This paper aims to look into the link between the experience of beauty at a sensory level and its connection with more cognitive considerations in Anglo-Saxon England. To do so, I have carried out a complete analysis of the usage of the Old English adjective faeger, one of the main descriptors of beauty in the linguistic variety. Using the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, I have created a concordance and a database containing all its attested forms, which I have analysed following diverse sociolinguistic criteria. This analysis has proven that the evaluation of beauty as rendered by Old English faeger had a strong cognitive component, mainly related to the moral and spiritual virtues of the aesthetic object and often visually represented by an abundance of light. According to this analysis, the experience of beauty in Anglo-Saxon England constitutes a rare experience that in most cases, goes beyond the sensory and the purely physical.[es] Tan bello por fuera, como por dentro: Sobre la conexión entre la belleza y la moralidad en el corpus del inglés antiguo Resumen. El propósito de este artículo es investigar la relación entre la experiencia de la belleza a un nivel sensorial y su conexión con aspectos más cognitivos en la Inglaterra anglosajona. Para ello, he llevado a cabo un análisis completo del uso del adjetivo faeger perteneciente al inglés antiguo, uno de los principales descriptores de belleza en la variedad lingüística. Usando el Dictionary of Old English Corpus, he creado una concordancia y una base de datos con sus distintas atestaciones, las cuales he analizado siguiendo diversos criterios sociolingüísticos. Este análisis ha demostrado que la evaluación de la belleza tal y como es descrita por faeger tenía un fuerte componente cognitivo, principalmente relacionado con las virtudes morales y espirituales del objeto que a menudo son representadas visualmente con una abundancia de luz. De acuerdo con este análisis, la experiencia de la belleza en la Inglaterra anglosajona constituía una experiencia poco frecuente que, en la mayoría de casos, traspasaba las barreras de lo sensorial y lo puramente físico. Palabras clave: belleza, inglés antiguo, lingüística histórica, faeger, estética.
This article analyses 23 different lexical items in Old English denoting positive aesthetic emotion, more specifically, related to the expression of appearance, moral qualities, and personal pleasant experience with the aim of gaining a better understanding of aesthetic standards in Anglo-Saxon England. Using different lexical tools, corpora and software, I have built a database where I have annotated the attestations from the corpus taking into account different sociolinguistic criteria. An in-depth analysis of these fragments and their statistical treatment has shown that descriptions of beauty in Old English poetry have two main routes: a) one that addresses the object’s aesthetic qualities objectively and b) another that focuses on the subject’s response to it. Furthermore, these two alternatives were often complementary in texts of a religious nature.
Drawing on the recent studies on aesthetic emotions and on their recent application to the field of the Old English aesthetic emotions, this paper explores one emotion from the emotion family of AMAZEMENT in the Old English poetic corpus, attending to the type of wonder that is typically triggered by objects of beauty, excellent manufacture and by the natural world. The purpose of this paper is to understand better the poetic usage of the Old English terms for wonder as well as evidence their role in literary and everyday contexts. Through a fine-grained analysis of the above domains, this paper has shown that the wonder implicit in these texts can be triggered by perceptual or cognitive appraisals, but also by a combination of both, highlighting the complexities and particularities of the early medieval English emotion of WONDER, as well as its similarity to other emotions like the EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY or AWE.
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