Abstract

The thesis approaches the textual tradition of commenting on beauty in the thirteenth century from a historical perspective and examines two major issues: the terminology of beauty and the sources of the thirteenth-century texts on beauty. The general organization of the thesis depends on the large amount of precise textual data placed in Appendices One and Two. The individual chapters are built around the interpretation of this material and contain multiple references to the Appendices. In Chapter One the thirteenth-century texts are chosen according to the principles of the continuity of textual tradition and mutual interdependence. Their contents are described, the terms of beauty are selected, and a preliminary list of sources is given. Chapter Two provides an analysis of the historical development of the meanings of the terms of beauty that are used in the thirteenth century. The study centers on the role of the earlier texts in the development of the thirteenth-century meaning of these terms, and examines the question of the historical convergence of their meanings. Chapter Three is devoted to the analysis of the sources of the thirteenth-century discussion of beauty. The Chapter is focused around the two figures whose texts played a major part in the thirteenth-century tradition of commenting on beauty: Cicero and Augustine. The use of these two authors is linked to the two textual traditions that are responsible for the dissemination of their texts related to beauty. The first tradition, which is the source of Cicero's quotations for the thirteenth-century discussion of beauty, is treatises "On the Good" and collections of moral excerpts. The second tradition, which supplied the relevant passages from Augustine, is Collections of Sentences, commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and the corresponding sections from the thirteenth-century Summae. Chapter Three is concluded by an examination of several thirteenth-century discussions around the interpretation of sources related to beauty. The thesis makes a contribution to the two areas---terminology and sources of the thirteenth-century discussion of beauty---that were inadequately covered in the previous scholarly literature. It provides another way of looking at the problem of "medieval aesthetics" from a historical perspective that is well supported by textual evidence