On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages(New Middle Ages)

With wit and imagination, Allen chronicles the fart in medieval culture from folklore, to popular and canonical literary works, to the upper reaches of Aristotle and Dante. Waste emerges as an aesthetic category and intersects with the contemporary study of the body.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Midden Age * Part I: Beginning * Old Farts * For the Edification of Copious Shitters and Costive Maidens Whose Hours At Siege Should Be Profitably Employed * A"Sometimes I sits and thinks; Sometimes I just sitsA" * Hard Lessons * Logic 101* The Music Album Musical Bum * Butts and Instruments: Nature vs. Art * The Musical Universe * Canticus Canticorum [Song of Songs] * Broken Air * The Nose Knows * I/Thou13. One Flesh * Pneuma * A Short Excursus on Wind * Till Death Us Do Part * Inspiration * A"Oh dear, what can the matter be? Three old ladies got stuck in the lavatoryA...A" * A"There was an old lady who swallowed a flyA...A" * Farting at the Devil * Filthy Lucre22. Shitting Ducats * Duck-Rabbit, Face-Bottom * Part II: In Between * In the Beginning was the Word * The Silver-Tongued Butt * The Grammar of Farts * Potent Words * Legitimate Etymology * Rebuilding Babel * Bastard Laughter * Better out Than In * Spend a Penny, Save a Penny * Flatus of the Voice * Conclusion: die afterwissenschaft [end-knowledge, pseudo-science, butthole-scholarship] * The Mystery of Roland * Fartprints of Roland

About the Author :
Valerie Allen is Associate Professor of Literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.

Review :
"Fascinating and witty...the strength of On Farting is its playful and evocative treatment of a number of scatological authors and episodes" - Times Higher Education Supplement "Funny and intellectually rewarding." - English Studies "If a book on farting may be called so, it is elegant and erudite." - Marginalia "Allen has written the secret history of waste from the Ancient to the early modern world, and - dare I say it? - the hidden history of humankind's relation to the anus. On Farting, in the line of Norbert Elias's Civilizing Process or Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther, begins small and spreads like wind to almost every area of personal, social, and even spiritual life in what is a truly original and significant work of cultural analysis. This is a book with a huge sweep - from the folklore of the fart, to popular and canonical literary works, to the upper reaches of Aristotle and Dante. Allen writes with such a combination of wit, imagination, and erudition that scholars will wonder, 'Why didn't I think of that?' and the more general reader will be drawn towards a vision of the past that is lively, courageous, and profound." - R. Howard Bloch, Sterling Professor of French, Yale University "Allen takes the fart seriously, refusing to see it either as a marker of abjection or as mere rudeness but also managing to tread the fine line between the portentous and the jeu d'esprit. The book is witty and learned: a tour de force of scholarship and cultural history. The tone is perfectly judged. Allen argues for the fart as a threshold between nature and culture, audible and smellable, and therefore material and bodily, but also roguishly invisible: a challenge to the primarily visual emphasis of contemporary culture. Allen's book savours the power of the fart to call in question not only the canons of good taste but bad taste too, transmuting the whiffy and ineffable into the fresh and audible." - Ruth Evans, Professor of English, University of Stirling, Scotland. "Gifted with a prodigious vocabulary, Allen is equally gifted with an expository style at once pristinely rigorous and utterly reader-friendly. The key is its generosity, what the ancients and medievals would have understood as its liberality or largesse. She writes with such largesse: of information, clarification, good sense, sweet humor, and abiding sympathy with what it means to be human - unfailingly and unstintingly magnanimous. Her years of reading in an unexpectedly vast array of medieval and early modern materials that show an endless fascination with understanding the bowels of humanity has provided her with a body of evidence that, like the body they and she write about, is full of an afflatus that careers deliriously and deliciously between oracular inspiration and fundamental analysis - when you read this book, I promise you, you are going to see some amazing shit." - R. Allen Shoaf, author of Chaucer's Body, co-founding editor of EXEMPLARIA