Building the ideal city: Female memorial praxis in Christine de Pizan's Cite des Dames

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2003 by McCormick, Betsy

While Jody Enders and Glenda McLeod have also suggested that the Cite resembles the kind of mnemonic system that Frances Yates calls the "art of memory," there has been no detailed examination of its practice in the Cite.13 Enders further contends that Christine's mnemonic system fails as a "virtual social performance" since it should "impel" Christine and her female readers not only to "authoritative speech" but to "authoritative action" (235). However, in Christine's perception, textual and ethical performance are social performance; that is, social action is informed and prompted by individual ethics. This text creates a special mnemonic space for women that provides a system not for large-scale action in the world but for individual contemplation of personal action and personal salvation. As a result, Christine's memory city is intended for the articulation of a personal ethical memory, with its mnemonic system providing her female readers with a virtual space for their ethical praxis: "it was in trained memory that one built character, judgment, citizenship and piety" (Carruthers, Book of Memory 9). Therefore, this memory system is designed to affect the personal ethics of the female readers, which will, in turn, affect their social actions. As Christine instructs her readers, "vous soit cause ceste cite d'avoir bonnes meurs et estre vertueuses et humbles" (1032; "may this city be an occasion for you to conduct yourselves honestly and with integrity and to be all the more virtuous and humble"; 255). Christine molds the City's individual citizens by training their ethical memories, which in turn builds their character, judgment, and piety.

Artificial memory as a fundamental rhetorical tool originates in classical rhetorical theory. Such mnemotechnical systems (ars memorativa) were used either to remember concepts and ideas (memoria rerum) or, less often and arguably less usefully, for word-by-word memorization of texts (memoria verbum). The usefulness of such a system was traditionally demonstrated by the story of Simonides of Ceos, considered the inventor of artificial memory, who was able to identify the participants of a dinner party after the roof collapsed and crushed them; Simonides could remember each participant by re-creating the image of the party in his mind and "seeing" where each individual had been seated.14 In his Confessions, Augustine alludes to the "treasure house" of memory (ubi sunt thesauri innumerabilium imaginum; 10.8)15 that his mind can access. Literary metaphors for this kind of mnemonic device are commonplace in medieval texts and include images of a storehouse (thesaurus), a book of memory that can be read page by page in the mind, buildings, libraries, storerooms or cellars, birds, bees, meadows, pearls, a money pouch (sacculus), a cave or inner room, and a chest (area).16 Medieval pedagogy ensured that students were trained in these mnemonic systems to aid them in developing similar storehouses.

One such storehouse, the architectural mnemonic, follows three basic rules.17 The first step is to visualize a building, either real or imaginary, that will provide an orderly and clearly defined series of rooms or spaces-loci-where the images to be memorized will be placed.18 The loci must also be well-lighted so that they and the images placed within them may be visualized clearly, free of clutter and distraction.19 The second step is creating the agent images (imagines agentes) of the idea to be memorized. These agent images should be active rather than passive, as unusual and emotionally striking as possible, and, ideally, violent and/or bizarre because the mind retains the unusual and strange more easily than it remembers the mundane. The classic example of such an agent image, repeated with slight variations throughout the rhetorical manuals, is one a lawyer would use to remember the facts in a murder trial: a sick man lies in bed, and the accused is seated beside him holding a cup in one hand and holding on the fourth finger of the other hand a ram's testicles (testiculos). The sick man is used to remember the victim, the cup to remember the means of death (i.e., poison), and the testicles to remember that a will and the testimony of witnesses (testes) are involved. The last step is moving sequentially through the loci to remember the agent images placed there. Once the system is established, the individual can mentally walk through the series of rooms and visualize the images, seeing in the mind what has already been placed there and drawing on what is useful in any given situation. Although typically one would start at the beginning of the building or structure and work step by step through the loci, the system should be so ordered that any locus can serve as the starting point-i.e., the system may be entered from the middle or the end and then worked through either backward or forward without losing one's place in the series. Carruthers's analogy of a random-access matrix is useful here; the system is organized so that access is possible from any entry point without changing the order or placement of the information stored within. Although constructed along rigid lines, such architectural structures are designed to be as flexible and adaptable as possible in practice so that the individual may easily access and retrieve stored information as necessary for reference or guidance.