"Remenants" of Things Past: Memory and the "Knight's Tale."

Description: Argues that "two medieval methods of memorializing" are in tension in KnT: "celebration" of chivalric loss, and Boethian remembrance. Theseus's admonitions to remember Arcite "leave little room" for "healthy" mourning and reveal the limits of Theseus's and the Knight's outlooks. Boethian memory, especially as presented in Nicholas Trevet's commentary on the "Consolation" (and in Bo), enfigured in the imagery of the tale (especially the temples), insists upon the need for memory to be "modeled imaginatively" in artful mnemonics, although eventually extinguished from "the minds of the living," a second death.

Chaucer Subjects: Knight and His Tale
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Boece