| Paper 1324-b | Body Metaphors of Memory in De Noe by Ambrose of Milan
(Language: English)
Lidia Raquel Miranda, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) / Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, Argentina
Index terms: Language and Literature - Latin, Philosophy, Rhetoric |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
Memoria was one of the most frequently used terms of medieval Latin writing, as over 20,000 occurrences in the Patrologia Latina corpus confirm. One way of summarizing use of such ubiquitous words is by investigating their frequent collocations which epitomize the word's meaning potential. In my paper, I show what the major collocates of memoria were and how they changed across authors and text genres. I pay special attention to metaphorical expressions the word was employed in, since, as the research in Cognitive Metaphor Theory shows, the abstract domains, such as memory, are regularly comprehended in more concrete terms.
Paper -b:
De Noe is part of the whole of exegetical works in which Ambrose of Milan reflects on human condition and the effects of actions in natural order. As in the previous treatises, De paradiso and De Cain et Abel, the subject of the work is organised parallel and consequently with the narration of the patriarch story that Genesis provides. In this paper, I focus on the dialectic relation between past and future indicated in De Noe 31, 116-119, in which the preponderance of memory is enlightened through body metaphors such as 'to walk backwards', 'to see the past things', and 'the sober mind'. These kind of metaphors reveal that biological life is necessary and ostensible to the development of any other human space, reason why the author prefers it as a privileged instrument of argumentation.
Paper -c:
This paper aims to be an inquiry into the meaning and the value of the mnemonic metaphor of the wound in the Italian and Latin works of Petrarch, where the image of the wound constitutes a good representation of the memory (as a whole and of the single moments of its working principles) and its link with religious inwardness reveal a strong sensitivity to the affective potential of visuality and memory. Linking the image of the page in the mind with that of the body on which such memorial traces can be inscribed as stigmata, wounds, and scars, my talk aims to explore the suffering dimension of the memory as emotion which hurts violently the soul, both in the experience of remembering/recollection made by the lover-poet Petrarch in his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, and in the analysis of the self-made by the humanist Petrarch in his Latin production (Epistles, Book of Secrets, religious works).
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