Abstract
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.
Your yen two wol slee me sodenly;
I may the beautee of hem not sustene,
So woundeth hit thourghout my herte kene.1
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Notes
Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘Merciles Beaute’, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1988), p. 659, lines 1–3. References are to this edition, cited by line number.
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford, 2002), 250c—e, 252b, pp. 34, 36. See Stephen Gersh and Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen, The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages: A Doxographic Approach (Berlin, 2002), for a discussion of how Platonic concepts and material, including from the Phaedrus, were transmitted to later medieval writers via intermediary sources (including Calcidius’s translation of Plato’s Timaeus, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and the works of Patristic writers such as Augustine of Hippo).
Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), p. 15.
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© 2015 Corinne Saunders
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Saunders, C. (2015). Beauty, Virtue and Danger in Medieval English Romance. In: Saunders, C., Macnaughton, J., Fuller, D. (eds) The Recovery of Beauty: Arts, Culture, Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426741_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426741_3
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