VIOLENCIA ESCOLAR ENTRE PARES I DEBER Y VALORES

The increasingly religious inflection of Augustine’s memorial system is apparent through terms such as ‘sanctuary’, whilst in this presentation it is God who dictates the terms of his ‘place’ in Augustine’s memory. Augustine adds a complicating factor a few paragraphs later however: ‘Why do I ask in which area of my memory you dwell, as if there really are places there? Surely my memory is where you dwell, because I remember you since first I learnt of you, and I find you there when I think about you’ (Augustine, Confessions, X.25).Although on one reading this is merely Augustine

acknowledging the memorial loci as tools and devices rather than physical things, this quotation also undercuts the idea of God’s sanctuary in the memory, through the demotion of notions of place. The power balance also seems to have shifted somewhat towards Augustine; it is he who finds God when he thinks about Him: Augustine seems to be the active agent. This aspect evokes the rhetorical tradition with its emphasis upon the agency of the rememberer: the artificial memory system can be toured at the discretion of the person remembering, albeit subject to rules of order and place. More generally this focus upon human role and agency is developed in subsequent disparate Medieval memory texts such as Pearl (c. fourteenth century) and The House of Fame (c. 1380), both of which rely upon an active role for the dreamer and rememberer, and indeed in the York Mystery Cycle, the performance of which at discrete places around York meant that the performances could be viewed from multiple perspectives or spatial locations subject to the viewer’s discretion and agency.

Indeed, this flexibility of the memory is apparent in other aspects of Augustine’s memorial system. Augustine, for instance, inverts the classical artificial memory rules for forming images by focusing upon darkness in contradiction of the explicit rules of the classical artificial memory systems that memory images must be well lit:

But who can say how images are created, even though it may be clear by which senses they are grasped and stored within. For even when I am in darkness and silence, in my memory I can produce colours at will, and distinguish between white and black and between whatever other colours I wish. Sounds do not invade and disturb my consideration of what my eyes absorb, even though they are present and as it were hide in an independent storehouse. (Confessions, X.8)

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The image presented is at first orderly: neither the sounds nor images of colours intrude or interrupt. Sounds however also ‘hide’. The device of composition at night is also recommended by Martianus Capella, a late classical teacher of rhetoric in the De Nuptiis (c. 470 CE) and Augustine’s association of memory and nocturnal spaces was to evolve into medieval narratives of dream memory, an aspect of medieval memory also contributed to by Boethius’s memorial visions.106 _{However, the creation of}

well-lit and ordered mental images in a context of ‘darkness and silence’ is potentially problematic and stands in opposition to the repeated insistence in Cicero and other seminal authors on both the primacy of vision and proper illumination of the mental images. The potential perils of creation by night are apparent in other and later memorial treatises. Albertus Magnus for example remarks:

Those wishing to reminisce […] withdraw from the public light into obscure privacy: because in the public light the images of sensible things (sensibilia) are scattered and their movement is confused. In obscurity, however, they are unified and are moved in order. This is why Tullius in the ars memorandi which he gives in the Second Rhetoric prescribes that we should imagine and seek out dark places having little light. And because reminiscence requires many images, not one, he prescribes that we should figure to ourselves through many similtudes, and unite in figures, that which we wish to retain and remember (reminisci). For example, if we wish to record what is brought against us in a law-suit, we should imagine some ram, with huge horns and testicles, coming towards us in the darkness. The horns will bring to memory our adversaries, and the testicles the dispositions of the

witnesses107

The rules regarding images being well-lit have been inverted and scrambled in Magnus’s account, so that he incorrectly suggests that Cicero encourages darkness. Although no explicit mention is made to this as a nocturnal composition, the isolation and darkness emphasised by Augustine recur.

Furthermore, as Yates notes, Magnus gave this rule in its correct form elsewhere (in the De Bono, c.

106 For a further analysis of ecclesiastical memorial composition at night see Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 195–202.

107 Albertus Magnus, De Bono in Opera Omnia, ed. by A. Borgent and E. Borgnet (Paris:Vivès, 1890–99), IX. pp. 97 ff;cited in Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 68.

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1450).108 _{This indicates either a failure of Magnus’ memory or an adaptation, perhaps for composition}

by night. Both dream-focused accounts of memory and their potential instabilities recur in a medieval context.

Another influence of Augustine upon later memorial works was the frequency of invoking memorial cities. Augustine often alludes to Carthage as a mental image, and once again the

interconnection of rhetorical and Neoplatonic approaches to memory is evident here. He remarks ‘[...] for the image of an object to be impressed upon the memory, it is first necessary for the object itself to be present, so that an impression of the image becomes possible? That is how I remember Carthage’ (Augustine, Confessions, X.16). Carthage is at once a memorial place but also draws upon the standard Platonic image of the impression made upon the wax tablet of the mind. Medieval memorial authors also share the Augustinian conflation of a memorial city and spatial place and an impression on a wax tablet, akin to writing. Later memorial accounts, as will be seen, combine memory-as-text and memory-as-architecture, treating memorial locations in terms of literary language and providing a welter of textual references for their memorial architecture. This is in part due to Biblical precedents. The discussion of New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelations informed later memorial cities (such as

in Pearl) and served as both textual and visual model; a vivid and memorable visual account preserved

in authoritative text.

Augustine’s comments on memory are interrelated with the nuanced and expansive discussion of time undertaken in Book XI. The relationship of time and memory is of course a perennial one, and Augustine’s writings profoundly influenced medieval thought on the relationship between the two. As Augustine notes, time seems to function as a measure of change in an external world — if nothing passes away or arrives then stasis is attained:

What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. But I confidently affirm myself to know that if nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no future time. Take the two tenses, past and future. How can they ‘be’ when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present

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were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would not be time but eternity. (Confessions, XI.14)

Memory requires recognising and ordering a chronological sequence, whilst also subverting it; a memory of the past requires making that memory with its concomitant sense of pastness

immediately present. This complexity is apparent in almost all of the texts considered in this chapter, particularly Noah (c. 1376), which is to be analysed next. Augustine is ultimately unable to resolve his conundrum. This is perhaps linked to the duality of Augustine’s Neoplatonic and rhetorical approaches to memory. The Neoplatonic method deals with eternal truths whilst the latter conceptualisation is more concerned with temporal existence and memories rooted in an external, spatial world. Later authors were to inherit however his central concern with the relationship of time and memory. The dreams and visions of medieval literature exemplify this complex relationship. Dreams were used both to enunciate Biblical accounts conceptualised as eternal truths and for secular purposes of

remembering. In both treatments, however, memory-as-text and memory-as-image are interrelated and both secular and religious memorial dreams deal with the relationship of time and memory in the ambiguous space of the dream. In both religious and secular accounts the dream as a Neoplatonic interior space and the dream as something rooted in temporal existence also occur, often within the same texts and with unusual results.

Notably, both The Consolation and Confessions contain elegiac qualities. Confessions laments a misspent youth, whilst Boethius writes The Consolation whilst imprisoned on what he maintains were spurious charges. Although both texts ultimately resolve these issues and move into a state of acceptance, the relationship between elegy and memory is a perennial one. This is particularly apparent in the literature of medieval England which bequeathed to early modern memory texts some of their often elegiac qualities. Through a consideration of the adaptation of memory in the Medieval context, the subsequent changes of memory in early modern England become more apparent. This is exemplified in the Chester Cycle play Noah. Despite the consideration above of issues of interiority and its relationship to exteriority in The Consolation and Confessions, Noah’s role as a dramatic presentation staged in a particular setting more clearly illustrates these issues and exemplifies the relationship between elegy and theatre, an association that will be explored further in the final chapter.

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Just as Confessions engages with the link between time, eternity and memory, so too does Noah. The exposition of eternal truths in accessible and subjective form was a key concern of Cycle plays more widely, whilst their status as parts of a cycle limited them to individual incompleteness. As David Mills notes: ‘In Tudor Chester, where there was already an impulse to locate the plays themselves within a particular point in the city’s past, the relationship of the present to the past becomes a major theme in the cycle. The past becomes the context which explains the present’.109 _{In analysing only one}

play this complex and fragmented treatment of time is particularly apparent. The selection of the biblical events and stories that became cycle plays is particularly interesting, comprising a seemingly random mixture of Old Testament and New Testament occurrences. As Pamela King observes however: ‘The arrangement is eccentric only if one comes to the cycle expecting a smooth biblical narrative; in fact something else altogether is going on’.110 _{The ‘something else,’ as King convincingly}

demonstrates, is a selection principle focused upon the patterns of weekly ecclesiastical bible reading in English churches and the feasts of Christmas and Easter.111 _{In this respect Noah as a microcosm of}

the entire sequence serves to remember not just the biblical account but also the ecclesiastical calendar. Central to Noah are both memory and, more specifically, a layering of memories.

The central theological motif is a memorial one: the play culminates with the appearance of the rainbow as a visual sign that God will remember his pledge not to repeat the devastation:

GOD: Here I behet thee an hest, That man, woman, fowl ne beast With water, while this world shall last, I will no more spill.

My bow between you and me In the firmament shall be,

By verray token that you may see [...].112

In this respect Noah also contains traces of both Boethius’s and Augustine’s overcoming of sadness

109 David Mills, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and its Whitsun Plays (London: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 153.

110 Pamela King, ‘York Mystery Plays’, in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c. 1350– 1500, ed. by Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 491–507 (p. 496).

111 Pamela King, ‘York Mystery Plays’, pp. 496–98.

112 Anon, Noah, in Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, ed. by Arthur F. Kinney, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 352–57.

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and of eulogy. Although the message of the rainbow is a positive one, it is predicated on a memory of human sinfulness. God also advises Noah over the course of his one hundred and twenty year project that his food preparation ‘For that no way be forgotten’. However, the interrelationship of time, space and memory become most apparent when the Ark itself is considered.

The loading of the ark runs to over thirty lines of dialogue and lists lions, oxen, sheep, rats, herons swans and apes amongst many other species. The stage description reads: ‘Then Noah shall go into the ark with all his family, his wife excepted, and the ark must be boarded round about. And on the boards all the beasts and fowls hereafter rehearsed must be painted, so that their words may agree with the pictures’.113 _{The painted boards are particularly suggestive; the list of creatures has been}

‘fixed’ to the memory with vivid visual imagery. Chester spectators were pre-conditioned to consider spatial factors in the memorialising — the Cycle plays were performed at numerous different locations in the town. Arthur Kinney pictures ‘[...] separate pageant wagons proceeding, one after another, through the town streets, stopping at fixed stations where the crowds stood or sat, waiting as the procession stopped to put on a show, allowing the whole of human history to unfold before them’.114

However, King also usefully highlights the agency of the viewers of the production, noting that the audience were free to follow particular wagons, skip productions and move forward and backward in the temporal sequence by physical movement.115 _{In this sense internal memorisation, external}

spectacle and the movement through ordered memorial places drawn from the outside world typical of the architectural memory systems are all apparent. Indeed, exactly this potential link between artificial memory systems and the Cycle plays has been productively suggested by Nicholas Davis.116 _This

interrelationship of the internal and external is important in that it prevents any easy division between the public Noah and the seemingly private literary dream texts to be discussed later.

Arks and ‘chests’ of memory (also referenced by Augustine in Confessions) became significant models for medieval ecclesiastical memory.117 _{Although arks could serve as the}

architectural plan for artificial memory systems, they also enjoyed a more localised plasticity of

113 Anon, Noah, 160.

114 Kinney, ‘Introduction to the Cycle Plays’, in Renaissance Drama, pp. 39–42 (p. 40). 115 King, ‘York Mystery Plays’, p. 499.

116 Nicholas M. Davis, ‘The English Mystery Plays and “Ciceronian” Mnemonics’, in Atti del IV Colloquio della Société for l’Etude du Théâtre Médiéval, ed. by M.Chiabo, F. Doglio and M. Maymone (Viterbo: Centro Studi sul Teatro Medioevale e Rinascimentale, 1983), pp. 1–12.

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reference with memorial ‘chests’, both in the sense of Aristotelian loci and the well-established trope of memories as precious treasure.118 _{It is in this vein that Noah’s wife refers to his ark as ‘thy chest’.}119

Theodore K. Lerud has convincingly suggested that readings of medieval religious drama must focus far more upon classical artificial memory treaties, specifically in terms of memorial image and place or backgrounds, tracing the evolution of such thought through the Wycliffite controversy over drama and image.120 _{Just as Noah serves to remember the events of the biblical account and also the}

ecclesiastical calendar, so too the ark serves a dual purpose, a focus upon order and place and temporal succession alongside the more static notions of eternity; the ark is at once indicative of Providence and eternal order but can also be put to more mutable and forward-focused memorial uses as mental image and receptacle. As with Augustine, the two tendencies occur in parallel and their occurrence in an explicitly didactic Christian play further indicates the complex relationship between Classical and Christian thought.

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To move from Noah to some of the most prominent poetic texts of the medieval period is to move from that emphasis on order, place and time, to the structural, narrative and affective role of memory and dreaming. The aspects of Augustine’s and Boethius’s memorial texts that touch upon dream and vision have already been outlined. The relationship of memory and dream reaches its fullest

development in medieval dream texts. In many respects, dream and memory function in a similar fashion. Both partake of the interrelationship of the interior and exterior, with memories stocked with images drawn from the world or modelled on the book whilst literary dream narratives similarly explore internal and external worlds and in a sense remember previous literary dreams, as will be seen. Both approaches also stand in a particularly complicated relationship to time. Memories require bringing the past to the present – that is to say, re-presenting what is past – whilst dreams often follow disordered or changing internal logics of time which can be disrupted by events in the external world. Literary dreams and memories also contain fictive aspects, an association apparent in the discussion of

118 For arks as an artificial memory system, see John A.H. Lewis, ‘History and Everlastingness in Hugh of St Victor’s Figures of Noah’s Ark’, in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 203–23.

119 Anon, Noah, 206.

120 Theodore K. Lerud, Memory, Images and the English Corpus Christi Drama (Houndmills: MacMillan, 2008).

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the classical arts of memory and which developed through medieval England and through the Reformation to have a shaping effect upon the presentation of memory on the Shakespearian stage. Memory and fiction also share a phantasmagoric quality. The memorial image is not the same thing as that which is remembered; in Cicero’s memorial building his friend Decimus is daubed with red paint to make him striking, whilst the dream image is a simulacrum of the real thing. This ambiguity may account in part for two marked characteristics of the dream vision. Firstly, religious memory dreams are almost invariably guided by a theologically astute guide. In Piers Plowman (c. 1360)the titular character guides the narrator Will in his early dreams; in Pearl,the maiden leads the narrator’s understanding and shows him New Jerusalem. Although Dante’s guide Virgil is denied admission to