Eating Well/Well Eaten: Lot’s Wife’s Folly and the Wisdom of Salt in Cleanness

In attributing the punishment of Lot’s wife to a culinary misuse of salt, the Cleanness-poet evinces salt’s potential as a vexed and unstable signifier in medieval cultural discourse. Far from clarifying the workings of divine justice, the poet’s rationale for Lot’s wife’s punishment actually exposes the inconsistencies of her story in its moral setting. Cleanness deviates from the predominantly favorable coding of salt in the Bible and in various medieval social and intellectual domains, where it was associated with sacrifice and covenant as well as preservation, table-fellowship, and prudence. Building on Derrida’s concept of hostipitality, this article investigates how salt figures in Cleanness’s consideration of the hostility or coercion latent within rituals of commensality, through which the Christian collective is modeled. Furthermore, I propose that the fate of Lot’s wife as saltlick establishes “the eater eaten” as a topos that adds piquancy to Cleanness’s many homiletic representations of feasting, from the Wedding Feast to Baltazar’s banquet. By destabilizing the exemplary structures Lot’s wife’s punishment traditionally buttresses, the backstory of salt points instead to the uncanny as a route into the poem’s subtle deconstruction of commensality.