Excrement in the late Middle Ages

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.

subjects: Body, Human, in literature,  Feces,  Feces in literature,  History and criticism,  Medieval Literature,  Refuse and refuse disposal in literature,  Sanitation in literature,  Symbolic aspects,  Symbolic aspects of Feces,  Symbolism in literature,  Chaucer, geoffrey, -1400,  Literature, medieval, history and criticism,  Human body in literature,  Refuse and refuse disposal,  POETRY,  English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,  Literary studies: classical, early & medieval,  British & Irish history,  Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500,  Literature

People: Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400)