We all use our memories everyday and although recent research in neuroscience and its related fields can be highly complex and technical, the subject of these investigations – memory itself – is essential to all human behaviour or existence and the way we interact with other people and the world. We use, and are exposed to, memory all the time and so, in fact, are already well versed in its abilities and limitations whether we recognise our inherent human understanding of the faculty or not. The human awareness of and aptitude for memory forms the basis for influential studies in the medieval period by Frances Yates and, more recently, Mary Carruthers. The medieval period had its own systems and philosophies regarding memory, which were perhaps just as complex and technical as modern science's tentative conclusions and theories discussed briefly in the Introduction to this study. However, the underlying complexity of the mechanisms of memory does not preclude the expression of the process of recollection (and its challenges) in an understandable and recognisable form. Indeed, the choice of metaphors or models for memory in the medieval explanations emerge, for a reason, and reveal something timeless and universal about the human relationship to memory and recollection in its broadest sense.

In this regard, it is not necessary, and indeed it would be hugely inaccurate, to claim that the lay public, the audiences of Middle English romances, had any real knowledge of memory theory and recollective abilities. However, as today, people were exposed to the faculty itself in church, in human relationships, or in professional life. With this in mind, this chapter will discuss the fundamental understanding of memory in terms of a human desire for progression, educated retrospection, and creation (both actual and mental), along with the mechanisms and attitudes which could be shared by the memorial faculty and romance genre. To accomplish this, a certain amount of technical language from classical and medieval theories will be highlighted and discussed, such as catena, ductus, skopos, locus, and imago. Although it would be artificial to apply these directly to romances, and indeed it should in no way be implied that these theories and technicalities were widely known to most in the late medieval period at all, the purpose is to draw out the scale of such conceptions and their inherent connection to human concerns for past knowledge, order, and a logical narrative.