Christine de Pizan styled herself as France’s memorialist, the shaper and keeper of the collective memory of the nascent nation-state. As Pierre Nora has claimed, the Grandes Chroniques were the source of “a new historical memory” in France. Nora’s insights into the crucial role of memory in constructing the idea of a nation are relevant to Christine’s project. Christine as it were perpetuates the efforts of the monks of Saint Denis, custodians of the Grandes Chroniques, to preserve and in some sense form the cultural memory of France. French rather than Latin becomes the language capable of creating the idea of a “nation,” a term that appears several times in the prologue to these dynastic chronicles. In writing her biography of “the wise king Charles V” at a time when his son, “the crazy king Charles VI,” had neglected the proper maintenance of the Grandes Chroniques, Christine attempted to provide an alternative memory to keep France on a stable course through troubled times.

In my presentation I will draw on the concept of cultural memory elaborated by the husband-and-wife team of Egyptologists Jan and Aleida Assman. Jan’s concept of selective memory refers to the fact that only a certain number of past events are committed to collective or public memory to be recalled and recorded with the help of symbolic figures and rituals that are repeated over and again, acquiring variations as time goes on. Aleida Assman speaks of the rites and rituals of collective memory: “Cultural memory has its anthropological origin in the memory of the dead. This consisted in the obligation of friends and family to remember the names of their dead and to hand them down to posterity. Remembering the dead has a religious dimension and a worldly dimension which one can summarize by opposing ‘pietas’ and ‘fama’. In contrast to the religious orientation of ‘pietas’, fama’ is a secular form of making oneself eternal which in many ways resembles a theatrical mise en scène.”

I will apply the Assman’s concepts of cultural memory to the 1378 visit of the Holy Roman Emperor to Paris, as recounted in the copy of the Grandes Chroniques prepared for Charles V and in Christine’s biography of the King. The ceremonials surrounding the function included a short play put on for the Emperor at the great feast held in his honor. The representation of the play in these two works will provide the focus for my remarks.