender identities. Whereas the Vitae patrum illustrates gender-specific formulations of memory networks, Gertrud of Helfta’s Exercitia spiritualia deploys widely accepted memorial tropes from the Bible and liturgy in order to include both women and men in a common formulation of religious experience.
In her chapter, Ella Johnson argues that Gertrud implicitly challenges assumptions about gender specificity by explicitly conflating gender markers in her descriptions of meditative and spiritual activities. The fourteenth-century mystic and theologian Julian of Norwich clearly constructed her Revelations of Divine Love by placing descriptions of her remembered visions within the shared mnemonic structures of the medieval Church. In her chapter, Elissa Hansen demonstrates how Julian rhetorically deploys the memory and imitation of the Virgin Mary to construct a space in which the recluse could assert her authority and relevance without directly threatening ecclesiastical hierarchy. Finally, Brad Herzog describes how Margery Kempe self-consciously models her narrative on virgin martyr’s legends in order to situate herself within a saintly category for her audience.
In describing at length her own commemoration and imitation of well-recognized holy women, Margery simultaneously shapes her identity through her devotional practices, and—by invoking remembered commonplaces from virgin martyrs’ tales—invites her audience to identify themselves as her “converts.” All of the chapters in this volume interrogate the complex interrelationship of reading, memory, and identity as they examine the ways in which medieval holy women remembered and were remembered in texts. Reconstructing male-authored texts in memory, female authors produced space for their own public authority, even as male authors used the same textual tradition and memory arts to delineate women’s possibilities for acceptable action. Both male and female authors recombined textual shards into unique mosaics, restructuring memory networks in order to define individual and communal identities in relation to gender.
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