Pure Filth : : Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Early French Farce / / Noah D. Guynn.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2019 English
• VerfasserIn: Guynn, Noah D.,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2019]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: The Middle Ages Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.) :; 2 illus.

As Noah D. Guynn observes, early French farce has been summarily dismissed as pure filth for centuries. Renaissance humanists, classical moralists, and Enlightenment philosophes belittled it as an embarrassing reminder of the vulgarity of medieval popular culture. Modern literary critics and theater historians often view it as comedy's poor relation—trite, smutty pap that served to divert the masses and to inure them to lives of subservience. Yet, as Guynn demonstrates in his reexamination of the genre, the superficial crudeness and predictability of farce belie the complexities of its signifying and performance practices and the dynamic, contested nature of its field of reception. Pure Filth focuses on overlooked and occluded content in farce, arguing that apparently coarse jokes conceal finely drawn, and sometimes quite radical, perspectives on ethics, politics, and religion.Engaging with cultural history, political anthropology, and critical, feminist, and queer theory, Guynn shows that farce does not pander to the rabble in order to cultivate acquiescence or curb dissent. Rather, it uses the tools of comic theater—parody and satire, imitation and exaggeration, cross-dressing and masquerade—to address the urgent issues its spectators faced in their everyday lives: economic inequality and authoritarian rule, social justice and ethical renewal, sacramental devotion and sacerdotal corruption, and heterosocial relations and household politics. Achieving its subtlest effects by employing the lewdest forms of humor, farce reveals that aspirations to purity, whether ethical, political, or religious, are inevitably mired in the very filth they repudiate.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- A Note on Sources -- Introduction. The Many Faces of Farce -- Chapter 1. The Wisdom of Farts: Ethics and Politics, Farce and Festive Comedy -- Chapter 2. A Justice to Come: Messianism and Eschatology in Maistre Pierre Pathelin -- Chapter 3. Sacraments and Scatology, Faith and Doubt: Andrieu de La Vigne’s Mystère de Saint Martin and Its Farces -- Chapter 4. Making History: Misbehaved Women, Well-Behaved Women, and the Sexual Politics of Farce -- Afterword. Against Protoforms -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- Acknowledgments