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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Keiser, Elizabeth B., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Homosexuality and literature--England--History.

Homosexuality and literature.

Courtly love in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (314 pages)

Place of Publication:

New Haven ; London : Yale University Press, [1997]

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 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

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

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-300-15782-7

OCLC:

1322125454