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Zusatztext "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"Susan Signe Morrison s book explores how medieval poets employ scatology, the body and its processes. Readers wanting to immerse themselves in the medieval imagery and language of defecation in medical, theological, and poetic texts will benefit from what Morrison assembles as she explores how defecation works along various religious continua in Chaucer and host of medieval authors,often involving the othering of filth . . ..Morrison is at her best when she explores archaeological artifact and archive, revealing a history of public waste management little known to literary scholars." - Speculum"Susan Signe Morrison has published the first monograph on excrement.She argues for a revaluation of that which we would rather not talk about, as a way of getting a different perspective on history.A true pioneer, she is swept away by the wealth of material from different cultures and literatures that they uncover. In this new area of academic gold-digging, there are plenty of nuggets and not just shiny flashes in the pan. Excrement and gold share a common logic. Morrison show[s] that defecation was consigned to the private sphere and shielded from public view . . . Bottoms deserve their turn in the spotlight." - Studies in the Age of Chaucer "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 our understanding of a seemingly remote era, holding up, as it were, a distant mirror to reflect our historically complex relation to our own waste. A pungent and salutary whiff from the dunghills of European history." - Jeff Persels, French Department and Director of European Studies, University of South Carolina andco-editor of Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies i...
