Excrement in the Late Middle Ages

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Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics (The New Middle Ages) by Susan Signe Morrison

Review
"Susan Signe Morrison's spry and sparkling study of excrement in the late Middle Ages...is thus hands-on or, more precisely, pants-down. Her book, purposefully and with elegant aplomb, rubs our noses in the midden of medieval poetry, theology and philosophy. Language, she writes, is 'itself a rubbish heap or sewer'; 'language makes excrement manifest'; 'the meaning of a word is litter-al'. The great privy of medieval literature spreads this scatological imperative across a wide variety of discourses to do with morality, gender, alchemy, medicine, race and, as Morrison most forcefully demonstrates, canonical debates around religious orthodoxy, to do with such issues as the function of purgatory (etymologically related to purge) or transubstantiation...But it is in Morrison's insistence on the contiguities of the Middle Ages and today that she is most forthright."--Times Higher Education

"Morrison's study offers an engagingly written book that makes a convincing case for the cultural significance of the medieval fecal and that elucidates Chaucer's poetry in thoughtful ways."--The Medieval Review

"If you thought there was something crappy about the Middle Ages, you’d be right. This book rubs our nose in the excremental poetries and culture of the High and Late Middle Ages, reminding us that waste is everywhere the foundation of civilization. In this fine and comprehensive study of that which we mark off as different from us, excrement becomes the necessary stuff for understanding identity, desire, and history. In the end, we realize that a critique of #### is a critique of culture."--Michael Uebel, author of Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages and co-editor of The Middle Ages at Work"

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