Norman, NAS; (2008) A study of female beauty in Italian literature in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century. Masters thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This study considers aspects of the presentation, iconography and visualisation of women in Italian prose and poetry in the period 1230 to 1330. It explores female beauty in both its appearance and its impact upon the beholder. Though the study focuses mainly on literary sources, other kinds of historical and religious material, from antiquity to the Middle Ages, are also included. Some of these are intended further to illustrate aspects of aesthetic sensibility generally in this period, and some of them to provide a context for medieval Italian literature by demonstrating the social situation of women in general. The study is divided into four chapters each considering the different ways in which female beauty is explored and celebrated. The first chapter examines and catalogues formal aspects of female beauty from the point of view of the descriptio mulieris. The second chapter investigates analogies and comparisons often incorporated into descriptions of women, analogies and comparisons at every point remarkable for their imaginative resourcefulness and hyperbolic intensity. The third chapter considers the perception of beauty and its psychology ex parte subiecti, in the onlooker. The fourth chapter explores by way, principally, of the extraordinary, the miraculous and the angelic, the relationship in madonna of the beautiful and the good, of the moral and the aesthetic.

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