Charlotte Allen, a doctoral student in medieval and Byzantine studies, writes a fantastic essay about her experience at a recent academic conference for Medieval scholars.  Sounds like something from the old Tom Wolfe.  Medieval studies, once the distinguished august province of Christopher Dawson and C.S. Lewis, has been sucked into the vortex of Higher Criticism and Lower Thought, with the end result that contemporary Medieval scholars are presenting conference papers on things as lofty as excrement, also known as “waste studies.” 

Waste studies is a brand new academic discipline invented by Susan Signe Morrison, a dark-haired, extroverted 49-year-old professor of English at Texas State University’s San Marcos campus and mother of two (her husband is also an English professor) who organized the session and admitted with good-humored candor in an email that her new field’s disgust-provoking subject matter might be a “challenge” to scholars thinking about specializing in it. Morrison’s own specialty as a medievalist used to be women on pilgrimages, but then she got the idea for her latest book, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics, forthcoming this September. In her email she explained that the idea for the fecal book came to her partly because she noticed that dung and privies played a role in the works of Chaucer, Dante, and other medieval authors, and partly because her “son was potty-training.” And so a new scholarly industry was born.

Other topics and papers presented at this conference:

“(Ab)normal Societies: Disability as a Socio-cultural Concept in Medieval Society”

“Becoming (m)Others, Becoming (hu)Men: Engendering Hybrids and Monsters in Two Medieval Romances”

“Two Sides of the Same Coin: Defining the Mentally Ill in Plantagenet England”

“Menstruating Male Mystics and the Sin of Pride”

“Googling the Grail”

“Saint Margaret: General Practitioner, not only an OB-GYN”

“Alisoun’s Aging Body: Gazing at the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales“

You can’t write satire this funny.