Transformations of Memory and Forgetting in Sixteenth-Century France: Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, Michel de Montaigne

By Nicolas Russell

This book proposes that in a number of French Renaissance texts, produced in varying contexts and genres, we observe a shift in thinking about memory and forgetting. Focusing on a corpus of texts by Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, and Michel de Montaigne, it explores several parallel transformations of and challenges to traditional discourses on the human faculty of memory.

Throughout Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages, a number of influential authors described memory as a powerful tool used to engage important human concerns such as spirituality, knowledge, politics, and ethics. This tradition had great esteem for memory and made great efforts to cultivate it in their pedagogical programs. In the early sixteenth century, this attitude toward memory started to be widely questioned. The invention of the printing press and the early stages of the scientific revolution changed the intellectual landscape in ways that would make memory less important in intellectual endeavors. Sixteenth-century writers began to question the reliability and stability of memory. They became wary of this mental faculty, which they portrayed as stubbornly independent, mysterious, unruly, and uncontrollable–an attitude that became the norm in modern Western thought as is illustrated by the works of Descartes, Locke, Freud, Proust, Foucault, and Nora, for example.

Writing in this new intellectual landscape, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, and Montaigne describe memory not as a powerful tool of the intellect but rather as an uncontrollable mental faculty that mirrored the uncertainty of human life. Their characterization of memory emerges from an engagement with a number of traditional ideas about memory. Notwithstanding the great many differences in concerns of these writers and in the nature of their texts, they react against or transform their classical and medieval models in similar ways. They focus on memory’s unruly side, the ways that memory functions independently of the will. They associate memory with the fluctuations of the body (the organic soul) rather than the stability of the mind (the intellectual soul). In their descriptions of memory, these authors both reflect and contribute to a modern understanding of and attitude towards this mental faculty.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781644531341

Book preview

Transformations of

Memory and Forgetting

in Sixteenth-Century France

Transformations of

Memory and Forgetting

in Sixteenth-Century France

Marguerite de Navarre,

Pierre de Ronsard, Michel de Montaigne

NICOLAS RUSSELL

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

University of Delaware Press

© 2011 by Nicolas Russell

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-133-4 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-134-1 (ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Russell, Nicolas, 1970–

Transformations of memory and forgetting in sixteenth-century France : Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, Michel de Montaigne / Nicolas Russell.

            p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. French literature—16th century—History and criticism. 2. Memory in literature. 3. Marguerite, Queen, consort of Henry II, King of Navarre, 1492–1549—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Ronsard, Pierre de, 1524–1585—Criticism and interpretation.

5. Montaigne, Michel de, 1533–1592—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PQ239.R87 2011

840.9'353—dc22

2011003493

Acknowledgments

Research for this book was made possible by a fellowship from the University of Virginia, where the project originated in conversations with Hope Glidden, George Hoffmann, John Lyons, and Mary McKinley. Their intellectual engagement with early modern France has continued to serve as a model for me through the years. I would like to thank them all for their guidance, and especially Mary McKinley who worked most closely with me in the project’s early stages. With her characteristic care and good will, she filled the margins of countless drafts with detailed comments and suggestions. Early on, the project also greatly benefited from the insights and challenging questions of John Lyons, who read the chapters as they were taking shape. At a later stage Gary Ferguson and Daniel Russell read the entire manuscript and gave me invaluable suggestions for revision.

I would also like to thank the many friends and colleagues who contributed to the project in other ways. Richard Cooper and Janie Vanpée offered guidance and excellent advice at crucial junctures. Many friends and colleagues including Charles Guérin, Marcus Keller, Reinier Leushuis, and Helene Visentin provided vital encouragement and intellectual exchange as the manuscript took shape and evolved. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Fabienne Bullot, for her patience and support throughout this project, on which I have been working ever since she met me.

D’un seiziémiste à un autre

Introduction

Memory is a central component of human experience that has often shaped the way we think about the world and ourselves. Recent theories of the unconscious, collective memory, historiography, traumatic experiences, and commemoration reveal our interest in how memory defines us as individuals and as societies. But like our conception of humanity and our understanding of the relationship between humanity and the world, the concept of memory has changed through the ages. This book proposes that a number of French Renaissance texts, produced in varying contexts and genres, demonstrate a shift in thinking about memory and forgetting, transforming and challenging traditional discourses on the human faculty of memory.

Throughout Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages, a number of influential authors (Hesiod, Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas) described memory as a powerful tool used to engage in a range of important human concerns such as spirituality, knowledge, politics, and ethics. This tradition esteemed memory and cultivated it using elaborate techniques. By the early sixteenth century, this attitude began to be widely questioned. Humanists such as Erasmus and Melanchthon criticized medieval pedagogy and its reliance on systems of artificial memory. The invention of the printing press and the early stages of the scientific revolution were also changing the intellectual landscape in ways that would make memory less important in intellectual endeavors. Sixteenth-century writers also questioned the reliability and stability of memory, which they portrayed as stubbornly independent, mysterious, unruly, and uncontrollable, an attitude that became the norm in modern Western thought, as shown in the works of Descartes, Locke, Freud, Proust, Foucault, and Nora, for example.

This study focuses on three authors who participated in the reworking of traditional ideas, attitudes, and discourses related to memory and forgetting in sixteenth-century France. Writing in this new intellectual landscape, Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, and Michel de Montaigne describe memory not as a powerful tool of the intellect but rather as an uncontrollable mental faculty that mirrors the uncertainty of human life. In a variety of genres, these writers explore the role of memory and forgetting in a wide range of human concerns, including spirituality, self-knowledge, fame, ethics, death, and consciousness. In spite of the many differences in the concerns of these writers and in the nature of their texts, they react against or transform their classical and medieval models in similar ways. They focus on memory’s unruly side, the ways that memory functions independently of the will. They associate memory with the fluctuations of the body (the organic soul) rather than the stability of the mind (the intellectual soul). Their explorations both reflect and contribute to a modern understanding of this mental faculty. Each chapter of this study focuses on a group of texts written by one of these three authors and traces their new attitudes toward memory and the mind.

From the beginning of the Western tradition, memory played an important role in conceptions of knowledge and literature. It was central to the role of seers, prophets, and poets in the Homeric and pre-Homeric periods.¹ Poets, it was thought, had a magical/religious power that gave them knowledge of the past, present, and future. They accessed this knowledge through a special kind of inspired memory,² and their speech perpetuated the memory of the gods and the virtuous acts of the living. In other words, poets used a divinely inspired memory to acquire the knowledge necessary to produce their poems; the poems then served as a storage device for the knowledge that the poets had recovered, thus creating a communal memory (Détienne, 24) thai in practice preserved not only the memory of the gods but also the useful knowledge and past experience of the culture.³ Thus poetry served as an encyclopedic memory of Archaic Greek knowledge relating to spiritual, ethical, and practical concerns.

Archaic Greek society expressed this close relationship between memory, truth, and immortality in its mythology and in its language. According to Greek mythology, the poet was the interpreter of Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses and the goddess of memory.⁴ Mnēmosunē (the archaic Greek word for memory) represented praise and life and lēthē(the word for forgetting) represented blame and death. These symbolic links developed in a symbiotic relationship with the warrior culture of Archaic Greece, which associated victory with praise and life and defeat with blame and death. The word alētheia, which signified both memory and truth, also demonstrates this symbolic relationship. The Muses, daughters of memory, proclaimed alētheia, the truth about the past. The proclamation of this truth served to preserve it and so was considered a kind of memory. Not only did lēthē, the antonym of the word alētheia, mean silence and forgetting,⁵ but Lethe is also the name of the river from which the dead drink in order to forget their past life. Thus both through its mythology and its vocabulary, Greek culture created a complex web of meaning that associated memory, life, and truth to the point where these concepts became inseparable.

The close relationship between memory and truth in Archaic Greece (776–479 BCE) reflects the fact that this was an oral culture. Such nonliterate societies store their knowledge entirely in the memories of their members, and consequently this knowledge takes the shape of what is memorable.⁶ As a result, knowledge in oral cultures is formulaic, simple, concrete, and nonanalytic. Studies have shown that this is the case in both ancient and modern oral cultures in many different parts of the world.⁷ The earliest written texts in Archaic Greece appeared between 700 and 650 BCE;⁸ however, writing did not immediately become a widely used technology. Because it was not a skill practiced by the majority of the population, it did not alter the oral nature of the culture (Havelock, 117). It was not until the end of the fifth century BCE that Greek culture shifted from a mostly nonliterate/oral culture, in which it was the exception rather than the rule to learn how to read and write, to a culture where learning to read was widespread (Havelock, 39ff.), and that more complex and abstract modes of thought became possible.⁹ It was in this new cultural framework that Plato attacked the epic poetry that was so central to the preservation of preliterate Greek culture. Epic poetry preserved useful knowledge and the past experience of the community, but Plato found this kind of knowledge to be nonlogical and nonreflexive. According to Plato, poetry presents only an imitation of reality, not reality itself, and imitation does not present the true nature of the object it represents (Republic 595a–598a). Since poetry cannot offer the truth about reality, it is not an acceptable source of knowledge (Republic 606e–607a). In place of this Homeric system of cultural memory, Plato proposed reasoned calculation.¹⁰

He rejected the Archaic Greek system of knowledge, which was entirely dependent on and shaped by memory, in favor of a system of knowledge structured by analysis and reason. Yet in his theory of knowledge as recollection he describes this very different type of knowledge as a kind of memory as well.¹¹ Plato’s epistemology takes into account the Pythagorean notion that the soul is immortal and that humans go through perpetual cycles of life, death, and reincarnation.¹² At birth, the soul forgets the divine knowledge it had possessed and only slowly remembers it through the process of human learning (recollection). Thus while Plato rejected an oral system of culture based on memory, he nonetheless claimed that memory is essential in seeking out knowledge: like the divinely inspired poet of the Archaic Greek period, Plato’s philosopher relies on a special kind of memory.

Aristotle rejected Plato’s theory of recollection, but he too gave an important place to memory. Aristotle described memories as images in the mind, images that were representations of the things remembered or of something related to the thing being remembered.¹³ It is clear that we must conceive that which is generated through sense-perception in the soul, and in the part of the body which is its seat,—viz. that affection the state whereof we call memory—to be some such thing as a picture (Aristotle, On Memory 450a.27–31). Aristotle claimed that images were necessary for all types of thinking (On Memory 450a.1): memory provided the raw material that human thought needed to function (Sorabji, 6). His account of memory as a kind of image relates closely to another ancient tradition involving memory, the tradition of artificial memory systems.

Even though Classical Greece was in the process of becoming a literate culture, important aspects of the society were still essentially oral and relied heavily on memory. The practice of dialectical reasoning, which took the form of a debate, is an example. A powerful memory was a useful tool for these complex oral exchanges. Accordingly, this culture developed systems of artificial memory (that is to say, techniques used to train and strengthen memory) to be used in various kinds of dialectical or rhetorical practices. Aristotle mentions systems of artificial memory (or mnemonic systems) several times and recommends their use explicitly for dialectical debate (Sorabji, 22–34). The mnemonic systems developed during this period enabled people to perform acts of memory that seem unimaginable to modern Western societies, which rely heavily on print media, and more recently on computers, for the preservation of information. There are stories of individuals, for example, who used artificial memory systems to memorize and dictate several different letters to scribes at the same time or to learn the text of entire books by heart.¹⁴

The best known type of mnemonic system both in Classical Antiquity and in the Middle Ages was what Mary Carruthers calls the architectural mnemonic, which consisted of representing the things one wanted to remember on imaginary surfaces, such as the walls of an imagined building. Each bit of information had its own place in a highly structured system, which could be compared to a mental filing system.¹⁵ Legend has it that the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–468 BCE) discovered this mnemonic system almost by accident.¹⁶ He was attending a banquet during which he was called outside. After he had left the banquet hall, it collapsed on all of the guests, crushing them so badly that they could no longer be recognized. Nonetheless, Simonides successfully identified each individual by recalling a mental image of the location where each person was seated during the banquet. Due to this experience, he realized the importance that space and images play in the process of remembering and used this realization to create an artificial system of images and places that could greatly increase the effectiveness of memory. As Cicero explains, [Simonides] inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty [memory] must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves (De oratore 2.354). Aristotle’s students did use the art of memory in their practice of dialectical reasoning, but the earliest extant descriptions of mnemonic systems appear in three rhetorical treatises from Roman Antiquity: Cicero’s De oratore, the anonymous Ad herennium, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (Frances Yates, 2–6). The system enabled orators to deliver long speeches from memory. It was treated in arts of rhetoric under the rubric of memoria, one of the five parts of the art of rhetoric.

Augustine, himself a rhetorician and philosopher, synthesized several of these Greek and Roman conceptual systems dealing with memory. He gives a famous treatment of memory in book 10 of his Confessions, which is part of a meditation on humanity’s knowledge of God. Augustine wonders how it is that he knows God, and finds that God is in his memory: Since, then, I came to know you, you have remained in my memory, and when I recall you and take pleasure in you, I find you there (Confessions 10.24). In claiming that the Christian gains access to a divine realm of existence through memory, and thus associating memory, metaphysics, and knowledge, his treatment of memory recalls Plato’s theory of recollection. Augustine also adopts Aristotle’s notion of the imprinted image as the medium for memory and, like Aristotle, gives a very detailed description of the various ways of remembering and of the various things that could be remembered. This account had a particularly strong influence on later generations in Europe because he developed it within a Christian worldview and because he described memory as a central component in the Christian’s relationship to God.¹⁷

Augustine’s training as a rhetorician made him familiar with the rhetorical arts of memory; rhetoricians used memory systems to manipulate and arrange ideas, as tools to produce texts. This method of composition also found its way into monastic practice in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. During this period, Christian monasticism practiced meditation that used mnemonic systems to create spiritual texts, combining memoria and invention,¹⁸ keeping mnemonic systems alive by adapting them to its own purposes. The Classical descriptions of these systems were not generally known in the Middle Ages until Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas wrote commentaries on Cicero’s De oratore and the anonymous Ad herennium in the thirteenth century. (They believed that Cicero had written both of these works.)¹⁹ Albertus and Thomas re-explained the art of memory in the context of ethics.²⁰ For these two theologians, the art of memory provided a powerful tool for organizing and retrieving the information necessary for making ethical decisions. They believed that in order to act ethically, individuals needed a strong memory to retain and retrieve knowledge of good and bad or alternatively to remember instances of exemplary behavior that they could use as models for their own behavior. Mnemonic systems that strengthened memory were also thought to strengthen moral character.²¹ In medieval European culture, memory continued to play an important role in poetry, as it had in Homeric and pre-Homeric Greece, and it also played a central role in the day-to-day life of medieval communities.²² Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas’s interest in the art of memory only hints at the extent to which memory served as a central component of medieval culture.

In the Renaissance, the art of memory went through another transformation, when hermetic philosophers applied it to their interest in arcane knowledge. Following in the tradition of Ramon Lull, figures such as Giulio Camillo and Giordano Bruno explored the possibility of acquiring encyclopedic knowledge through mnemonic systems. They believed that it was possible to structure categories of knowledge using an architectural memory system in such a way that the structure and essence of the universe would be revealed, granting them access to the secrets of the universe.²³ These uses of memory systems often go beyond the limits of human psychology and into the physical and metaphysical realm. Giulio Camillo built a memory theater, which was an actual architectural structure, not just an imagined edifice. Built of wood, it was big enough for at least two people to enter it at the same time. The interior panels presented painted mnemonic images to the viewer, and in these panels were drawers containing papers that gave the viewer unlimited knowledge about the world. Camillo’s system differed from the classical and medieval arts of memory not only in its focus but also in the way that it functioned. It shifted the content of memory from the mind into the theater itself, and the secret workings of the theater were not primarily psychological but magical. The theater derived its power in large part from astrological forces.²⁴ While Cicero and Aquinas had focused on the ways that mnemonic systems could hone and strengthen the mind’s natural ability to remember, Camillo used this art to harness the supernatural powers of the cosmos.

Hermetic memory systems transformed the art of memory in the Renaissance. However, the memory systems developed by Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus continued to be used in the scholastic tradition throughout the Renaissance. In the 1570s, for example, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci learned to use memory systems in Jesuit colleges in Italy and then used them actively in his work in China. Printers published numerous books describing memory systems throughout the sixteenth century.²⁵ However, enthusiasm for memory systems during this period was not universal. A good number of humanists rejected the use of mnemonic systems, seeing them as products of the Scholastics’ overly complex logic. Erasmus thought that memory was very important but believed that it was better simply to study material with great care and in an orderly way rather than using mnemonic systems. He especially opposed magical mnemonic systems such as Camillo’s.²⁶ Henry Cornelius Agrippa also gave a harsh critique of memory systems in his De vanitate scientiarum, book 10. Agrippa claimed that mnemonic systems provided a vacuous knowledge and that the monstrous images contained in these systems could drive some mad.²⁷ Rabelais’s satire of scholastic education in Gargantua (chap. 14) attacked the use of memorization in scholastic pedagogy as well, though he did not explicitly mention mnemonic systems. The humanists critiqued memory systems in part because they disliked medieval systems of thought in general, but these critiques were also made possible by a significant change in the way that information was preserved and exchanged in this period. The printing press increased the availability of books, decreasing dependence on human memory for the preservation of information.²⁸ Despite the enthusiasm that certain groups still had for the mental faculty of memory, it slowly lost its place as the cornerstone of thought and culture.

Mary Carruthers demonstrates the great difference between modern and medieval attitudes toward memory by comparing contemporary descriptions of two geniuses, Thomas Aquinas and Albert Einstein, intellectuals whom she considers emblematic of the intellectual activity in their period. Both men are described as original, prolific thinkers who have great powers of concentration and a deep understanding of their subject. However, the descriptions differ in their explanations of the mental faculties that gave these men their great genius. The description of Aquinas praises his incredible memory, whereas the description of Einstein praises his great imagination.²⁹ Einstein’s contemporaries no longer thought of memory as one of the primary tools of the intellect. By this time, it was thought to play at best a supporting role in humanity’s intellectual endeavors. It was during the early modern period that this shift in thinking about mental faculties took place.

The shift becomes dramatically apparent when we look at Descartes’ attitude toward memory. For Descartes, it is reason and clear perception that guide the mind and preserve it from error, not memory. In contrast with Augustine, Descartes finds God through reason, not memory. Descartes thought of memory as a weak mental faculty, to which the mind should give as small a role as possible.³⁰ He claimed that memory is incapable of preserving the certainty of truths found by reason and clear perception and that it leads the mind into error by preserving preconceived opinions that the mind had never established as true.³¹

This new attitude toward memory had a lasting impact on Western thought about the mind. The mental faculty of memory ceased to be considered as a powerful tool in public life, philosophy, and spirituality. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, psychology and historiography helped reintroduce memory as a key element in the understanding of the human condition, but these disciplines presented memory as a mysterious aspect of the mind that we must attempt to understand rather than as a mental faculty that humanity could use to gain greater understanding of the world.

This book analyzes some of the first texts that led to this change in thinking about the mind in the early modern period. Various theories and uses of memory served as a point of departure for these new views, and the texts studied in this book are in dialogue with many classical and medieval ideas about memory. Greek mythology, neoplatonism, artificial memory systems, and other ancient and medieval conceptions of memory play an integral role in the arguments of this study. Modern theoretical distinctions between collective memory and personal memory and among three types of personal memory (procedural, semantic, and episodic) also help reveal and articulate some of the subtleties in the evolving attitudes toward memory in the sixteenth century.

The term collective memory comes from the work of the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s and 1930s. Halbwachs contended that the social interaction between members of a group creates a common set of memories and that this collective memory has a direct effect on the nature of personal memory.³² There was no word for collective memory in sixteenth-century French, but the idea that groups shared certain memories, either through common experience or through written and oral communication, did exist. Sixteenth-century French texts do not make a clear lexical distinction between personal memory and shared memory. They often