Abstract
That murder will inevitably be made known is proverbial wisdom; but this line appears in two of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at oddly similar moments. The anti-Semitic Prioress’s Tale concerns a young Christian boy, brutally attacked by vicious Jews and left for dead in the “wardrobe” (VII.572) that collects the filthy matter purged from the bowels of the “cursed folk” (VII.574). In The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the knowledgeable rooster, Chauntecleer, relates famous prophetic dreams, including one in which a murdered pilgrim is hidden under a pile of manure on a dung cart on its way to “donge lond” (VII.3036); mention is made of a town whose dung is clearly meant for delivery outside of the walls to fertilize nearby fields. In both of these tales, we are assured that murder will out; the body of the innocent victim will be found and the guilty discovered and punished. The dead body, hidden in filth to secure the secrecy of the ill deed, symbolizes the abject humiliation of murder with waste from living human bodies. These murders will come to light—must come to light. Yet the exposure of the violent actions necessitates the seeker to wade through mire, possibly sullying himself. Material filth in the form of human or animal excrement cannot be avoided— indeed, as I will argue, should not be avoided. Just as murder, a repugnant and morally filthy act, cannot remain undisclosed, material dirt itself demands investigation.
“Mordre wol out.”
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale (VII.576); The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (VII.3052, 3057).1
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Notes
All references to Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York/London: Routledge, 1995), p. 32, cited in Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie, “Introduction: ‘Talking Your Body’s Language’: The Menstrual Materialisations of Sexed Ontology,” in Menstruation: A Cultural History, ed. Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie (London: Palgrave, 2005), p. 5 [1–10].
Bryan S. Turner, “The Body in Western Society: Social Theory and Its Perspectives,” in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 19 [15–41].
Thomas A. Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 3; also pp. 4, 10, 16. See Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective.” Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 1–33; and Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), esp. p. 196 [160–219].
Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), p. 92, citing Erasmus, Ciceronianus (1528), in Collected Works, trans. and ed. A. H. T. Levi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), XXVIII, p. 374.
Miri Rubin, “Body Techniques,” in The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, ed. Miri Rubin (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1997), p. 216 [95–123]; also Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 185–187; and Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 151.
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 3, citing Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2 (1973 [1934]): 73 [70–88]. Although Mauss writes concerning the various techniques of the body, “Hygiene in the needs of nature: Here I could list innumerable facts for you,” he does not go on to do so. Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 118. Also, David Inglis, A Sociological History of Excretory Experience: Defecatory Manners and Toiletry Technologies (Lewiston, ME: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), p. 14.
Thomas DiPiero, “Shit Happens: Rabelais, Sade, and the Politics of Popular Fiction,” Genre 27 (1994): 303 [295–314]. Also in Michael Uebel, “On Becoming Male,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997), p. 371 [367–384].
I am playing with the term “ecopoetic” as used by Jonathan Bate, Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 266.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 25.
Peter J. Smith, “ ‘The Wronged Breeches’: Cavalier Scatology,” in Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology, ed. Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2004), p. 170 [154–172]. See also Thomas W. Ross, Chaucer’s Bawdy (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1972), p. 18; and Tiffany Beechy, “Devil Take the Hindmost: Chaucer, John Gay, and the Pecuniary Anus,” The Chaucer Review 41.1 (2006): 83 [71–85].
Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), p. 193.
Valerie Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Jeremy J. Citrome, The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Martha Bayless, “The Story of the Fallen Jews and the Iconography of Jewish Unbelief,” Viator 34 (2003): 142–156, and The Devil in the Latrine: Sin and Material Corruption in Medieval Culture (forthcoming); Conrad Leyser, “Masculinity in Flux: Nocturnal Emission and the Limits of Celibacy in the Early Middle Ages,” in D. M. Hadley, ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 103–120; Kathryn L. Lynch, “From Tavern to Pie Shop: The Raw, the Cooked, and the Rotten in Fragment 1 of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Exemplaria 19 (2007): 117–138; and Paul Strohm, “Sovereignty and Sewage,” in Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 57–70.
This is a both a neologism and pun: coprolite signifies fossilized feces and corporeal signifies of the body. The term thus signifies the body through faecal production.
Cf. Robert Mills, “Ecce Homo,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 162 [152–173].
Lennard J. Davis, “Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body,” in Visualizing the Disabled Body: The Classical Nude and the Fragmented Torso, reprinted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Letch (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 2421 [2398–2421].
Persels and Ganim, Fecal Matters, p. xiii. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have influentially argued, “what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central.” Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 5; also see Chapter 3, entitled “The City: The Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch,” pp. 125–148, for an analysis of Chadwick, Engels, Marx, and sewage in the Victorian city.
There is a vast amount of literature dealing with filth in the Victorian period. A few include Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. William Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Dale H. Porter, The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1998); Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London: J. M. Dent, 1983); Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (Studies in Gender History) (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); also Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 2000), p. 43.
Mervyn James, “Ritual, Drama and the Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town,” Past & Present 98 (1983): 9, 7 [3–29].
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), p. 295; also Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 31.
Dav Pilkey, Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People (New York: Scholastic, 2006), pp. 19–20.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966/2002), p. 200.
See, for just one example out of many, the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles who, in 1979/80, was an artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, in a performance called Touch Sanitation.
Gail Weiss, “The Body as Narrative Horizon,” in Thinking the Limits of the Body, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Gail Weiss (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), p. 25 [25–35].
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. II the History of Eroticism, Vol. III: Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), p. 31, quoting Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 24.
Kelly Anspaugh, “Powers of Ordure: James Joyce and the Excremental Vision.” Mosaic 27, 1 (1994): 77 [73–100]. Also, Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke, “Introduction: Cultural Economies of Waste,” in Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, ed. Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. xiv [ix–xvii].
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968/1984), p. 175.
Davis points out that “what the term [grotesque] has failed to liberate is the notion of actual bodies.” “Enforcing Normalcy,” p. 2418.
Martin Pops, “The Metamorphosis of Shit,” Salmagundi 56 (1982): 50 [26–61].
Gay Hawkins, “Down the Drain: Shit and the Politics of Disturbance,” in Culture and Waste, p. 43 [39–52].
Quoted in Shail and Howie, “Introduction,” in Menstruation, p. 5, from Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, p. 35.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 4–12, cited in Shail and Howie, “Introduction,” in Menstruation, p. 5.
Maurice Bloch, “Religion and Ritual,” in The Social Science Encyclopedia, ed. A. Kuper and J. Kuper, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 734–735 [732–736]. Cited by Miri Rubin, “Introduction: Rites of Passage,” in Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Nicola F. McDonald and W. M. Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2004), p. 2 [1–12].
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 106.
Paster, The Body Embarrassed, pp. 23, 115. See also Keith Thomas, “The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England,” TLS 21 (January 1977): 80; and Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 1.
Gail Kern Paster, “Purgation as the Allure of Mastery: Early Modern Medicine and the Technology of the Self,” in Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Olin (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 195 [193–205].
As William Tronzo writes, in his review of Nurith Kenaan-Kedar and Asher Ovadiah, eds., The Metamorphosis of Marginal Images: From Antiquity to Present Time (Tel Aviv: The Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv University, 2001), in The Medieval Review, January 10, 2006, referring the work of Michael Camille, “[H]ow do we determine just what it is that constitutes an edge and hence a center in any given work of the past?”
Steven F. Kruger in a panel entitled “What Happened to Theory in Medieval Studies? A Roundtable,” The Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University (May 2007).
Not uncommon are cases recorded of people having drowned in their own filth. For example, in Erfurt at a gathering given by Emperor Frederick I in his Great Hall, the weight of guests collapsed the floor and they sank into the cesspool below. Reginald Reynolds, Cleanliness and Godliness (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1946), p. 52. Richard III is said to have conjured up the idea of killing the princes in the Tower while sitting on a privy; Pope Leo V was killed while fulfilling his human necessity. The Arabian Nights includes tales where people are killed while defecating. Ralph A. Lewin, Merde: Excursions in Scientific, Cultural, and Sociohistorical Coprology (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 59.
Inglis, A Sociological History, p. 15. Most medieval castles and Tudor manor-houses had garderobes from which excrement was directly placed into barrels or containers; the matter in them would then be used agriculturally or in tanning. Caroline Holmes, The Not so Little Book of Dung (Thrupp: Sutton, 2006), p. 141.
“Fecology, the study of dung, is an interdisciplinary pursuit that touches every science.” Dan Sabbath and Mandel Hall, End Product: The First Taboo (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), pp. 13–14, also see p. 272, note 13.
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth-Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ed. Donna Haraway (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–181.
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© 2008 Susan Signe Morrison
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Morrison, S.S. (2008). Introduction. In: Excrement in the Late Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615021_1
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