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Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics. By Susan Signe Morrison. Palgrave Macmillan, 288pp, Pounds 42.50. ISBN 9781403984883. Published 14 November 2008
In York's Jorvik Viking Centre, snug in the ostentation of its own display case, is a supercilious and eye-wateringly huge human turd. Nestling in its celebrity status, this magnificent stool squats amid weapons, jewellery, household implements and other artefacts dating back 1,200 years, triumphantly defying the claims of history that the past is a foreign country and things are done differently there. Susan Signe Morrison's spry and sparkling study of excrement in the late Middle Ages (while admittedly focusing on a subsequent period) could well have adopted the Viking shit as talismanic inasmuch as it symbolises her stated purpose to redress the tendency of literary theory to dematerialise the body and so rarefy the somatogenic inspiration of so much artistic endeavour.
In too many historical and literary accounts of the Middle Ages, Morrison argues, corporeal experience is deodorised and its representation euphemised: "material...