Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art

Studies in Scatology

Jeff Persels, Russell Ganim, Jeff Persels, Russell Ganim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351936828
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Feces, urine, flatus, phlegm, vomitus - unlike ourselves, our most educated forebears did not disdain these functions, and, further, they employed scatological references in all manner of works. This collection of essays was provoked by what its editors considered to be a curious lacuna: the relative academic neglect of the copious and ubiquitous scatological rhetoric of Early Modern Europe, here broadly defined as the representation of the process and product of elimination of the body's waste products. The contributors to this volume examine the many forms and functions of scatology as literary and artistic trope, and reconsider this last taboo in the context of Early Modern European expression. They address unflinchingly both the objective reality of the scatological as part and parcel of material culture - inescapably a much larger part, a much heavier parcel then than now - and the subjective experience of that reality among contemporaries.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Scatology, the Last Taboo
• 1 The ‘Honorable Art of Farting’ in Continental Renaissance Literature
• 2 ‘The Wife Multiplies the Secret’ (AaTh 1381D): Some Fortunes of an Exemplary Tale
• 3 Doctor Rabelais and the Medicine of Scatology
• 4 ‘The Mass and the Fart are Sisters’: Scatology and Calvinist Rhetoric against the Mass, 1560–63
• 5 Community, Commodities and Commodes in the French Nouvelle
• 6 Pissing Glass and the Body Crass: Adaptations of the Scatological in Théophile
• 7 Scatology as Political Protest: A ‘Scandalous’ Medal of Louis XIV
• 8 Foolectomies, Fool Enemas, and the Renaissance Anatomy of Folly
• 9 Holy and Unholy Shit: The Pragmatic Context of Scatological Curses in Early German Reformation Satire
• 10 Expelling from Top and Bottom: The Changing Role of Scatology in Images of Peasant Festivals from Albrecht Dürer to Pieter Bruegel
• 11 Tamburlaine’s Urine
• 12 ‘The Wronged Breeches’: Cavalier Scatology
• List of Works Cited or Consulted
• Index