NOTES Introduction 1. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, quoted in Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim, eds, Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art (Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. xii–xv. Also William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 43–4. This said, Douglas does not consider the fart in any systematic way, only incidentally; for example, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge 1966, repr. 1996), p. 120. Waste studies is a scholarly domain in its own right. Most relevantly to medieval waste, see Susan Signe Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), especially pp. 139–58. 2. John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Re Proprietatibus, ed. M.C. Seymour, Elizabeth Brockhurst, Gabriel M. Liegey, M.H. Blechner, Ralph Hanna III, Joseph E. Grennen et al., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975–1988), 7.49, 1:401. 3. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 197. 4. At a distance, the Angel and Royal gargoyle looks like a face, but viewed from underneath, is clearly a butt. Autun’s gargoyle, however, leaves no room for doubt at any angle. See Janetta Rebold Benton, Holy Terrors: Gargoyles on Medieval Buildings (New York: Abbeville, 1997), pp. 60–3. “Gargoyle” comes from OF la gargole [throat]. 5. For Middle Ages as origin of the contemporary, see Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (London: Picador, 1986), pp. 64–5. 6. Galen, On the Natural Faculties, ed. and trans. Arthur John Brock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 3.12. 7. Laurent Joubert, Traité du ris (Paris: Nicholas Chesneau, 1579), 1.26, (p. 128). English translations of Joubert throughout are from Treatise on Laughter, trans. Gregory David de Rocher (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1980), p.60. 8. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 69. Citing Claude Gaignebet, Flavio Cazzaro observes the abject boundary around bodily orifices. Only when bodily matter is ejected does it become dirty. “Un Perfum de scan- dale ou l’esthétique scatologique dans la literature française du nord du XIIe au XIVe siècle” (Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, M.A. thesis, 2003), p. 7. 184 NOTES FROM PP.3–10 9. For a detailed critique of Platonically influenced medieval musical aesthetics and an examination of the “embodied materiality” (p. 4) of abstract num- ber, see Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press: 2001). See also C.M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 63–83. 10. Brian O’Doherty, “Feldman Throws a Switch between Sight and Sound,” The New York Times, February 2, 1964, p. X11. 11. Quoted in Philippe Kohly, dir., Matisse, Picasso DVD (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003). 12. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1992), p. 13. 13. Ascham, The Scholemaster, in English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904; repr. 1970), p. 105. 14. Malcolm Jones, “The Parodic Sermon in Medieval and Early Modern England” Medium Aevum, 66 (1997): 101 [94–114]. 15. Bynum, Fragmentation, p. 25. The Beginning 1. Chronicle of London, From 1089 to 1483, ed. E Tyrrell and Sir N. H. Nicolas (London: Longman, 1827; repr. Felinfach: Llanerch, 1995), p. 20. 2. Count Rainier of Boulogne “took the meaning literally, like the Jews,” in Lambert of Ardres, The History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, trans. Leah Shopkow (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 68. For a blindfold Synagogia who carries tablets signifying the letter of the law, see Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 2.II.36. 3. Exodus 33.3. For L. dura cervix, Wyclif translates “hard nol” (head, nape of neck). John Wyclif, The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, ed. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850), 1:272–3. 4. For Jews throwing the murdered corpse of a Christian boy in a wardrobe [privy], see CT, 7.572–3. See also the story of Abraham, a Jew, who in 1250 bought a statue of the Virgin and Child and subjected it to a daily ritual of defecation, forcing his wife to do the same; Matthew of Paris, Matthæi Parisiensis, Monachi Sancti Albani, Chronica Majora: Vol 5, A.D. 1248 to A.D. 1259, ed. Henry Richards Luard (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1880), pp. 114–15. No doubt there is a triangulated association between shit, gold, and Jews in respect of their money-lending. 5. Léon Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, Volume One: From the Time of Christ to the Court Jews, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vanguard, 1965), pp. 124–5. Martha Bayless tracks the wide dissemination of the story in “The Story of the Fallen Jew and the Iconography of Jewish Unbelief,” Viator 34 (2003): 142–56. NOTES FROM PP. 10–12 185 6. Middle English Sermons, ed. Woodburn O. Ross, EETS O.S. 209 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 159. 7. Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls Preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall, ed. A. H. Thomas. 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929–1961), 2:237. 8. Calendar of Plea, 4:124, 157. 9. Calendar of Plea, 4:135. 10. Garderobes in palaces and castles were often multiseaters, though sometimes with some minimal privacy; Lawrence Wright, Clean & Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water-Closet (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 47. 11. Ælfric, “An Edition of Ælfric’s Letter to Brother Edward,” ed. Mary Clayton, in Early Medieval English Texts and Interpretations: Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg, eds. Elaine Treharne and Susan Rosser (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), pp. 282–3 [pp.263–83]. 12. For arswyspes, see Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum, dictionarius Anglo- latinus princeps by Fratre Galfrido Grammatico dicto, ed. Albertus Way (London: Camden Society, 1865), s.v. arswyspe. The Promptorium is a fifteenth-century English-Latin word list; Latin equivalents are maniperium and anitergium. 13. Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 70.20 (pp. 66–7). 14. Wynkyn de Worde, The demaundes ioyous 1511, anon, London, 1511. For gorse as toilet paper, see William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London: Longman, 1995), A.5.194. 15. Georges Duby, ed. A History of Private Life II: Revelations of the Medieval World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 89. 16. Thundergust: A Kentucky Court of Appeals Decision (Louisville, KY: Privately Printed, 1930), unpaginated. 17. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), p. 305. 18. Carsten Niebuhr, Description de l’Arabie faite sur des observations propres et des avis recueillis dans les lieux mêmes (Amsterdam and Utrecht: S.J. Baalde [Amsterdam] and J. van Schoonhoven [Utrecht], 1774), p. 27. 19. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, trans. and ed. Richard F. Burton. 10 vols. (London: Burton Club [privately printed], 19–?), 5:135–7. 20. Book of the Thousand, 5:137. 21. Calendar of Plea, 2:135: on February 2, 1372, “Richard Bakere, brewer, was fined 2s [2 shillings] for casting dung into the street against the ordi- nance.” In May 1373, the dung dumped daily in the Ward by carters from 186 NOTES FROM PP. 12–15 throughout the City of London caused oppression of the inhabitants (2:156); and Dolitellane was so “stopped up with dung,” that no one could perform their labors because of the “stench and filth” (2:157). Whether Do-litel-lane acquired its name before or after the work-stopping poop is anyone’s guess. 22. PRO C 1/66/290. 23. Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel (La Haye: Chez Arnout, 1694), s.v. vesse. 24. The Complete Works of François Villon, ed. and trans. Anthony Bonner (New York: David McKay, 1960), pp. xviii–xix. 25. Rosemary Woolf, “Later Poetry: The Popular Tradition,” in The Middle Ages, ed. W.F. Bolton (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970), p. 280 [pp. 263–311]. 26. For discussion of the passage she contests, see p. 197, fn 291. 27. The Antwerp-London Glossaries, ed. David W. Porter (Toronto: Publications of the Dictionary of Old English, forthcoming), 4.2027. 28. Owl and the Nightingale, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2001), ll. 115–16, 591–6, 1686. See also Margaret Laing, “Raising a Stink in The Owl and the Nightingale: A New Reading at Line 115,” Notes and Queries 45 (1998): 276–84. 29. See Thomas W. Ross, “Taboo-Words in Fifteenth-Century English,” in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1984), p. 140. 30. Liber feodorum, The Book of Fees, Commonly Called Testa de Nevill: Ed. H.C.M. Lyte et al., 3 vols. (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1920–1931), 2:1174. 31. William Camden, Britain Or A Chorographicall Description of the Most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the llands adioyning, out of the depth of Antiqvitie (London: Impensis Georgii Bishop & Ioannis Norton, 1610), p.