Material Envy
Envy also has a material physiology, in the four humors. Envy and sorrow are aligned with the cold and dry melancholic humor in both pastoral and medical texts. Warning the faithful about particular humoral balances that the devil might try to exploit, the compiler of The Book of Vices and Virtues stresses that the melancholic must guard against “enuye and anger of herte” just as Gower warns that the person with “malencolie” must wrestle with “envie.” 55 In his description of melancholic imbalance, Bartholomaeus emphasizes sorrow and its effects on the heart, which “constreyneþ and closiþ” under the influence of sorrow.
As a cure for envy, Rypon prescribes the “moisture of piety” consistent as a contrary to the dryness of melancholia. 56 The sins of envy, wrath, and avarice are particularly associated with dryness and their cures or contrary virtues often manifest qualities thought to be moist in nature.
In Piers Plowman, the poet William Langland (d. c. 1386) captures the material complexity of the sin in the character Envy. The confession of the sins occurs in the fifth passus of the B-text, the version of the text cited throughout this book. The poem exists in several versions, with a complicated manuscript tradition. 57 All versions of the poem include the same description of envy, although some lines are reshuffled to different places in the text.
In the poem, Envy is one of the most physically and physiologically detailed of the seven deadly sins. 58 His cheeks are sunken, his body shriveled, and his lips chewed. Envy suffers from severe indigestion and serious heart problems. Painfully aware of his ailments and their cause, Envy diagnoses his condition and outlines a cure. As might be expected, this material cure is ineffective. Sugar will not alleviate Envy’s internal swelling, nor will the pharmaceutical “diapenidion” relieve his gas. 59 However, the failure of medicine does not simply consist in the inability of a material solution to remedy a spiritual problem. After dismissing these medical cures, Envy suggests the spiritual treatments of “shrift” [confession] or “shame” unless “whoso [someone] shrape [scrape] my mawe [stomach].” 60 This lateral shift back and forth between medical and spiritual treatment suggests something other than the merely symbolic use of medical discourse.
Langland’s Envy also exhibits some of the conventional attributes of envy covered earlier: Envy’s eyes look astray from the altar to focus enviously upon Eleyne’s “new coat,” and he ingests venom. However, Envy is embodied in more medically specific ways. As one example, Langland develops the conventional diet of venom into severe gastro-intestinal distress. By ingesting his own venom, Envy poisons himself with the poison he produces. “Ech a word that he warp [flung out] was of a neddres [adder’s] tonge,” and later we learn that he “myghte noght ete [eat] many yere as a man oughte,/For envye and yvel wil [ill will] is yvel to defie [digest].” Langland’s reference to diapenidion reflects a pharmacological understanding, as the drug was widely prescribed for gas and a defective appetite, two conditions from which Envy suffers. For example, the late medieval pharmacological manual by Gilbertus Anglicus recommends using the drug “to dissoluen [dissolve] corrup wyndes and humours of þe stomake, and comfortiþ þe stomake and þe guttis boþe.” 61 Comparably, although the initial description of Envy as “pale as a pelet, in þe palsy he semed” suggests a conventional and generic symbolism, as paleness might be symptomatic of numerous particular conditions or illness in general, the symbolic association here is specifically with envy. Augustine, for example, describes demons “pale with envy” in the City of God. 62 As we have seen, there are also recurring symbolic associations of envy with palsy.
As the passage continues, Envy takes on an even greater medical specificity, moving beyond merely metaphorical into more metonymic and material correspondences. He is compared to a leek who “hadde yleye longe in þe sonne” “wiþ lene chekes, lourynge [scowling] foule.” 63 His dryness and thinness immediately suggest signs of melancholy. Common diagnostic symptoms of melancholy included thinness and digestive distress. 64 Indeed, Envy explains his condition as that of imbalanced “malencolie”: “and whan I may noȝt haue þe maistrie, swich malencolie I take.” 65 Here, he expresses sorrow in the sense of emotional anguish at the good of others but also suggests that the melancholy humour has “maistrie” over him. In light of the penitential context of Envy’s confession and the injunction for priests to take their penitents’ complexions into consideration, it is worth noting that some of the physical symptoms experienced by Langland’s Envy, such as his hollow appearance, would likely have led to a diagnosis of melancholia, thus mitigating his culpability and in turn the severity of his penance.
However, Envy exhibits symptoms of choler as well as melancholia. His physical form is likened to a leek not only in reference to his metaphorical self-consumption—that is, being consumed with envy in the symbolic sense, as discussed earlier, but perhaps also in reference to jaundice. Medieval medical texts recognized several types of jaundice, arising from the various species of harmful choleric humor; however, Envy’s particular symptoms suggest green cholera as the most likely culprit. Green cholera is formed in the stomach through the excessive consumption of hot herbs, such as leeks and onions. Bartholomaeus Anglicus describes green cholera, “p[r]assina,” as “grene of colour and bittir, scharp as an herbe þat hatte [is called] prassium … in latyn.” 66 This cholera causes painful indigestion, and when filtered to the outer part of the skin by the blood, it colors the skin green. 67
Langland gives the metaphorical association of jaundice with envy a physiological basis by elaborating on the symptoms of green jaundice. 68 He then embellishes this physiological basis with metaphorical symptoms. Envy, who resembles a leek, makes himself sick through self-consumption. He both bites his lip and consumes himself with envy. To the best of my knowledge, medieval medical texts do not directly relate envy to indigestion or green jaundice. Although medical texts associate envious dispositions with melancholy and wrathful ones with choler, Langland develops an additional medical correlation between the two.
Normally positioned side by side in lists of the sins, wrath and envy also attain a physiological proximity in Langland’s Envy in terms of the passions. Envy’s body is “to-bollen [swollen] for wrath,” and his envious thoughts so “angreth” him that “al [his] body bolneth [swells] for bitter of my galle.” 69 This visible swelling is consistent with anger as passion, whereas the internal swelling is consistent with envy as passion, as vital spirits prompted by anger and envy move away from and toward the heart, respectively. Langland’s complex matrix of material and metaphorical causation and signification is consistent with Katharine Breen’s argument that his depiction of Envy represents “not merely sin but the ingrained habit of sin, sin inscribed on his body through long-standing practices until body and sin become ‘connatural,’ fused and nearly inseparable.” 70 Therefore, habit transforms Envy from an envious person—someone who suffers and indulges stirrings of envy—to the personification or embodiment of Envy itself. Envy can thus be acute or chronic.
If his angry, choleric symptoms are understood as acute or symbolic, Envy’s heart conditions are more consistent with medieval medical understanding of the passion of envy. Envy laments his “crampe” and “cardiacle,” conditions characterized by heart palpitations, sweating, and fever caused by an excess of the melancholic humor, as he recognizes. 71 We have seen how other pastoral and theological texts draw a symbolic correspondence between envy and the heart.
Envy also recognizes that none of these envious conditions are curable. If envy has become natural or habitual, material and spiritual cures will not work. The only thing left is for someone to perform a more radical and almost certainly fatal surgical operation; to “shrape [scrape] his mawe.” It is difficult to translate “mawe” precisely, as it means “stomach” in some general contexts but in surgical settings it can refer to the abdomen, the bowels, or the guts. 72 The authors of medieval surgical texts are pessimistic about wounds in the stomach, and warn against cutt
ing into the viscera due to the likely inability to heal and thus likely fatal consequences. But in Envy’s case, vanquishing the body vanquishes envy itself. Only the scraping away or surgical removal of envy from the body will allow shame and confession to work. The “vnremouabilnes” of habit necessitates annihilation.
As we see in Langland’s interpretation, even the spiritual sin of envy reveals extensive occasions for medicalization, whether in its symbolic imagery, its relationship to the passions, its humoral physiology, or some interplay of these three modes.
Notes
1.Chaucer, “Parson’s Tale,” in Riverside Chaucer, X.303.
2.Ibid., X.303.
3.Jessica Rosenfeld, “Compassionate Conversions: Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the Problem of Envy,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42 (2012): 83–105.
4. Fasciculus Morum, pp. 148–9.
5.Ibid., pp. 148–14.
6.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, qu. 64., art. 3.
7.Ibid., I, qu. 64, art. 3. Lombardo notes in relation to Aquinas’ discussion of pride and envy, that his “attention to affectivity leads to creative interpretations of traditional vices” (The Logic of Desire, p. 191).
8.See Young, p. 171.
9.Book I. Ch. 64, p. 104.
10. Envy, Spite and Jealolusy: the Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece, ed. David Konstan and N. Keith Rutter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003).
11.William Caxton, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, 2 vols. (New York: G. Braziller, 1968), Vol. 1, 2.22.
12.Ibid., Vol. 1, 2.22.
13.On the medieval reception of Ovid, see Ovid in the Middle Ages, eds. James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson and Kathryn L. McKinley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
14.Bridget K. Balint, “Envy in the Intellectual Discourse of the High Middle Ages,” in The Seven Deadly Sins: from Communities to Individuals, ed. Richard Newhauser (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 41–56 (p. 43). For the etymology of invidia, see Isidore, Etymologies, p. 221.
15.Ecclesiasticus 30:26.
16.Proverbs 14:30.
17.Ecclesiasticus 14:8.
18.Matthew 20:15.
19.1 Samuel 18:9.
20.Peter of Limoges, The Moral Treatise on the Eye, p. 79.
21.Balint, “Envy in the Intellectual Discourse,” p. 44.
22. Ancrene Wisse, p. 126. In the same tradition, Dante’s Purgatorio describes the envious with eyes sewn shut with iron threads as they are purged of their sin. Purgatorio XIII.70–71 in Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. C. H. Sisson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
23.Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, p. 55.
24.Gower, Confessio Amantis, Vol. 2, Book 2, lines 3144–3146.
25. Ancrene Wisse, p. 151.
26.Gower, Confessio Amantis, Vol. 3, Book 2, line 5.
27.“Templum Domini,” lines 591–2.
28. The Book of Vices and Virtues, p. 22.
29.Ibid., p. 22.
30.Ibid., p. 22.
31.“Medicines to Cure the Deadly Sins,” in Religious Lyrics of the XV Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 273–77, line 62.
32.Ibid., line 66.
33.Gower, Mirrour de l’Omme, p. 56.
34. On the Properties of Things, Vol. 1, pp. 375–6.
35.Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, p. 135, and “Treatise of Ghostly Battle,” in Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole and His Followers, ed. C. Horstmann (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1895), pp. 420–36 (p. 432).
36.Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, p. 135, lines 3975–6.
37. Fasciculus Morum, pp. 156–159.
38.See Johnson, “A Fifteenth-Century Sermon Enacts the Seven Deadly Sins,” p. 121.
39. On the Properties of Things, Vol. 1, p. 107.
40.Pecock, The Folower to the Donet, p. 94.
41.Ibid., p. 112.
42.Ibid., p. 79.
43.Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions, p. 188. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–I, q. 37, art. 1.
44.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–I, q. 39, art. 2.
45.Ibid., II–I, q. 39, art. 3.
46.Ibid., II–1, q. 37, art. 4.
47.Ibid., II–I, q. 37, art. 4.
48.Ibid., II–I q. 36, art. 2.
49.Ibid, II–I, q. 36, art. 3.
50.Third Sermon for St. Oswald, fols 190r–192v from MS. Harley 4894, cited from a transcription and translation by Holly Johnson, who generously shared her work in progress with me. Rypon’s sermons are found in MS. Harley 4894. Johnson’s edition is forthcoming with Dallas Medieval Texts & Translations. See Wenzel’s notes on the manuscript in Latin Sermon Collections, pp. 66–73.
51.Rypon, RY51B, ed. Johnson, forthcoming.
52.Ibid.
53. Richard Morris’ Prick of Conscience: a Corrected and Amplified Reading, ed. Ralph Hanna and Sarah Wood, EETS o.s. 342 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 85. This incredibly popular poem is preserved in over 100 manuscripts.
54.Pastoral writers describe envy’s disfigurement in symbolic terms, as well: “it is mooste disfygured, for this is he that resembleth verily to the feende his fader, the whiche loveth but the evil of oother … and thowe knowest wel that love maketh a soule feire or foule.” The Mirroure of the Worlde: a Middle English Translation of Le miroir du monde, ed. Robert R. Raymo and Elaine E. Whitaker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 125.
55.Gower, Mirrour de l’Omme, p. 201.
56.Rypon, RY51B, ed. Johnson, forthcoming.
57.The editing history of the manuscript and its attendant controversies are covered in Charlotte Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman: the Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Lawrence Warner, The Lost History of Piers Plowman: the Earliest Transmission of Langland’s Work (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and David C. Benson, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
58.Rosanne Gasse opens the poem to interpretations of medicine not merely “as a metaphor for something, but as human craft.” Tracing the use of medical language throughout the poem, Gasse argues that Langland criticizes human medicine as removed from the ideal of Christus medicus. Where human practitioners falter is “in their attempts to create a dichotomy of body and soul, the secularization of medicine.” Gasse, Rosanne. “The Practice of Medicine in Piers Plowman,” The Chaucer Review 39 (2004): 177–97 (p. 186).
59.Langland, Piers Plowman, V.122.
60.Ibid., V.123.
61. Healing and Society in Medieval England: A Middle English Translation of the Pharmaceutical Writings of Gilbertus Anglicus, ed. Faye Marie Getz (Madison, 1991), p. 158.
62.“[Demons] are spirits most eager to inflict harm, utterly alien from righteousness, swollen with pride, pale with envy [inuidentia liduios] subtle in deceit.” Augustine, The City of God, VIII.22.
63.Langland, Piers Plowman, V.81–2.
64.“Chirurgie de 1392,” pp. 176–7.
65.Ibid. V.334.
66. On the Properties of Things, Vol. 1, p. 406.
67.Other references to green cholera are consistent with Bartholomaeus; for example, those found in Arderne’s, Treatises in Fistula, p. 60; Guy de Chauliac, Cyrurgie, pp. 100–101 and Lanfranc, Science of Cirurgie, p. 203.
Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture Page 16