Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture
Page 26
15.Most notably, US Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin claimed that “legitimate rape” does not cause pregnancy on the grounds of unspecified medical knowledge. Aaron Blake, “Todd Akin, GOP Senate Candidate: ‘Legitimate Rape’ Rarely Causes Pregnancy,” Washington Post. 19 August 2012. Accessed 11 August 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2012/08/19/todd-akin-gop-senate-candidate-legitimate-rape-rarely-causes-pregnancy/
16.See Ruth Mazo Karras and Jacqueline Murray, “The Sexual Body,” in A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age (500–1500), ed. Linda Kalof (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 59–75. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, p. 95.
17.Monica H. Green, “The De Genecia Attributed to Constantine the African,” Speculum 62 (1987): 299–323 and Joan Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 93–7.
18.Jacqueline Murray, “Sexuality and Spirituality: the Intersection of Medieval Theology and Medicine,” Fides et historia 23.1 (1991): 20–36.
19.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–I, qu. 95.
20. The Liber Celestis of St. Bridget of Sweden, ed. R. Ellis, EETS o.s. 291 (London: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 45, 47. The Liber Celestis (1987), p. 486. There are two independent translations of this text into Middle English and numerous excerpts in the vernacular. On Bridget’s influence, see Gunnel Cleve, “Margery Kempe: a Scandinavian Influence in Medieval England?” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England V (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 163–178.
21. The Book of Vices and Virtues, p. 4.
22.Rypon, RY51B, ed. Johnson, forthcoming.
23. On the Properties of Things, Vol. 1, p. 293.
24. The Book of Vices and Virtues, p. 156; Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, p. 201. For a humoral explanation of the instructions to the illuminator of Le Somme le Roi that Lechery’s mouth should flow with blood, see Ellen Kosmer, “The ‘Noyous Humoure of Lecherie,’” Art Bulletin 57 (1975): 1–8.
25.“Perambulauit Iudas,” pp. 149–50, lines 55–60.
26.Ibid., p. 150, line 56.
27.Jacqueline Murray discusses this passage in “Men’s Bodies, Men’s Minds: Seminal Emissions and Sexual Anxiety in the Middle Ages,” Annual Review of Sex Research 8 (1997), pp. 1–26. Yet where she concludes that the speaker reveals the “uniqueness of his body’s responses and movements compared to those of other men…indicating that other men could be hotter and more prone to emissions.” However, I think it just as likely that the speaker is old.
28.Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum, p. 330.
29.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II, q. 154, art. 5; Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum, p. 331.
30.John Bromyard cited in Craun, “It is a freletee of flessh,” p. 181.
31.Ibid., p. 184.
32. Book to a Mother, p. 91.
33.John of Burgundy, “Treatises on Plague,” p. 588.
34.John Lydgate, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part II, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS
es. 107 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 702–7.
35.Demaitre, “The Description and Diagnosis of Leprosy,” pp. 327–44.
36.Bryon Lee Grigsby. Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 12.
37.Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England in Medieval England, p. 122. On the association of prostitutes with disease, see Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 40, 42.
38.Ibid., p. 338.
39.Robert of Flamborough, Liber poenitentialis, 4.6.228, p. 238 “Per singulos menses gravia atque torpentia mulierum corpora immundi sanguinis effusione relevantur. Quo tempore si vir coierit cum muliere, dicuntur concepti secum vitium seminis trahere, ita ut leprosi et elephantici ex hac conceptione nascantur, et foeda in utroque corpora pravitate vel enormitate membrorum sanitas corrupta degeneret.”
40.Robert of Flamborough, Liber poenitentialis 4.8.225, p. 197.
41.Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 88.
42. Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen, p. 187.
43. A Litil Tretys on the Seven Deadly Sins, p. 23.
44. Dives and Pauper, p. 64.
45.Albertus Magnus, Man and Beasts: De animalibus (Books 22–26), trans. James Scanlan (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1987), p. 64.
46.Rypon, RY51B, ed. Johnson, forthcoming.
47. Quattuor Sermones, p. 60.
48. Chastising of God’s Children, p. 214.
49.Ruth Mazo Karras, “Gendered Sin and Misogyny in John of Bromyard’s ‘Summa Predicantium,’” Traditio 47 (1992): 233–57.
50. Speculum naturale of Vincent of Beauvais cited in Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 37.
51.Albert the Great, Questions Concerning Aristotle’s “On Animals,” trans. Irven M. Resnick and Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), p. 454.
52. Dives and Pauper, p. 67.
53.Ibid., pp. 68–9.
54.Ibid., p. 92.
55.Ibid., pp. 92–3.
56.Ibid., p. 84.
57.For the trial itself, see Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31, ed. Norman P. Tanner (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 99. For discussion of the text, see Anne Hudson, Premature Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 417–20.
58.See for example, Dyan Elliott, “Bernardino of Siena versus the Marriage Debt,” in Desire and Discipline, ed. Eisenbichler and Murray, pp. 168–200; Ruth Mazo Karras, “Two Models, Two Standards: Moral Teaching and Sexual Mores,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 126–38.
59.Cited Karras, “Two Models, Two Standards,” p. 130.
© 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_10
10. Conclusion
Virginia Langum1
(1)Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
Even the most humble vernacular pastoral manual recognized the significance of medicine and the medicalized body in relation to the sins, whether functioning metaphorically, metonymically, or materially. Confessors and medieval writers were sensitive to, if not in agreement upon, the challenging pulls of physiology and the body’s natural inclinations in reference to both private confession and widespread social phenomena. Furthermore, the wide range of medical images produced reveals the circulation of medical ideas in culture and a multifarious understanding of the body and behavior in the later Middle Ages. The discussion of the medical underpinnings of religious imagery might smack of the “medical materialism” deployed to make sense of religious experience that William James disparages in The Varieties of Religious Experience. 1 Understanding the medical contexts of the seven deadly sins—their status in relation to the passions, their symbolic and material effects upon both body and soul—do not undermine their significance in medieval culture. Rather than a material reduction of religious experience and spirituality, medicine is integral to better understanding cultural meanings of living and suffering, being a body and a soul.
The present unavoidably shapes the types of questions we ask of the past, and the seven deadly sins have never left the popular imagination. Advertising and marketing campaigns use the sins to sell products such as underwear and Zinfandel wine. The sins organize “how-to” pieces about dating, consultancy, Internet gaming and so on. However, in more serious ways, modern discussions re-invent, re-inscribe, and re-center the sins as ethical
concepts. A 2001 printed public lecture series devoted to the sins reflects their various cultural reinterpretations. In this series, Michael Eric Dyson’s Pride probes racial identity and racial pride, and Joseph Epstein’s Envy considers backbiting among academics, among other manifestations. 2 Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous claim that envy serves as the basis for most successful democracies has been echoed in various editorials and scientific experiments, promoting envy as a positive, competition-spurring force, whose cultivation is necessary for progressive, societies, bodies and minds. 3 The indictment of greed was frequently made by the Occupy Wall Street Movement. 4
However, other recent studies invite a return to older texts and earlier thoughts about the sins. The psychologist Solomon Schimmel, for example, weaves case studies from his psychotherapeutic practice into a discussion of premodern teachings on the sins. He offers the following rationale:We need not shun modern secular psychology and return exclusively to religion and philosophy for psychological knowledge and therapy. But we must recognize that secular psychology is seriously deficient in addressing problems associated with impulse control, selfishness, existential meaning, moral conflict, and ethical values which were so prominent in earlier psychological reflection. A first step in rectifying these deficiencies is for secularists to acknowledge them and to respectfully study the premodern traditions. 5
Every year, popular books and documentaries gesture to the premodern traditions of the sins. After briefly citing Thomas Aquinas and Dante in his recent series on the sins, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock focuses on extreme subcultures or disorders rather than more common, insidious human behavior.
However, the sins have also been folded into medical and scientific discourse. In a general sense, neuroscientific models plot motivation and responsibility—our “culpability”—and the idea of genetic or physiological dispositions to certain kinds of behavior, from over-eating to assault, have repeatedly shaped both popular and scientific discussions of criminality and legislation of morality. At the other pole, one movement in psychiatry, moving against the medicalization of all human behavior, has argued that there are certain “moral, and not medical, conditions” in psychiatry. 6
Some scientists have used the seven deadly sins as a more specific organizing principle. For example, the molecular biologist John Medina draws images from Dante’s Inferno into his genetic and biological discussion of human behavior. 7 More recently, the Australian experimental psychologist Simon Laham argued for the “scientific” benefits of committing the seven deadly sins. This book was released as The Joy of Sin in the UK and The Science of Sin in the USA. One of the caveats, however, is that the sins have to be practiced in moderation, which arguably challenges their definition as sins. 8
In the political sphere, “sin taxes” levy duties on products deemed unhealthy, such as alcohol and tobacco. 9 The individual’s sin and the consequent risk of disease are social problems; the healthy individual body forms a part of the healthy social body. A Mayo Clinic report neatly compacts these ideas in its report: “The Syntax of Sin Taxes: Putting it Together to Improve Physical, Social and Fiscal Health.” 10 Discussion is ongoing as to whether to extend sin taxes to unhealthy foods, such as sugar and trans fat, the commonly charged culprits of the obesity epidemic.
Specific sins explain the causes of obesity in scientific and political discussions. An article in the British Medical Journal, for example, asks in its title, “Obesity in Britain: Gluttony or Sloth?” 11 The political debate following the report echoed this language, with a recent British House of Commons Health Committee Report on Obesity asking whether obesity should be “blamed on gluttony, sloth, or both?” and an editorial in an American medical journal suggesting that encouraging fitness in diabetic patients “combat[s] sloth as well as gluttony.” 12 While politicians and reporters might choose this catchy language to generate media interest in otherwise dry policies and scientific studies, the introduction of sin implies moral responsibility on the part of the obese. Other scientists and writers have seized upon this language of sin and causality to remove obesity from the realms of morality and agency and replace it within those of disease and determinism. For example, responding to the previous titles, the geneticist Stephen O’Rahilly delivered a talk at Cambridge entitled “Genetics and Obesity: Beyond Gluttony and Sloth.” Similarly, The Seven Deadly Sins of Obesity adopts the moral language of the debate and framework of the seven deadly sins but transfers responsibility from the individual to the environment. 13
Although the language employed is not always so obviously moral as in accounts of sin taxes, sloth and gluttony, these examples illustrate a common intertwining of medicine and morality. But how relevant is contemporary language to medieval and religious understanding of the seven deadly sins? The use of the words “gluttony” and “sloth” does not imply historical or cultural continuity, let alone similar medical underpinnings. Some modern thinkers have contested the idea that the modern language of sin entails a moral or religious dimension at all, or at least one resembling traditional understanding of the sins. For example, the philosopher Robert Solomon argues that the “seven deadly sins” as understood today:have nothing to do with damnation or degeneracy but rather with poor health. They lead to a reduced lifespan, an unappealing appearance, the inability to attract a mate at the health club. What is deadly about the deadly sins is that, literally, they shorten our lives. Thus gluttony is really a code name for calories and high cholesterol. Lust is short for overdoing it, endangering one’s health, wasting one’s “precious bodily fluids”… Sloth now means not getting enough exercise. Greed is taking on more than you can handle, inducing dangerous stress. Pride becomes an excuse not to exercise, and envy is just another excuse not to try. 14
In this sense, the seven deadly sins are reduced to metaphors for acts against the body, radically upending the disease-for-metaphor motif found in many of the texts discussed in this book.
Rather than reducing morality to the purely physical and artificial “medicine has replaced religion as the social guard of morality,” some sociologists have argued. 15 Therefore, health and even beauty regimes may re-affirm moral and social values. For example, contemporary feminist works, such as Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth and Michelle Lewica’s Starving for Salvation argue that the diet and beauty industries imitate patristic forms of religion in subjugating the female body. The less subtle “faith-based weight loss” movement also reasserts the relationship between weight and morality.
Scholars disagree on the value of comparing medieval and modern models of health and morality. This debate is particularly fertile in relation to female ascetic practices, with accounts that pathologize medieval holy women with modern diagnoses. For example, the author of Holy Anorexia argues that there is “a resemblance between the contemporary anorexic teenager counting every calorie in her single-minded pursuit of thinness, and an ascetic medieval saint examining her every desire.” Caroline Walker Bynum, one of the most prominent medieval cultural historians, has argued against such correspondences. In the epilogue to her highly influential Holy Feast, Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Bynum writes that modern women “cultivate not closeness to God but physical attractiveness by food abstinence.” 16 As for the relevance of her study of the Middle Ages to the modern world, Bynum offers only a negative analogy: “compared to the range of meanings in medieval poetry and piety, our use of body and food as symbols is narrow and negative.” 17
Understandings of body and sin, however, need not be so narrow and negative. A potential point of convergence between modern and medieval treatments of sin and disease is the idea of alienation. In his sociological account of the seven deadly sins, Stanford Lyman explains that this “alienating quality” is central to understanding of the sins. He writes that “the inhumanity of humanity is located in the sins’ capacity to separate man and woman from their kind, and ultimately from themselves.” 18 In both modern and medieval theological accounts, sin d
esignates such a rupture. Likewise, the phenomenologist Drew Leder has described pain, and by extension, disease, in terms of an alienation from others. 19
However, whereas modern discourses of pain and disease emphasize the impossibility of sharing these experiences, late medieval culture offered a rich context for the holistic understanding of suffering, resisting the alienating effects of disease, in which confessors practiced physical medicine and physicians offered spiritual counseling. Moralized medicine is palliative rather than merely punitive when considered from a wider perspective that incorporates material medicine and healing. Neither simply material nor simply figurative, medicine is the mantle that contains and warms the community of believers, preserving “the natural heat of the virtues” and defending it “against the sharp assaults of bodily and ghostly enemies.” 20