46.Lanfranc, Science of Chirurgie, p. 16.
47. A Late Fifteenth Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, Vol. 1, p. 269.
48. Fasciculus Morum, p. 401.
49.Lydgate, Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, p. 374, lines 1382–5.
50.Ibid., p. 374, lines 13826–7.
51. An Alphabet of Tales: an English 15th Century Translation of the Alphabetum narrationum of Etienne de Besançon, ed. Mary Macleod Banks, EETS o.s. 126, 127(London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1904–5), p. 20.
52. The Book of Vices and Virtues, pp. 26–7.
53.Bromyard, Summa Praedicantium; see Ziegler, Religion and Medicine, p. 239.
54.Henry of Lancaster, Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines: the Unpublished Devotional Treatise of Henry of Lancaster, ed. E. J. Arnould (Oxford: Blackwell, 1940) and trans. Catherine Batt Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines: The Book of Holy Medicines (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014). Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines, 54.18.19 and p. 124.
55.On the hospital and sloth in the text, see Catherine Batt, “Sloth and the Penitential Self in Henry of Lancaster’s Livre de Seyntz Medicines / The Book of Holy Medicines,” Leeds Studies in English 41 (2010): 25–32.
56. Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines, 56.10–12 and p. 126.
57. A Late Fifteenth Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, Vol. 2, p. 361.
58.Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 361.
59.Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 361. Likewise, in an Oxford sermon, sweat produced while laboring in God’s vineyard cures sloth. Oxford, Bodley MS. 95, f. 28.
60.BL MS Royal 7.F XI fol. 129v cited in Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), p. 100.
61.Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies, pp. 99–100 and passim.
62.While certainly not a unique image (Peraldus uses the image of stagnant water in Summa, see Wenzel, p. 235 n.30), these images of miasma arguably have greater significance in post-plague society.
63. Middle English Sermons, p. 75.
64.On legislative changes, see Robert C. Palmer, English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348–1381 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
© The Author(s) 2016
Virginia LangumMedicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and CultureThe New Middle Ages10.1057/978-1-137-44990-0_8
8. Gluttony
Virginia Langum1
(1)Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
In rankings of the seven deadly sins, gluttony is almost always first or nearly last. For the desert father Cassian (d. 435), gluttony is first among the sins. However, a century or so later, Gregory the Great (d. 604) inverts Cassian’s order, placing gluttony last. Yet for many theologians in the later Middle Ages, gluttony retains the place of pride. Peraldus (d. 1271), for example, begins his treatise on the vices with gluttony, reasoning that the devil first tempts Christ with gluttony in the desert. 1
Regardless of its place in the septenary, gluttony, the most natural of the sins, poses a unique sort of problem for theologians. In Cassian’s words, “we can never rid ourselves of the proximity and service of gluttony and of a certain daily contact with it. For the desire for food and for things to eat will always live in us as an inborn and natural quality.” 2 That the ultimate root of gluttony—the desire for food to sustain life—cannot be removed makes it particularly dangerous, serving as one critic writes as, “a synecdoche for all human desire, because human need remains always in some form or another.” 3
What is gluttony? Gluttony has a much more expansive definition in medieval texts than it does now. It refers not only to eating and drinking too much, but to consumption between or outside mealtimes and eating too richly or too daintily. Borne of these excesses are subsidiary sins, such as for Gregory the Great: inepta laetitia [foolish mirth], scurrilitas [buffoonery], immunditia [uncleanness], multiloquium [babbling], and hebetudo sensus circa intelligentiam [dullness of sense in understanding]. 4
Gluttony is inextricable from the body, and, arguably, has always been medicalized. On the one hand, eating and drinking are necessary to human health; on the other, eating and drinking can be detrimental to human health. Therefore, discussion of gluttony often focuses on defining what is healthy and unhealthy, natural and unnatural.
Explaining how best to guard against gluttony, the English Augustinian mystic Walter Hilton (d. 1396) structures the sin in terms of medicine and health. If hunger is a “sikenesse of kynde and mete is medicyn thereto,” eating cannot be a sin. However, “whanne it passith into luste and into wilful likynge, thanne it is synne.” By structuring eating as medical or non-medical, a person can determine whether he or she is fulfilling a need or committing a sin. 5 However, as we see in Piers Plowman, the apparent simplicity of the similar-sounding maxim “mesure is medicine” can be deceptive. In the next two lines, the poet complicates the seemingly straightforward correspondence of spiritual and physical health as mediated through the consumption of food and drink: “it is nought al good to the goost [spirit] that the gut asketh,/Ne liflode [necessities] to the likame [flesh] that leef [valuable] is to the soule.” 6
Further strengthening and sometimes complicating the role of medicine in accounts of gluttony in the later Middle Ages, theologians and writers were exposed to dietary texts from Greece and the Middle East, which reinforced Christian attitudes toward moderation and offered physiological arguments to support ethical ones. 7 Medicine and religion shared many behavioral norms throughout the ancient world and the Middle Ages. 8 Medieval medicine regulated the intake of food both in diets prescribed by doctors to treat particular ailments—diet was the first and principal form of treatment, followed by herbs and then surgery—and in the regimen sanitatis, which advised certain diets as preventative aids. Some writers offer general dietary advice, such as John Lydgate (d. c. 1451) in the much copied “Dietary,” while other diets were formulated specifically to fit the physiologies of their patrons. 9 Queen Isabel’s dietary provides guidelines for keeping the various parts of the body in good health and lists behaviors that damage health. What is “yuel” for the brain includes “surfet or glotenye, drunkeschipe, late sopers” as well as too much raw garlic or dieting. Thus, the dietary not only regulates what is consumed but when consumption takes place and how much is consumed. 10 The passages on each body part mention particular foods and eating habits. Both learned theology and simple pastoral texts refer to Galen and Hippocrates in reference to gluttony and appropriate dietary habits, whether as scholarly authorities or negative exempla. 11
Such regimens are not unique to late medieval Christianity. The desert monks inherited standards and guidelines regarding food and drink from learned authorities. Cassian records the desert father Moses’ discussion of how to measure quantities and determine what types of foods to consume, listing particular foods and diets: beans, vegetables and fruit, or small portions of bread. However, the text urges the monk to judge for himself based on his particular circumstances. 12 Too much fasting is also dangerous. Having immoderately deprived himself of food and sleep, the same Moses suffers “the devil’s assaults,” and realizes that he is “more seriously endangered by repugnance for sleep and food than [he] was by the struggle against lethargy and gluttony.” 13 Many centuries later, the compiler of a treatise on the five senses offers similar advice. Describing the sense of taste, the text advocates eating at noon for digestive purposes: “for by þat tyme after kynde þe stomake of an hool man þat reuleþ him resonabely is voyded. And yf he absteyne lenger it wol apeyre [damage] þe body.” 14 Yet the text also affords the faithful some individual judgment: “when þou hast experience of þyself, loke what manere of diete, what manere of reule holdeþ þyn herte holyest to Iesu.” 15 Although girded with physiological arguments, the text advocates a spiritual goal whose fulfillment entails individual examination as to “what maner of mete oþer drynke þat draweþ þyn herte to luste of itself, wherþurgh þe lust to God is lessed and apeyred, fle it and
enchywe it, for it is nouʒt þy mete, bot þe foule lust þat hyndreþ þe soule.” 16
As we shall see, both religious and medical texts emphasize the importance of a proper diet to maintain not only health but reason, which in turn enables ethical behavior. A typical pastoral indictment against gluttony is that “synful lusti fedyng of riche metis and riche drynkis … turnen vpsodoun a mannes mynde.” 17 Furthermore, over-indulgence was thought to directly affect the sinner’s reasoning power and the messenger of reason: speech. What, then, if anything, distinguished the medical and religious concepts of gluttony, or, medical and religious diets? Recurring aspects of medieval discussions of gluttony—such as the sicknesses it causes, including disturbed reason and disturbed speech—are treated in the next sections in relation to metaphoricity, metonymy, and materiality, respectively.
Metaphorical Gluttony
Gluttony’s general association with illness is fundamental to Christian theology. Some later medieval pastoral writers identify gluttony as the source of all sickness, construing the eating of the apple as an act of gluttony and bodily sickness as a punishment for original sin. 18 In a fourteenth-century apocryphal life of Adam and Eve, God punishes Adam and his offspring with 62 different kinds of sicknesses for Adam’s transgression. 19 Gluttony continues to plague Adam’s descendants. As Peraldus writes, “what follows as retribution for gluttony is bodily sickness, not only one but many and eventually death.” 20 For the diseases caused by gluttony, pastoral writers often offer the cure of abstinence, as well as temperance and sobriety. 21 However, while encouraging fasts in accordance with the Church calendar, pastoral texts tend to urge moderate eating rather than ascetic fasting to combat gluttony, even noting the dangers of excessive fasting in places as we shall see.
Furthermore, the signs of human decay bear witness to gluttony. Gluttons outwardly project their inner pollution. As the compiler of Memoriale Crendencium writes, “glotony makyþ corrupcioun and stynkyng in a man. for þe better þat a man eitþ: þe fouler ordur comeþ fram hym.” 22 Yet, obesity and fat bodies are generally absent from discussions of gluttony. Indeed, the answer to a related question posed in the verse encyclopedia Sidrak and Bokkus, “whennes comeþ fatnesse and why þat a man haþ in his body?”, does not mention gluttony, dietary habits or food at all. 23 This association appears to have developed centuries later. 24
In addition to the foul and tainted products of excess, pastoral writers discuss the chemical form of excess food and drink, which are imagined as venom or poison. Memoriale Credendcium warns that “dryng [drink] þat is y take out of mesure sprediþ venyme into al a mannus body.” As a result, “þe mouth [is] ful of tresoun and trecherye and sweryng and cursyng.” 25 The body digests the venom of food and drink, transforming it into the venom of vile speech. Evil speech and the tongues from whence it derives are often referred to as venomous. Venom and speech have an old association, of course, with the Garden of Eden. 26 As the devil’s lie to Eve is often considered the first sin of the tongue, pastoral writers allude to this linguistic fall in references to the devil’s snake-form. In a discussion of ill speakers, the English compiler of The Book of Vices and Virtues enjoins the faithful to “herken not þe wikked tonge … þat is þe tonge of þe addre of helle þat þe euel spekere bereþ, þat enuenymeþ hym þat hereþ hem.” 27
Although certain authors emphasize gluttony as the material cause of these physical effects and diseases, I will first work through the symbolic associations of disease with gluttony. Various diseases are connected with gluttony, some of which are more symbolic than others: vomiting, loup royal, quinsy, hypertension, stuttering, stupor. Gower draws loup royal from medicine—“it uses up medicines and in the end cannot be cured”—for a symbolic comparison with gluttons’ insatiability and waste of various foods. 28 Yet in the same passage, Gower also lists the material implications of gluttony: painful indigestion, diminished reason and judgment, gout, and various orifices overflowing with filth. 29
Elsewhere, fever serves as a metaphor for gluttony. In Book to a Mother, the author explains how God serves the gluttonous with a “bodily feuere” corresponding to their “gostliche feuere,” and describes gluttons as “distempered, louinge ouer muche worldli þinges.” 30 However symbolic the correspondence, the physical heat induced by “ouer muche hete of mete or drinke” is physiologically consistent.
One of the simplest symptoms of gluttony—vomiting—is also a common metaphor for confession in the later Middle Ages. 31 Medieval medical authorities teach that what is superfluous to the nutrition of the body is cast out as excrement or air. Pastoral writers thus measure the sinfulness of unrestrained and improper diet by the quantity and quality of that which is cast. In his De Miseria Condicionis Humane, Pope Innocent III details the foul products of gluttony: “what goes in vilely comes out vilely, expelling a horrible wind above and below, and emitting an abominable sound.” 32 However, vomiting can also be induced to purge the excesses of the body, just as confession can purge the excesses of the soul. 33 Thus the excesses of gluttony are symbolically linked with the act of confession.
Metonymic Gluttony
Aquinas considers gluttony “inordinate concupiscence.” Concupiscence is a particular passion, a “craving for that which is pleasant,” which like the other passions is ethically neutral in itself. 34 There are two objects of pleasure: intelligible, which pleases reason, and sensible, which pleases the senses. Aquinas further delineates two types of sensible concupiscence. Shared by animals and humans, natural concupiscence fuels the desire for food, drink, and that which sustains life. Only humans experience non-natural concupiscence, seeking pleasure “beyond that which nature requires.” 35
Unnatural concupiscence transcends and even dulls reason on account of the “fumes of food disturbing the brain.” 36 Yet even more perilous is the role of pleasure in consumption. Sensible pleasure may impede reason in three ways: by distracting reason, by opposing reason, and by fettering reason “in so far as a bodily pleasure is followed by a certain alteration in the body, greater even than in the other passions.” 37 The paradigmatic example is the drunkard.
Nature’s insistent prompting of the desire for food to sustain life makes gluttony a complex case study of the role of nature in sin and the excuses made for sin. The compiler of Fasciculus Morum illustrates the role of reason and free will with an exemplum of a blind man and his good guide. When the blind man becomes hungry, he asks his guide to find a place for them to eat. However, the guide replies that it is not yet time to eat and it would slow them down to leave the road just then. Furthermore, the road is uneven and the blind man might hurt himself. Refusing to listen, the blind man stumbles and almost breaks his neck to find an eating place, where he is offered delicious but raw and unhealthy food. The guide warns him against eating it, yet the blind man indulges and falls ill. In the exemplum, the compiler explains, the blind man “who has no understanding except by way of his intellectual faculty” represents the appetites. The guide represents reason, urging the soul on the path to heaven. If the hungry will distracts reason, wasting its time in searching for food, then “our will stumbles like the blind man when his guide is absent.” 38
Nevertheless, many sinners obviously used nature as an excuse as evidenced by the persistent pastoral condemnations of nature and self-preservation as excuses for sin, some of which we saw in Chap. 2. For example, Alexander of Carpenter complains that the gluttonous explain their sins in terms of their cold natures. On hearing the same excuse, the compiler of Fasciculus Morum responds as follows: “of course I want you to eat and drink but be sure that your need for food is as great as you make it out to be; for while it is true that you cannot go without food, you certainly can live—and even better—if you do not eat more than necessary.” Reason rather than the stomach’s desires should direct consumption. 39
Material Gluttony
We recall Aquinas’ “fumes” that disturb the brain. How exactly does this work physiologically? How do fumes
from food disturb the brain? Is Aquinas being poetic? Aquinas’ description is not singular; many similar images can be found in pastoral materials. After citing a conventional biblical idea in which gluttons make their bellies into gods, William Peraldus continues the metaphor: “out of this temple (the stomach), one makes a kitchen, which is so stuffed with food and drink that the natural heat does not suffice to digest these things, but by reason of fresh or damp firewood, a smoke is produced which renders man dull and drowsy.” 40
Such descriptions are medically consistent. From the mouth, food and drink pass to the “furneis of the stomach,” where they are digested, cooked down. 41 In its role of cook, the stomach plays a critical role in the health of the body. When everything works properly, the stomach’s reduction is passed to the liver where it is converted into blood and distributed throughout the body. At each stage of digestion, the superfluous by-products are purged from the body through sweat, farts, urine, and so on. These processes of input and output are integral to the body’s health. However, digestive trouble arises when the body takes in too much food and drink. Excess causes the stomach to work too hard, generating more steam than it can contain. The English encyclopedist Bartholomaeus Anglicus explains that this “malicious smoke” rises to the brain, where it causes a variety of diseases and aberrations, some of which prove detrimental to reason and speech: “he disturbiþ þe substaunce and þe vse of resoun, and ryueþ [constricts] and apeireþ [impairs] þe tongue at telliþ what resoun meneþ, and makeþ þe tonge stamere and faille, as it is iseye in dronke men.” 42 Such is the smoke that Peraldus references in his description of gluttony, and such is the smoke that attacks Baltazar’s reason in the verse homily Cleanness: “So faste þay weʒed to him wyne hit warmed his hert/And breyþed vppe into his brayn and blemyst his mynde,/and Al wakyned his wyt, and welneʒe he foles.” 43 The same excess moisture that causes uncontrolled speech also returns to the stomach and bowels, causing diarrhea and various other ailments.
Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture Page 22
