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 ...

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