Cleanness is shown to be unconventionally affirmative of loveplay and other refinements of courtly artifice. Keiser explores the broad intellectual and social consequences of this celebration of late medieval masculine ideals and analyzes how the poet's class-specific aesthetic sensibility underlies a theologically and ethically flawed revisionist history of the biblical Creator's love affair with the creation. These limitations shed interesting light on Cleanness's relation to its theologically more complex and structurally more sophisticated companion poems -- Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Pearl.
"Keiser's work is no ordinary critical study of a medieval poem. She finds in Cleanness an articulation of a standard of pleasure for heterosexual lovemaking, without concern for procreation, that is novel and otherwise unattested in the Middle Ages". -- Charlotte C. Morse, VirginiaCommonwealth University
