Book Review| February 01 2016 Review: The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages, by Mary Carruthers Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages(Oxford-Warburg Studies), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. xii + 233 pp. ISBN 9780199590322 Juanita Feros Ruys Juanita Feros Ruys Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2016) 34 (1): 113–115. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.1.113 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Juanita Feros Ruys; Review: The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages, by Mary Carruthers. Rhetorica 1 February 2016; 34 (1): 113–115. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2016.34.1.113 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2016 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 113 had to resort to the footnotes with their quotations in Latin in order to fully understand the text. This confession is a hardly covert recommendation to publish as soon as possible an English translation of this wonderful book, written in the best tradition of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. Kees Meerhoff, Amsterdam Marv Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (OxfordWarburg Studies), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. xii + 233 pp. ISBN 9780199590322 The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages is, like the rhetorical artworks it examines, a tour (iter) through the beauty of artifice. As we progress, our expert guide, Mary Carruthers, offers us insights into aspects of rhetoric that led the medieval reader to pleasure, such as suavitas (sweetness). Indeed, the book's own construction embodies the rhetorical pleasure of varietas, as our guide now points to Augustine, then Dante, before casting back to Aristotle and then taking up Aquinas; meanwhile her favourite, Bene of Florence, is never far from the scene. Chapter 1 examines the notion of ludic space and the medieval distinc­ tion of serin and ioca, moving from medieval school debates to the complex compositional and experiential aesthetics of the Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood. The next chapter explores the sensory and volitional nature of aesthe­ tics, particularly considering the aesthetic of difficult style in patristic letters and those of Bernard of Clairvaux. Chapter 3 discusses 'sweetness' as both aesthetic pleasure and a form of medicine in medieval thought, and compre­ hensively analyses the valences of multiple Latin terms for 'sweetness', including how medieval thinkers recognized the dangers of sweetness in persuasion. The fourth chapter considers the conceptual and linguistic history in the classical and Medieval Latin tradition of the Modern concept of 'Taste' as an aesthetic judgment. In Chapter 5, Carruthers shows us how the medieval mind and body valued 'varietas', utilizing hybridity ('monsters') not just didactic purposes, but for the aesthetic sensory experi­ ence it could offer as well. And yet, if we proceed through the book via its own ductus, the path it sets out before us, as Carruthers has outlined here and elsewhere,1 we arrive in the final chapter, 'Ordinary Beauty', at a conundrum. Only here is volume's title term 'Beauty' given definition and the concept of 'aesthetics' subjected to ’Here, p. 53; see also Carruthers, 'The Concept of ductus, or Journeying through a Work of Art', in Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts ofthe Middle Ages, ed. Mary Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 190-213: 'an ongoing, dynamic process rather than. . .the examination of a static or completed object'; 'Ductus is the way by which a work leads someone through itself'. 114 RHETORIC A analysis.2 These late-placed definitions allow us to see that while Carrutilers' focus in the preceding chapters on the aesthetic attributes of human-crafted artifacts has lent itself to an analysis and vocabulary of pleasure, it has not nec­ essarily lent itself to a vocabulary of beauty, in the way traditionally associated with natural and supernatural forms (human, landscape, divine). Carruthers has been able to show us medieval readers taking enjoyment and pleasure in texts constructed to evince suavitas and varietas, but the leap from this to 'beauty' resides in a conflation that pertains throughout the volume: corporeal sensation = aesthetic sensation = beauty.3 In terms of the book's argument, then, Carruthers need only find sensory perception to find beauty. This is not, however, a necessary correlation, as a text cited by Carruthers in her earlier chapter on ductus reveals: there she quotes Horace, Ars poetica (99): 'It is not enough for poems to be beautiful—they must be sweet'.4 This would suggest a distinction between aesthetic ideal and sensory pleasure that tends to be collapsed in The Experience ofBeauty. Neither does the identifi­ cation of sensory input with beauty allow for the medieval understanding that sensory pleasure could be taken in what was not beautiful—for example, sin. It is also telling that the words 'pulcher' / 'pulchritudo', which one might think most immediately expressive of 'beauty' in Medieval Latin, hardly appear until the final chapter. Also of concern...