According to Paul Zumthor, the Middle Ages occupies a specific position in our collective memory since this period provides the most obvious term of comparison for readers from the end of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. Modern medievalism grew in Europe and the United States precisely at this time, when western societies began to feel the uncertainty of the future and the distance of the medieval past. According to Pierre Nora, since the seventies and eighties “our present time [has been] promoted and doomed to memory, that is fetishism of traces, of historian obsession, of patrimonial capitalization [. . .] Everything [has] become historical, deserves to be remembered, and to be kept in memory.” Are these two phenomena – memory and medievalism – connected? Memory (Latin memoria, Greek mnēmē) may be defined as the faculty to preserve and evoke representations of past and absent things – facts or states of mind – and bring them to the present: to presentify and actualize them; or, to put it briefly, to keep information in mind and recall it. Still, memory, as conceptual “crossroads,” belongs to multiple fields and possesses multiple applications: in biology (heredity, neurophysiology), history and psychology, social sciences and humanities, modern technology (computers). Throughout the twentieth and the twenty-first century, the concept has expanded by analogy and metaphor. As Pierre Nora has remarked, it is not possible to reduce memory to a mere opposition to oblivion or to a shared experience. Memory is best understood in conceptual pairings: present and past, present and future, faculty and result, spontaneity and will, private and public, remembering and forgetting, praise and criticism, oral and written. Memory is both a faculty and a result; it is a synonym of remembrance, like vestige, remnant, trace, or remanence. More precisely, it is usually conceived, after Aristotle, either as mnēmē – a spontaneous remembrance, close to an affection (Ricœur) – or anamnesis, that is the result of a voluntary effort to recall. Nevertheless, these related concepts are not antonyms; they are to be understood in a dialectics with forgetting. Memory is also made of oblivion because it is sometimes discontinuous, as the fortune of texts, writers, or motives reveals: their history is made of disappearances. Besides, memory is torn between preservation of the past and creation of an image, always risking that the latter will become a delusion. Since memory, both individual and collective, is not inherited, but is the result of a construction, one may try and define the nature of the relation between memory and medievalism: is memory a staple of history and medievalism, or is it a construction? Can we indeed “remember” the Middle Ages, and if so, what Middle Ages do we “remember” since we cannot rely on a personal and direct experience of the Middle Ages? The issue is particularly acute in literature and the arts, which offer a form to express memory: since medievalism is forced to rely on images, which are the mode of appearance of the “representation of the past,” what is it but a form that is another (further) mediation? What is the limit between image and imagination, and where does invention, or fiction, begin? En ligne sur HAL : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-03119342

Anne-Marie Thiesse testified that in letters, the echo of the "epic coming from the bottom of the centuries" is constantly heard. According to her, songs collected by Macpherson with the passion of the storyteller, are the substrates upon which the creation of literature transforms the great codes of different ethnicities into transcendental codes. This kind of search for the resurrection of epic ash in the letters could not carry the different ethnic and cultural feelings of the people, unless they were linked to the sign of their origin, i.e. by searching for the predecessors of a group who believes in some common values and cultivates them from generation to generation. These ancestors may be different: family members, a religious community, an ethnic community, or members of a religious community that unites the right and memories, or a cultural community, that unite some common symbols. In terms of the resurrection of "epic grace letter," they constitute a social category distinct from other categories by the language, customs, myths, religion, etc. The myths in which they believe constitute the way how they treat themselves througout history. Our paper aims to discuss this relationship between the myth and literature and the memory for common values, which at some point appear as an essence in artistic works. The scope is to analyze the report that memory has with myths and the way how both affect literature. The paper tries to study a complex relationship between letters and myths, applying it to a pattern: The Medieval Literature.

The crucial question we are facing today in the Humanities pertains to the issue of how we engage with the past and how we converse with literary or philosophical voices from the Middle Ages, for instance, and recover their relevance for us today. This paper examines the meaning of cultural history at first and then turns to two major voices from the past to illustrate the central concern, first the late antique philosopher Boethius (d. 525), then Wolfram von Eschenbach (active ca. 1200-1220). Both endeavored to explore the meaning of human life and offered intriguing perspectives that appear to have timeless value. Whereas Boethius investigated the issue of how the individual can productively face or dismiss mis/fortune and thereby gain an understanding of the true meaning of happiness, Wolfram outlined in his Grail romance Parzival how the human individual must forge his/her path through life in order to discover the true goal of one's self. While the future is waiting for us, we can prepare ourselves by listening to those past voices as guides through all existence.

This article was a different kind of recovery of memory as related to the epistemology of love in medieval romance, specifically, in the psychology of Chrétien's famous interior monologues.

This dissertation argues that by pioneering new ways of constructing and reading literary character, writers of twelfth- to fourteenth-century romance also claimed a new authority for vernacular fiction. Through readings of several key medieval texts, the dissertation not only illuminates character as an underestimated critical tool used by medieval writers in but also intervenes in the ongoing scholarly discussion of medieval authorship. It begins with Le Roman d'Enéas, a twelfth-century adaptation of Virgil's Aeneid that, by revising tensions in the characters of the Latin royal court, familiarizes the epic for a courtly audience and posits its writer as an authoritative interpreter of the Aeneid. Next, medieval concepts of memory and contemporary serial narrative theory are used to argue that Chrétien de Troyes, inventor of French Arthurian romance, creates a model of character that requires audiences to read his romances as a corpus and thus establishes himself as the au...