Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory by Jamie McKinstry

Abstract

Reviewed by: Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory by Jamie McKinstry Maud Burnett McInerney Jamie Mckinstry, Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2015. Pp. 289. ISBN: 978–1–84384–417–4. $99. Jamie McKinstry’s Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory promises to explore ‘the workings of the memorial faculty’ (9) in the romance genre. Romance, of course, is always in some sense about remembering the past (one could indeed say the same of narrative in general), but this book wants to think about how memory is figured within the romances as ‘a set of processes and challenges experienced by the characters and audience’ (18). In other words, McKinstry is arguing that romance expresses a characteristic self-consciousness regarding the importance of memorial practice. The book opens with an overview of medieval theories of memory, beginning with Aristotle’s Memoria and moving through medieval thinkers such as Hugh of St Victor and Thomas Aquinas, all of whom are interested not simply in the cultivation and training of memory for more or less practical purposes, but in the related questions of what memory is and how it works; interestingly, McKinstry notes that Aristotle’s emphasis on the visual structure of memory appears to be confirmed by modern neuroscience. The essential point of this chapter, however, concerns the relationship of memory to time; recollection, the memorial work, is what moves the past into [End Page 142] the present and then on to the future. I must confess, however, to being completely baffled by one of the final points in the chapter. The statement ‘order and disorder are inherently antithetical to human memorial ability, the former being much easier to negotiate than the latter’ (42–43) appears to contradict earlier statements about the essential nature of order to the construction and preservation of memory; earlier, McKinstry describes Hugh of St Victor’s construction of a memorial Ark as ‘a memorial expedition which seeks to conquer disorder or emptiness of space with order’ (32), which would seem to mean that order is anything but antithetical to human memorial ability. The rest of the book is all too often marred by such confusion. The second chapter expands upon the importance of place to memory, of geographical nodes as an essential connection to the past. A reading of Sir Orfeo grounds McKinstry’s argument about the relationship between topography and redaction, but does so somewhat precariously; certainly the romance’s transposition of its characters from a Classical to a Middle English context (via Anglo-Saxon and Celtic ‘memorial places’ [54]) operates to move the past into the present. To read the romance as ‘a literary ordering of a tale’s earlier contexts or unfamiliar spaces’ (59) and to argue that we could read other romances the same way if we were only aware of their sources, however, seems rather obvious; as Barthes insisted as long ago as 1972, ‘a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation . . . a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’ (Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image / Music / Text, trans. Stephen Heath [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, 148]). Subsequent chapters treat romances well-known (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Troilus and Criseyde, Le Morte Darthur) and less well known (Sir Gowther, Sir Degrevant, Sir Isumbras), considering memorial rituals, the function of forests and other ‘memorial landscapes,’ the storage and recuperation of memory, and failures of memory. Never, however is the centrality of memory to romance in particular addressed directly. McKinstry insists that ‘the present and the future is [sic] shaped . . . by the past in romance’ (161) without ever considering that the same could be said equally forcefully of both epic and history, genres that co-exist with romance in the medieval period. It also seems curious, given the McKinstry’s emphasis on the topographical, to find no reference at all to Pierre Nora’s ‘lieux de mémoire,’ perhaps the most influential exploration of topography and temporality in recent memory, available in English as Rethinking France: Les Lieux de M...