Synopsis
Are butts the most medieval of body parts? From the Wild Man to Chaucer to good old Michelangelo, let’s pontificate about the posterior.
Do you need more of a pitch than that?
Notes
0/ Preorder Em’s book: a little obscene, only a few butts.
1/ Warning for…talking about butts, I guess.
2/ The Wild Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_man
3/ York Minster Cathedral: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York_Minster
The monkey burial: Window n25 (bottom of left window–the bier is covered in green cloth and there is a monkey who has grabbed hold and is hanging off of it). Here is a close up of the detail.
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The legend of the mocker(s) who attempt to stop the Virgin’s funeral procession was well known in medieval Europe, although the name Fergus seems to be specific to York. See the notes at the bottom of the linked page for the lost York Play.
Here is a depiction in medieval art with a summary of the legend: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RYV
Here is the an article by Stephen J. Shoemaker ” ‘Let Us Go and Burn Her Body’: The Image of the Jews in the Early Dormition Traditions” in Church History 68.4 (Dec. 1999), 775–823. Shoemaker also wrote a book The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption
4/ Gargoyles and grotesques: Michael Camille Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art.
5/ Michael Camille “Dr Witkowski’s Anus: French Doctors, German Homosexuals and the Obscene in Medieval Church Art,” in Medieval Obscenities (ed Nicola F. McDonald), 17–38. (We discuss a number of images from this essay, including 2.2.)
6/ Borges Cathedral: http://en.posztukiwania.pl/2017/09/26/details-from-behind/
7/ Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo)
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel pettiness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNeHaAmjkIQ
8/ Barbara Newman quote: “[F]or us, the secular is the normative, unmarked default category, while the sacred is the marked, asymmetrical Other. In the Middle Ages it was the reverse” (viii). Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).
9/ Marginalia butt faces (just as examples!)
11/ Henry Medwall, c.1461–1501?
A play: Fulgens and Lucrece B: “Nay, we shall nede no horse ne Mule/ but let us just [joust] at fart pryke in cule”(p. 328, lns. 1164–65). (Presumably they are trussed up around poles and brooms that serve as the spear.) I’ve cited page and line from Medieval Drama: An Anthology edited by Greg Walker.
Peter Meredith, ” ‘Fart Pryke in Cule’ and Cock-Fighting” Middle English Theater, vol. 6 (1984), 30–39.
12/ Dante, canto 21 (line 139)
13/ Roman de la Rose (Wikipedia)
See our previous episode, note 11, for more on female illuminator Jeanne de Montbaston who illuminated a manuscript of the Roman de la Rose (and for links to examples of her “obscene” work on this manuscript, BNF25526).
Alastair Minnis “From Coilles to Bel Chose: Discourses of Obscenity in Jean de Meun and Chaucer,” Medieval Obscenities (ed. Nicola F. McDonald), 156–178.
14/ The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
15/ Miller’s Prologue and Tale
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