Abstract
As famously attributed to Augustine, we are born between urine and feces (“inter faeces et urinam nascimur”).1 The mingled sexual and excretory organs necessitate secrecy. We feel nausea for “both kinds of ‘filth.’ We cannot even know if excrement smells bad because of our disgust for it, or if its bad smell is what causes that disgust.”2 At the same time, the entanglement of these functions makes desire an integral element in filth production. Desire—for erotic or excremental fulfillment—must be disciplined. By analogizing sin—particularly sexually related sins—with filth, the Church Fathers attempted to control and shame the individual into socially constructive behavior. Our bodies are cause enough for us to be disgusted with ourselves. Excrement became a means to control the body and to punish the soul.
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Notes
Quoted in Bataille, The Accursed Share, p. 62. While this quote is frequently attributed to Augustine, finding the actual source has proven elusive; one commentator has suggested that the attribution might have been “retrofathered” onto Augustine. Many thanks to Robert Gorman for his tireless efforts.
Mary Clayton endorses this ascription in “An Edition of Ælfric’s Letter to Brother Edward,” in Early Medieval English Texts and Interpretations: Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg, ed. Elaine Treharne and Susan Rosser (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), p. 264 [263–283].
From a twelth-century collection of Ælfrician writings from Worcester. Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose, p. 43.
In the Old English, masculine pronouns are used for the general disapproval voiced in the concluding passage; nevertheless, as Clayton points out, “It is possible that the practice was both a male and a female one, but that Ælfric connects it particularly with women and focuses his disgust on women.” Clayton, “An Edition of Ælfric’s Letter to Brother Edward,” p. 274.
Nigel Barley, “The Letter to Brother Edward,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 79 (1978): 23–24. In Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, people defecate together, but shamefully sneak off to eat privately in little rooms, a wry comment on our obsession with what constitutes proper public behavior and private action.
The Holy Bible, Douay Version 1609 (New York: P. J. Kennedy & Sons, 1914).
Leslie Donovan, Women Saints’ Lives in Old English Prose (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), p. 39. 12. Donovan, Women Saints’ Lives, p. 47.
Sir John Clanvowe, The Two Ways, in The Works of John Clanvowe, ed. V. J. Scattergood (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1965), pp. 67–68.
Anna Popiel, “Between Potentiality and Non-existence: The Concept of Matter in the Light of Neoplatonic Philosophy,” paper delivered at the conference “Rubbish, Waste, and Litter: Culture/al Refusals,” Warsaw School of Social Psychology, Institute of English Studies, November 17–18, 2006.
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 401–402. It is clear that the entrails, including the intestine that contained excrement, were the lowest ranked body parts. See Elizabeth A. R. Bowen, “Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse,” Viator 12 (1981): 221–270; Miri Rubin, “The Body, Whole and Vulnerable, in Fifteenth-Century England,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 23 [19–28].
William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 151. See also Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 68; Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body,” 17 [1–33]; Thomas H. Seiler, “Filth and Stench as Aspects of the Iconography of Hell,” in The Iconography of Hell, ed. Clifford Davidson and Thomas Seiler (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), pp. 132–140; Bayless, “The Story of the Fallen,” 148 [142–156]; Alan David Justice, “Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle,” Theatre Journal 31 (1979), p. 58; Carolyne Larringon, “Diet, Defecation and the Devil: Disgust and the Pagan Past,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald (York: York Medieval Press, 2006), p. 140 [138–155].
On Satan and bowels, see Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, p. 75; Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 140; Miriam Gill, “Female Piety and Impiety: Selected Images of Women in Wall Paintings in England After 1300,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 110 [101–120].
S. A. J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: J. M. Dent, 1991), pp. 195– 196. Cynewulf ’s Juliana eliminates “Juliana’s casting the demon into a dung heap.” R. D. Fulk and Christopher Cain, A History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 100.
Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ed., Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 90, ll. 34–36, p. 91.
Millett and Wogan-Browne, Medieval English Prose for Women, p. 124, ll. 10, p. 125. See also pp. 126–127.
Allen, On Farting, pp. 114–115, quoting and translating Ancrene Wisse, ed. Robert Hasenfratz (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 2.434–2.437, pp. 126–127.
All references to Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1984).
Durling, “Deceit and Digestion,” p. 65 [61–93]. For a discussion on how Purgatory turns “excrement into words,” see Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 73.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Holkham misc. 48 from Bodleian Roll 389.1. canto 28, page 42, frame 43. The manuscript comes from northern Italy and dates from the third quarter of the fourteenth century.
Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350– 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 39. See Annette Weber, “The Hanged Judas of Freiburg Cathedral,” in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representations and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. E. Frojmovic, Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions 15 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 165–188.
All English quotes from Eugene Clasby, trans., The Pilgrimage of Human Life (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 46.
Clasby, Pilgrimage, p. 36. A fourteenth-century Danish church wall painting shows a religious man brewing beer or wine. His helper, a devil, throws excrement into his jug, suggesting that liquor leads to sin. Ørslev28S, circa 1325.
Millett and Wogan-Browne, Medieval English Prose for Women, p. 68, ll. 32–33, p. 69 and p. 70, ll. 4–5, p. 71.
Axel Bolvig, “ ‘I Am Well Done — Please Go On Eating’: Food, Digestion, and Humour in Late Medieval Danish Wall Paintings,” in Grant Risee? The Medieval Comic Presence / La Presence Comique Médiévale: Essays in Memory of Brian J Levy, ed. Adrian P. Tudor and Alan Hindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), p. 251 [247–263].
Monica H. Green and Linne R. Mooney, “The Sickness of Women,” in Sex, Aging & Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium, ed. M. Teresa Tavormina, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2006), vol. 2, p. 494.
John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall and K. B. Locock, EETS 77, 83, 92 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1899/1996), lines 9114–9119; 20848–20850.
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 1990), Book 24, ll. 197–198; see also Book 22, ll. 485–488.
In this manuscript of La Estoire de Saint Aedward Le Rei, the poet writes, “Mais ne regna pas A[e]dmundz mut,/Un duc l’ocist par traisun/A la foraine maisun” (365–367). The translation reads, “But Edmund reigned not long,/A duke slew him by treason/At the house of retirement” (365–367). From Lives of Edward the Confessor, ed. Henry Richards Luard (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), pp. 35, 189.
Allen, On Farting, p. 78, quoting and translating Henry of Huntington, Henrici Archidiaconi Huntendunensis Historia Anglorum, The History of the English by Henry from AC 55 to AD 1154 in 8 books, ed. Thomas Arnold (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1879), 6.14, p. 186. James I of Scotland is also said to have been killed in a privy in 1437 at the Black Monastery in Perth. Lister M. Matheson, Death and Dissent: Two Fifteenth-Century Chronicles (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1999), pp. 43–45. Charles of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor, was born in a privy. Reynolds, Cleanliness and Godliness, p. 325.
Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992), p. 134.
Arthur Rackham Cleveland, Woman Under the English Law: From the Landing of the Saxons to the Present Time (Littleton, CO: Fred B. Rothman, 1987), p. 75 and p. 75, n.1.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, f.56. Many thanks to Rigmor Båtsvik for suggesting this interpretation. High and low become perversely interchanged: “Thus turds are the relics worshipped by a nun at the altar of the anus in the margins of the Bodleian Alexander Romance.” Camille, Image on the Edge, p. 112. See also D. J. A. Ross, Alexander Historiatus: A Guide to Medieval Illustrated Alexander Literature (London: The Warburg Institute, 1963).
Carol J. Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Speculum 68 (1993): 373 [363–387]. President Lyndon Johnson (in)famously would conduct interviews while sitting on the toilet. While it might seem that such an act would humiliate him, in fact, he intimidated those with him, rendering the embarrassed voyeurs as filth in his power.
Njal’s Saga, trans. Robert Cook (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 57, 74, 156. In the Renaissance, nails and hair were also referred to as excrements. See Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1434, 292–294; and Will Fisher, “The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern Europe,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 168, 174, 177 [155–187].
Douglas, “Jokes,” p. 104 [90–114]. For another story linking excrement and humiliation, see the German “Veilchenlegende” attributed to Neidhart von Reuenthal, as discussed in Alan Dundes, Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Study of German National Character Through Folklore (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), pp. 29–30; also Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, trans., Læxdala Saga (London: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 167–168. For a discussion of this scene, see Larringon, “Diet, Defecation and the Devil,” p. 146.
Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry, trans., The Poem of the Cid (London: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 142–143, ll. 2286a–2310. Many thanks to Misty Schieberle for elaboration on this passage.
Boccaccio, The Decameron, p. 629, Eighth Story, Ninth Day. See illuminations of maestro Simone on a toilet at night in Chiara Frugoni, A Day in a Medieval City, trans. William McCuaig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 172.
Boccaccio, The Decameron, p. 103. For a lovely illumination of this scene, Frugoni, A Day in a Medieval City, p. 171.
Laporte, History of Shit, pp. 78–79. Urine was used by fullers into the Middle Ages to wash grease from woolen cloth, a process carried on well into the twentieth-century to full Harris Tweed in a process called “waulking.”
Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal Eroticism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, Volume IX (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), p. 174 [167–175]. He further discusses the link between gold and faeces as supported by anthropology in The Interpretation of Dreams, VI. “The Dream-Work E. Some Further Typical Dreams,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, Volume V (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 403 [350– 404]. See also “H. Affects in Dreams,” pp. 468–471 [460–487], about a dream concerning faeces. I disagree and think the link has to do with imaginary value and excess. Also see Allen, On Farting, pp. 92–96.
Boehrer, “The Ordure of Things,” p. 176 [174–196].
Brown, Life Against Death, p. 245. Also see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 223, n. 4; and C. Ginzburg, “Representations of German Jewry: Images, Prejudices, Ideas—a Comment,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. R. P. Hsia and H. Lehmann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 211 [209–212].
This is followed by the discussion on how to divide a fart into twelve parts. See Peter W. Travis, “Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Fart: Noise in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale,” Exemplaria 16 (2004): 323–348; and Beechy, “Devil Take the Hindmost,” 81 [71–85].
Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, p. 154, also p. 155; Laporte, History of Shit, p. 40; Anna Sapir Abulafia, “Bodies in the Jewish-Christian Debate,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 129 [123–137]; and Sharon Achinstein, “John Foxe and the Jews,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 86, n. 2 [86–120].
Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 34. See also Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, pp. 88–91, who, also citing R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), argues that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw an upsurge in somatically based religious polemic.
Little, Religious Poverty, p. 52. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 214, argues that the twelfth century signals the start of an intensification of the construction of the “other.” She draws on the work of Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, and Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 69, p. 349, n. 32, quoting Ibn Abdun, Hisba manual, in Medieval Iberia: Reading from Christian, Muslim and Jewish Sources, trans. Olivia Remie Constable (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 178.
Wheatcroft, Infidels, p. 68, quoting al-Wansharishi, Abul Abbas Ahmad, Kitah al-mi`yar al-mugrib (Rabat: 1981), p. 141. Translated from the Arabic by L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 58–59. See also Wheatcroft, Infidels, p. 349, n. 31.
For a description of this event, see Wheatcroft, Infidels, pp. 86–87, quoting Reinhart Dozy, Spanish Islam: A History of the Moslems in Spain (London: Frank Cass, 1913 reissued 1972), pp. 519–520.
Bayless, “The Story of the Fallen Jews,” 142 [142–156]. Larry Scanlon has read such stories as “narrative enactment[s] of cultural authority.” Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 34; quoted in Bayless, “The Story of the Fallen Jews,” 147.
Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 115. Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 26. Usurers have been depicted as both eating and defecating money, as in a famous example in a façade on a house in Goslar.
John DuVal, Cuckolds, Clerics, and Countrymen: Medieval French Fabliaux (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1982), pp. 77–86.
Steven F. Kruger, “The Bodies of Jews in the Late Middle Ages,” in The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard, ed. James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 318–319, 303 [301–323]. See also Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), p. 36 on the Christian subject as constituted through the rejection of the Jew.
Irving A. Agus, Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg: His Life and His Works As Sources for the Religious, Legal, and Social History of the Jews of Germany in the Thirteenth Century (New York: Ktav, 1970), pp. 179, 180, and 183.
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice, revised M. T. Clancy (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 81.
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, p. 184. Kristeva, like Abelard citing Matthew 15, argues that with the advent of Christianity there comes an “interiorization of [the] abject.” Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 112, 114. Also Luke Ferretter, “Histories de l’Église: The Body of Christ in the Thought of Julia Kristeva,” in Writing the Bodies of Christ: The Church from Carlyle to Derrida, ed. John Schad (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 147 [145–157]. Elliott, Fallen Bodies, p. 3, cites Jean Gerson (early fifteenth century) as arguing that “our conscience is a clean toilet filled with daily excrement,” p. 26. Jeff Persels examines this passage from the Gospel arguing that in Rabelais it is the damned who are constipated, retaining filth in their bodies, and the saved who are not. Jeff Persels, “ ‘Straightened in the Bowels,’ or Concerning the Rabelaisian Trope of Defecation,” Études rabelaisiennes XXXI (1996): 101–112. Compare to Bridget of Sweden, Saint Bride and Her Book: Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations, Julia Bolton Holloway, trans. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 36–37.
Lothario Dei Segni (Pope Innocent III), On the Misery of the Human Condition: De miseria humane conditionis, ed. Donald R. Howard, trans. Margaret Mary Dietz (Indianapolis: The Bobbs–Merrill Company, 1969), p. 6.
Holmes, The Not so Little Book of Dung, p. 153. It is difficult to imagine Innocent sitting in a “stercoraceous chair” at St John Lateran, a processional throne the pope was, over the course of several hundred years, reputed to have sat on. Lewin, Merde, p. 57.
Jacques Le Goff, Saint Francis of Assisi, trans. Christine Rhone (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 33.
Lawrence Wright, Clean and Decent (New York: The Viking Press, 1960), p. 26.
See Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 29–30. Indeed, in Hull, Massachusetts, at St. Mary’s of the Bay Church, sold by the Catholic Church in the 1990s, the confessional area was turned into a bathroom by its private owner.
Elizabeth Robertson, paper delivered at the Revisiting Chaucer and Christianity Conference (July 2003) called: “ ‘I have... a Soule for to Kepe’: Discerning the Female Subject in ‘The Merchant’s Tale.’ ” Canterbury, England.
Georges Duby, A History of Private Life, Volume I, from Pagan Rome to Byzantium, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 586.
Durling, “Deceit and Digestion,” p. 84; also Citrome, The Surgeon, pp. 106, 109, concerning excremental language in the confessional exchange.
Bynum, Resurrection, pp. 57, 122. See also Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 17. 121. Bynum, Resurrection, p. 87.
John the Scot, Periphyseon: On the Division of Nature, ed. and trans. Myra L. Uhlfelder (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill), p. 229, from Book IV. 123. Bynum, Resurrection, p. 102.
“Body is worse than dung, asserted the pagan Celsus (quoting Heraclitus); it is ‘a disgusting vessel of urine’ and ‘bag of shit,’ said the Christian apologist Arnobius.” Bynum, Resurrection, p. 61.
Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Food and the Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theology (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 338–339.
Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 218.
Summa Theologiae, 3a.54.I. Quoted in Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, p. 219.
Summa Theologiae, 3a.54.4 ad. 2. Quoted in Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, p. 220.
Bynum, Resurrection, p. 265. See also Ralf Lützelschwab, “Zwischen Heilsvermittlung und Ärgernis — das preputium Domini im Mittelalter,” Pecia 8–11 (2005) (Reliques et saintetée dans l’espace médiéval), ed. J. L. Deuffic, pp. 601–628, esp. 604, 608, 626–627, on issues of the Last Judgment. 132. Bynum, Resurrection, p. 269.
Agamben, The Open, p. 19. Agamben cites Thomas Aquinas, The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas, vol. 20, Part III (Supplement) QQ. 69–86, trans. Fathers of the Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1912), p. 193; original in Aquinas, Somme théologique. La Résurrection, ed. Jean-Dominique Folghera (Paris-Rome: Desclée, 1955), pp. 151–152.
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© 2008 Susan Signe Morrison
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Morrison, S.S. (2008). Moral Filth and the Sinning Body: Hell, Purgatory, Resurrection. In: Excrement in the Late Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615021_3
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