International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2007 Abstracts

The thirteenth century brought an increasing concern about the art of memory through a revival of interest in Aristotelian teachings about memory and sense perception.  The same period marked an increasing interest in portraying, in often graphic terms, the sufferings, humiliations, tortures, and murders of Christ and the martyrs.  The power of these types of images, particularly when found in manuscripts, make them more than just visualizations of the written narrative; the pictures had devotional, didactic and mnemonic functions.  When text is turned into image, how much more fearful and memorable for the spectator.  The author of the Roman treatise Rhetorica ad Herennium, widely circulated in the later Middle Ages and Renaisssance, had a telling prescription for fixing memories in the mind; this is most easily accomplished if “we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking.” Thomas Aquinas’s prescriptions for good mnemonic tools fit the violent imagery of texts such as the “Golden Legend” and other hagiographic material with a focus on the passion of the martyrs; he stated that “Man cannot understand without images…We remember less easily those things which are of subtle and spiritual import; and we remember more easily those things which are gross and sensible.”  Particularly in the often-private activity of viewing a manuscript, focused, personal contemplation of images of the passions of Christ and the martyrs would only intensify the depth of the experience; a viewer might find them both stimulating and disturbing, both attractive and repulsive.