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The Man in Foul Clothes and a Late Fourteenth-Century Conversation About Sin Lynn Staley Colgate University By the time he steps into the late fourteenth century, the man in foul clothes has long ago acquired a dirty and ragged garment, rather than having attended a feast without the proper clothing. The sartorial alteration was accomplished early, first by Origen, who gave him an unclean garment; by Pseudo-Chrysostom, who described it as ‘‘tattered’’ and ‘‘unclean’’; and by Pseudo-Augustine, who in two sermons on Advent that employ the parable of the Wedding Feast in Matthew 22, urged his listeners to clothe themselves cleanly for their own bridal feasts.1 The shift from no wedding cloak to a dirty and ragged one served those who employed the detail by allowing them to emphasize not so much the man’s lack of charity, but his persistent sin in the face of God’s bounty or his inability to find a way of cleansing his dirty clothing.2 However, by the fourteenth century, the man is more than a figure for impurity; he has become a figure who can be used to interrogate the institutional church. Possibly his relevance to the state of the church also came by way of Chrysostom, who in his treatise On the PriestI thank Ralph Hanna and David Aers for reading this essay and making suggestions. Susan Crane’s study, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) was published while this essay was in production. Crane explores the courtier identity, but the links she articulates between self-definition and material appearance is one that likewise informs fourteenth-century treatments of the man in foul clothes. 1 See PL 56.864; PL 39. 1973–74, 1975–76: cited in Jane K. Lecklider, Cleanness: Structure and Meaning (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 36–38. For other exegetical treatments of the man in foul clothes, see Lynn Staley Johnson, The Voice of the GawainPoet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), p. 103. 2 The former reading of the man as lacking the garment of charity did not disappear; it can be found in Jerome, Expositio IV Evangelium. Matthaeus, PL 30:576; Comment. In . . . Matthaeum, PL 26: 165; St. Gregory, Hom. in Evangelia, PL 76: 1287, and also in the Wycliffite Glossed Gospel of Matthew, BL, MS. Add. 41175. 1 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER hood warned against allowing one arrayed in filthy garments to be admitted into the sacred mysteries, where he will handle God’s body.3 This essay is a look at that man as he is given a contemporary identity , and sometimes a voice, by late fourteenth-century English and vernacular writers. The author of Cleanness, of St. Erkenwald, and William Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Chaucer, all use him to explore the necessarily interlocked issues of sin and judgment as they define the very identity of the church. Not only do these authors appear to suggest that, in many cases, they are responding to one another, but each forms a piece of a non-Wycliffite scrutiny of the church that existed alongside the ongoing Lollard critique of its practices and privileges. Wycliffite treatments of Matthew’s Parable of the Wedding Feast describe the man as not wearing the wedding garment of charity, which was seen as a sign of his elect status. They thus focus upon the process by which the disobedient will be sorted out from those who obey God’s laws, not upon an exploration of the relationship between human sin and the possibility of divine forgiveness.4 In their depictions of the story of the man in foul clothes, the authors here discussed offer a powerful set of responses to the subject of sin as it relates to church doctrine or to church practice that is, in some ways, more devastating and more searching than any offered by Wyclif or his followers. A caveat: In this essay I am trying to do at least two things. First, I wish to describe the connections among the ways in which these authors employ the man in foul...

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