Memoria agens: Verbal and visual rhetoric in late medieval English lay culture, c.1300--c.1500

Recent studies on the relation of visual and verbal rhetoric in the English Middle Ages have mainly focused on monastic Latinate culture. As a corollary study, this dissertation investigates the employment of rhetorical and mnemonic structures through words and images in late medieval lay environments. The first chapter is dedicated to the analysis of such schemes in the context of late medieval religious drama (Corpus Christi Cycle) and the second chapter approaches the subject through a comparative study of popular thematic issues in sermon literature and English parish church wall paintings.;The interdisciplinary comparison reveals how rhetorical, and in particular, mnemonic schemes derived from classical Antiquity were filtered through the monastic culture of the High Middle Ages and were at the base of the organizational structuring of lay and vernacular artistic productions.