Introduction

The Middle Ages have long been accused of lacking systematic and formalised aesthetic and ethical theories, despite a variety of scattered statements that can be related to aesthetics and ethics. Most historians of philosophical theories about aesthetics and ethics have devoted virtually no attention to the early Middle Ages and have subjected to closer scrutiny only a few prolific authors from the later Middle Ages, among them Peter Abelard, St Thomas Aquinas, William Ockham and John Duns Scotus. As far as aesthetics is concerned, the most persuasive justification for this approach has been drawn from the history of the word aesthetics. Indeed, the word aesthetica was invented only in the middle of the eighteenth century when it served as a term for the academic study of perception in general. Some historians of aesthetics have drawn attention to the fact that, before the word aesthetica was derived from Ancient Greek in Germany, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British sensualists had already laid down the principles of the philosophical inquiry into perception. Aesthetics did not become generally applied as a term for a philosophical discipline until the nineteenth century, when the eighteenth-century wider meaning was narrowed down to the study of the means to determine the criteria for judgements of beauty, in the context either of art alone or jointly of nature and art. Yet it can hardly be denied that aesthetic thought existed during the Middle Ages, even without necessarily being recorded in writing.

Without using the word aesthetics, medieval aestheticians studied perception in general and established connections with ontology and with ethics. There were many controversies. One long-term controversial issue was the ontological relationship between the perceivers and the objects perceived. In the words of St Augustine: ‘If I were to ask first whether things are beautiful because they give pleasure, or give pleasure because they are beautiful, I have no doubt that I will be given the answer that they give pleasure because they are beautiful.’ Augustine recorded an objectivist doctrine that dominated in his own time and connected perception and being. What constituted beauty according to this doctrine was the quality of the objects perceived, not some activity of the perceiving person.