Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture

by Virginia Langum

  Generally, medieval theology distinguishes between a sin [peccatum], which refers to one particular evil act [actus malus], and a vice [vitium], which refers to a bad habit [habitus malus]. This is the distinction that Aquinas draws in Summa Theologica. 79 Whereas a sin describes an act, a violation of God’s law, a vice describes embeddedness: a behavioral pattern. However, such terms are fluid in medieval texts, particularly works of popular religious instruction. 80 The deadly sins might also be referred to as capital sins. Capital and deadly sins can be venial or mortal. Veniality accounts for mitigating circumstances, such as ignorance or intention, and—particularly relevant for our purposes—often also the passions, pre-rational impulses. 81 The physical experience of the passions can influence or move the will, and the will is the proximate cause of virtuous or vicious action, according to thinkers such as Aquinas.

  Discussions of the sins flowered with the pastoral movement of the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils in 1179 and 1215, and various schemata were designed to help priests as well as the faithful to understand and remember the sins. These schemata included the seven-headed beast of Revelation, the seven kinds of animals, the seven kinds of stones, the seven demons driven from Mary Magdalene, the seven Old Testament kings who persecuted Israel, the seven wounds of Christ, the seven branches on a tree, and the seven diseases. 82 As we shall see, the schemata of diseases varied in specificity and sophistication. For example, some sermons systematize the sins as symptoms of leprosy or types of blindness. Other sermons correlate sins with particular types of diseases, stages of life, or seasons of the year, based on humoral balance. Furthermore, theologians throughout the Middle Ages debated whether the sins were natural or non-natural, whether certain sins were more natural or less natural than others, and whether this naturalness diminished their sinfulness. These arguments are considered for each individual sin during the course of this book.

  The period 1215–1500 marked the zenith of the seven deadly sins. Reformation historian John Bossy argues that in the early modern period, there was a shift in preference toward the Ten Commandments in the religious literature, and that this shift enacted the movement toward Protestant ethics. In both content and form, the Commandments are more rigid and precise than the sins. Bossy maintains that although not fully realized in the popular religious literature until early modernity, the movement toward the Decalogue was initiated in the later Middle Ages by theologians such as the English William Ockham (d. 1347) and the French Jean Gerson (d. 1429), who argued that Christian ethics are a matter of faith, not reason. 83 According to Bossy, this shift is officially enacted in the Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), where the Commandments and not the heptad are to form the basis of confession. 84 However, the sins do not simply disappear in reformed Catholicism or Protestantism. Rather, as Richard Newhauser has persuasively demonstrated, while divested of their sacramental authority, the seven deadly sins persisted in other contexts, such as drama, and functioned in new roles. 85

  While the Ten Commandments were prevalent in the pastoral and poetic materials of the later Middle Ages, they were not usually elaborated in the same way as the seven sins, for understandable reasons. Whereas the Commandments mete out fixed syntactical units, accounts of the sins revel in a more protean polysemy, easily adapted or allegorized to suit the speaker or writer’s needs. Hence, the seven deadly sins were enormously prevalent in sermons, poetry, and popular theological works. Imprinting experience, thought, literary, and artistic output, the seven deadly sins formed an integral part of “medieval anthropology.” 86

  Literature and Culture

  The study draws upon a pan-European base of medical and religious tracts that circulated around Europe and England in the period in question. 87 However, the popular religious works under study, such as sermons, exempla and other pastoral material, and poetic works, are limited to medieval England. A focus on medieval England allows insights to be gained into the transmission of medical images and ideas into wider culture. All quotations from Latin sources and other languages are provided in translation, and Middle English quotations are included in the original with glosses for the more obscure words. Yoghs and thorns are retained. The yogh [Ʒ, ʒ] corresponds to a range of sounds, but particularly “y” and “gh.” The thorn [Þ, þ] corresponds to “th” in modern English.

  The medical information relevant to this project is gleaned from a variety of sources, from the learned texts that served surgeons and physicians, to the lay regimens that provided basic guidelines on healthy living, and from texts written during particular circumstances, such as times of plague, to more general repositories of learning, such as encyclopedias. The surgical tracts under study include the major works of Guy de Chauliac (d. 1368), Lanfranc of Milan (d. 1306) and John Arderne (d. 1392), all of which circulated in Latin and vernacular translations during the later Middle Ages. 88 The dietary writings examined include general advice manuals and dedicated plague tracts. 89 I use the thirteenth-century De Proprietatibus Rerum [On the Properties of Things] by the Franciscan Bartholomaeus Anglicus (d. 1272), which was translated into English by the Dominican John Trevisa (d. 1402) in the fourteenth century, as my base encyclopedic text. 90 However, distinctions made by audience and genre are difficult to maintain. Encyclopedic texts, in particular, defy medical or religious categorization, as well as classification by target audience. 91

  The religious material under study, which includes writings on the seven deadly sins, also varies. There are many treatises dedicated to the virtues and vices. With Richard Newhauser, who cites the fourteenth-century Dominican Henry of Suso, I readily concede that “there are so many books about the vices and virtues” that “this short life would end before one had managed to look them all through.” 92 The present book draws on the major treatises, such as those by William Peraldus and Lorens d’Orleans using vernacular translations where possible. Major theological treatises, such as Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, contribute to an understanding of both the relationship between the body and sin and critical distinctions between the passions and the sins. Confessional manuals and preachers’ handbooks, such as the thirteenth-century Summa Confessorum of Thomas of Chobham and the fourteenth-century Fasciculus Morum, are also significant sources on the seven deadly sins. Some mystical treatises, such as the fourteenth-century Scale of Perfection by the Augustinian Walter Hilton (d. 1396) and the anonymous late fourteenth-century Chastising of God’s Children, also offer insight into the embodiment of the seven deadly sins. Yet the most diffuse and vivid of the religious sources are sermons. 93 Medieval sermons do not simply feature turgid talk of damnation. They teem with rich stories and figurative imagery designed to teach and instill ideas into their readers and listeners. They are as receptive to literary and cultural analysis as more conventional literary works.

  Finally, I consider short lyric poems and longer poems that illuminate aspects of the seven deadly sins. For example, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, dating from the last quarter of the fourteenth century, examines medieval conceptions of medicine and sin. In a series of dreams, dreams-within-dreams, and waking moments, Piers Plowman describes the quest of the narrator, “Will,” to learn how to live a good Christian life. Will is both an allegorical representation of “the will” and a person named Will who fathers a daughter, makes mistakes and grows old. As he progresses through the poem and his own life passus by passus (meaning both “step” and division of the poem) he sees and meets several allegorical figures, including the seven deadly sins. The seven deadly sins confess to the priest “Repentaunce,” offering an account of their actions and dispositions that the poet supplements with physical descriptions. Like “Will,” the sins are both allegorized representations of the sins and flesh-and-blood people who commit sins. 94

  Another example is John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c. 1390). Although its primary subject is secular love, the poem adopts the pastoral frame of the seven deadly sins. The poet yokes the penitential images of sickness and
the cure of confession with the “maladie” of lovesickness. 95 The lovesick Amans pleads to Venus as “mannes hele,” and Venus encourages him to “schew” his “sekeness.” 96 However, as per the dictates of the Fourth Lateran Council mentioned above, Venus calls upon her priest to “hier this mannes schrifte [confession]” as all earthly medicine—although metaphorical in this case—must be preceded by spiritual medicine. 97 The poem includes a chapter on each sin, focusing on how the sins pertain to love with illustrative exempla. Beyond the initial conceit, the poem reveals an interest in medicine, the passions, and the physiology of the sins. 98

  Outline

  The first chapter proposes three ways in which medieval texts medicalize the seven deadly sins: as metaphor, as metonym, and as material. These three models are considered in detail, and key issues relating to the interpretation of medical language in religious and literary texts, as well as religious language in medical texts, are outlined. The chapter also addresses the theoretical and practical relationship between spiritual and material medicine.

  Following this chapter on the complex interrelationships of language, medicine, and sin, each sin is then allotted its own shorter chapter, following a variant of the Gregorian order adopted in many late medieval texts: pride [superbia], envy [invidia], wrath [ira], avarice [avaritia], sloth [acedia], gluttony [gula], and lechery [luxuria], or abbreviated by the first letters of their Latin names as SIIAAGL. 99 Each chapter is structured by the three models of its respective sin: metaphorical, metonymic, and material. While these models provide a means for organizing the material, their boundaries are not always so easily drawn. The figurative and the material become increasingly entangled, particularly as we progress from the sins of the spirit into the sins of the flesh. Therefore, while the chapters consistently follow these divisions, the length with which they are treated is not always equal nor their demarcation always clear, as will be noted in reference to the particular sins.

  What emerges in this book is not a culture adverse to thinking about material explanations in relation to ethical choices and actions but rather a culture that made extensive use of circulating ideas, images, and practices. Although interpretations and the depth of engagement vary, medicine serves as a useful means to consider human frailty and resilience, as reflected in learned theology and simpler pastoral works. Despite continuing arguments that medieval orthodoxy smothered science before renaissance culture delivered us into modernity, the religious culture depicted here recognized the possibilities of new scientific ideas and actively sought to question, reconcile, and adopt them. 100

  Notes

  1.The broad relationship between medicine and religion throughout history is mapped out in Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Harper Collins, 1997) and most recently in Gary B. Fengren, Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014).

  2.Heidi Rimke and Alan Hunt, “From Sinners to Degenerates: the Medicalization of Morality in the 19th Century,” History of the Human Sciences 15.59 (2002): 59–88.

  3.Thomas Dixon, Science and Religion: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 118.

  4.Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor: and AIDS, and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 1989), p. 58.

  5.See, for example, David Edge, “Technological Metaphor and Social Control,” New Literary History 6.1 (1974): 135–47, and Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race and Gender: the Role of Analogy in Science,” History of Science Society 77.2 (1986): 261–77. Also, Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?: a History of the Genetic Code (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  6.Jenn Webb and Sam Byrnand, “Some Kind of Virus: the Zombie as Body and as Trope,” Body & Society 14.2 (2008): 83–98 (p. 85).

  7.Neeraja Sundaram, “Imagining Bio-disaster, Reproducing Social Order: Epidemics in Contemporary Hollywood,” Journal of Creative Communications 7.1&2 (2012): 135–151 (p. 136).

  8.Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, “Infection, Media and Capitalism: From Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10.2 (2010): 126–147.

  9.See, for example, Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: Routledge, 1996), Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1994) and Bryan S. Turner, “Social Fluids: Metaphors and Meanings of Society,” Body & Society 9.1 (2003): 1–10.

  10.See, for example, Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Emily Russell, Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011).

  11.On the developments in later medieval confession, see Thomas N. Tentler’s classic study Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), and for a more modern account, see Abigail Firey, ed., A New History of Penance (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

  12.Bryon Grigsby, “The Social Position of the Surgeon in London, 1350–1450,” Essays in Medieval Studies 13 (1996): 71–80.

  13.Thomas Rütten, “Early Modern Medicine,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine, ed. Mark Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 60–81 (p. 63).

  14.Furthermore, the impact of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries on the period’s religious mentality is a contested issue. Eamon Duffy argues that the Reformation had little impact on the lives of the ordinary faithful. See, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

  15.John Bossy, “Moral Arithmetic: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments,” in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 214–234 (pp. 216–7).

  16.On the continuing legacy of the sins, see Richard Newhauser, “‘These Seaven Devils’: The Capital Vices on the Way to Modernity,” in Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, eds. Richard G. Newhauser and Susan J. Ridyard (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012), pp. 157–88 and in the same volume, Kathleen Crowther, “Raising Cain: Vice, Virtue, and Social Order in the German Reformation,” pp. 304–20.

  17.Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 84–6.

  18.Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices (London: Warburg Institute, 1939), p. 44 and passim; Lavinia Griffiths, Personification in Piers Plowman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985).

  19.Richard Newhauser, The Treatise on the Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), pp. 159–60 and Siegfried Wenzel, “Preaching the Seven Deadly Sins,” In the Garden of Evil: the Vices and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Newhauser (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005), pp. 145–69.

  20.Amundsen casts some doubt on the wide application of this prescription, arguing that the prohibition only applied to secular clergy in major orders and did not exclude surgical operations related to wounds and fractures. Darrel W. Amundsen, “Medieval Canon Law on Medical and Surgical Practice by the Clergy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 22–44.

  21.Fay Marie Getz, “Charity, Translation and the Language of Medical Learning in Medieval England,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64 (1990): 1–17.

  22.Peter Murray Jones, “Medicine and Science” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, eds. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 433–48 (p. 433).

  23.Vernacular manuscripts appear to have been owned by university-trained physicians, barber surgeons, as well as clerics and lay people. See, for example, Vern L. Bullough, “Duke Humphrey and His Medical Collections,” Renaissa
nce News 14 (1961): 87–91; Peter Murray Jones, “Four Middle English Translations of John of Arderne,” in Latin and Vernacular Studies in Late Medieval Manuscripts, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), pp. 61–89; and Claire Jones, “An Assortment of Doctors: the Readers of Medical Books in Late Medieval England,” Journal of the Early Book Society 3 (2000): 136–151.