The Recovery of Beauty ─ Arts, Culture, Medicine

The Recovery of Beauty comprises fourteen essays exploring what constitutes beauty across time in Western thought and art, its shaping and sustained cultural role, and its relation to a fully human existence. The book engages with the need to rescue beauty, not just to keep alive traditions of thought, but also to reinstate beauty as something more than a shifting cultural construction, to probe its constants and its value. Many of the essays engage with the cultural history of beauty and of its recovery, exploring the development of conceptions of beauty across time, the ways in which tensions are inherent in cultural understandings of beauty, the differences and continuities between past and present ideas of beauty, and the intersection of the aesthetic with the moral and spiritual. Literature provides a particular focus, but the book engages too with medicine and cosmetic surgery, philosophy, theology, visual arts, architecture and dance. Recurrent themes are the human need for beauty, its links to truth and understanding, and also its deceptive dangers. Finally, the book asks: does beauty have a restorative or healing agency?

Corinne Saunders is Professor of Medieval Literature in the Department of English Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. She specialises in medieval literature and the history of ideas. Her books include Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (2010), Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (2001), and The Forest of Medieval Romance (1993).

Jane Macnaughton is Professor of Medical Humanities and Dean of Undergraduate Medicine at Durham University, UK. She is also a general practitioner working in gynaecology. Her research focuses on the idea of the critically engaged medical humanities, seeking to influence clinical practice, therapy and research through dialogue with the humanities. Her publications include Clinical Judgement (2000, with Robin Downie) and two edited volumes with Corinne Saunders, Madness and Creativity (2005) and The Body and the Arts (2009).

David Fuller is Emeritus Professor of English at Durham University, UK, and former University Orator. He continues to teach on Shakespeare and related topics. He has written on subjects from Medieval to contemporary, particularly Marlowe, Shakespeare and the Renaissance, Blake and the Romantic period, and Joyce and Modernism. His main other interest is in music, especially opera and song. He trained as a Musicologist, and plays the piano and organ.