Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics
ISBN-10
1403984883
ISBN-13
9781403984883
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
288
Language
English
Published
2008-09-15
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Author
Susan Signe Morrison

Description

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.

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