SELIM 16.indb


María Beatriz Hernández Pérez, Selim 16 (2009): 103–119ISSN: 1132–631X

HOUSING MEMORY IN THE LATE MEDIEVAL
LITERARY TRADITION: CHAUCER’S HOUSE OF FAME

Abstract
Literary renderings both in written and oral forms would be regarded during the Middle Ages as 
enactments of an individual moral and intellectual evolution linked to the eff ects of memory on the 
human soul. Augustine’s insightful depictions of the works of memory insisted on the visual quality 
of such a mental process, thus linking it to the writing and reading activities. When reviewing the 
imagery regarding this fi eld, the fi gure of memory appears related to specifi c locations or habitats for 
images and words. Of particular interest is the coincidence of such metaphors to those attributed to 
the fi gure of Fame in classical literature, developed by Chaucer as he also explored the role of memory 
in the rise of a conscious individual writing positioning. This paper proposes to analyze Chaucer’s 
“The House of Fame” in the light of Augustine’s rendition of memory. Chaucer used fame as the 
embodiment of the preservation of public name in memory, regarding its locations as repositories of 
the legendary past in late medieval collective memory. The paper presents Chaucer’s house of Fame 
as the place  om which he starts a dialogue with past literature and history and with himself and the 
reader as recipients of that common legacy. Keywords: Chaucer, The House of Fame, Oral and written 
medieval literature, Memory, Saint Augustine.

Resumen
Durante la Edad Media las composiciones literarias tanto en su forma escrita como oral se consideraban 
representaciones de la moral individual tanto como de una evolución intelectual, e iban ligadas a los 
efectos de la memoria en el alma humana. Las acertadas representaciones que San Agustín propuso 
para las obras de la memoria insisten en las cualidades visuales de esos procesos mentales, de modo 
que las actividades de la escritura y de la lectura quedan unidas. Cuando revisamos las imágenes y 
metáforas que encontramos en este campo, la fi gura de la memoria aparece de forma relacionada con 
lugares específi cos o con ambientes propios de imágenes y palabras. Resultan de particular interés 
las coincidencias de esas metáforas en relación con las que se atribuyen a la fi gura de la Fama en la 
literatura clásica según nos la presenta Chaucer. También Chaucer exploró el papel de la memoria en 
el desarrollo de la posición de la conciencia individual de la escritura. Este trabajo se propone analizar 
La casa de la Fama de Chaucer a la luz de la representación de la memoria que hace San Agustín. 
Chaucer utilizó la Fama como personifi cación de la memoria del nombre y la personalidad pública 
en relación con sus funciones de archivo del pasado legendario en la memoria colectiva del periodo 
bajomedieval. Este trabajo presenta la casa de la Fama de Chaucer como aquel lugar en el que comienza 
el diálogo entre la literatura y la historia del pasado con el autor y con el lector considerándolos como 
herederos de esa herencia común. Palabras clave: Chaucer, La casa de la Fama, Literatura medieval 
oral y escrita, Memoria, San Agustín.

I n Listening for the Text, Brian Stock propounds the existence of a relationship of interdependence between oral and written traditions as one of the features of medieval culture. As legatees of 



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the Biblical and the Classical heritage, medieval authors acknowledged 
the preeminence of the divine utterance as well as the undeniable worth 
of the written literature they had received. Out of these legacies,1 a 
symbiotic process started to arise between the oral and the visual systems 
of communication, so that “There was no orality without an implied 
textuality: there was no literacy without the primal force of the spoken 
word. Much of the subsequent dynamism of literature and society, in the 
sacred as well as in the secular sphere, arose  om the continual reworking 
of this arrangement” (1990: 4).

One of the authors that best embodies the rise of such a symbiotic 
process is Augustine, whose own spiritual advancement was presented in 
his Confessions. The work presents the autobiographical rendition  om 
the point of view of one who has been revealed the ultimate truth of 
the Bible and starts a vivid dialogue with himself and the divinity by 
recollecting his early years as imminently bound to the ensuing Christian 
vocation. By constantly resorting to his past as he talks in the present 
to the divinity, he evinces the outstanding role of memory in enabling 
the rise of an individual’s personal continuity and thus of self-knowledge. 
Having devoted his youth to the study and teaching of rhetoric2, 
Augustine certainly understood the signifi cance of memory within the 
oratorical scheme. Therefore, he was able to draw on some practical 
mnemonic issues when adapting some of the Platonic tenets pertaining 
memory to Christian requirements. Well acquainted with the classical 
mnemonic tradition that had started in the pre-Socratic age, he delved on 
the metaphor of memory as a house, palace or cave the space of which is 
distributed and inhabited by diverse sets of memory bits:

1 In reference to this huge legacy, C. S. Lewis (1964: 10) points out one of the medieval 
intellectual qualities which has traditionally been underrated: “At his most characteristic, 
medieval man was not a dreamer not a wanderer. He was an organizer, a codifi er, a 
builder of systems. He wanted ‘a place for everything and everything in the right place’. 
Distinction, defi nition, tabulation were his delight. Though full of turbulent activities, he 
was equally full of the impulse to formalize them”.
2 His teaching activity starts in 375 at Tagaste, holding his own school in Carthage  om 
the following year to 383, when he travels to Rome to do the same, a work he will continue 
further when moving to Milan in 384.



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Transibo ergo et istam naturae meae, gradibus ascendens ad eum, 
qui fecit me, et venio in campos et lata praetoria memoriae, ubi sunt 
thesauri innumerabilium imaginum de cuiuscemodi rebus sensis 
invectarum. Ibi reconditum est, quidquid etiam cogitamus, vel augendo 
vel minuendo vel utcumque variando ea quae sensus attigerit, et si 
quid aliud conmendatum et repositum est, quod nondum absorbuit 
et sepelivit oblivio. Ibi quando sum, posco, ut proferatur quidquid 
volo, et quaedam statim prodeunt, quaedam requiruntur diutius et 
tanquam de abstrusioribus quibusquam receptaculis eruuntur, quedam 
catervatim se proruunt et, dum aliud petitur et quaeritur, prosiliunt 
in medium quasi dicentia: “ne forte nos sumus”? Et abigo ea manu 
cordis a facie recordationis meae, donec enubiletur quod volo atque 
in conspectum prodeat ex abditis. Alia faciliter atque perturbata serie 
sicut poscuntur suggeruntur et cedunt praecedentia consequentibus et 
cedendo conduntur, iterum cum voluero processura. Quod totum fi t, 
cum aliquid narro memoriter.

I come to the fi elds and spacious palaces of memory, where are the treasures 
of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by 
the senses. There is stored up, whatever besides we think, either by enlarging 
or diminishing, or any other way varying those things which the sense 
hath come to; and whatever else hath been committed and laid up, which 
forgetfulness hath not yet swallowed up and buried. When I enter there, I 
require instantly what I will to be brought forth, and something instantly 
comes; others must be longer sought after, which are fetched, as it were out 
of some inner receptacle; others rush out in troops, and while one thing is 
desired and required, they start forth, as who should say, ‘Is it perchance 
I?’ These I drive away and with the hand of my heart from the face of my 
remembrance; until what I wish for be unveiled, and appear in sight, out 
of its secret place; until what I wish for be unveiled, and appear in sight, 
out of its secret place. Other things come up readily, in unbroken order, as 
they are called for; those in front making way for the following; and as they 
make way, they are hidden from sight, ready to come when I will. All which 
takes place when I recite a thing by heart. (Bk X, ch. 8, 12, pp. 217–218)3

In this passage, the visual quality of memory as glossed by Yates’s seminal 
work (1966) leans on the personifi ed fi gures of vivifi ed past events we have 
just seen dwelling in the rooms of this palace, and seems to respond to 
Aristotle’s claim that any mental activity is produced by means of images. 
In accordance with such dictum, the most commonplace metaphors 
dealing with memory in ancient times emphasized the motive of the 

3 Translation by Frances Yates, p. 60.



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storage, or that of the stamping of an image into some kind of so  
matter.4 According to Mary Carruthers: “This assumption concerning 
the material, and therefore spatial, nature of memory images also helps to 
account for why the ancients persistently thought of memoria as a kind of 
eye-dependent reading, a visual process” (1990: 27).

Notwithstanding the prevalence of the visual, Augustine however, 
also included in his program the neo-platonic discrimination between 
temporal things that could be reproduced thanks to images and intemporal 
or eternal ones, which he linked not only to the visual realm, but to the 
oral one as well, maybe as the echo of Plato’s heuristic method, based 
on the dialogue. This oral tradition Augustine somehow restores in his 
constant addresses to God when referring to the process through which 
he searched further into his memory to fi nd out the ultimate divine nature 
within himself.5

Drawing on these parallel ancient traditions and on the capital place of 
the mnemonic activity in late Roman times, Augustine could eventually 
present memory as one of the three qualities of the soul. His contribution 
to Western thought is equally based on his articulation of a particular sense 
of time, in which memory stands as the matrix of all human temporal 

4 Frances Yates (1966: 22) presents the artifi cial cra  of memory exercised in classical 
times as parallel to the learning of the alphabet, through which the metaphor of the wax 
tablets turns even more meaningful: “The art of memory is like an inner writing. Those 
who know the letters of the alphabet can write down what is dictated to them and read 
out what they have written. Likewise those who have learned mnemonics can set in places 
what they have heard and deliver it  om memory. ‘For the places are very much like wax, 
tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the 
images like the scripts, and the delivery is like the reading’”.
5 Janet Coleman states (1992: 105): “Thanks to this eternal truth as form, we have in us a 
true knowledge of things engendered like the word, in an interior diction. (…) Augustine 
affi  rms that there is nothing that we do voluntarily which we have not previously said in 
our hearts”. It is precisely this transcendental tendency in Augustine’s theory of memory 
that has made authors like Luis Merino (2000: 361) defend his departure  om mere 
rhetorical schemes in order to delve into deeper meanings. Thus, although the location 
imagery used by Augustine may be taken  om the rhetorical mnemonic tradition, its 
target is placed farther: “El pasmo y el temor que Agustín siente ante la inmensidad de 
la memoria demuestra que el intelecto es incapaz de abarcarla. Por tanto, la topografía de 
la memoria de la que Agustín habla en clave metafórica debe entenderse en un sentido 
propiamente fi losófi co, incluso religioso, y no retórico”.



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perception.6 Since memory makes present that which is no longer seen 
in actuality, it becomes the matrix within which humans perceive present 
and future as well. According to Carruthers, “this amounts to saying that 
present and future are mediated by this memory of the past” (1990: 193). 
Cultural historian Pierre Nora (2004: 25) argues that Western society is 
no longer based on memory as a collective activity, this being one of the 
causes for the obsession with history as a means of recollecting those lost 
traces. In the late ancient world and the Middle Ages, instead, the key 
role assigned to memory guaranteed the survival of the past. But if the 
past could modi  the sense of the present, the present was conversely 
engrained in the recollection of the past, and thus was persistently 
used to reconstruct it. This could be easily evidenced by the role of the 
rhetorician and poet, who spoke not about the real historical events but 
about the probable more universal accounts  om which general lessons 
could be drawn according to present perceptions.7 To Coleman (1992: 
37), the orator or poet “unites a community of individual rememberers by 
integrating them into the collectively accepted plausible fi ctions of their 
common past.” This duty had already been acknowledged by authors 

6 According to Harald Kleinschmidt’s interpretation of Confessiones cap. XI, 14–15 (2000: 
17), “If time exists, it is not present, because it has no duration; but if it has a duration, 
then it is either past or future, and the[n], we cannot say that time is, because the past 
is no longer, and the future is not yet. But, nevertheless, time exists. (…) The most 
general remark about St Augustine’s experience of time is that he perceived it as a remote 
process, far beyond the practical command and intellectual grasp of human beings, 
perplexingly created by the divinity, with an absolute dominance over the human world, 
moving on autonomously  om the past into the future and preventing human beings  om 
penetrating its inner nature. (…) the human experience of time was indirect, transmitted 
through instruments of the measurement of time, on the one side, and, on the other, 
through the human mind through which knowledge of the past could be recreated by the 
use of words.”
7 Matthew Innes (2000: 3) equally reminds of the diffi  cult approach of nineteenth-
century historians to early medieval historical texts which had not been conceived out 
of the moral exegetical  ame of poetry: “In a study of four of the canonical texts in 
early medieval history, Goff art argued that Jordanes’ Gothic History, Gregory of Tours’ 
Histories, Bede’s Ecclesiastica History of the English People and Paul the Deacon’s History of 
the Lombards, needed to be read as literary arguments, whose authors drew upon classical 
historiographical and rhetorical traditions inherited wholesale in representing the past of 
their societies to make a point about the present”



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like Cicero, who claimed poets had “to maintain the life of the collective 
memory through recalling the exemplary nature of the past (Coleman 
1992: 59)8. Augustine received the Ciceronian oratorical schemes as well 
as the respect for the concept of auctoritas through which the survival of 
the past was to be enacted.

Resting on the Augustinian foundation, the Middle Ages was therefore 
an intense memorial culture, so that, according to Evans (2003: 92), by 
the fourteenth century:

[…  ] memory was by and large omnipresent, integrated, ritualistic, 
and tinged with the sacred: not a property of the individual, but a 
means of putting the individual and the community in a continuous 
relation with the past (…) All levels of society were concerned with 
the transmission of collective values through ‘remembrance’, whether 
through the learned textual traditions of auctoritas or through 
everyday domestic objects”.

It is the contention of this paper that the The House of Fame explores 
the links between present and past, the representation of what is being 
individually recollected out of communal contents of social nature which 
the author shares and makes present through the local and temporal 
imaginative device of the journey as symbolic of the memorial process.

To start with, the poem could be interpreted as one of those items 
of family memory; just as today’s siblings may gather together around a 
picture album to comment on the family photographs and so reconstruct, 
alter or reinforce their common memories and identities (Middleton 
& Edwards 1992: 12), the poem is a picture in which legendary fathers 
and sons might be recognized: the key concept being that of fame, the 
narrator presents his journey to the palace of this allegorical fi gure, where 
he will be able to meet many of the famous auctores of the ancient and 
medieval literary tradition in a “vindication of poetry”(Bennett 1986: 
xi). But on the other hand, it is also a reenactment of a poetic scheme 
that enabled the imaginary contact between the past and the present, 
namely the dream-vision  ame, which poets had followed relentlessly 
since ancient times. Thus, in reproducing a kind of dream experience 

8 “This recollection was unproblematic; its capacity to convince depended not on an 
investigation of evidence (…) but on the rhetorical plausibility of present arguments whose 
basis lay in unrefl ective common opinion.” (Coleman 1992: 59).



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that Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machaut, Dante, Boethius or Cicero had had, 
Chaucer was not only off ering a picture of ancient fi gures, but taking a 
picture of himself among his equals and adding his own point of view to 
the portrait. However, his reconstruction of the past literary tradition, 
although responding to this conventional  ame, performs a divergent and 
particular operation: Chaucer will underline the alternation of visual and 
aural transmission in order to question the resilience of fame as a means of 
defi ning the reliable remembrance of the past in individual and collective 
memory.

The structure of the poem and its unfi nished state have puzzled readers 
and critics who wonder whether Chaucer might be parodying previous 
poets and thus trying to release himself  om the chain of auctores that 
had set the path for him either in Latin or in the vernacular languages. 
Whatever appears in this dream might recall the traditional elements laid 
out as part of the ritualistic poetic setting of the dream vision: it is on the 
air or ethereal regions that the poet approaches higher truths, led by the 
hand of a reputed guide, Cicero and Aeneas being the most outstanding 
ones. Dante’s infl uence over The House of Fame having been confi rmed, 
its echo resounds not only in the fi gure of the eagle or in the dreamer’s 
invocation to Apollo, but particularly in the reference to Troy, that 
immediately evokes the key guiding fi gure of Virgil in Dante’s Comedy.9 
However, I think that Augustine’s Confessions are equally decisive in the 
treatment of the Dido-Aeneas episode (HF 221–382). Chaucer’s treatment 
of the legend is quite revealing of the degree of intricacy between the 
written and other visual languages in late medieval culture. As the poet 
wakes up within his dream, he fi nds himself in the temple of glass where 
he sees the portrait of the ruling goddess, Venus. In such depiction, he 
refers to colors and shapes; what next attracts his attention, as he says, is 
the following:

9 On the one hand, Piero Boitani (1984: 82) refers specifi cally to the architectural device of 
the castle of Limbo in Dante’s work as an undeniable source of inspiration for Chaucer’s 
castle of Fame: “[…] Aeneas and the heroes of the Troy legend that Dante places in 
his Limbo, and the matter of Thebes which is represented there by Statius’ heroines 
do fi gure in Fame’s hall.” (1984: 83). On the other hand, authors like St John (2000: 
82), still accepting such infl uence, stress the diverse standpoints  om which both poets 
depart, since “In Chaucer’s poem, however, the limitations of the individual’s perspective 
are transcended not spiritually but rationally”.



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But as I romed up and doun,
I fond that on a wall ther was
Thus written on a table of bras:
“I wol now synge, yif I kan,
The armes and also the man
That fi rst cam, thurgh his destine,
Fugityf of Troy contree,
In Ytalye, with ful moche pyne
Unto the strondes of Lavyne”

But as I wandered up and down  / I found that on a wall there was  / 
Upon a tablet made of brass / Inscribed the following: “If I can, / I now 
shall sing arms and the man. / The destined knight of mighty fame / Who 
fugitive from Troy fi rst came / Much suff ering to Italian land, / And trod 
Lavinium’s river-strand” (HF 140–48)

These lines reproduce the beginning of The Aeneid, which the dreamer 
seems to be presently reading;10 the narrator starts referring to verbs that 
reinforce the sense of sight, so much so that he seems to have stopped 
reading and devotes his eyes to watching fi gurative depictions of the 
legendary characters, thus keeping to the metaphor of memory as a surface 
on which images are being carved or drawn. The location, a temple, is also 
evocative of Augustine’s depictions of the palaces of memory where the 
passages known by heart wait on us as we search for them. The dreamer 
fi nds it easy to move  om the glass walls devoted to goddess Venus to 
the space dedicated to Aeneas, her son. Once there, the fi gurative quality 
enables the narrator to supersede the Virgilian account and to present 
the narration  om his own point of view, since he no longer seems to be 
reading but rather reproducing the famous Troy legend in his imagination 
out of the painted shapes he fi nds on the walls, no longer on the brass 
tablet. Thus, thanks to this work of recollection of the Trojan past, he 

10 Besides, it reenacts the  agment in Bk I of The Aeneid in which, when entering the 
temple of Juno in Libya, Aeneas see the depiction of the war of Troy on the walls. 
Let’s remember that there existed the mythographic tradition of the “poetic pictures” 
to refer to the poetic arts in rhetorical uses. When dealing with the concept of locational 
memory, Carruthers (1993: 887) reminds that Chaucer had already used the wall-painting 
in the form of a written book which glossed the Romance de la Rose in “The Book of 
the Duchess”, this device of stained-glass windows or wall-paintings being traditionally 
recognized as demanding meditational recollection.



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will be slowly varying the intensity and opinions on some passages, like 
that dedicated to queen Dido:

Ther saugh I such tempest aryse
that every herte might agryse
To see hyt peynted on the wal
(…  ) Ther saugh I Joves Venus kysse,
And graunted of the tespest lysse.
Ther saugh I how the tempest stente,
And how with alle pyne he wente,
(…) Ther sawgh I grave how Eneas
Tolde Dido every caas
That hym was tyd upon the see.
And a er grave was how shee
Made of hym shortly at oo word
Hyr lyf, hir love, hir lust, hir lord,
And dide hym al the reverence.

I saw there such a tempest wake / That every heart would shudder and 
shake / To see it painted on the wall. / (…) I saw Jove kiss her; then he 
swore / To Venus he would still the uproar. / I watched the tempest come 
to rest / And saw Aeneas, much distressed” (HF 209–11 & 219–22). I saw 
Aeneas painted there, / Telling Dido all the care / And woes he suff ered 
while at sea. / And then was painted there how she / Created him with 
just one word / Her life, her love, her joy, her lord. / And did him every 
reverence. (HF 253–59)

From this moment onwards, the dreamer seems to be gazing at (or reading) 
a diff erent book, since he cannot help producing his own continuation of 
the episode according now, not to Aeneas’ interests, but to a female point 
of view which rather is identifi ed with that of queen Dido, as she realizes 
that Aeneas has abandoned her and laments her fate:

“O wel-awey that I was born!
For thorgh yow is my name lorn,
And alle myn actes red and songe
Over al thys lond, on every tonge.
O wikke Fame!—for ther nys
Nothing so swi , lo, as she is!
O, soth ys, every thing ys wyst,
Though hit be kevered with the myst.
Eke, though I myghte duren ever,
That I have don rekever I never,



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That I ne shal be syd, allas,
Yshamed be thourgh Eneas,

“Ah woe the day that I was born! / Through you my name is lost and 
gone, / And all my acts are read and sung / Throughout the land by every 
tongue. / O wicked Fame! There cannot be / A thing that moves as swift 
as she! / Yes, all is known and nothing missed, / Though it be covered with 
a mist. / Indeed, though I might live for ever, / Undo what I have done I 
never / Shall be able to. My name / Through Aeneas is brought to shame”. 
(HF 345–56)

These lines reveal that Chaucer, though acknowledging the Virgilian 
masterpiece and Dante’s reverential portrait of his guide, does not agree 
with the triumphant epic tone tradition had endowed it with. Instead of 
reproducing Virgil’s song of glory, he presents fame not linked to the 
heroic male character but to Dido’s tragedy, according to her portrait in 
Ovid’s seventh letter of Epistolae Heroidum (Heroides 7). The betrayed 
queen kills herself once she understands she has lost her good name as a 
consequence of the male habit of telling about love conquests.

Virgil’s work had been specifi cally linked to the training of memory. 
No wonder Augustine in De anima referred to his school  iend Simplicius 
and his remarkable ability to handle this text and recite it even backwards:

[…] cum interrogatus esset a nobis, quos uersus Vergilius in omnibus 
libris supra ultimos dixerit, continuo celeriter memoriterque respondit. 
Queaesiuimus etiam superiores ut diceret: dixit. Et credidimus eum 
posse retrorsus recitare Vergilium; de quocumque loco uoluimus, 
petiuimus ut facere: fecit.

[…] when he might be asked by us for all the next-to-last verses in each book of 
Virgil, responded in order quickly and from memory. If we then asked him to 
recite the verse before each of those, he did. And we believed that he could recite 
Virgil backwards. If we desired a commonplace concerning any topic, we asked 
him to make one and he did. (De Natura et Origine Animae Libri quattuor, 
IV, vii, 9, 1987: 815–816)11

The capacity to master memory was best proved by this backward 
utterance of the passages, which Cicero had also attributed to fellow 
orators or famous characters in the art of memory. Beryl Rowland fi nds 
Chaucer’s possible source for his topic in bishop Brawardine’s treatise on 

11 Translation by Mary Carruthers, 1990, p. 19).



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artifi cial memory,12 but maybe Augustine’s references were as well taken 
into account. Together with this capacity to recite poems in the reverse 
order, a very diff erent way to substantiate the mark of a literary  agment 
on the listeners was their liability to be moved by it. It is quite revealing 
that in the Confessions Augustine complains about the fact that, instead 
of having read the Bible in his student years, he had employed his wits in 
learning the Latin alphabet and grammar precisely through the reading 
of the Aeneid.

[…  ] nam utique meliores, quia certiores, erant primae illae litterae, 
quibus fi ebat in me et factum est et habeo illud, ut et legam, si quid 
scriptum invenio, et scribam ipse, si quid volo, quam illae, quibus 
tenere cogebar Aeneae nescio cuis errores oblitus errorum meorum 
et plorare Didonem mortuam, quia se occidit ab amore, cum interea 
me ipsum in his a te morientem, deus, vita mea, siccis oculis ferrem 
miserrimus.

[…] These letters (the Greek ones) were much more useful than the 
following ones (Latin). The former gave me the power, which I still hold, 
to read what is written and to write what I want. However, through the 
latter ones they made me learn by heart the adventures of an Aeneas, whom 
I did not know, while forgetting my own mistakes. I also learnt how to 
lament the death of Dido, who killed herself out of love, while I, amid these 
things, died far from you, my God and life, not shedding a single tear. (Bk 
I, ch. 13)13

12 “Metrodorus of Scepsis was reputed to have recorded on the images of the zodiac all 
that he wished to remember. Brawardine may be alluding to a similar system when he 
says that if one wants to be reminded of more things, he should put ‘images in the places 
following in the same way’.  He adds, ‘when this is done, he who is recalling can recite 
those things in the order which he wishes, that is to say directly or backward’” (1975: 
44–5). For Chaucer’s use of artifi cial memory, see also E. Buckmaster (1986).
13 My translation. Robertsonian echoes can be found in Koonce’s (1966: 112) analogical 
reading of the temple of glass passage in comparison to Dante’s “Inferno”, based on the 
tropological interpretation through which Dido is perceived as the symbol of libidinous 
love. Marilynn Desmond’s chapter on Dido as libido starts by referring to Augustine’s 
quotation as a seminal reference to the danger that Dido’s image symbolically posed 
as identifi ed with the desire that arouse out of memory (1994: 76):“He notes that his 
acquisition of literacy ostensibly provided him with the autonomy to read and write what 
he wished, but his initial experiences of reading the Aeneid and committing it to memory 
threatened his autonomy as a subject and undermined his will”.



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In the Confessions, Aeneas’ abandonment of Dido and her death are made 
parallel to young Augustine’s abandonment and forgetfulness of God. 
The misdirected tears of the forlorn woman and those of the young 
grammar pupil may bring fatal consequences: physical and spiritual death 
respectively. But whereas young Augustine had fi nally redirected his quest 
towards inner memory in search of God, Chaucer’s persona does not 
forget Dido, and instead warns women to beware of men who boast about 
their conquests. Chaucer turns therefore the whole passage into a strong 
reminder of the need to remember what has been read. He performs the 
role of the orator or poet, who tries to transform stories into universal 
examples for readers to keep in their heart and meditate on.

This endeavor to emphasize a pragmatic approach to memory is but 
the fi rst step of a careful program of decomposition of the notion of 
fame. My theory is that the whole structure of the poem rests primarily 
on the Dido-Aeneas episode, which epitomizes the values of memory 
and Chaucer’s exercise of backward recitation. Its disposition in diverse 
spaces, its written or engraved form, the sacred quality of the crystal 
architecture… If considered this way, the Carthaginian episode should 
correspond chronologically, not to the fi rst, but to the last step in the 
initiation journey, the encounter with inner memory a er having properly 
read and swallowed the ancient authors. But then, what about the palace 
of Fame and the house of Rumour? What is their role in his passage to 
memory? These also follow the storage space metaphor, but they are 
not made for housing memory but that which precedes it, rumour being 
chronologically prior to fame and fame to memory. These two former 
stages, anterior to the stamping of memories in our mental spaces are best 
conveyed by the oral communal habit. The leading character here, the 
eagle, will announce the sound quality of these second and third parts of 
the poem. As it arises seizing the poet in its talons, the bird teaches him 
about the nature of sound, on which fame rests.14 When the poet gets 
into the palace, again the sound of the pomp surrounding Fame will be 
outstanding: among the crowd of musicians, poets, the trumpets Great 

14 “Sound is only air that is broken. / And every single word that is spoken, / Aloud or 
secret, foul or fair, / Is in its essence only air” (HF 765–68) “Each air stirs up another one / 
Increasingly: and once begun / Then voice or noise or word or sound / With amplifi ed 
eff ect is bound / To travel to the House of Fame.” (817–821)



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Renown and Evil Fame and all kinds of supplicants for fame, very few 
will be guaranteed the survival of their name. Some of these sounds have 
arrived embodied in the shapes of the characters in their stories, dressed 
in the colors of books, or become simply the authors’ human shapes, a 
process the eagle had warned the poet about:

But understond now right wel this:
Whan any speche ycomen ys
Up to the paleys, anon-ryght
Hyt wexeth lyk the same wight
Which that the word in eerthe spak,
Be hyt clothed red or blak;
And hath so verray hys lyknesse
That spak the word, that thou wilt gesse
That it the same body be,
Man or woman, he or she.

But grasp this further: when a speech / Arrives within that house’s reach, / 
Then straight away it starts to take / The form its speaker used to make / 
On earth below when it was said, / Whether clothed in black or red; / And 
has a likeness so exact / To the speaker that you’d swear in fact / It must the 
self-same body be, / Man or woman, he or she. (HF 1073–1082)

The dreamer immediately recognizes some of the fi gures, but these are 
not those of the great heroes, but of the poets who sang them; thus, he 
privileges the role of poets over those of historical or legendary characters.15 
Finally, as he feels seduced by the sound of the next house, that of 
Rumour, the oral quality exceeds the visual element. Chaucer presents 
thus the very fi rst stage in the rise of collective imagination and memory: 
the notion of gossip. But let’s remember that gossip had already appeared 
in the poem precisely as the reason for Dido’s disgrace, which was carved 
in the mind’s memorized version of the temple of glass. If reciting in the 
reverse order was known to be an ability of profi cient students in the art 
of memory, Chaucer is here implying his own backward journey, since 
Dido and Aeneas’ story had fi rst started in the house of Rumour, had later 
gone through the work of poets at the house of Fame and fi nally landed 

15 “And by him stood—no lie I speak / High on a column of iron true, / Great Homer, 
with him Dares too, / The Phrygian, Dictys of Crete / In  ont, and Lollius, complete / 
With Guido delle Colonne and / Geoff rey of Monmouth, understand? / For each of these, 
God grant me joy / Busily penned the fame of Troy. / So mighty was that city’s fame, / 
To write of it was not a game.” (HF 1464–1474).



116

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Selim 16 (2009)

as memorized engraved poems in the temple of glass, precisely where the 
dream starts.

The stories told at the house of Rumour spring  om anonymous 
mouths and try to get into the house of Fame. The poet seems happier 
witnessing the spontaneous and varying whirl of words moving through 
this labyrinth, which does not resemble the organized realms of memory. 
Here movement and sound reign completely16. The collective quality of 
rumour will undergo an individual authorial turn that lady Fame’s decisions 
will seal up;17 but even so, we are certainly very far  om Augustine’s 
conception of memory as a quality of the soul through which mankind’s 
divine origin might be traced. In Chaucer’s backward dream, the origin 
of memory is in the last space he has access to, the house of Rumour, but 
this cradle of future memories stands not for God’s primeval word but 
for the communal constant need to share and reproduce words. Chaucer’s 
claim is for an individual perception of the relative quality of fame when 
attributed to the work of past authors, and therefore, to the past as a 
whole.18 He acknowledges the role of poets as endowers of fame, but 
defends as well a present communal disposition or aff ection for some works 
that might diverge  om traditional attitudes so far thought immutable. 

16 The multiplying and distorting eff ect of repeated oral accounts is best perceived by the 
image of the swelling of news which in their competition to come out of the labyrinth: 
“Each time he told it to a man / His news was more and stranger than / It was before. 
Thus north and south / Went all the news  om mouth to mouth, / Each time increasing 
more and more,” (HF 2073–2077) “I saw two rising to the air, / A falsehood and a serious 
truth / By chance at one time coming both / And striving for a window space. / Colliding 
in that narrow place,” (2089–2092) “Thus saw I false and true confounded, / Flying up in 
each report. / So out of holes there squeezed and fought / Each bit of news, and went to 
Fame,” (HF 2108–2111).
17 Or, as Minnis, Scattergood & Smith would put it (1995: 213): “The movement  om 
Rumour to Fame is the process in which experience becomes tradition—and contamination, 
it would seem, is an unavoidable part of the process”.
18 Norman Klassen (1995: 190) points out to this particular disposition in the Chaucerian 
poem: “Unlike Augustine, Chaucer does not off er the same evaluation of reading poetry. 
Whereas for the Church father such reading is aff ective and contrasts with the certainty 
of acquiring basic skills or essential spiritual knowledge, for Chaucer it provokes positive 
questions of his relationship as poet to auctoritas. He is conscious of the role of the 
individual in negotiating the past, hearsay, truth. His is a humanistic response, where 
knowledge in whatever form has become interesting per se.



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The dreamer’s preference for Ovid’s19 (instead of Virgil’s) approach to the 
fi gure of Aeneas20 as a traitor and defamer, as well as his relish in fi nding 
present day’s manifold hybrid news and stories at the house of Rumour, 
describe Chaucer’s skepticism about the static nature of literary tradition21 
and of the past.22 But if he acknowledges the creative role of gossip in 
the formation and deformation of oral traditions, he equally highlights 
through this peculiar journey with Dido & Aeneas the importance of 
individual reading in the molding of memory and experience, a legacy he 
might have received  om Augustine.

María Beatriz Hernández Pérez
University of La Laguna

19 According to Minnis, Scattergood and Smith (1995: 237): “Certainly, in book I of 
the House of Fame, as in the narratives of the Legend, Chaucer sided with Ovid, and 
that inevitably meant the subversion of the authority of Virgil. That is hardly surprising, 
since Ovid had set himself up as a writer who was diametrically opposed to Virgil; his 
retelling of the Aeneid in Heroides vii constitutes a refusal to ally himself with his elder 
contemporary’s celebration of military glory and the distinguished lineage of the Emperor 
Augustus, ruler of the New Troy.
20 As Silvia Federico (2003: 148) states: “[…]Aeneas creates Chaucer in his image: the 
medieval poet becomes, a er his death, the founder of an empire (of letters). He is the 
“father of English poetry” just as Aeneas is the father of Europe. But both foundations are 
based in treason, or in heroic defections  om authoritative precedent, and both prompt 
disavowals and revisions in their wake.”
21 Ibid., p. 236: “In The House of Fame, by contrast, Chaucer seems to be conveying a sense 
of the lack of durability of literary fame-and indeed of all fame (as book iii intimates), since 
fame rests on evidence which is invariably literary, the testimony of ‘olde bookes’. Neither 
is there any belief in the durability of empire and civic fame, no vision of the translation 
imperii to a ‘New Troy’, whether it be Rome or London, to correspond to Dante’s faith in 
the divine origin and preservation of his continuing city. In view of such powerlessness, 
the House of Fame can be said to record Chaucer’s crisis of authority.”
22 Ibid., p. 146: “‘History’ is thus created through a loss of control that more broadly 
characterizes the writing process. As Chaucer himself lamented on many occasions, once 
a text is ‘published’ and sent out to the future, anything might happen to it. This loss of 
control is simultaneous with the process of trying to fi x, to capture, to solidi  an event as 
history. Fama and history are bedfellows, and the authority of history is as dangerous as 
the supposed impediments to it”.



118

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•

Received 04 Mar 2010; revision received 31  May 2010; accepted 02 Aug 2010