In the first comprehensive study of Cleanness and its medieval
contexts, Elizabeth B. Keiser shows how this fourteenth-century
religious poem legitimates erotic pleasure as natural apart from
procreative justification and thus represents a unique moment in
western culture. She argues that Cleanness sacralizes heterosexual
erotic play while condemning male homosexual love as profaning the
Creator's workmanship and his nature. To situate the poem in the
context of medieval homophobic constructions of nature as the basis
of sexual norms, this book compares Cleanness's concepts of sexual
desire and deviance with those of its literary and theological
antecedents, including Thomas Aquinas's discourse on temperance,
Alain de Lille's Complaint of Nature, and Jean de Meun's Romance of
the Rose.
Cleanness is shown to be unconventionally affirmative of
loveplay and other refinements of courtly artifice. Keiser explores
the broad intellectual and social consequences of this celebration
of late medieval masculine ideals and analyzes how the poet's
class-specific aesthetic sensibility underlies a theologically and
ethically flawed revisionist history of the biblical Creator's love
affair with the creation. These limitations shed interesting light
on Cleanness's relation to its theologically more complex and
structurally more sophisticated companion poems -- Patience, Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, and Pearl.
"Keiser's work is no ordinary critical study of a medieval poem.
She finds in Cleanness an articulation of a standard of pleasure
for heterosexual lovemaking, without concern for procreation, that
is novel and otherwise unattested in the Middle Ages". -- Charlotte
C. Morse, VirginiaCommonwealth University
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