Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art Studies in Scatology

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.

Contents: Introduction: scatology, the last taboo; The 'honorable art of farting' in continental Renaissance literature, Barbara C. Bowen; 'The wife multiplies the secret' (AaTh 1381D): some fortunes of an exemplary tale, Geoffrey R. Hope; Doctor Rabelais and the medicine of scatology, David LaGuardia; 'The mass and the fart are sisters': scatology and Calvinist rhetoric against the mass, 1560-63, Jeff Persels; Community, commodities and commodes in the French Nouvelle, Emily E. Thompson; Pissing glass and the body crass: adaptations of the scatological in Théophile, Russell Ganim; Scatology as political protest: a 'scandalous' medal of Louis XIV, Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi; Foolectomies, fool enemas, and the Renaissance anatomy of folly, Glenn Ehrstine; Holy and unholy shit: the pragmatic context of scatological curses in early German Reformation satire, Josef Schmidt, with Mary Simon; Expelling from top and bottom: the changing role of scatology in images of peasant festivals from Albrecht Dürer to Pieter Bruegel, Alison G. Stewart; Tamburlaine's urine, Joseph Tate; 'The wronged breeches': cavalier scatology, Peter J. Smith; List of works cited or consulted; Index.

Jeff Persels is an Associate Professor at the Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, University of South Carolina, USA and Russell Ganim is Department Chair of the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA.