Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia: The Legitimation of Sexual Pleasure in Cleanness and Its Contexts.

Elizabeth B. Keiser. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 299pp. $37.50 (cloth).

This study needed a good editor. Nonetheless, Keiser's efforts oblige us to reflect anew on an unusual medieval text. Cleanness not only extolls heterosexual love-making not aimed at reproduction, it characterizes its celebration of loveplay as emanating from the Creator. It does so even while condemning in the most vituperative terms "the Sodomite men's proclaimed preference for making love with males" (13). (The words "sodomy" and its adjective form are not used by the Cleanness poet.) Although the juxtaposition of these two attitudes in the poem have previously attracted attention, Keiser departs from other interpretations by insisting that there is an all-important link between what the poet affirms and what he denounces. "I think the poet depicts homosexual practices as the revolting invention of predatory brutes in order to maintain a reassuring boundary between licit and illicit and to remove from the courtly ideal of erotic artifice any taint of the stigma of effeminacy that usually was associated with heterosexual intercourse indulged in with no intention of procreation, but only for mutual delight" (8).

She illustrates her point by comparing Cleanness with three other medieval works: Alain de Lille's Complaint of Nature, Jean de Meun's section of the Romance of the Rose, and Thomas Acquinas's Summa Theologiae ("On Temperance"). Each of these texts helps Keiser trace, rather convincingly, the increasing value placed on heterosexual desire from Alain's twelfth-century poem to the fourteenth-century Cleannness poet.

The importance of Keiser's explication extends beyond the worth of Cleanness itself. To argue that a defense of the courtly ethos depends significantly on the vilification of same-sex activity between males is to offer one explanation for the rise in homophobia that occurred at the end of the Middle Ages. This perspective also highlights the heterosexist bias not only of the poem but in Western society. Keiser willingly lends her study to advocate for liberation from such bias. Given the obscurity of the work she analyzes, however, and her own ponderous prose, the goal seems highly elusive.

WILLIAM A. PERCY, III