Charms in medieval memory

Abstract

In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde when Troilus lies sick with love and fevers (‘the accesse’) during a dinner party at Deiphebus’s house, the noble guests, upon hearing of his illness, immediately begin to offer charms to cure him, while Criseyde sits quietly among them knowing, as readers do, that she herself is the best remedy for his malady.2 We see in Chaucer’s fictional social occasion one way in which charms circulated within late medieval society. The charm-knowers in Troy are aristocrats and the charms they would offer - for the fevers - they can evidently recite from memory.