Introduction The Midden Age

Abstract

Here is a book about the body’s detritus, the wind, water, and solids that our intestines throw out daily. Beyond farts, its general preoccupation is with what people throw out. Worthlessness sustains the project throughout. Most irresistible of all garbage is scientifically obsolete bodies of knowledge: a geocentric universe, four humors, the doctrine of sympathies, alchemy, astrology; and what better repository for such rubbish than the Middle Ages? Itself the waste lot of redundant knowledge and “false” etymologies, the Middle Ages provides a vantage point from which to rethink modernity’s preoccupation with accumulation. Waste reveals more about those who threw it out in the first place than about the nature of the revolting. In dirt, observes one anthropologist, there is system.¹