Medieval Nature Class 5 – Cleanness
Cleanness belongs to a manuscript now known as Cotton Nero A.x/2: Cotton because it belonged to the seventeenth-century library of Robert Cotton; Nero because he organized his manuscripts in shelves each topped with the bust of a Roman Emperor (Beowulf for example is in a manuscript cataloged as Cotton Vitellius A. xv); the A and x further divisions; the /2 to mark the divisions wrought to Nero A.x since Cotton had three unrelated manuscripts bound together: the other two, each Latin manuscripts, are Cotton Nero A.x/1. Apart from Cleanness, /2 has Patience, a retelling of the story of Jonah; Pearl; and most famously Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Each survives singly in this small manuscript, about the size of a Penguin paperback, written in a single hand, and provisioned with illustrations.
For several glorious years, a fully digitized copy of the manuscript, now held at the British Library, was available to anyone with internet access. But the British Library’s database was destroyed by vandals, and the Cotton Nero A.x Project, a digital humanities effort to reëdit each of the poems and dig deeply into the manuscript, may be moribund, or had some shattering of its own website, a catastrophe all too common for so many Digital Humanities projects. O fortuna.
I was still able to access what may be scraps of the project to give you a sense of what the manuscript looks like. Using it is suboptimal. Click through to share my frustration.
I’m interested in a passage from the first example, about the parable of the wedding feast, which allegorizes proper attire to being without sin. The passage can be transcribed like so:
Þat þo be frely and fresch, fonde in þy lyue,
and fetyse of a fayr forme to fote and to honde,
and syþen alle þy oþer lymeȝ lapped ful clene—
þenne may þou se þy sauior and his sete ryche (173-176; ed. Kenna S. Olsen, 2015, for the Cotton Nero A.x project)
Other editions do this differently. Casey Finch does the first line as “Þat þo be frely and fresch fonde in þe lyue”; Kevin Gustafson as “Þat þo be frely and fresch fonde in þy lyve”; Finch ends line three with a semi-colon; Gustafson with a comma; Olsen with an em-dash. All punctuation here is modern punctuation.
Furthermore, Finch prints the text continuously, with no stanza breaks. Gustafson, likewise. Like many others, Olsen does this as four-line stanzas, encouraged by marks in the lefthand margin that generally, but not always, come every four lines: these double slashes, barely perceptible now, are on rare occasion rendered in modern editions as a pilcrow, a ¶. Arthur Bahr’s recent book on the manuscript discusses these in wonderful detail.
Furthermore furthermore, the decision to print the text with its original letters is, well, a decision. The thorn, a þ or Þ, is a th- sound; the yogh, ȝ, often a guttural sound, variously used, likely not guttural in its use here. None of these are used in modern English except by antiquaries and those seeking an antique effect. Preserving them in a scholarly edition feels imperative; preserving them in an edition primarily geared for students feels, perhaps, archaizing, as these letter forms, so strange to us, at least initially, would likely have struck the poem’s first readers as no more remarkable than any other letter.
And then there’s the matter of translation into modern English.
Brian Stone’s 1971 translation for Penguin does this as:
If generous and gentle, you shall be judged noble.
Then fashioned in fair form, with foot and hand
And all your other limbs habited immaculately,
You may see your Saviour and his seat of majesty.
Casey Finch as
If they’re found to be fair, to be fine and well meant,
Well fitting in form for your foot and your hand,
If the bulk of your body is beauteously clothed,
Then you’ll see our Saviour Who sits on his throne.
Kevin Gustafson as:
If they be found bright and beautiful in your life,
Fittingly fashioned at foot and at hand,
And immaculately adorning all your other parts,
Then you may see your Savior and His seat of glory.
And Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, whose translation I suspect most of you used, did it as
endeavour that those be beautiful and fresh during your lifetime, and well-proportioned in a fine fashion for foot and for hand, and then all your other limbs wrapped most cleanly; then you may see your Saviour and His noble throne.
The first question may be whether the translator takes this material as a four-line unit and whether they preserve it as syntactically complete in itself.
My chief concern is with two words of the second line of this unit: the “fayr forme” of “and fetyse of a fayr forme to fote and to honed.” “Form,” the Middle English Dictionary tells us, means much the same as it does in modern English: physical shape, outward appearance, semblance, a mold, manner, correct way of doing something, model to be imitated, and so forth.
I’m interested in this word because of the importance of form as a word in this poem. I won’t have time list or discuss every instance, but I hope this can inspire discussion. About the post-diluvian people, before their turn to filth, we are told that they were “þe fairest of forme and of face als” (253), in Stone’s translation, which I prefer to many others because it keeps the word form, “they were the fairest of form and of face also.”
We encounter the word, perhaps most signally, in the poem’s third line, which speaks of the “fayre formeȝ” that the good rhetor finds to advance his speech. We don’t need the word to be aware of the importance of “fair form.” For we have a sense of perfect form too in the demand that we be like pearls, which “schynes so schyr [bright] þat is of schap rounde” (1121) for Christ himself is Pearl-like, “þat euer is polyced als playn as þe perle seluen” (1068). We should be smooth and circular, the very image of perfection at least since Plato’s Timaeus.[1]
We have a sense of perfect form throughout, as well, more negatively, in the poem’s frequent recourse to metaphorized disability: not so much when it lambasts anyone who imagines God might be blind or deaf – for these are, as it were, invisible disabilities – but in its account of Christ’s healing of “laȝares monye” (1093), which Stone does as “lazars,” and Andrew and Waldron as “loathsome people.” The word laȝar, or “Lazar,” is both a common name, Lazarus, a general name for people with leprosy – singled out in Cleanness‘s next line as “lepre”(1094), and perhaps clearly here a word meaning more generally people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, all of them figured as filth whom Christ, overcoming his disgust (1090), needs to cleanse by healing.
With all that in mind: what is the relationship between poetic form, perfect dress, the norm, the beautiful, the fitting, and the inverse of all of these? That’s what I’m hoping we can discuss.
