Abstract
In Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, one of the main characters, Irwin, teaches history at a state school for boys in the 1980s. Eventually he becomes a television history “talking head.” We witness the filming of one of his shows at Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire. The sardonic, embittered Irwin speaks to the camera (us): This is Rievaulx Abbey and this vertiginous trench is its main latrine.
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Notes
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 124; also p. 321; Cecilia F. Klein, “Teocuitlatl, ‘Divine Excrement’: The Significance of ‘Holy Shit’ in Ancient Mexico,” Art Journal, Fall, 1993; originally in “Teocuitlatl, `Divine Excrement’: The Significance of ‘Holy Shit’ in Ancient Mexico”; Special issue on “Scatological Art,” Gabriel Weisberg, Guest Editor, Art Journal 52, 3 (1993): 20–27; Lewin, Merde, p. 121.
Michael Camille, “Dr. Witkowski’s Anus: French Doctors, German Homosexuals and the Obscene in Medieval Church Art,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald (York: York Medieval Press, 2006), p. 36 [17–38].
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 44.
McCracken, “The Body Politic and the Queen’s Adulterous Body in French Romance,” p. 50 [38–64]. This has been recognized even in the popular press.
“[A]ll margins are dangerous....Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins.” Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 150. See also Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 108; James, “Ritual, Drama and the Social Body,” 7, 9.
Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 2, 44; also Freud, “Character and Anal Eroticism,” pp. 172–173 [167–175]; and Thompson, Rubbish Theory, p. 116, where Thompson ascribes the concept originally to Lord Chesterfield.
Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 46; William A. Cohen, “Introduction: Locating Filth,” in Cohen and Johnson, Filth, pp. xi, xxix [vii–xxxvii].
Molly Morrison, “Ingesting Bodily Filth: Defilement in the Spirituality of Angela of Foligno,” Romance Quarterly 50 (2003): 204–216.
Sheila Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England: The Work of Osbern Bokenham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 115–116.
Patrick J. Nugent, “Bodily Effluvia and Liturgical Interruption in Medieval Miracle Stories,” History of Religions, 41 (2001): 67–69 [49–70].
C. H. Talbot, ed. and trans., The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth Century Recluse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 103–105.
Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich. Part Two. The Long Text (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), p. 606, n. 49, citing The Chastising of God’s Children and the Treatise of Perfection of the Sons of God, ed. Joyce Bazire and Eric Colledge (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), p. 285.
Nona Fienberg, “Thematics of Value in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Modern Philology 87 (1989): 140 [132–141]. Saint Simeon would lower down his excrement from the pillar he prayed on. Presumably someone would take it away and dispose of it as a charitable act. Lewin, Merde, p. 49.
In Melanesian society, mana, as explored by Mircea Eliade, is a mysterious and active power that “[e]ven latrines have... in that they are ‘receptacles of power’—for human bodies and their excretions....” Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. R. Sheed (London: Sheed and Ward, 1958), p. 19.
R. Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Greek Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 233. Quoted in Von Staden, “Women and Dirt,” 16 [7–30].
Dung is “a very proper symbol of decay and re-birth.” Reynolds, Cleanliness and Godliness, p. 249.
See Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 213–214; also Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus, p. 2.
Dawn Marie Hayes, Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100–1389 (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 31.
See Hayes, Chapter Three, on the interpenetration of the sacred and profane in churches, and Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance (London: Routledge, 2000), Chapter Three.
Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 9. See also Elliott, Fallen Bodies, p. 11.
Hayes talks about how when the murdered saint’s body was undressed, the monks reveal a hair shirt and “breeches riddled with lice and worms.” Hayes, Body and Sacred Place, p. 91.
Britton J. Harwood, “Chaucer’s Pardoner: The Dialectics of Inside and Outside,” Philological Quarterly 67 (1988): 410 [409–422].
Piero Camporesi, trans. Anna Cancogne, “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), p. 228 [220–237].
Camporesi, “The Consecrated Host,” p. 232; also Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Lollard Joke: History and the Textual Unconscious,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995), pp. 23–44.
See “Du Prestre ki abevete (The Priest Who Peeked),” in Du Val, Cuckolds, Clerics, and Countrymen, pp. 43–46.
For a parallel example in the mid-seventeenth century, see Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, p. 284, n. 89, from Shane Leslie, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory: A Record from History and Literature (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1932), p. 103.
Bayless, “The Story of the Fallen Jews,” 147–148 [142–156]; also, Margaret E. Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005), p. 67.
Reynolds, Food and the Body, pp. 5–6. See also Teresa Whalen, The Authentic Doctrine of the Eucharist (Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1993), pp. 9–10.
Laporte, History of Shit, pp. 110–111. Also, Harpet, Du Déchet, p. 201; Lewin, Merde, p. 146.
Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 320, also 37; Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, p. 39; J. H. Blunt (ed.), Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, Ecclesiastical Parties and Schools of Religious Thought, London, 1874, p. 579; J. G. Bourke, Scatologic Rites of All Nations, Washington, DC, 1891, p. 213.
In the Lollard trials of 1428, Agnes Bethom testified against Margery Baxter of Martha, claiming Margery said, “You believe wrongly, since if every such sacrament were God and Christ’s real body, then gods would be infinite in number, because a thousand priests and more confect a thousand such gods every day and then eat them, and once eaten emit them from their back side in filthy and stinking pieces,” Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 328; also, Norman P. Tanner, Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31 (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1977), pp. 44–45; Anne Hudson, “The Mouse in the Pyx: Popular Heresy and the Eucharist,” Trivium 26 (1991): 44–45 [40–53]; and Strohm, “Chaucer’s Lollard Joke,” pp. 38–39. Very frequently the accused Lollards argued against transubstantiation, often affirming in virtually identical language “that Y have holde, beleved and affermed that no prest hath poar to make Goddis body in the sacrament of the auter, and that aftir the sacramentall wordis said of a prest at messe ther remaneth nothyng but only a cake of material bread” (Tanner, Heresy Trials, p. 111) [said by Johannes Reve de Becles, glover]. The expression “cake of material bread” shows up in numerous testimonies (pp. 115, 121, 126, 134).
See Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, p. 241; Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, p. 69; Jeff Persels, “ ‘Straightened in the Bowels,’ or Concerning the Rabelaisian Trope of Defecation,” Études rabelaisiennes XXXI (1996): 101–112.
Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 337–338; also pp. 37, 25; also J. I. Catto, “John Wyclif and the Cult of the Eucharist,” in The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley, ed. Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 279, 274 [269–286]. For a detailed discussion of transubstantiation, Joseph Goering, “The Invention of Transubstantiation,” Traditio 46 (1991): 147–170; and Gary Macy, “The Dogma of Transubstantiation,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45 (1994): 11–41.
See Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 165–181, “What Can We Know about Chaucer That He Didn’t Know about Himself?”
Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 64. For a discussion of Bakhtin and excrement see Paster, The Body Embarrassed, pp. 14–15; also Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 147.
Paul Brians, Bawdy Tales from the Courts of Medieval France (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), pp. 59, 60, 64, 69.
See Heather Blurton, Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 73–80.
Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism, p. 153. See R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); and Hsia, Trent, 1475 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 360. Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body,” 15 [1–33]. See also Merrall Llewelyn Price, Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 21–25.
Geraldine Heng, “The Romance of England: Richard Coer de Lyon, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 148 [135–171].
Draper, “Chaucer’s Wardrobe,” 249 [238–251]; also Holmes, The Not so Little Book of Dung, p. 38.
Corey J. Marvin, “ ‘I Will Thee Not Forsake’: The Kristevan Maternal Space in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale and John of Garland’s Stella maris,” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 47–48, n. 16 [35–58]; also Bayless, “The Story of the Fallen Jews,” 150, 152. Similarly, in some versions of Christ’s passion, dung is thrown at him.
Louise O. Fradenburg, “Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale,” in Chaucer’s Cultural Geography, ed. Kathryn L. Lynch (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 182 [174–192].
See Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, p. 96. Also Robert Boenig, Chaucer and the Mystics: The Canterbury Tales and the Genre of Devotional Prose (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), p. 87; Fradenburg, “Criticism,” in Chaucer’s Cultural Geography, p. 99.
There are cases from Coroners’ papers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Middlesex Sessions of the Peace, c. 1350–1889, available through A2A), of newborn children and infants having been thrown into privies in cases of “willful murder.” Presumably these cases were not limited to the modern period and could have happened earlier. Personal communication from Bridget Howlett. See Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England 1600–1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 143, 188 for cases in the eighteenth century.
See R. Allen Shoaf, Chaucer’s Body: The Anxiety of Circulation in the “Canterbury Tales” (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001), p. 26; Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life, p. 36; and Durling, “Deceit and Digestion,” p. 68 [61–93].
Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 6.
Steven F. Kruger, “The Spectral Jew,” New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998): 11 [9–35].
Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 78.
Sylvia Tomasch, “Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew,” Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 248 [247–267]; also Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, pp. 116–117.
Tomasch, “Judecca,” in Text and Territory, p. 262. Also Fradenburg, “Criticism,” in Chaucer’s Cultural Geography, p. 88, and Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing, p. 107.
Kruger, “The Bodies of Jews in the Late Middle Ages,” p. 303 [301–323]. Miri Rubin, “Medieval Bodies: Why Now, and How?” in The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, ed. Miri Rubin (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1997), p. 216 [209–219], writes of how the Jewish body has been linked to “stench [ foetur judaicus or Jewish stink] [and a] predisposition to suffer from flux.” Holler, Erotic Morality, p. 112, mentions how Jewish males were “stigmatized as feminized males.” There were also suggestions that Jewish males menstruated, an accusation stemming from the distinction of the Christian male body from other, “lesser” bodies (female, Jewish, etc.). See Steven F. Kruger, “Becoming Christian, Becoming Male?” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997), pp. 21–41. This menstruation myth might have fed into a medieval belief, mentioned in Bernard de Gordon’s 1305 Lilium Medicinae, that Jews suffered excessively from hemorrhoids. Harry Friedenwald, The Jews and Medicine: Essays, 2 vols. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1944), Vol. 2, p. 527. See Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, pp. 175–182, about the feminization of Jewish males and its possible link to hemorrhoids.
Steven F. Kruger, “Medieval Christian (Dis)identifications: Muslims and Jews in Guibert of Nogent,” New Literary History 28 (1997): 186 [185–203]; also Kruger’s “Becoming Christian, Becoming Male?” in Becoming Male, pp. 21–41.
Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, p. 28. His translation is based on Richard of Devizes, Cronicon, ed. and trans. J. T. Appleby (Oxford: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963), pp. 3–4.
See the work of Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris: Editions Gallimar, 1984); Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, “Introduction,” Representations 26 (1989): 1–6; Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” Les Lieux de Mémoire, Marc Roudebush, trans., Representations 26 (1989), pp. 7–25; Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England, pp. 134–135; also Rubin, Gentile Tales, p. 131.
Jody Enders, “Emotion Memory and the Medieval Performance of Violence,” Theatre Survey 38, 1 (1997): 149 [139–159].
Robert S. Nelson, “Tourists, Terrorists, and Metaphysical Theater at Hagia Sophia,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 74 [59–81].
Nelson and Olin, “Destruction/Reconstruction,” in Nelson and Olin, Monuments and Memory, p. 206 [205–207]. See also Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 103–105, concerning the way in which the Christian community chose to remember a Jewish “purge.”
Rubin, Gentile Tales, pp. 144, 145. Kathy Lavezzo in “The Minster and the Privy” (forthcoming) argues for a proximity between the Christian and Jewish worlds, one that the tale attempts, but fails, to disguise. One connection concerns how many of the physical spaces of Christian worship in England were funded by Jewish money.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1, f. 124v A. This manuscript is a miscellany of religious prose and verse, mainly in Middle English, though including some works in Anglo-Norman and Latin. It dates from after 1382, probably in the decade before 1400. Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490, Vol. II Catalogue and Indexes (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), p. 19.
Achinstein, “John Foxe and the Jews,” 95 [86–120]. Page 95, cites Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. and trans. Richard Vaughn (New York: 1984), p. 215.
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© 2008 Susan Signe Morrison
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Morrison, S.S. (2008). Sacred Filth: Relics, Ritual, and Remembering in The Prioress’s Tale . In: Excrement in the Late Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615021_6
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