Presented in association with the
Philadelphia Chamber Music Society

An Introduction to The Legends of St. Nicholas and Anonymous 4, by Mary Carruthers

Mary Carruthers' introduction to the performance of Anonymous 4 provided insight into the meaning of memory, history and the present in medieval thought. Of primary importance to Carruthers is the distinction between the perceived roles of memory in the modern and medieval worlds. For the modern individual, memory is typically conceived of as a method of recapturing lost time. It is the recreation of the past. For the medieval individual, though, memory was more directly tied into the present. Memory acted as a way of (re)inventing the present. Memory was conceptualized spatially as well as temporally; it was a linkage of mental spaces, leading to the creation of vivid mental pictures. Tracing notions of memory from the Classical through to the Medieval periods in Europe, Carruthers' discussion made clear that aspects of medieval figural art that to the modern viewer appear as failures in the rendering of perspective are, in fact, successful mnemonic renderings intended to create for the viewer new linkages between various aspects of memory.

Thus, medieval art is not merely intended to evoke in memory a replica of a known subject matter, though they clearly make direct reference to biblical passages as rendered in paintings or illustrated bibles. Rather the differential renderings of these mnemonic devices created a sort of play whereby the viewer is forced to recreate present perception from memorized knowledge evoked by those devices. In so doing medieval artists provided a creative device in the form of memory that was intended to provoke meditation. Nowhere is this more evident, concludes Carruthers, than in the work of musical artists such as those whose music was performed by Anonymous 4.

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