Negative Affect, Queer Aesthetics, and the Illuminations of Cleanness

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1924, W. W. Greg referred to the twelve illuminations of London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x. as “queer pictures.” Greg’s provocative description of these images serves as the foundation for a reconsideration of the manuscript’s much maligned visual program. By first attending to the affectively negative and highly aestheticized terms which have come to be associated with the images, such as “crude” and “amateur,” this article argues for the reconsideration of the implications of such language. In doing so, it provides a means of understanding how such language reinforces notions of aesthetic and sexual normativity. It likewise explores the role of Cleanness — one of the four poems copied into MS Cotton Nero A.x. — in establishing an aesthetic dialectic which pervades the manuscript object itself. In juxtaposing the “fayre formez” of God’s court and the “dedez vnfayre” ascribed to sexual deviancy, the poet of Cleanness fashions a dialectic which highlights the co-constitutive interplay of cleanness and filth in the medieval religious imagination. This article ultimately contends that the “crudity” of the illuminations represents a complex understanding and deliberate extension of the poet’s textual dialectic which is predicated on the careful suggestion of sin and explicit depiction of God’s judgment.