Remenants of Things Past: Memory and the Knight's Tale

Abstract

Chaucer's Knight's Tale uses medieval memory theory and the practice of mnemonics to suggest the inescapability of trauma for chivalric subjects racked by violent, compulsive remembering. The Tale explores the burdensome chivalric requirement that living knights remember their dead companions, set out by Theseus in his Boethian First Mover speech. Examining Chaucer's philosophical reworking of Boethian conceptions of memory in the Boece illuminates the poet's understanding of the function of human memory and its resonance in the opening of the Canterbury Tales. The memorial onus of this obligation, figured in both the Knight narrator's Tale and in his telling of it, marks a mournful ambivalent desire to remember lost friends and to forget traumatic memorial images of death and violence; the Knight narrator alternately expands and contracts the remnant of his Tale.