ABSTRACT
The art of memory as it was understood and practised in the Middle Ages has been a topic of increasing interest among scholars, inspired in a large part by the work of Mary Carruthers. The mnemonic techniques that were revived from ancient treatises and developed in the later Middle Ages, often relied upon a combination of the textual and the visual, so that words and images could be used either separately or in tandem to fire the imagination and imprint themselves upon the memory. Real violence visited upon actual bodies becomes memorialized through the trace left by the image, leaving but an impression upon the memory, but one that can be returned to any number of times for devotional, educational. The thirteenth century is a particularly interesting period in which to consider the intersection between violence and memory. It was during this century that there was an increasing interest in the art of memory and Aristotelian mnemonics.
