“I cluppe and I cusse as I wood wore”: Erotic Imagery in Middle English Mystical Writings

Paper · 2013 · Władysław Witalisz

Summary

This is a literary-historical essay, not an NLP study. It asks why erotic and bodily imagery appears in Middle English mystical writing, and how that imagery differs from the eroticised praise of Mary in male-authored Marian lyrics. Witalisz traces two sources. The first is patristic allegory of the Song of Songs by Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, who read carnal love as a mere linguistic vehicle for a passionless union of soul and God. The second is Bernard of Clairvaux's affective theology, where love of Christ's flesh becomes the starting point of spiritual love. He then reads female and anonymous visionaries, including Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich and A Talkyng of the Loue of God, using the cognitive notion of affective intentionality. His main claim is that in these late texts the sensual image stops being a pure metaphor. It becomes a sensory rationalisation of an inner elation, and sometimes it even becomes the core of the message. This matters for understanding gendered religious voices that were often censored or edited by men.

Key points

Patristic exegesis by Origen and Gregory of Nyssa treated the Song of Songs as allegory. In this reading, words for body parts name faculties of the soul, and passion must be turned into passionlessness (the Stoic apatheia, via Clement of Alexandria and the Desert Fathers).
Bernard of Clairvaux shifted the emphasis. Because humans are fleshly, love must begin with the flesh and be completed in spirit. His work founds medieval affective spirituality.
The broader context includes the Fourth Lateran Council, mendicant orders and vernacular literature. These opened spiritual life to laypeople, and the period saw an unprecedented rise in female mystics.
Marian lyrics borrowed courtly-love and pseudo-Petrarchan beauty language. The author treats this as a male eroticisation, distinct from the somatic imagery of female mystics.
The erotic language of Mechthild of Magdeburg was softened by her Latin translators. The essay closes with Simone Weil's analogy: blaming mystics for loving through sexual feeling is like blaming painters for using material colours.

Interesting ideas

I1. The essay separates the literal vehicle of an image (bodily, erotic) from the intended tenor (spiritual), and asks which level the text really foregrounds.
I2. Origen's view treats scripture's body words as homonyms that also denote soul faculties, so the same lexeme systematically names two domains.
I3. Affective intentionality explains imagery as a projection of the speaker's inner state onto descriptions of outer experience.
I4. The case of Mechthild shows translators toning down register and content, so comparing versions reveals what a translation silently dropped.
I5. The essay contrasts the same imagery across author groups (male Marian poets vs female visionaries) to show that function depends on voice and genre, not on the words alone.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

I1 (frames): Keep the literal frame of a figurative sentence and attach a separate, labelled metaphorical mapping, so the explanation shows both readings instead of overwriting one.
I2 (world): Represent systematic body-to-mind sense pairs from WordNet as linked senses in the ontology, so entity-building can choose the abstract referent when context signals allegory.
I3 (frames): Add a frame attribute that distinguishes reported events from projected inner states, which helps implicature and irony modules avoid treating emotional description as literal action.
I4 (back): In translation through the meta-world, diff the source graph against the regenerated text's graph to flag lost intensity or softened stance as an explicit fidelity warning.
I5 (answer): For QA on fables and tales, condition literal-versus-moral readings on genre metadata, so allegorical stories get answers about their lesson rather than only their surface events.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Institutions

🎓Jagiellonian UniversityKrakow ·

Poland3 works · 235 citations

📚 Shelves 2Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Classics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 2English · 1,373 works Historical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Władysław Witalisz. 2013. “I cluppe and I cusse as I wood wore”: Erotic Imagery in Middle English Mystical Writings. Text Matters.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.2478/texmat-2013-0026

@inproceedings{witalisz2013i,
  title = {{“I cluppe and I cusse as I wood wore”: Erotic Imagery in Middle English Mystical Writings}},
  author = {Władysław Witalisz},
  booktitle = {Text Matters},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.2478/texmat-2013-0026},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.2478/texmat-2013-0026}
}

References

3 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

Astell, Anne W. The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995. Print. Bernard of Clairvaux. On the Song of Songs. Vol. 2. Cistersian Fathers Series. Trans. Kilian Walsh. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistersian, 1976. Print. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone, 1991. Print. The Cloud of Unknowing. Ed. James Walsh. New York: Paulist, 1982. Print. Coakley, Sarah. “Gregory of Nyssa.” The Spiritual Senses. Perceiving God in Western Christianity. Ed. Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 36–55. Print. Dreyer, Elizabeth A. Passionate Spirituality. Hildegard of Bingen and Hadewijch of Brabant. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2005. Print. Farina, Lara. Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006. Print. Foucault, Michel. L’Histoire de la sexualité. 3 vols. Gallimard: Paris, 1984. Print. Gavrilyuk, Paul L., and Sarah Coakley, eds. The Spiritual Senses. Perceiving God in Western Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Gregory of Nyssa. Commentary on the Song of Songs. Ed. and trans. Casimir McCambley. Brookline: Hellenic College, 1987. Print. Hadewijch. The Complete Works. Ed. and trans. Columba Hart. New York: Paulist, 1980. Print. Hugo of St. Victor. “Explicatio.” Patrologia Latina 196. C406. Ed. Jacques Paul Migne. find
Paris, 1864. Print. Julian of Norwich. The Shewings of Julian of Norwich. Ed. Georgia Ronan Crampton. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1994. N. pag. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Web. 15 June 2011. Lewis, C.S. The Allegory of Love. A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1936. Print. Lochrie, Karma. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991. Print. Logan, F. Donald. A History of the Church in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. McGinn, Bernard. “The Language of Inner Experience in Christian Mysticism.” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 1.2 (2001): 156–71. Web. 18 June 2011. find
McInroy, Mark J. “Origen of Alexandria.” The Spiritual Senses. Perceiving God in Western Christianity. Ed. Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 20–35. Print. The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha: King James Version. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. Origen. The Song of Songs. Commentary and Homilies. Trans. R. P. Lawson. Westminster: Newman, 1957. Print. Petrarcha, Francesco. Canzoniere. Ed. Ugo Dotti. Roma: Donzelli, 2004. Print. Phipps, William E. “The Plight of the Song of Songs.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42.1 (1974): 82–100. Web. 20 June 2011. Saupe, Karen, ed. Middle English Marian Lyrics. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute, 1997. N. pag. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Web. 25 June 2011. A Talkynk of the Loue of God. Ed. M. Salvina Westra. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950. Print. Tallon, Andrew. Head and Heart: Affection, Cognition, Volition as Triune Consciousness. New York: Fordham UP, 1997. Print. Taylor, Henry Osborne. The Mediaeval Mind; A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages. London: Macmillan, 1911. Print. Tobin, J. Frank. Introduction. The Flowing Light of the Godhead. By Mechthild of Magdeburg. New York: Paulist, 1998. Print. Weil, Simone. The Notebooks. Vol. 1. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. find

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