Carrie Griffin (Heidelberg: Univer-sitätsverlag Winter, 2013), p. 7. The text survives in 35 manuscripts dating from the late fourteenth century to the early seventeenth century.
156.Ibid., p. 7.
157.“Condemnations of 219 Propositions,” trans. Ernest L. Fortin and Peter D. O’Neill, in Medieval Political Philosophy: a Sourcebook, eds. Johsua Parens and Joseph C. Macfarland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 320–332.
158.On the impact of the Condemnation on notions of free will and agency, see Martin W. F. Stone, “Moral Psychology After 1277,” in Nach der Verurteilung von 1277, eds. Aertsen, Emery and Speer, pp. 795–826.
159.On the concept of discourse community, see Claire Jones, “Discourse Communities and Medical Texts,” in Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, eds. Pahta and Taavitsainen, pp. 23–36.
160.Guy de Chauliac, The Cyrurgie of Guy de Chauliac, ed. Margaret S. Ogden, EETS o.s. 265 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 381.
161.James J. Bono, “Science, Discourse, and Literature: Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science,” in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), pp. 58–89.
162.Edge, “Technological Metaphor,” p. 137.
163.See Rossell Hope Robbins, “Medical Manuscripts in Middle English,” Speculum 45 (1970): 393–415, p. 406 and 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.
164.See Robbins, “Medical Manuscripts,” p. 406. For Lanfranc’s text, I use the printed edition, cited as “Lanfranc, Science of Chirurgie” and the anonymous Middle English surgical texts found in London, Wellcome MS. 564, which are a compilation of Lanfranc and Henry de Mondeville, “Le MS. Wellcome 564 Deux Traites de Chirurgie de Moyen-Anglais,” ed. Richard Grothé (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Montreal, 1982) and cited as “Chirurgie de 1392.”
165.Paul Hodgkin, “Medicine is War: and other Medical Metaphors,” British Medical Journal 291 (1985): 1820–1.
166.George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
167.Dale Keiger, “Why Metaphor Matters,” John Hopkins Magazine (1998) < http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0298web/metaphor.html>; Heather Patricia Lane, SueAnne McLachlan and Jennifer Philip, “The War Against Dementia: Are We Battle Weary Yet?,” Age Ageing 42.3 (2013): 281–3.
168.Citrome, The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature, pp. 137–172.
169.Christiania Whitehead, Castles of the Mind: a Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003).
170.On the first view, see Luke Demaitre, “The Description and Diagnosis of Leprosy by Fourteenth-Century Physicians,” Bulletin in the History of Medicine 59 (1985): 327–44 (p. 339) and on the second (the longer quotation), Ziegler, Medicine and Religion, pp. 49–50.
171.John Arderne, Treatises of Fistula in Ano, Haemorrhoids, and Clysters, ed. D’Arcy Power, EETS o.s. 139 (London: K. Paul. Trench, Trübner & Co., 1910), p. 7.
172.Glendig Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 39–89.
173.Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 23.
174.Jean Gerson, “On Hearing Confessions,” in Jean Gerson: Early Works, ed. and trans. Brian Patrick McGuire (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), pp. 365–77 (p. 367).
175.Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 36.
176.Lanfranc of Milan, Lanfrank’s Science of Chirurgie, ed. Robert v. Fleischhacker, EETS o.s. 102 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1894), p. 54.
177.Lanfranc, Science of Chirurgie, pp. 25–6; 42, 136.
178.Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 21.
179.Peter Murray Jones, “The Surgeon as Story-Teller,” Poetica 72 (2009): 77–91 (p. 86).
180. Preaching in the Age of Chaucer: Selected Sermons in Translation, ed. and trans. Siegfried Wenzel, (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), p. 93.
181.Ibid, p. 93.
182.Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 22.
183.McVaugh, “Bedside Manners in the Middle Ages,” p. 202. See also Julie Orlemanski, “Jargon and the Matter of Medicine in Middle English,” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42.2 (2012): 395–420.
184.Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 4.
185.Ibid., p. 4.
186.Ibid., p. 4.
187.Edwin Craun, Lies, Slander and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 15–16.
188.Lanfranc, Science of Chirurgie, p. 8; Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 5.
189.Lanfranc, Science of Chirurgie, p. 9; Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 4.
190.“Chirurgie de 1392,” p. 192.
191.Ibid., p. 192.
192.Ibid., p. 192.
193.“Chirurgie de 1392,” p. 192; Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 4.
194.Lanfranc, Science of Chirurgie, p. 9.
195.Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 7.
196.Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 8; “Chirurgie de 1392,” p. 192.
197.Craun, Lies, Slander and Obscenity and Jean E. Gosall-Myers, Speaking in the Medieval World (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
198.Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 8.
199. Middle English Dictionary “inducten” b.
200.Lanfranc, Science of Chirurgie, examples on pp. 209, 256, 270, 272, 278, 292.
201.Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 15.
202.Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS. 95, f.28v.
203.Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 107.
204.Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 64.
205.Lanfranc, Science of Chirurgie, p. 197.
206.Ibid., p. 353.
207.Arderne, Treatises of Fistula, p. 6.
208.Ibid., p. 7.
© 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_3
3. Pride
Virginia Langum1
(1)Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
The first epistle of John 2:16 creates a threefold division of the sins well known to medieval homilists: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Theologians also employed these three biblical categories to explain the operation of sin, particularly the Fall. The last stage of Adam’s Fall involved his rational consent, represented by the pride of life. 1 The “pride of life” as a phrase commonly employed in medieval texts reveals two attributes of pride or superbia that recur in medieval texts: an undue focus on the matters and qualities of this earthly life and an association with a particular point in human life: later adolescence and middle age. The pride of life is so called because this is the point at which the rational powers of discretion are fully developed. 2 The potential for age to trigger pride is explored in the section on the material associations of pride.
When did pride become preeminent? The desert fathers considered it the ultimate sin, and in the sixth century Gregory the Great made pride the root of all the sins. As mentioned in the introduction, Gregory’s emphasis on pride may have had a practical motivation in the growth of monasticism. However, Gregory also relied on scriptural authority from Ecclesiasticus 10:15 (“pride is the beginning of all sin”), a verse often cited in theological works.
Pride has various species or sub-categories in medieval texts. 3 Gregory the Great’s offshoots of inanis gloria [vainglory] include inoboedientia [disobedience], iactania [bragging] hypocrisis [hypocrisy], contentiones [contentions], pertinaciae [obstinacies], discordiae [discords], and nouitatum praesumptiones [presumptions of novelties]. 4 One of the most significant developments in the categorization of pride is the combination of pride a
nd vainglory. Whereas Cassian distinguished between vainglory and pride on the basis of how one sees oneself in relation to others and in relation to God, vainglory is usually a species of pride in the later Middle Ages. For example, The Book of Vices and Virtues lists the species of pride as untruth, madness, presumption, ambition, 5 vainglory, hypocrisy, and pusillanimity. 6 As we shall see in more detail later, certain species of pride bear a particular relation to the body and its health. For example, ingratitude, classified under pride in many treatises on the vices and virtues, and here in The Book of Vices and Virtues as a subspecies of untruth, includes the failure to acknowledge God’s grace in “good of kinde, as fairenesse, helþe and strengþe of body, wit and wisdom as to the soule.” 7 In this sense, health and other physical attributes precipitate pride.
Metaphorical Pride
Late medieval writers metaphorically compare the sin of pride to illness in a general sense, as well as to particular illnesses and medical conditions. The Book of Vices and Virtues accounts pride to be worse than other sicknesses “for certes he is in gret perel þat alle manere of triacles turneþ hym in-to venym.” 8 However, pride is likened to particularly destructive illnesses, such as the plague. According to one homilist, pride alone “destreweþ all þe vertews of þi sowle. As þou seeste þat generall sekenes of pestilence corruppeþ [corrupts] all men, so it corruppeþ all vertews.” 9 Such a statement will take on greater significance after contextualizing the perceived role of pride in material epidemics, such as the Black Death, later in this chapter. However, the general metaphor of pride as disease emphasizes the overarching destructiveness of pride, inside and out; for in the words of Aquinas, the sin “raises itself up against all the powers of the soul, and like an all-pervading and poisonous disease corrupts the whole body.” 10
Pride’s association with the rational powers makes for a convincing correlation with types of madness. Madness or “wodnesse” is its own branch of pride in the pastoral The Book of Vices and Virtues. The compiler explains that people consider a person “wod” who is “out of his witt” and whose “resoun is turned vp-so doun.” The mad man proves himself when he “euele dispendeþ [squanders] þe goodes þat beþ nouʒt his; for þei beþ his lordes goodes,” for which he must eventually make account. Metaphorically, this refers to “þe precious tyme and þe worldely goodes þat he haþ in kepynge. þe vertues of his body, þe þenkynges and assentynges and þe willes of his soule,” which the proud man wastes “in folies and outrages riʒt to-fore his lordes eiʒen, ne ordeyneþ hym not to ʒelde his acountes, and wel wot þat he mot acounte, and ne wot whanne, ne in what stide, ne what day; suche folie is wel cleped wodnesse.” 11
Furthermore, pride is conceived as particular types of madness or brain sickness, such as frenzy 12 or “fallynge ewill” [falling evil or epilepsy]. 13 Citing both biblical and medical authority, Bartholomaeus begins his entry on epilepsy by addressing its spiritual connotations: it was historically called “Goddis wraþþe” and still is called “þe holy passioun” because it occupies the “holy partye of þe body,” or the head. 14 Medieval homilists specifically associate epilepsy with pride, as metaphorically descriptive of both its symptoms and its preventions. A fifteenth-century sermon, for example, describes the epileptic in the throes of a seizure as having no awareness of the surrounding world. Equivalently, the proud man has no awareness of himself. 15
In contrast, the thirteenth-century manual for anchoresses Ancrene Wisse develops the concept of a metaphorical falling sickness as a cure or awakening from pride and presumption: “an anchoress of the sublime and holy life has great need of the falling sickness.” 16 The writer takes great care to demarcate the image as a metaphor: “I do not mean the sickness … but I call the falling sickness bodily illness or temptations of the flesh by which she thinks she is falling downward from her holy sublimity.” Although epilepsy is used metaphorically, physical illness serves as a guard against pride, lest the anchoress think too highly of herself. “If neither the body nor the spirit were sick … pride would awaken which is the most dreadful sickness of all.” However, the metaphor ultimately proves circular, as the falling sickness signifies not only bodily sickness but spiritual sicknesses such as “pride, envy and anger.”
Often serving as a loose medical catchall for all the seven deadly sins, blindness more precisely calibrates with pride and the lack of self-knowledge of the proud. 17 In The Book of Vices and Virtues, pride is likened to strong wine that “blyndeþ a man þat he ne knoweþ not hymself, ne seeþ not himself” and “þat þe deuel ʒyueþ to men to make hem dronke.” 18 Texts often offer more specific figurative causes for the blinding of pride, such as smoke in Fasciculus Morum and “a spiritual film over the eye” in the well-circulated pastoral manual The Moral Treatise on the Eye of Peter of Limoges (d. 1306). 19
However, swelling is probably pride’s most immediate symbolic correlative, leading to a cluster of medical associations, such as tumors, dropsy and leprosy. 20 The swelling of the body provided a simple and effective analogy for the proud person, and swelling and tumescence abound in discussions of pride from the patristic theologians through to the later Middle Ages. Both Gregory and Augustine compare the swelling of pride with the swelling of tumors. 21 In later medieval texts, the swelling of pride ranges from swelling in the body to swelling in the soul. Chaucer’s Parson presents both kinds. The more metaphorical variety of “swellynge of herte is whan a man rejoyseth hym of harm that he hath doon.” 22 However, pride is also physically manifest in those who wear scant clothing, showing the outline of “the horrible swollen membres, that semeth lik the maladie of hirnia, in the wrappynge of hir hoses [their stockings].” 23 The Parson dwells at length on this sartorial trend. The pressed genitals of the fashionable proud give the appearance of hernias, of which one symptom is swelling, and the variety of bright colors they wear suggest that “half the partie of hire privee membres were corrupt by the fire of Seint Antony [ergotism or erysipelas], or by cancre, or by oother swich meschaunce.” 24 The bodies of the proud display symptoms of various medical conditions related to swelling.
Furthermore, the symbolic unity of swelling and pride leads some medieval authors to describe pride in terms of dropsy, which in modern terms is known as edema. In one Wycliffite sermon, the homilist stretches the physical symptoms of dropsy to accommodate a moral interpretation. Having describing the illness as “an euyl of false greetnesse of mannys lymys and comeþ of vnkyndly watur bytwyxe þe flesch and þe skyn,” it follows that “pruyde of worldly goodis þat ben vnstable as þe watyr makiþ a man in ydropisye and falsely presumen of hymself.” 25 Other texts also couple pride and dropsy, albeit in less detail than the latter example. 26
Finally, the association with swelling explains the use of leprosy as a metaphor for pride. Although leprosy is a powerful image for a range of evils, the swelling of leprosy is exploited in particular in expositions of pride. A sermon comparing the symptoms of leprosy to each of the sins develops the metaphor of swelling as pride, effectively yoking the swelling of a blister with the noisy boasting of the proud person. The homilist writes that as a leper “is swolyn and blowyn wiþ wynd of vnclennesse” so proud men are “swollyng wiþ pride and blowyn with bost as a bladir ful of wynd wiþ benys [beans] þerinne þat clateryn or makyn noise or prike þis bladdre wiþ a nedil and þan al þe bost is laid doun riʒt so from þe tyme þat deþ haþ persed þe herte of a proud man al his bost and brag is clene laid doun.” 27 Pride is again aligned with leprosy in one macaronic sermon that compares each sin to a disease, and then relates each pairing of sin and disease to Christ’s crucifixion. 28 Here, the homilist discusses Christ’s scriptural healing of the leper in Matthew 8:2–3 in terms of the leprousness of the human race caused by pride. Among the symptoms shared by pride and leprosy are voicelessness and swelling. However, the homilist also correlates the symptoms of leprosy with the humiliations suffered by Christ. People flee from lepers and observe them with horror; the wicked despise lepers.
Metonymic Pride
In mappings of the sins to particular body parts, pride invariably takes the head. 29 Indeed, pride has an early and persistent association with the rational part of the soul. In his Conferences, for example, Cassian associates the corruption of the rational part of the soul with pride and vainglory; the latter, as previously noted, was usually fused with or treated as subordinate to pride in the Middle Ages. 30 Cassian also writes that vainglory and pride are “consummated without any action on the body’s part.” 31 Likewise, in his Quaestio de vitiis capitalibus [Inquiry into the Capital Vices], Albertus Magnus (d. 1280) describes how pride disorders the rational power, urging a person to desire spiritual goods for the wrong ends; that is, superiority over others. 32 Schemata of sins constructed by theologians, such as the Franciscan Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), further confirms pride’s ethereal nature. Alexander offers the following divisions of man: spiritus, which includes pride and envy; anima, which includes wrath, avarice and sloth; and corpus, which includes gluttony and lechery. 33
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