Ruth Evans

This essay seeks to explore the relationship between memory and history in Chaucer’s Troilus. In order to clarify some important differences between the medieval and the postmodern, the essay begins with an analysis of a scene from Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000), drawing on the work of the French cultural historian Pierre Nora. If we are now (according to Nora, obsessed with memory, vernacular writers in the later Middle Ages were concerned to intervene in the medieval tradition whereby memory is kept alive through authoritative textual tradition. I argue that Chaucer’s poem participates in the rethinking of vernacularity in terms that do not simply reproduce Criseyde (the focus of the poem’s anxious memorialization) as a figure of loss and/or textual feminine indecidability.

Key words: memory, Chaucer, Troilus, Criseyde, authority, vernacularity, history.

The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark has argued that humans have always been 'natural-born cyborgs,' that is, they have always collaborated and merged with non-biological props and aids in order to find better environments for thinking. These 'mindware' upgrades (I borrow the term 'mindware' from Clark, 2001) extend beyond the fusions of the organic and technological that posthumanist theory imagines as our future. Moreover, these external aids do not remain external to our minds; they interact with them to effect profound changes in their internal architecture. Medieval artificial memory systems provide evidence for just this kind of cognitive interaction. But because medieval people conceived of their relationship to technology in fundamentally different ways, we need also to attend to larger epistemic frameworks when we analyze historically contingent forms of mindware upgrade. What cultural history adds to our understanding of embedded cognition is not only a recognition of our cyborg past but a historicized understanding of human reality. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 64–71.

First published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Editorial matter © 1994 Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson Individual contributions © 1994 respective ...

... translation, The Second Sex, published by Alfred A. Knopf (USA) 1953 HM Parshley's translation, The Second Sex, published by Jonathan Cape (UK ... of women that they had had illegal abortions, signed inter alia by Beauvoir Bcauvoir joins the MLF: Gisele Halimi and Simone de ...

Introduction Let me begin by observing that Courtney Druzak's and Jade Godsall's very striking papers use very different disciplinary frameworks, and that while the session title Gender and Ecocriticism describes very well the focus and methodology of Druzak's paper, it is not an adequate rubric for Godsall's project, which is not in any sense ecocritical (and was not intended to be). Where both papers coincide is in their interest in queer identity and the medium of water, and in their shared understanding that Galenic humoral theory is not as straight as it seems, but has queer potential. Godsall links the humors to gender identity historically, bringing out the handy-dandy nature of the ideology of the humors that is seen in the medieval link between the Devil and the feminine through his association with water. This allows her to use medieval humoral theory and medical discourse to lever notions of queer identity that are meaningful for readers today, opening up female identity and Catherine's joining with Christ's body in the Dialogues in a completely novel way. Druzak also resists " the binaristic logic of humoral theory " (6), but, by contrast, she argues provocatively that the sea, qua water, in Shakespeare's Pericles, is our " queer, non-binary third parent " (1), and that we are all made up of water and share a kinship with all forms of water, an understanding that provides the theoretical ground for practical activism in the present, namely to protest against the practice of fracking.

How did European road travellers in the later Middle Ages find their way from one part of a country to another? from one town to another? and within unfamiliar towns and cities? How did they plan their journeys? What aids did they use for getting to their destinations? Such questions seem obvious, yet there has been very little systematic attempt by road historians to answer them. Information about this topic is hard to come by because wayfinding is a practice that of its nature is not likely to leave any traces. The aim of this paper is to survey some of the evidence for medieval wayfinding and to provide some initial answers to these questions. 1 I will draw on a number of different disciplines, including urban studies and space studies, in order to understand the cultural and cognitive aspects of medieval wayfinding practices. 2 I will argue that in the absence of the technological and material aids that we now take for granted medieval travel presumed a culture of human cooperation that is very different from that of today. This paper is also a contribution to the neglected social history of the everyday in the European premodern era. 3 Medieval wayfinding is seldom, if ever, seen as worthy of comment, either by historical travellers or by modern commentators on those travellers. 4 J. J. Jusserand, for example, in his classic study of medieval wayfarers, never refers to the subject. 5 Nor does G.