Excrement in the Late Middle Ages Sacred Filth and Chaucers Fecopoetics [Paperback]

This interdisciplinary book intergrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, concluding that excrement is a moral and ethical category deserving scrutiny.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

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 shit 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

Effectively a cultural study of how late medieval England dealt with excrement, this book has much broader applications. In a truly fearless and foundational work, wide-ranging and adventurous in scope, Morrison draws from new and pertinent critical approaches (ecocriticsm, waste studies, green studies) and some of their source disciplines (psychology, anthropology, sociology) to invent, define, illustrate and examine the practice of fecopoetics - the cultural poetics of excrement. The result is an accomplished interpretive sourcebook that enriches lã1