Medicine as Metaphor in the Middle English Cleanness

Abstract

fourteenth-century religious poem Cleanness has at its core three Old Testament episodes: the Deluge (249-544), the destruction of Sodom (601-1048), and Belshazaar's Feast (1056-1804). This linear movement through sacred history is, however, interrupted after the second episode by a description of the Incarnation (1069-1108), which is depicted in lan guage as flowery and reassuring as that of the three main episodes is grim and foreboding. This seeming arbitrariness of the poem's narrative struc ture has led some readers to suggest for it a unifying schema which emphasizes its potential as eschatology. Theresa Tinkle, for one, has described the poem's strategy as historiographic: The homiletic move ment gradually discloses the human need for and the divine offer of grace, roughly the progress of history from the Old to the New Testament.1 For Tinkle, the poem presents history as a movement in which our urgent need for divine salvation emerges more and more vividly.2 Sarah Stanbury, arguing along similar lines, regards the poem as explication of an historical process, the developing and unfolding knowledge of God that culminates in the beatific vision, the sight of God on his throne.3 Yet why, in so broad an historiographical exercise, does the poet concern himself so rigorously with the corporeal, and especially with, as Allan Frantzen has put it, the sights, sounds, and smells of Sodomy?4 I will argue that this emphasis on corporeality derives from a broader medical metaphorics, deployed by the poet to illustrate this progress of divine justice from Old Testament vengeance to New Testament grace. In this schema, Sodomy, in its perceived status as unnat ural, serves as an appropriate sin with which to represent disease, while the grace of Christ, arriving with the Incarnation, is our cure. Cleanness, although nearly two centuries removed from the landmark events of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, reflects Lateran's influence in its use of medicine as metaphor. Pope Innocentius III was concerned to unite, under the rubric of a renewed orthodoxy, what he then believed was a splintered ecclesiastical community. Toward this end, Innocentius