Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology

by Persels,Jeff; Persels,Jeff

• ISBN13: 9780754641162
• ISBN10: 0754641163
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-05-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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

List of Figures	vii
General Editors' Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	x
Notes on Contributors	xi
Introduction: Scatology, the Last Taboo	xiii
1 The 'Honorable Art of Farting' in Continental Renaissance Literature	1	(13)
Barbara C. Bowen
2 'The Wife Multiplies the Secret' (AaTh 1381D): Some Fortunes of an Exemplary Tale	14	(10)
Geoffrey R. Hope
3 Doctor Rabelais and the Medicine of Scatology	24	(14)
David LaGuardia
4 'The Mass and the Fart are Sisters': Scatology and Calvinist Rhetoric against the Mass, 1560-63	38	(18)
Jeff Persels
5 Community, Commodities and Commodes in the French Nouvelle	56	(10)
Emily E. Thompson
6 Pissing Glass and the Body Crass: Adaptations of the Scatological in Theophile	66	(19)
Russell Ganim
7 Scatology as Political Protest: A `Scandalous' Medal of Louis XIV
Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi	85	(11)
8 Foolectomies, Fool Enemas, and the Renaissance Anatomy of Folly	96	(13)
Glenn Ehrstine
9 Holy and Unholy Shit: The Pragmatic Context of Scatological Curses in Early German Reformation Satire	109	(9)
Josef Schmidt, with Mary Simon
10 Expelling from Top and Bottom: The Changing Role of Scatology in Images of Peasant Festivals from Albrecht Dürer to Pieter Bruegel	118	(20)
Alison G. Stewart
11 Tamburlaine's Urine	138	(16)
Joseph Tate
12 'The Wronged Breeches': Cavalier Scatology	154	(19)
Peter J. Smith
List of Works Cited or Consulted	173	(16)
Index	189