Excrement in the Late Middle Ages / The New Middle Ages (PDF)

Susan Signe Morrison is Professor of English at Texas State University, USA.

"If you thought there was something crappy about the Middle Ages, you d be right. This book rubs our nose in the excremental poetries and culture of the High and Late Middle Ages, reminding us that waste is everywhere the foundation of civilization. In this fine and comprehensive study of that which we mark off as different from us, excrement becomes the necessary stuff for understanding identity, desire, and history. In the end, we realize that a critique of shit is a critique of culture." - Michael Uebel, author of Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages and co-editor of The Middle Ages at Work

"Effectively a cultural study of "how late medieval England dealt with excrement," this book has much broader applications. In a truly fearless and foundational work, wide-ranging and adventurous in scope, Morrison draws from new and pertinent critical approaches (ecocriticsm, waste studies, green studies) and some of their source disciplines (psychology, anthropology, sociology) to invent, define, illustrate and examine the practice of fecopoetics - the "cultural poetics of excrement." The result is an accomplished interpretive sourcebook that enriches our understanding of a seemingly remote era, holding up, as it were, a distant mirror to reflect our historically complex relation to our own waste. A pungent and salutary whiff from the dunghills of European history." - Jeff Persels, French Department and Director of European Studies, University of South Carolina andco-editor of Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology

"Some fastidious readers might be tempted to turn away from the pungent topic of Susan Morrison's new book. To do so would be to miss adventurous theory, wide learning, fascinating stories, startling juxtapositions, and witty writing that presents Chaucer as he has never been seen before, both disturbingly transformed and oddly familiar. History from the bottom up has never been so