ABSTRACT

To speak of medieval aesthetics will strike many as contrived, partly because aesthetics, regarded as a distinct discipline, is usually dated approximately from the appearance in 1790 of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1928), which may itself be thought contrived inasmuch as Kant has remarkably little to say about the appreciation and interpretive criticism of the arts, and proposes a formal definition of the ‘aesthetic’ (or of aesthetic judgment) which serious contributors to the topic admit to be too narrow or too artificial. Of course the analogy between the moral and the aesthetic, and the paedeutic use of the aesthetic, redeem Kant’s standing as the initiator of philosophical aesthetics, and a similar retrospective reading of medieval texts justifies the selective reconstruction of so-called medieval aesthetics. As Paul Kristeller (1950) has compellingly shown, the very idea of the system of the ‘fine arts’ is a late development in western thought, by virtue of which ancient, medieval and even early modern views of the arts are tolerably but anachronistically treated as contributing to a relatively straightforward conceptual history of aesthetics.