The God of the Middle English "Cleanness" and his erotic exhortations of purity
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2012
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
The Middle English Cleanness is a poem unique in the medieval context in that it couples
its homophobic discourse with a powerful vindication of sexual pleasure and its
role in relationships without referring to the procreative telos of marriage. In fact,
Cleanness does not even stress that the only proper arena for erotic desire is the marriage
bed, with the narrator emphasising the mutuality of pleasure instead. The article
investigates the text’s rhetorical interplay between the vilification of homosexuals and
the divine endorsement of heterosexual lovemaking. Going beyond the established critical
consensus on the issue, it argues that the contrast between the two serves not only to
allow the author to vent his homophobic prejudice but also connects with the epistemological
concerns of Pearl, the text that precedes Cleanness in the Cotton Nero A.x
manuscript
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Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 47.4 (2012), pp. 133-145