Pure Pleasure: Cleanness and Fourteenth-Century Sexual Liberation

ABSTRACT Although the critical tradition reads the Middle English poem Cleanness as a homophobic endorsement of heteronormativity, this article insists that the fourteenth-century poem contributes to a much more interesting moment in the history of sexuality. Cleanness includes one of the most shocking celebrations of sexual pleasure from the Middle Ages: without any reference to procreation, God exhorts Abraham to participate in the “play of paramours,” whereby a lover and his beloved discover through their passionate love the visio Dei, bringing about paradise on earth. Reading the poet’s celebration of pleasure alongside Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic, this article discovers in Cleanness a discourse of liberation that sought to realize a more equitable, less violent, world through a sexual pleasure that feels like ecstatic union with God. The poem contributes to a counter-discourse from the end of the Middle Ages that sought in contemplative practices a recuperation of primal “cleanness” and a licensing of pleasure. Such claims to cleanness, however, often resulted in justifications for rapacious violence. The poet maintains the real possibility of recovering this lost pleasure, but he insists on the risk inherent in claims to cleanness. By walking this line between pleasure and hedonism, the poet acknowledges a much more nuanced medieval moralization of sexual pleasure.