Excrement in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract

This interdisciplinary book integrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, with special focus on fecopoetics and Chaucer's literary agenda. Filth in all its manifestations - material (including privies, dung on fields, and as alchemical ingredient), symbolic (sin, misogynist slander, and theological wrestling with the problem of filth in sacred contexts) and linguistic (a semantic range including dirt and dung) - helps us to see how excrement is vital to understanding the Middle Ages. Applying fecal theories to late medieval culture, Morrison concludes by proposing Waste Studies as a new field of ethical and moral criticism for literary scholars.The Medieval Body: Disciplining Material and Symbolic Excrement * The Rhizomatic Body * Moral Filth and The Sinning Body: Hell, Purgatory, and Resurrection * Gendered Filth * Chaucerian Fecopoetics * Urban Excrement in The Canterbury Tales * Sacred Filth: Relics, Ritual, and Remembering in The Prioress's Tale * The Excremental Human God and Redemptive Filth: The Pardoner's Tale * Rhizomatic Pilgrimage and Alchemical Poetry * Chaucerian Fecology and Wasteways: The Nun's Priest's Tale * Looking Behind, Looking Ahead * Waste Studies: A Brief Introduction * Bottoms Up! A Manifesto for Waste Studies