ABSTRACT

As the expression, 'etre presse de son honneur' ('to have one' s honor put under pressure, to feel the need to urinate or defecate') (Dictionnaire du moyen fram;ais 350) attests, sixteenth-century men and women in France associated defecation and (dis)honor. Honor could be sullied (,honnir') and a single word referred to those without honor and without cleanliness - 'vilain.' In the Heptameron, Marguerite de Navarre regularly characterizes her morally depraved characters as 'ord et salle' (,vile and dirty') . Since Renaissance honor was inextricably linked to class, the notion of excrement evoked not only the dishonorable, but also the lower classes as Mikhail Bakhtin has so famously demonstrated. In reality as well as in discourse, the social elite had a different relation to scatology (the likelihood of having a latrine installed in one's home, for example). It is important, however, not to overstate the pudeur of the upper classes. As Montaigne reminds us at the end of the century, 'Et les Roys et les philosophes fientent, et les dames aussi ' (,Both kings and philosophers defecate, and ladies too') (1063).' As notions of intimacy and privacy were beginning to take form in the sixteenth century, how were scatology and scatological discourse perceived by different social classes? In order to address one small part of that question, I turn to the nouvelle, a particularly popular French Renaissance genre that uses the mundane as a setting. I explore the limits of social privilege in four related scatological tales from the collection of King Francis 1's sister, Marguerite de Navarre, first published in 1558, and from the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (ca. 1515), written by Philippe de Vigneulles, a merchant from Metz.2