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Music, Delivery, and the Rhetoric of Memory in Guillaume de Machaut's Remède de Fortune

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Abstract

Recent work on the momentous implications of mouvance and on the fluidity of genres in medieval literature has only begun to excavate the wealth of extant commentaries on the interplay during performance of rhetoric, poetry, music, dance, and drama in early cultures. Even today, Guillaume de Machaut's fourteenth-century Remède de Fortune offers compelling testimony about the generative and regenerative harmony between images and speech—themselves engendered and preserved by that most egregiously neglected rhetorical canon memoria. Long cited by poets, musicians, rhetoricians, and dramatists as crucial to their arts, mnemonics constitutes a complex epistemological framework by which to restore the lost dynamism to a literary corpus—lyric poetry—that enacted each of those arts. As the conceptual precursor to literary invention, memory collapses our current distinctions between seeing, saying, and singing, between visual, virtual, and actual performances, thus assisting us in revising our conceptions not only of performance but of genre as well.

Type
1. Writing Performance: Harmony, Silence, Noise
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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