Laudator Temporis Acti

Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), p. 94:

The variety of subject-matter, the freshness and grainy earthiness of the carving and the intimate scale of misericords have attracted countless popular and scholarly treatments (we all have our favourites). But what is often not emphasized enough is the relative position of this art and its meaning, as regards the low subject-matter. A number of French examples have a distinctly 'popular aspect, depicting riddles, pastimes and folk tales in a dynamic and often derogatory style. Here in the very centre of the sacred space, the marginal world erupts. Why this became a fashion, and why it was allowed, has to be related to the way in which these carvings were literally debased and made subservient to those 'above' them. The peasants labouring in the fields, the foolish merchant who carries his horse across a stream, the fox preaching to the geese — all are blotted out by the bottoms of the clergy. Sometimes this is actually reflected in the carver's design, as at Saumur, where a figure is pinned with his nose reaching up to the choir-stall seat — literally the posterior of the sitter (illus. 47).

47 Sniffing the bottom. Misericord, Church of St Pierre, Saumur

Laura Kendrick, "Comedy," in Peter Brown, ed., A New Companion to Chaucer (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), pp. 105-121 (at 112-113):

This sort of gestural and olfactory humor was long lived, if we judge from the churlish fart‐sniffer (see Figure 7.1) who has positioned his nose right beneath the edge, not of a cartwheel, but of a misericord seat, upon which a canon would have rested his buttocks during the singing of liturgical offices in the choir stalls (c. 1475) of the church of Saint Pierre in Saumur, France.

Figure 7.1 Fart‐sniffer misericord carving. Choir stall in the church of Saint Pierre in Saumur, France (c. 1475). [Photo: author.]

Labels: noctes scatologicae