Nottingham Medieval Studies

Memoria and mimesis have in common that they are modes of human understanding and symbolic representation of things and events of the world and of experience that have suffered distorted accounts of them as mechanical processes under the control of ‘memorization’and ‘imitation’, respectively. As such, intentionality and creativity in human cognition and language use have often been denied them. The essay aims to demonstrate these tendencies in particular cases, to sketch something of the history of the phenomenon, to suggest how mimesis can be seen at the root of memoria, and to argue for the creative nature of both.

What did stage costumes contribute to the allegory of Tudor theatre? We might expect an iconology based on the visual arts. The Court Revels Wardrobe accounts suggest a rather different approach. As a case history: in November 1527 the French ambassadors were shown a lavish Latin play praising Wolsey’s peace-brokering. Hall’s Chronicle, written after the English Reformation, suggests a purely political anti-imperial scenario. Wardrobe accounts show that it was in fact vigorously anti-Lutheran and pro-papal, chauvinistically using the tailors’ expertise in national and religious dress to identify undesirable sectarian trends with foreign countries, and reflecting the witch-hunt against Tyndale’s Bible.

The essay compares the final novella of Boccaccio’s Decameron - the tale of Griselda - with Petrarch’s Latin translation of the tale at the close of his letter collection, the Seniles. In considering the status of the ‘ending’ and Griselda’s relationship to it, I focus on Petrarch’s enigmatic line to Boccaccio: ‘I don’t know if I have deformed your tale or beautified it; you be the judge.’ How might we speak about the beauty of the vernacular Griselda vis-a-vis that of the Latin Griselda? And how do both versions of the tale represent their authors’ self-conscious farewells to their feminized and perhaps insufficiently beautiful texts?

From the tenth through the twelfth centuries some manuscripts containing Virgil’s poems contain the musical notation known as neumes. Thereafter such notation of Virgil apparently ceases for centuries. The neumes (and singing) may have fallen by the wayside as new practices developed of singing Latin rhythmic poems or vernacular songs based on Virgil, rather than excerpts from Virgil’s own quantitative poetry. In prefaces to the Paraclete Hymnbook Peter Abelard quotes observations by Heloise on the need for a more regular syllable count than in quantitative hymns. Virgilian reception and musical notation may have evolved together away from quantitative Latin.