This lecture is the keynote address for the conference on Constructing Memory in Pre-modern East Central and Southeast Europe: Creation, Transformation, and Oblivion.
Some of the most amazing memory systems surviving from the Middle Ages can be found in manuscripts. That’s hardly news to medievalists, since we all consult codices regularly in search of memory constructions. But just how visible are manuscripts as memory networks in and of themselves? This lecture poses that question for a codex that illustrates the importance of perceiving manuscripts as much for what they do, as for the meanings we find in them.
Early in the ninth century, in a Flemish monastery called Saint-Amand-les-Eaux, one of the most extraordinary European manuscripts we possess began to take shape.
Before it was finished, this manuscript would construct a memory network of religious thought, history, and poetry from Cappadocia in Asia Minor, to Islamic Spain, all the way to the northern marches of Gaul and Germany. It would commemorate the influence of Eastern Mediterranean religious thought and the rhetorical finesse that assured its dominance on the Latin West. It would testify to the spread of ineffable spirituality from East to West, and it would extend this memory system to the earliest extant examples of Old French poetry and Old High German heroic poetry.
Stephen G. Nichols, a medievalist, is James M. Beall Professor Emeritus of French and Humanities, and Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He received the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography, and his The New Philology was honored by the Council of Learned Journals. He holds an honorary Docteur ès Lettres, from the University of Geneva, and was decorated Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres from the French government. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awarded him its coveted Research Prize in 2008.
In 2010, he received a Mellon Emeritus Research Fellowship, and is Principal Investigator for a research grant involving four universities in the United States and Europe awarded by the Mellon Foundation also in 2010. In 2011, he co-founded the electronic journal, Digital Philology, A Journal of Medieval Culture, jointly produced by The Milton S Eisenhower Library and the Department of German and Romance Languages and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
He chairs the Board of the Council of Library Information Resources, and Co-directs.
JHU’s Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts (www.romandelarose.org). Nichols is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy, and Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, which he also directed. His books include: The Long Shadow of Political Theology, Rethinking the Medieval Senses, L’Alterité du Moyen Age, Medievalism and the Modernist Temper; The Whole Book, The New Medievalism, and Mimesis: From Mirror to Method. A new, augmented edition of Romanesque Signs was published by the Davies Group in Spring 2011.
