NOTES 1 Introduction 1. All references to Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 2. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York/London: Routledge, 1995), p. 32, cited in Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie, “Introduction: ‘Talking Your Body’s Language’: The Menstrual Materialisations of Sexed Ontology,” in Menstruation: A Cultural History, ed. Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie (London: Palgrave, 2005), p. 5 [1–10]. 3. Bryan S. Turner, “The Body in Western Society: Social Theory and Its Perspectives,” in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 19 [15–41]. 4. Thomas A. Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 3; also pp. 4, 10, 16. See Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective.” Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 1–33; and Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), esp. p. 196 [160–219]. 5. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), p. 92, citing Erasmus, Ciceronianus (1528), in Collected Works, trans. and ed. A. H. T. Levi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), XXVIII, p. 374. 6. Miri Rubin, “Body Techniques,” in The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, ed. Miri Rubin (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1997), p. 216 [95–123]; also Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 185–187; and Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 151. 7. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 3, citing Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2 (1973 [1934]): 73 [70–88]. Although Mauss writes concerning the various 160 NOTES techniques of the body, “Hygiene in the needs of nature: Here I could list innumerable facts for you,” he does not go on to do so. Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 118. Also, David Inglis, A Sociological History of Excretory Experience: Defecatory Manners and Toiletry Technologies (Lewiston, ME: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), p. 14. 8. Thomas DiPiero, “Shit Happens: Rabelais, Sade, and the Politics of Popular Fiction,” Genre 27 (1994): 303 [295–314]. Also in Michael Uebel, “On Becoming Male,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages , ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997), p. 371 [367–384]. 9. I am playing with the term “ecopoetic” as used by Jonathan Bate, Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 266. 10. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 25. 11. Peter J. Smith, “ ‘The Wronged Breeches’: Cavalier Scatology,” in Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology, ed. Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2004), p. 170 [154–172]. See also Thomas W. Ross, Chaucer’s Bawdy (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1972), p. 18; and Tiffany Beechy, “Devil Take the Hindmost: Chaucer, John Gay, and the Pecuniary Anus,” The Chaucer Review 41.1 (2006): 83 [71–85]. 12. Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), p. 193. 13. Valerie Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Jeremy J. Citrome, The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Martha Bayless, “The Story of the Fallen Jews and the Iconography of Jewish Unbelief,” Viator 34 (2003): 142–156, and The Devil in the Latrine: Sin and Material Corruption in Medieval Culture (forthcoming); Conrad Leyser, “Masculinity in Flux: Nocturnal Emission and the Limits of Celibacy in the Early Middle Ages,” in D. M. Hadley, ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe ( L ondon: L ong m a n, 1999), pp. 103 –120; K athr y n L . Ly nch, “From Tavern to Pie Shop: The Raw, the Cooked, and the Rotten in Fragment 1 of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Exemplaria 19 (2007): 117–138; and Paul Strohm, “Sovereignty and Sewage,” in Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny- Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 57–70. 14. This is a both a neologism and pun: coprolite signifies fossilized feces and corporeal signifies of the body. The term thus signifies the body through faecal production. 15. See Shail and Howie, “Introduction,” in Menstruation, pp. 3, 5. 16. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, p. 38. NOTES 161 17. Cf. Robert Mills, “Ecce Homo,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 162 [152–173]. 18. Lennard J. Davis, “Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body,” in Visualizing the Disabled Body: The Classical Nude and the Fragmented Torso, reprinted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Letch (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 2421 [2398–2421]. 19. Persels and Ganim, Fecal Matters, p. xiii. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have influentially argued, “what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central.” Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 5; also see Chapter 3, entitled “The City: The Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch,” pp. 125–148, for an analysis of Chadwick, Engels, Marx, and sewage in the Victorian city. 20. There is a vast amount of literature dealing with filth in the Victorian period. A few include Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life , ed. William Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Dale H. Porter, The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1998); Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London: J. M. Dent, 1983); Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (Studies in Gender History) (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); also Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 2000), p. 43. 21. Mervyn James, “Ritual, Drama and the Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town,” Past & Present 98 (1983): 9, 7 [3–29]. 22. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, p. 90. 23. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), p. 295; also Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 31. 24. Dav Pilkey, Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People (New York: Scholastic, 2006), pp. 19–20. 25. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966/2002), p. 200. 26. See, for just one example out of many, the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles who, in 1979/80, was an artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, in a performance called Touch Sanitation. 27. John Scanlan, On Garbage (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), p. 163. 28. Gail Weiss, “The Body as Narrative Horizon,” in Thinking the Limits of the Body, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Gail Weiss (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), p. 25 [25–35]. 29. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. II the History of Eroticism, Vol. III: Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), p. 31, quoting Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 24. 30. Bataille, The Accursed Share, p. 52. 162 NOTES 31. Kelly Anspaugh, “Powers of Ordure: James Joyce and the Excremental Vision.” Mosaic 27, 1 (1994): 77 [73–100]. Also, Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke, “Introduction: Cultural Economies of Waste,” in Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, ed. Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. xiv [ix–xvii]. 32. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968/1984), p. 175. 33. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 19, 110; also Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, p. 14, on carnival. 34. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 149; Beechy, “Devil Take the Hindmost,” 71. 35. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 124, 321. 36. Davis points out that “what the term [grotesque] has failed to liberate is the notion of actual bodies.” “Enforcing Normalcy,” p. 2418. 37. Martin Pops, “The Metamorphosis of Shit,” Salmagundi 56 (1982): 50 [26–61]. 38. Shail and Howie, “Introduction,” in Menstruation, p. 9. 39. Gay Hawkins, “Down the Drain: Shit and the Politics of Disturbance,” in Culture and Waste, p. 43 [39–52]. 40. Shail and Howie, “Introduction,” in Menstruation, p. 4 [1–10]. 41. Quoted in Shail and Howie, “Introduction,” in Menstruation, p. 5, from Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, p. 35. 42. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 4–12, cited in Shail and Howie, “Introduction,” in Menstruation, p. 5. 43. Maurice Bloch, “Religion and Ritual,” in The Social Science Encyclopedia, ed. A. Kuper and J. Kuper, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp.