Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 26 May 2016 Version of attached le: Accepted Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Saunders, Corinne and Macnaughton, Jane and Fuller, David (2015) 'The recovery of beauty : arts, culture, medicine.', Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Further information on publisher's website: http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137426734 Publisher's copyright statement: Corinne Saunders, Beauty, Virtue and Danger in Medieval English Romance, in The Recovery of Beauty: Arts, Culture, Medicine. Saunders, Corinne, Macnaughton, Jane, Fuller, David (Eds.) 2015, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. This extract is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been edited. The denitive, published, version of record is available here: http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137426734. Additional information: Sample chapter deposited. Chapter 2: 'Beauty, Virtue and Danger in Medieval English Romance', pp. 35-52. https://doi.org/10.1057/97811374267413 Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk 1 Corinne Saunders Beauty, Virtue and Danger in Medieval English Romance Your yen two wol slee me sodenly; I may the beautee of hem not sustene, So woundeth hit thourghout my herte kene.1 Thus Geoffrey Chaucer on the beauty of his lady’s eyes, their power so great that she is ‘of [his] lyf and deeth the quene’ (9). Her beauty has chased pity from her heart and purchased him his death. These lines play on the medieval convention of love as illness that only the beloved can cure, and conceive of female beauty as an ambiguous force, enthralling in both positive and negative terms. In romance, the dominant fictional genre of the medieval period, female beauty is an imperative, signalling virtue and nobility, opening the way to the divine and inspiring the highest ideals, but at the same time dangerous, destructive, treacherous. Its powers can be magical and life-enhancing, literally wish-fulfilling, but also corrosive, imprisoning and death- dealing. Secular literary texts engage with the difficulties of interpreting beauty, of making sense of its affect. At the same time, beauty is strangely unelaborated in romance texts: interpretation cannot rest on detailed description of beauty, but must probe its often concealed valences, its collocations, and especially, the actions and consequences that attend beauty. Beauty proves virtue not only in those who possess it, but also in those who experience its power, both within and beyond the text. Ideas and Ideals The fraught relation of physical beauty to the mind and soul has a long history. Mark McIntosh’s essay in this volume shows compellingly the enduring relation of beauty to the divine. The idea of beauty is crucial to the Platonic concept of ideal forms underlying nature: in the Phaedrus, Plato depicts beauty as shining out in the 2 heavens. Earthly beauty is unique in its ability to recall its ideal form : ‘once here on earth we found, by means of the clearest of our senses, that it sparkles with particular clarity’; ‘it is only beauty which has the property of being especially visible and especially lovable’. Whereas the corrupt man surrenders to earthly pleasure, the soul of the initiate in philosophy flourishes and grows wings through gazing on the divine form of the beloved: ‘this is the experience men call love’. 2 Aristotle distinguishes beauty from good, but in the Metaphysics takes up the image to present the prime mover as an object of desire, setting the heavens in motion, in the same way that the soul is drawn by beauty. Crucial to his definition of beauty are ‘magnitude’ and ‘order, symmetry and delimitation’ – the objects of the mathematical sciences.3 Aristotle returns to the same principles in The Poetics: ‘beauty depends on size and order’; of a magnitude to be taken in by the eye and retained in memory.4 Beauty can perfect the senses and summon the soul, but Platonic ideas also underpin the ubi sunt motif so prominent in classical and medieval writing. The enduring beauty of the eternal is set against the ‘sleek looks’ of worldly beauty, ‘fleeting and transitory, more ephemeral than the blossom in spring’, as Boethius writes, an evocation of worldly transience especially influential for later Christian writers.5 For St Augustine, perhaps the single most influential thinker for the later Middle Ages, who was profoundly influenced by neo-Platonic philosophy, earthly beauty is a potential snare, distracting from ‘that beauty which is higher than souls’. He is torn between the pull of corporeal and divine, ‘But although I am the person saying this and making the distinction, I also entangle my steps in beautiful externals. However, you rescue me, Lord, you rescue me’.6 The beauty of the created world, including human beauty, both reflects and distracts from the divine. Medieval asceticism renounces worldly beauty precisely because of this power: ‘We who have 3 turned aside from society, relinquishing for Christ’s sake all the precious and beautiful things in the world, its wondrous light and colour, its sweet sounds and odours, the pleasures of taste and touch, for us all bodily delights are nothing but dung’, writes St Bernard of Clairvaux.7 Yet theologians continue to recognise the moving and transformative power of beauty, and its relation to inner beauty. Elsewhere, St Bernard describes the brightness of beauty as replenishing the secret places of the heart and shining forth openly in the body: ‘The body is an image of the mind, which, like an effulgent light scattering forth its rays, is diffused through its members and senses, shining through in action, discourse, appearance, movement – even in laughter. ’8 Hugh of St Victor recommends the aesthetic power of beauty: ‘Look upon the world and all that is in it: you will find much that is beautiful and desirable . Gold . has its brilliance, the flesh its comeliness, clothes and ornaments their colour.’9 If beauty could distract, it could also open the way to Paradise. Abbot Suger of St Denis is eager to follow the model of King Solomon, filling his church with beautiful things that carry the soul to God. Through ‘the loveliness of the many-colored gems’ he is ‘called . away from external cares’ and ‘transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner’.10 Considerably more problematic than the ornamentation of churches or the power of art was the beauty of woman. In classical writing, there was already a well- established strand of misogyny, and a sense of the dangers of female beauty and desire. Aristotelian physiology places women as bodily, passive, defective, whereas men are associated with the soul, rationality and action. The poetry of Ovid and Juvenal is sharply satirical concerning the dangers as well as the fascinations of women. In medieval thought, these preconceptions merge with Scriptural warnings 4 concerning women – in Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, in exemplary stories such as that of David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel, 11), in the epistles of St Paul, who requires that women be silent and modestly covered (1 Corinthians, 14: 34). All look back to the paradigm of Eve: created by God out of Adam’s rib, and ruled by the bodily rather than the rational, seduced by the serpent and seducing Adam, causing the Fall and the first sin of concupiscence. But it is too easy to separate notions of female beauty from more general conceptions of beauty: the more positive, idealised aspect of beauty as an effulgent force does not disappear in medieval attitudes to female beauty. Commentators on the Song of Songs discuss the beauty of the Spouse as representing the Church, but in so doing they also engage with the ideal of female beauty. The many representations of the Virgin in medieval art and sculpture signal the transcendent power of female beauty, which in Mary reverses the Fall and rewrites the name of Eve as Ave. Despite a recurrent emphasis on the dangers of female beauty, the association between beauty and virtue is fundamental to both sacred and secular writing, an essential building block of romance. Suspense and drama are created by the tension between the expectation that interior and exterior, body and soul, will be aligned and the fear that they are not. In the female figures of romance, beauty shines out as a transformative, sometimes dangerous and destructive, force. It is no coincidence that its power can be associated with magic. In the enchantress, we see most clearly the two faces of beauty. Shining beauty The interweaving of idealism and realism, convention and originality characteristic of the romance genre is evident in its depictions of beauty. Beauty is a given of medieval romance, as it is of hagiography, where the almost invariable beauty of female saints reflects their inner virtue. Romance is similarly peopled by 5 idealised ladies, who possess the physical attributes associated with beauty in this period – fair hair, grey eyes, white skin, red cheeks, harmony of features, form and proportion.