Mary Carruthers. The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages

The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages is a jumble of interesting and perceptive insights into the conceptual underpinnings of medieval art, architecture, and literature. Mary Carruthers’s scholarship is wide-ranging, and her depth of knowledge is evident. The book represents a new, fresh, and welcome approach to medieval aesthetics. But it has severe limits. The author distinguishes her approach from the metaphysical/theological perspective that has dominated the study of medieval aesthetics as formulated by Edgar de Bruyne and Umberto Eco, applied to architecture by Erwin Panofsky and Otto von Simson, and stretched to breaking by D. W. Robertson Jr. She credits that approach but works from the premise “that medieval aesthetic experience is bound into human sensation and that human knowledge is sense-derived” (8). Carruthers sums up her premise—and at the same time shows its vulnerabilities—when she claims that “human senses are what medieval aesthetics is all about” (196)

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Contemplation · Epistemology · Metaphysics · Middle Ages · Perspective (graphical · Premise · Scholarship · Theology · Visual arts · Architecture · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies