Abstract
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the so-called great renunciation took place in men’s clothing, whereby male attire shed the ornate design that had held sway since the High Middle Ages. In a parallel plot of history, the Middle Ags has been viewed as a period revelling in filth, prior to the “great enunciation” of filth with the adven of the early modern period. The d anger for a medievalist in exploring excrement lies in confirming what ome believe to be the essence of the Middle Ages: filth. A long study of such a topic might therefore be exected to underscore the very alterity and abject nature some ascribe to the period. Filth, as we have seen, is key to understanding the Middle Ages; it appears liberally in literary texts, legal documents, theological writings, and art historical material. But this book is not intended to reinforce a popular view of the Middle Ages as “excremental” nor is it intended to offend. Rather, my hope is that other scholars will continue to expand our knowledge of the excremental. Much work remains to be done: relic inventories could be investigated for references to waste as sacred and venerated object;2 historical documents citing cases of pollution and property need to be paid attention to; and further explorations into the vast range of linguistic possibilities for expressing filth and excrement could be undertaken.
“Man is a wasting animal.”
J. C. Wylie, The Wastes of Civilization1
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Notes
For example, the fascinating de Plancy, Dictionnaire Critique des Reliques et des Images Miraculeuses, p. 46.
Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006).
John Frow, “Invidious Distinction: Waste, Difference, and Classy Stuff,” in Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, ed. Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. 28 [25–38].
See Barney, “Filthy Thoughts,” 287 [275–293]; Anspaugh, “Powers of Ordure,” 75 [73–100]; and Frow, “Invidious Distinction,” in Culture and Waste, p. 26.
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
Scanlan, On Garbage, p. 22. See the Ph.D. dissertation of Ruth L. Harris, “The Meanings of ‘Waste’ in Old and Middle English,” University of Washington, 1989, especially p. 157 and following on Piers Plowman and Wynnere and Wastoure.
In Middle English, waste meant “despoiling, or unreasonable abuse of proper resource.” Allen, On Farting, p. 17.
All references to the standard edition edited by Stephanie Trigg, EETS 297 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
William Langland, Piers Plowman, A Norton Critical Edition, eds. Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 451, n. 8.
Gary Snyder, “The Politics of Ethnopoetics,” in Snyder, A Place in Space, p. 131 [126–147].
Lester K. Little, “Pride Goes before Avarice: Social Change and the Vices in Latin Christendom,” The American Historical Review 76 (1971): 37–38 [16–49].
Statutes of the Realm (London, 1810–1828), 23 Edw. III, c. 5–7 (1339), vol. I., pp. 307–309; reprinted in Langland, Piers Plowman, A Norton Critical Edition, pp. 428, 430.
“[W]e seem to have [... a... ] metaphorical reductio ad absurdum in which, through a fiendish triumph of technology, ‘dirty’ Jewish f lesh was melted down in order to transform it into ‘clean’ soap.” Dundes, Life is Like a Chicken Coop, p. 127.
Perkyn wastes money (4387–4388). Bullón-Fernández, “Private Practices,” 172 [141–174].
Paper presented at the Literary London Conference, Greenwich, England, July 13, 2006.
Tadeusz Slawek, paper presented at the “Rubbish, Waste, and Litter: Culture/al Refusals” Conference, Warsaw School of Social Psychology, Institute of English Studies, November 17–18, 2006.
Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, p. 29. See also Steven Shaviro, Passion & Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory (Tallahassee: The Florida State University Press, 1990), pp. 54–56.
Derek Pearsall, “Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman,” in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 167–185; excerpted and reprinted in Langland, Piers Plowman, A Norton Critical Edition, pp. 563–571. Pearsall argues that Langland is referring to the urban poor here, an increasingly bigger element in society in the fourteenth century. Also Elizabeth D. Kirk, “ ‘What is this womman?’ Langland on Women and Gender,” in Langland, Piers Plowman, A Norton Critical Edition, pp. 616–626, especially pp. 620–621.
See also the Guild Ordinances from 1402 to 1403 for St. Peter’s Church, Cornhill. Sixth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (London, 1877), pp. 407–414; reprinted in Langland, Piers Plowman, A Norton Critical Edition, p. 423.
All references to the C-Text come from Derek Pearsall, Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
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© 2008 Susan Signe Morrison
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Morrison, S.S. (2008). Waste Studies: A Brief Introduction. In: Excrement in the Late Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615021_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615021_11
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