Facultad de Letras

During the 18th century aesthetics became fashionable due to Burke’s influential work Philosophical Enquiry: the beautiful and the sublime arose as two aesthetic categories that were to fascinate Romantic poets. However, as systematised by Burkean theory –among many others– both beauty and sublimity were perceived as closed systems, which, furthermore, have been considered as gender based ones by most recent feminist criticism. Nevertheless, categories proved to be permeable since they favoured the birth of powerful female characters that defied Burkean hermetic categorisation – such as Matilde in The Monk. Thus, my aim throughout this article is to explore how the beautiful may cast its own shadows and how, in doing so, a linkage with the sublime (male dominated aesthetic) is supported. The following poems, namely, “Lamia”, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “On the Medusa”, will constitute the keystone of this essay, since they epitomise aesthetic ambiguity. In that way, I will centre on the implicit duality in beauty, which, the same as women, is not necessarily docile, but powerfully obscure. The beautiful is not a guarantee of good and virtue any more, but its pulchritude may be shadowy treacherous.

This article aims at showing how and why the influencing category of the sublime as systematized by Burke, Kant and, very meaningfully, by Schiller proved to be a way of understanding, expressing and referring to the divinity in aesthetic terms. Taking into account the above thinkers as well as Lowth’s Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (1787), William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experiences (1902) and Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1963), I will analyze why sublimity is to be associated with an Hebraic God rather than with a Christian theist One; and, in this sense, I will centre on the idea of the Numinous in the Old Testament and its relation with the New Testament. In addition to that, I will first examine one of the elements representative of the “Numen”, of the Mysterium Tremendum: the mountain. Then, as Romantics did, I will also explore a second aesthetic space in relation to the “Numen”: the horizon. Taking all this into consideration, I will refer to how poets and painters (such as Turner, Friedrich or Goya) reflected in their works and canvases the experience of the numinous; an experience that, in the end, derived in forsakenness and nothingness.

Estos veinticuatro molinos harineros, situados en las márgenes del río Guadiana, en el entorno de Ciudad Real capital, cumplieron una función primordial de abastecimiento, en las respectivas épocas históricas durante las que funcionaron. Los molinos hidráulicos fueron utilizados durante siglos, llegando, algunos de ellos, a moler el grano hasta la década de los años 60 del siglo XX; otros dieron paso a las “fábricas de luz”; finalmente, el abandono de sus instalaciones está llevando, irremisiblemente, a la desaparición física de todos ellos y, por tanto, a la supresión de una parte fundamental de la memoria colectiva y del paisaje ribereño del Campo de Calatrava

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. 154 fRANCISCO JAVIER MINAYA GóMEz MEZCLANDO LA BELLEZA Y EL PLACER: EXPERIENCIA ESTÉTICA POSITIVA EN LA POESÍA EN INGLÉS ANTIGUO RESUMEN. Este artículo analiza 23 lexemas que denotan emociones estéticas positivas en inglés antiguo, más en concreto, relacionados con la expresión de la apariencia, la moralidad y la experiencia personal agradable, con el objetivo de entender mejor la experiencia estética en la Inglaterra anglosajona. Valiéndome de distintas herramientas lexicográficas, corpus textuales y software informático, he creado una base de datos donde he anotado las atestaciones del corpus atendiendo a distintos criterios sociolingüísticos. Un análisis en profundidad de estos fragmentos y su tratamiento estadístico ha demostrado que las descripciones de belleza en la poesía en inglés antiguo tienen dos rutas principales: a) una que se centra en las cualidades objetivas del objeto y b) otra se limita a la respuesta del sujeto. Estas dos posibilidades a menudo son complementarias en textos de una naturaleza religiosa. Palabras clave: poesía anglosajona, belleza anglosajona, estética, lingüística histórica, lingüística cognitiva, historia de las emociones, emociones estéticas.

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.

Drawing on recent research on aesthetic emotions and folk aesthetics, the purpose of this paper is to look into the way aesthetic pleasure and negative aesthetic experience are described and rendered in the Old English Martyrology (OEM). Using different Old English lexical tools and an edition of the OEM with a translation, this paper analyses these two aesthetic responses taking into consideration the context of the composition of the text and the possibility that it was aimed towards the emotional education of a particular religious community. It argues that, to a certain extent, the author of the OEM standardises the aesthetic experiences that they narrate, both positive and negative, and associates them with particular religious and doctrinal messages that are aimed at providing sensory inputs through which the conceptualisation of abstract and religious experiences is facilitated.

Based on some of the most recent studies on aesthetic emotions, the purpose of this paper is to examine how aesthetic concepts and aesthetic experience are translated and adapted from Felix's Vita sancti Guthlaci into Old English prose. Looking into the Old English terms from the lexical domains of beauty and aesthetic pleasure, this paper highlights very specific translation practices on the part of, especially, an Old English author, who implements an additional aesthetic dimension that is not generally found in the Latin source. This paper highlights an apparent hybridity between the cognitive and the sensory in these literary texts, and it also stresses how one of these authors in particular frequently uses sensory evaluations to describe the complex and abstract ideas that are typical of the hagiographical genre.

This article explores the role of FEAR and AWE in Guthlac A and that of WONDER in Guthlac B. Based on recent emotion theories, scholarship on the adaptation of Latin sources into Old English verse, and studies on emotional communities in the Middle Ages, the purpose of this paper is to examine how these two Old English authors interpret emotional experience in these poems and how they construct an effective emotional dimension in their texts that is linked to doctrinal ideas. This research reveals how each of these authors prefers some emotional response over others and how they also employ figurative language to transmit a series of doctrinal messages that are constructed around an appreciation of saintly virtue and secular and religious knowledge, and a fear of moral contamination that is triggered by the demonic.

Even though as of late there has been a renewed interest in the aesthetic ideals in early Medieval England, the conceptualisation and experience of ugliness in Old English sources has been largely neglected. Drawing on the recent research carried out on aesthetic emotions and folk aesthetics, and despite the lack of academic materials on artistic and literary canons of ugliness, the purpose of this paper is to look into the terms that rendered the experience of ugliness and its closest emotional response, aesthetic horror, in order to examine how these are employed in poetic texts. The findings from this study evidence a lack of use of terms for negative aesthetic experience in Old English poetry that suggests that the lexical domain of ugliness and related emotional responses were not fundamental constituents of the Old English formulaic style, while the lexical domain of beauty and its responses were. Additionally, this study highlights the fundamentally moral character of the idea of ugliness.

Based on some of the most recent studies on aesthetic emotions, the purpose of this paper is to examine how aesthetic concepts and aesthetic experience are translated and adapted from Felix’s Vita sancti Guthlaci into Old English prose. Looking into the Old English terms from the lexical domains of beauty and aesthetic pleasure, this paper highlights very specific translation practices on the part of, especially, an Old English author, who implements an additional aesthetic dimension that is not generally found in the Latin source. This paper highlights an apparent hybridity between the cognitive and the sensory in these literary texts, and it also stresses how one of these authors in particular frequently uses sensory evaluations to describe the complex and abstract ideas that are typical of the hagiographical genre.

Based on the most recent research on emotion and, specifically, on contemporary aesthetic emotion theories, and combining methods from cognitive and historical linguistics, this paper aims at looking into the cognitive and semantic dimension of Old English literal and figurative denominators of wonder. Exploring how these terms are used in the Old English corpus, this paper highlights a recurrent use of literal emotion terms for wonder with varying semantics, and a wide array of figurative expressions that rely on the most common action tendencies and somatic profiles that are attributed to this emotion. This research stresses the rich variety that Old English authors had at their disposal when describing wonder-experiences and the many ways in which these authors described and narrated these emotional experiences, all of which, in extreme, reveals important information about the semantic dimension of these terms and identifiable patterns of conceptualisation for this emotion.

Located in a semi-arid zone of the central Iberian Peninsula, the Tablas de Daimiel National Park is a wetland of international significance that has experienced intense agricultural pressure since the eighteenth century. The impact of this is recorded in the sediments within the wetland, which have been studied by means of surveys. Several sediment anomalies have been found that were caused by an increase in agricultural activities, distinguishing this wetland from natural  sedimentary behaviour. Four phases of significant disturbance have been established: the first drainage project in the 1750s, an increase in cultivated area in the surrounding land during the second half of the nineteenth century, a drainage attempt during the Spanish Second Republic and a final degradation in the second half of the twentieth century. Dated with some uncertainty due to the laboratory methods used, these disturbances have been corroborated by historical sources. In conclusion, one can establish that deforestation in the surrounding land, changes in land use, continual ploughing and drainage projects are all crucial in explaining the impoverishment of this wetland.