Presented at the 2024 CiRCE National Conference: A Contemplation of Prudence.

The classical Greeks and Romans developed the highly specialized spacial art of memory for use in rhetoric, but the great Christian thinkers of the High Middle Ages turned that art to the cultivation of virtue, specifically prudence, using the powerful visual imagination that the art of memory produced, and resulting coincidentally in great beauty in the visual arts such as painting, architecture, sculpture, book illumination, and dress. We will look at this clear connection between the cultivation of the art of memory, of prudence, and of the love of beauty.