In the thirteenth century one of the most important qualities constituting beauty was luminescence." Light is truly the principle of all beauty," said Robert Grosseteste (c. 1245);" light, as the principle of color, is the beauty and ornament of all that is visible."'Beyond the metaphysics enunciated by Grosseteste and other thinkers like Albert the Great, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas, 2 literary and economic manifestations of light's aesthetic importance increased in secular daily life. Michael Camille, in his recent work Gothic Art: Glorious Visions, shows that the Gothic style, with its love of light," fully permeated the world of things," transforming religious life and courtly fashion alike. 3 Whether for priest, artisan, noble, or bourgeois, male or female, group or individual, beauty required the possession of light. Like cathedrals with their stained glass and gilt altars, to be beautiful-and thereby attractive, influential, and prestigious-meant emitting light from one's person. Constructions of beauty in courtly literature, such as those in the allegorical portraits in the Roman de la Rose, 4 can be seen as profoundly vision-centered. 5 The allegories of the Rose mixed fantasy and material verisimilitude to promulgate this ideal of luminescence as necessary for beauty. From Eugene Vance's convincing argument that the material realm of the burgeoning market economy supplied the limits of verisimilitude and imaginability for poets by the products it offered consumers, it follows conversely that the marketplace of-