[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Yet chapter 4,  Gendered Filth, ultimatelysupports a more complex understanding of gender and bodies.As  clenemoder ( clean mother in Piers Plowman, II.50), the Virgin Mary redeemsthe woman s body from filth and pollution.I NTRODUCTI ON 9Part II of the book,  Chaucerian Fecopoetics, explores how excre-ment, both material and symbolic, played itself out in the imaginaryworld created in Chaucer s The Canterbury Tales.An exploration ofprivate versus public space controls the ideas of chapter 5,  UrbanExcrement in The Canterbury Tales. The material reality of excrementin the city created anxiety about public hygiene issues, causing excre-ment to be viewed as increasingly superfluous and foul, requiring itsexpulsion.Late medieval urbanization meant that in the city excrementcould no longer be harmonized with the environment; consequently,urban excrement becomes associated with moral filth as in the ChurchFathers tradition and becomes increasingly subject to legal regulation.The Canterbury Tales illustrates the tension between public and privateexcrement (The Miller s Tale, The Reeve s Tale), given that it was writtenat a transitional time in the development of urban culture correspond-ing with an increased privatization of space.The chapter concludes byexploring why Chaucer chose Southwark, rather than London, as thestarting place for his literary pilgrimage.Southwark was imagined inopposition to London.I return to issues of gender raised in chapter 4 toread Southwark as feminine in contrast to a masculine London in theGeneral Prologue.Chapter 6,  Sacred Filth: Relics, Ritual, and Remembering in ThePrioress s Tale, establishes how anti-Semitic rhetoric associated Jews withfilth as in Chaucer s The Prioress s Tale; excrement is demonized and sym-bolically yoked with the Jews into whose  pit or privy the woundedChristian boy is thrown.52 Jews become regulated through rhetoricalexcess.Purity and pollution were a semantically rich means to describethe matter (Jews) outside of the Christian body and outside of England,from which Jews had been expelled in 1290.Filth can be demonized inanti-Semitic writings or viewed as a crucial aspect of the sacred.Religioussystems often enshrine what is taboo.The relic functions as symbolicdetritus or  excrement that is fetishized in the ritual of pilgrimage.ThePrioress s Tale shows how pilgrimage functions as an act of rememberingand memorializing the past.The sanctified little boy, like the Eucharist inHost desecration tales, is made filthy and yet retains sacred power.Chapter 7,  The Excremental Human God and Redemptive Filth: ThePardoner s Tale, extends this discussion by exploring the late medievalfocus on the humanation or enfleshing of Christ.The increasing focusin the late Middle Ages on the human aspects of Christ complicatesconventional binaries regarding the body, such as sacred and profane,masculine and feminine, clean and filthy.As Julian of Norwich s worksuggests, Christ s  excremental body is fully humanizing and in fullconcordance with orthodox theology.Filth predicates redemption.In10 EXCREMENT IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGESChaucer s Pardoner s Tale, the Host suggests cutting off the Pardoner s tes-ticles and enshrining them in a hog s turd.The Host s insult contaminatesthe sacred with the fecal, suggesting slippage between the holy and thefilthy.The relic, the dead detritus of the human body, could be, Chaucerscandalously and ironically suggests, sacralized excrement.But the poetultimately leaves us desiring the true Host, the body of Christ, not thefalse supper promised by the earthly Host, Harry Bailey.Chapter 8,  The Rhizomatic Pilgrimage Body and AlchemicalPoetry, reads poetry laden with filth as linguistic alchemy, a catalystfor transformation just like pilgrimage itself.Medieval manuscripts ofsacred texts that include images of excremental activities and mattervisualize this ambiguous line between the sacred and the profane toshow how bodies are unbounded [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]