ABSTRACT
In fourteenth-century King Edward II suggests that male beauty could have an effect on men, and that effect could be conceptualized as love, just as the effects of women's beauty. Furthermore, it shows that men in the late sixteenth century, in all their susceptibility to human beauty, were considered very emotional indeed, and emotions in turn an essential component of masculinity. By looking at love and beauty the author would also like to comment on the history of emotions more generally, and suggest reading the specific ways in which different historical periods and communities described and explained their emotional processes. The author will look at male beauty through Gaveston's fictional self-portrait which allows imagining a potential lived body with its projected emotional life, constructed mainly through the idea of exceptional beauty. In fact, the whole emotional, sexual and social process that went into male-male erotic relationships could be narrated through the conceptual matrix of beauty.
