Corruption and infected sin: The Elizabethan rhetoric of decay

In the Elizabethan era, corruption became the over-arching topos for characterizing somatic and spiritual putrefaction, and sin in general. Yet scholars repeat many sixteenth-century terms of corruption, such as "purging," "purifying," and so on, without necessarily acknowledging the intrinsic physicality that these words imply, or considering that corruption was a medical term with implications that have been lost to us over the years. Moreover, those studies that focus on Elizabethan medicine generally focus on the humors per se, and neglect the determinative importance of bodily corruption (to which humoral balance plays but a supporting role). As the body was so important and pervasive a cultural trope, understanding the Elizabethan view of disease and corruption is essential to understanding much in Early Modern English literature.;Accordingly, I consider the Elizabethan understanding of corruption in both its physical and religious uses, first looking at Elizabethan medical texts, then at Reformed Christian texts, and finally, at how the physical and religious understanding of corruption informs The Faerie Queene. After discussing medical treatises, I look at corruption in two of the most important or influential (in a populist sense) Reformed Christian works of the era---the 1560 edition of The Geneva Bible, and the Second Book of Homilies. Although the Geneva glossators set forth their interpretation of corruption in an explicitly religious, not medical, context, nevertheless, they portray spiritual corruption in specifically medical terms. Like the medical writers, they believe that the actual, physical flesh could be purified and purged of corruption---albeit by God alone. In the glosses, they portray post-apocalyptic heaven as a restoration of prelapsarian Earth, and, possibly responding to patristic influence, suggest that the individual human body is purged in glorification: it is changed but still physical flesh worthy of cherishing now with temperance. Finally, I turn my attention to Book I of The Faerie Queene, and discuss how the various physical and spiritual understandings of corruption and purging shape a dialectic of diseased sexuality, physical generation, and somatic glorification.