Memory, Emotion, and the Death of a Queen

Abstract

This chapter deals with the attractive and doomed Dido as medieval manuscripts reveal their emphasis on her emotions, a focus illuminated by modern research on memory. It begins with Augustine's boyhood obsession with Virgil's Aeneid. While Augustine had a dismissive reaction to Virgil's hero Aeneas, he had an obsessive boyhood identification with Dido and her emotional pain. Augustine called his own memorizing of Aeneas's wanderings a forced process (cogebra), but appears to remember Dido effortlessly, indeed almost against his will, and he associates that memory with strong emotions, particularly his reaction to her death. Augustine's rhetorically powerful sequence of words associated with weeping and death fixes his own emotional reaction in our minds, as Dido became fixed in his.