Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics

Author / Editor
Morrison, Susan Signe.

Title
Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics

Published
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Physical Description
xiii, 271 pp.

Series
The New Middle Ages.

Description
Morrison constructs a cultural poetics of excrement to suggest that Chaucer's treatment of fecal matter, in both its literal and figurative senses, illustrates the ways that the Middle Ages viewed excrement. This cultural poetics enables the modern critic to better understand the Middle Ages, as well as the legacy that medieval attitudes toward fecal matter have left to modern culture. Morrison addresses much of CT (PrT, NPT, and PardT most extensively), focusing on fecal matter in an attempt to "correct the potential decorporealization of the medieval body."

Chaucer Subjects
Canterbury Tales--General
Prioress and Her Tale
Nun's Priest and His Tale
Pardoner and His Tale