ABSTRACT
Medievalists are all interested in memory, although this means something different to each specialization. Historians might concentrate, as does Clanchy, on the replacement of orally transmitted memory by literacy and the keeping of written records, or as McKitterick does on the ways societies construct and remember their pasts, or as Yates and Carruthers do on the artificial memory of the literate class. This chapter examines generally the question of how Old French chansons de geste were transmitted. The focus here is centred on what may be a new piece of evidence of the oral transmission of Old French epics, namely, an author's acrostic signature embedded in a FrancoItalian poem from the mid-fourteenth century and on what it may tell us about the role of memory in epic performance. Any theory about orally-transmitted narratives positions itself somewhere between the two poles of memorization and improvisation.
