This monograph examines three aesthetic emotions in AElfric's Lives of Saints. Drawing on recent research on emotional communities, this research combines methods from Cognitive Sciences and other studies on early Medieval English language and literature in order to explore AElfric's usage of the terms in the lexical domain of amazement. The main aim of this study is to identify preferred modes of expression that would reveal a series of emotional rules in the context of AElfric's emotional community. Looking into AElfric's usage of this lexical domain and how he depicts emotion dynamics in these texts, this monograph shows how the emotion family of amazement is central to the hagiographical genre, and it highlights important emotion-regulation scripts that operate in these texts.

This monograph offers an analysis of the lexical domain of beauty and other additional lexical domains that are figuratively used to refer to beauty, highlighting their central role in the Anglo-Saxon formulaic style. Using different methods from computational and cognitive linguistics, this study is aimed at determining the exact semantic value of these terms, detecting possible patterns of metaphorization and metonymization and identifying strategies behind their usage, ultimately determining how beauty was conceptualised and experienced in early Medieval England and in its literature. This research evidences the importance of this aesthetic idea in the Old English poetry and its aesthetic paradigm and revealing the core associations between beauty and other religious and social ideas.