Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics

The New Middle Ages

by Susan Signe Morrison

This interdisciplinary book intergrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, concluding that excrement is a moral and ethical category deserving scrutiny.

Genres: History, Medieval, Literary Criticism

284 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2008

About the author

Professor of English at Texas State University, Susan Signe Morrison lives in Austin, Texas, and writes on topics lurking in the margins of history, ranging from recently uncovered diaries of a teenaged girl in World War II to medieval women pilgrims, excrement in the Middle Ages, and waste.

Reviews

[Mattomic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have I really read this book? Hell no! But that doesn't matter. The title alone merits a couple of stars. That and the fact that this kind of subject matter's been elevated to the level of academic discourse. Look at the walls of your ivory tower now, motherfucker. They're smeared with Chaucer's feces!

As my grad-level hermeneutics professor would say, it's thanks to the phenomenon of phenomenology that we would even entertain the notion of putting subject matter like this under academic scrutiny. I'm pushing (pun intended) for my library to get a copy of this. I'm predicting that this will be the new bestseller that will go down in infamy in the anals, ahem, annals of history.

[Bronwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

You might not be able to judge a book by its cover, but the title of Susan Signe Morrison’s book completely lived up to the implications. This book is about shit. And for a book about shit, it is expertly researched and written with no discernable biases other than that Captain Underpants is relevant and timely. “One day you’re a superstar because you pooped in the toilet like a big boy, and the next day you’re sitting in the principal’s office because you said the word “poopy” in American History class (which, if you ask me, is the perfect place to say that word).” Indeed it is. Morrison’s book explores the presence and significance of all types of excrement: feces, urine, puss, ejaculate, menstrual blood, tears, vomit, and more. Once that context is established, she interweaves references and examples from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and writings by his contemporaries. With over 25 pages of primary and secondary sources in the bibliography, this book thoroughly addresses the physical and symbolic representations of excrement in the late Middle Ages.

[Josephine]

How could I NOT read a book with this title.