Title Courtly desire and medieval homophobia : the legitimation of sexual pleasure in Cleanness and its contexts / Elizabeth B. Keiser

Published New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, ©1997

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Description 1 online resource (x, 299 pages) Contents 1. The Narrative Theology of Cleanness and the Aesthetic Ethics of Thomas Aquinas -- 2. Homophobic Wrath and Paradisal Pleasure -- 3. Educating Love: Nature as Sexual Norm in Cleanness and Alain's Complaint -- 4. The Sexual Ethics of Cleanness and Thomas Aquinas on Temperance -- 5. Revising the Complaint: Desire in the Roman as Context for Cleanness -- 6. Privileging the Feminine: Courtly Revisions of Masculinity -- 7. Homosocial Bondings with God and Christ -- 8. Theopoetic Coherence: Cleanness among Its Manuscript Companions Summary 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 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. This book is of groundbreaking importance for students of medieval literature and religion, the history of sexuality, queer studies, and gender studies Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Print version record SUBJECT Purity (Middle English poem) http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n83208439 Purity (Middle English poem) fast Subject Homosexuality -- Religious aspects -- Christianity -- History -- Middle Ages, 600-1500 Pleasure -- Religious aspects -- Christianity -- History of doctrines -- Middle Ages, 600-1500 Sex -- Religious aspects -- Christianity -- History of doctrines -- Middle Ages, 600-1500 Christian poetry, English (Middle) -- History and criticism Homosexuality and literature -- England -- History Courtly love in literature. Homophobia in literature. Gay men in literature. Desire in literature. Literature, Medieval -- english LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Homofobia -- En la literatura Christian poetry, English (Middle) Courtly love in literature Desire in literature Gay men in literature Homophobia in literature Homosexuality and literature Literature Christentum Homosexualität Höfische Kultur Sexualverhalten Religieuze gebruiken. Erotiek. Homoseksualiteit. Middelengels. Geschichte 600-1500. Sodom (Extinct city) -- In literature England Israel -- Sodom (Extinct city) Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780300157826 0300157827

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