Finding the Forms of Cleanness

Abstract

The Middle English poem Cleanness is regularly marked off into four-line units in its sole surviving manuscript, British Library Cotton Nero A.x, and I argue that reading Cleanness with attention to these divisions helps the poem emerge as a more complex piece of verbal and homiletic art. By suggesting reading strategies for the lines that they mark off, the stanza marks evoke the interpenetration of the visual and the verbal that the poem proposes more broadly. The author’s words and the scribe’s activity thus combine to shape the poem’s interpretive potential. The crucial issue is therefore not whether Cleanness was intended by its author to be written or read in stanzas, but rather the fact that the poem’s uniquely surviving physical form encourages us to consider whether it is so, and what that might mean for our engagement with its content—how we should go about finding, in short, the literary, codicological, and homiletic forms of Cleanness .