Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art. Studies in Scatology

Edited by Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim. Aldershot, Ashgate. 2004. xxi+192 pp. Hb £45.00. Observing that academia has traditionally shunned dirty literature, our editors present twelve scatological studies moving from antiquity (Hope resurrects Plutarch) to the English Restoration (Smith considers Rochester), and examining the power of what they term (too emphatically?) ‘the last taboo’ (following the Introduction). Bowen studies fart jokes within those facetiae collections whose study she virtually initiated: albeit offensive, they were still cultivated by eminent humanists and reedited well into the seventeenth century. Hope also considers short narratives, particularly the exemplum, observing how moral imperatives and anti-feminist meanings were variously imposed on scatological fantasies such as men laying eggs or shitting crows. LaGuardia concentrates predominantly on Rabelais, imposing his own moral readings on such passages as Pantagruel's cured bellyache or Gargantua and the arse-wipe. However, he subjects his material to too strong an allegory, so neglecting the ambivalence of Rabelaisian filth which other contributors readily identify. Persels is more convincing when showing how excremental references reinforced anti-Catholic propaganda (Calvin noting in context the frankness of Biblical text), whilst Zarucchi examines a scurrilous reissue of a catalogue of Louis XIV's medals demonstrating similarly how pious fervour might both empower and excuse the extreme obscenity used in religious polemics. Thompson cites a more refined Reformation figure, Marguerite, who still employs terms like ‘ord’ and ‘salle’ as negative markers in her characterization, though again the reading of L'Heptaméron 11 (a lady besmirched in a monastery latrine) strays towards the over-moralistic. In contrast, when Ehrstine (‘The Renaissance Anatomy of Folly’) examines more broadly how early modern culture depicted the grotesque, or Schmidt (‘Holy and Unholy Shit’) unearths the origins of early modern scatology, many of the ambiguities Bakhtin perceived inevitably re-emerge. Not only do faeces provide a cheap way to attack one's enemies; they also, even when so applied, retain overtones of purgation and cure. Simultaneously, however, the religious propaganda flooding the Reformation reveals a clear shift towards that sarcasm and derision which, again for Bakhtin, overwhelmed medieval popular laughter. Stewart, considering sixteenth-century art, notes more positively how the portrayal of peasant life was purified during the same period, Bruegel being a key figure in this particular civilizing process. However, though urine may disappear from his pictures, Tate has it dominate the symbolism of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, implying that a tyrant's power and lifespan have impassable limits. Moving back into the seventeenth century with his examination of Théophile's often outrageous libertine verse, Ganim shows that the poet's blasphemous excesses are not irredeemably outrageous or desperate. If faith in God and humanity are threatened, at least his wit survives ‘even in the most exasperating of circumstances’, something less true of Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, whose depressing foulness is, for Smith, void of any Rabelaisian spirit, showing merely how the English nobles, even though restored under Charles II, had lost their cultural identity. Overall this well-presented and well-edited volume offers an intellectually rewarding, if not always sensually pleasurable, read

Allegory · Ambivalence · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology · Humanism · Humanities · Literature · Power (physics · Sociology · Taboo · Theology · Anthropology · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Renaissance Literature and Culture

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