Few things preoccupied the medieval Christian church more than the notion of sin: because of mankind’s propensity to corruption the church as an institution existed to guide those who fell under its influence toward morally good actions, and away from demonic temptations. It is also true that few things played as central a role in the experience of ordinary people in later medieval Europe than the stench and filth which predominated. The poor sanitation systems of medieval towns are well-documented;[1] and the limited availability of latrines forced the majority to simply relieve themselves in the street, meaning that foul odours were ubiquitous in medieval towns.[2] It may be unsurprising, therefore, that these phenomena so central to later medieval life should converge: both provoke reactions of disgust, and crucially, both were understood to be hazardous to physical as well as spiritual wellbeing. The link between them was established in theology, communicated through sermons and popular culture to the masses, and it helped to shape later medieval Christian societies in law and in culture. It is therefore the aim of this essay evaluate stench, filth, and sin in terms of their roots in theological and scientific discourse, their communication to the laity, their role in writing legal and cultural norms and their influence in shaping and structuring the Christian community. On this analysis, it is possible to conclude that the later medieval church used the association of stench and filth with sin to make Christian doctrine more accessible and tangible to the laity, to better regulate Christian behavioural norms, and to make specific boundaries both around and within the Christian community – though not always entirely successfully. What made this pursuit so effective was that the sensory perception of stench and filth was so visceral and universal, creating a reference-point by which (almost) everyone could better conceive of sin. However, before this analysis can be conducted, it is necessary to explain the theological foundations of the stench, filth and sin.
With roots in early medieval and even late antique Christianity, the idea that stench was associated with sin was buttressed by a robust logic. Since things that tended to smell bad – rotting food, excrement, or human and animal corpses – were all examples of natural decay, it followed that, in the spiritual realm, they represented a moral decay of some kind.[3] If stench represented sin, then the converse was also true: piety was represented by fragrance, with the Garden of Eden’s odoriferous flowers underpinning the notion that moral virtue carried with it good smells. This notion pervaded later medieval Christian writings. William of Malmesbury told of how the Anglo-Saxon princess Mildburh was discovered beneath the floorboards of Wenlock Abbey, the pleasant aromas of balsam arising from her body unmistakably identifying her as a woman of good faith;[4] and conversely, Adam of Eynsham’s Vision of the Monk of Eynsham characterised Hell by the sulfuric odours and the stench of lustful sweat which indicated the sinfulness of its inhabitants.[5]But there were further layers to this relationship. The Christian cosmos was characterised by the contrast between that which was ‘higher’ (or Heavenly) and that which was ‘lower’ (or Hellish); and the human body was seen to symbolise this cosmological ordering. Thus, the upper body (capable of exercising reason and observation) was associated with piety, whereas the lower body (capable of lustful actions and of producing foul-smelling waste) was considered a bastion of sin. Indeed, excrement, being a necessary aspect of human existence, served as a reminder of humans’ corporeality: fleshly beings produced filth precisely because their flesh was corrupt and impure – a direct result of man’s original sin.[6] The upper body, by contrast, was emphasised for the crucial role it played in battling sin. If stench indicated a demonic presence, then the nose could act as a means to spot the potentially morally hazardous. This was suggested in the Biblical metaphor of the “nose… like the tower of Lebanon” (Song of Songs, 7:4), where the sense of smell performs the function of a watchtower guarding against enemies; and similarly, Bridget of Sweden wrote of a corrupted priest, whose cut-off nose implied an inability to distinguish between what was pious and what was sinful.[7] On a theoretical level, therefore, stench and filth were seen as physical manifestations of humans’ propensity to sin; the implications of this relationship meant that the sense of smell was crucial to good Christian conduct.
How the church communicated these ideas to the wider public could be interpreted as a way of making abstract theology more tangible and accessible. In so doing, it became easier to encourage the laity to resist the latent corruption around them. Sermons being the primary point of contact between the laity and academic theology, that so many of them appealed to the sense of smell should imply that many lay Christians were encouraged to think of sin in olfactory terms. For example, the fourteenth-century author of French preaching texts Pierre Bersuire integrated medical knowledge about the production of stench from heat into his sermons, linking the physical sweat of sexual activity with the spiritual stench of lust.[8] Jacobus de Voragine, too, explained the spiritual significance of leprosy through the smell of the afflicted: “Leprosy, inasmuch as it is a fetid illness, signifies the sin of lust that stinks before God and men”; in this case, the social stigma surrounding lepers is both a symptom of and a punishment for their sins.[9] By tying the abstract (sin) to a familiar physical reality (leprosy), preachers like Jacobus and many others could put theological doctrine into more individually relatable terms. Against this, the charge may be raised that no matter how engaging the oral delivery, many sermons were conceptually beyond the grasp of the laity, making little impact on ordinary listeners. And while there was undoubtedly a gap in levels of engagement between the educated and non-educated, this argument ignores the long-term popularity of many authors whose preaching texts contained complex scholastic theology and medical knowledge, which Katelynn Robinson has argued indicates a solid foundational understanding among the laity.[10] Additionally, this charge fails to recognise the totality of the laity’s experience of religious ideas, which filtered down into cultural output. We can see it in Chaucer, whose ‘Parson’s Tale’ told us that foul-smelling hell was the punishment for sinners (‘The Parson’s Tale’, X.208-210);[11] and even in lesser-known chronicles like those in the fifteenth-century Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, which told of a knight’s altercation with Satan in a latrine, portraying a foul-smelling but nonetheless commonplace location as the abode of demonic spirits.[12] And even for the illiterate, there was the symbolism of sin in medieval artwork: anal imagery, such as a fourteenth-century English illustration depicting the very embodiment of evil himself inverting the natural order, with a face on his bottom, at the source of excrement from which so much filth and stench came forth (see appendix 1).[13] These examples serve to illustrate two things: firstly, there were various different ways to communicate theological ideas to the laity beyond sermons; and, secondly, that this totality of sensory experience, through sermon, literature and art, helped to bring the ubiquity of sin to the front of the public consciousness, fostering what one can imagine was a near-constant reminder of pervasive human corruption, expanding the presence of ecclesiastical doctrine into ever more areas of life – even into the more intimate sphere of personal hygiene.
But the Christian association of stench and filth with sin was not simply an abstract idea to be explained to the laity; it was also a principle along whose lines law and culture could be shaped, meaning that stench and filth actually helped to regulate aspects of Christian behaviour. Medieval public health regulations targeted supposedly hazardous filth: hence the 1385 national ordinance which demanded the removal of garbage from England’s streets in order to purify “corrupt air”,[14] or the 1439 law in Lynn which required butchers to dispose of waste in the River Nar at low tide so as to improve public hygiene.[15] Stench, too, had to be regulated: in thirteenth-century Rome, for instance, Pope Gregory IX legislated the removal of stenches from the streets, concerned both for spiritual and health hazards.[16] Later laws in Pistoia legislated a minimum ditch depth for the burial of plague victims, “in order to avoid the foul stench that the bodies… give off.”[17] David Carr’s analysis of English butchery regulations concluded that anti-filth legislation was primarily motivated by the civic pride attached to a clean city, and, especially in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries, anxieties over the plague.[18] But, Carr’s conclusion can be taken a step further: since filth and stench were closely associated with sin, there was an inherent moral dimension to these laws too. Scholarly writings on plague legislation would substantiate this, like the plague tract of Thomas Forestier. He warned of the diseases carried by privy water, which infected food and drink, before imploring the reader: “Let every man that loves God and his neighbour amend these things.”[19] According to this source, then, the need to clean medieval streets and purify the air was not just a matter of civic duty, but of Christian devotion: the association of filth and stench with sin meant that the fight against public health hazards was an act of piety, lending moral urgency to the problem. Public health legislation in medieval towns therefore appears to be heavily based on the idea that sin and stench were analogous, with compliance with these laws encouraged through appeals to religious devotion. It is another example of the discourse around sin extending further into the lives of Christians, here being the basis for legal practice in major issues of public health.
If stench, filth and sin were key in constructing legal norms in later medieval Christian communities, then it would not be unreasonable to assume that social norms, too, were influenced in some way. Indeed, some sources give an insight into how the spiritual dimensions of smell were used to both define and construct what may be termed the wider Christian community. Records of a complaint made in Barcelona in 1330 are indicative: an overflowing sewer in the Jewish quarter intruded into a Christian neighbourhood, provoking a scribe who complained that the stench and filth offended the Virgin of the Pine, patron of the parish church.[20]The contrast he makes is clear: on one hand, purity, fragrance, and Christian piety; and on the other, stench, filth and Jewish sinfulness. Nor was this the only example of Jews being characterised as smelly or filthy. The folk tale of a Jew who drowned in a latrine was widely retold in ordinary as well as elite contexts, suggesting this trope had real purchase across the social spectrum. According to the story, the struggling Jew appealed to Christian bystanders for help on the grounds that it was the Sabbath; but since the Christian Sabbath falls on a different day, no help was given.[21] Thus, because of his unbelief, the Jew is condemned to wallow and die in stench and filth – and sin. In both cultural and social contexts, therefore, the association of stench and filth with sin emphasised the difference between in-group and out-group, strictly defining the borders between Christian and other communities, and exacerbating social conflict where these groups came into contact. That the stench of waste was and is capable of provoking such visceral reactions of disgust would presumably serve only to increase anti-Semitic resentment. The social effects of stench and sin did not just concern outsiders, however; they were also used to justify hierarchies of power within the Christian community itself. The diminished status of women (both social and economic) in medieval Christian Europe is a commonplace, explained by the original sin of Eve in the Book of Genesis, which suggested women were generally more prone to sinning. Entertaining tales like Du Con qui fu fez a la besche gave new meaning to this structural inequality, asserting that, during the creation of woman, the devil had farted on Eve’s tongue, and thus all women henceforth were regurgitating demonic flatulence.[22] Women’s idle gossip was portrayed as sinful through the illuminating imagery of stench and filth. Regardless of the humorous nature of such tales, the systematic dismissal of medieval women would likely have been reinforced by appealing to the senses in this way, invoking feelings of revulsion, just as was done with Jews and non-believers. Filth and sin therefore could be employed in the justification of the most unforgiving ravages of medieval Christianity, on the grounds of proclivity to sin.
However, it is important to temper this account with a degree of nuance. It has been argued that the later medieval church associated sin with filth and stench in order to create a universal analogue for immoral conduct which all could relate to, facilitating the extension of theological doctrine ever further into the legal, social, and cultural dimensions of Christian communities. But it must also be acknowledged that this was not necessarily universally received; the transmission of these ideas was not one-way traffic from the elite to the laity, who unquestioningly accepted this role which was ascribed to filth. Whatever the desires of the church, the fact is that many people associated stench not with sin but with commerce and prosperity: leather was stained with pigeon-droppings in English workshops;[23] the putrid odours of butchers’ slaughterhouses polluted the streets of medieval towns;[24] and rural farms across Europe depended on dung to fertilise their fields – so much so that an eleventh-century text on estate workers’ rights asserted the farmers’ entitlement to dung.[25] With so many crafts and by extension livelihoods dependent on the positive applications of filth, it is difficult to maintain that filth and stench were incontestably tied to the idea of sin, at least not in the minds of the many who profited from them. It also must be noted that in the popular culture of the illiterate laity, filth and stench had a comical as well as a spiritual dimension. We know, for example, that later medieval theatre often featured the devil, whose entrances and exits would be announced by loud farting, designed for humorous effect.[26] Though these examples do clearly conform to the notion that foul odours were symptoms of demonic presence, it is doubtful that the comical onstage flatulence would inspire a great deal of serious reflection of mankind’s propensity to sin. Compounding this, there is the overwhelming evidence of casual lay attitudes toward the filth populating their streets. Narrative jokes such as that of the farmer who fainted at the smell of a perfumery and could only be revived by the stench of dung suggest filth was not universally considered a bastion of filth; and place names like Shiteburn Lane in Winchester and Shitewell farm in Warwickshire could be seen as part of a wider diminution of the seriousness with which Christianity regarded filth.[27] Do these examples necessarily undermine the notion that stench and filth were associated with sin, or can the differing lay and elite attitudes be reconciled? It could conceivably be argued that the two are compatible, for just as the church appealed to the disgust which filth and stench provoke in order to expand the discourse around sin, it is plausible that this also augmented the significance of filth and stench in people’s everyday lives – hence the street names and comical stories. That people derived a living from foul-smelling trades is not a contradiction of Christian doctrine, but rather an acknowledgement of sin’s inescapability. Stench and filth were not a taboo in medieval society precisely because they were associated with sin, not in spite of it; and it is perhaps for this reason that the church was so successful at expanding the public discourse around sin through analogy with something so ubiquitous, so viscerally disgusting, and so utterly unavoidable as stench and filth.
In conclusion, it was obviously within the church’s official interest to discourage sin wherever it prevailed; and it is to this end that the association of stench and filth with sin can best be understood. With conceptual roots in Biblical passages and theological ideas, the association between stench, filth and sin was made by literate elites within the church, communicated to the laity via sermons and writings which linked the theological with the physical so as to make church doctrine relatable. This association had implications in the legal, social, and cultural spheres of later medieval life, constructing hierarchies, boundaries, and divisions which were maintained by tapping into the sensory experience of Christians – primarily, their sense of smell. Through analysis of the sources in which reference is made to the spiritual dimensions of stench and filth, it can be plausibly argued that later medieval Christianity made people more aware of and in touch with the pervasiveness of sin, as well as more conscious of filthy and foul-smelling phenomena in their own lives. This is not to say that the later medieval church made people view stench and filth in a certain way, nor that the church had supreme control over how people understood sin in their lives; rather it is simply to state that powerful figures within the church attempted to do so, and that these ideas were at least registered by ordinary Christians, if not universally accepted.
Mark Connolly is in his fourth year of an MA in History at the University of St. Andrews.
Notes: [1] See Kathryn Reyerson, ‘Urban Sensations: The Medieval City Imagined’, in Richard G. Newhauser (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages (London, 2019), pp. 45-65, or Dolly Jørgensen, ‘Cooperative Sanitation: Managing Streets and Gutters in Late Medieval England and Scandinavia’ in Technology and Culture 49:3 (July 2008), pp. 547-567 [2] Martha Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine (New York, 2012), p. 29 [3] Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley, 2006), p. 202 [4] William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), pp. 398-401 [5] Adam of Eynsham, Vision of the Monk of Eynsham, cited in Katelynn Robinson, The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages: a Source of Certainty (London, 2019), p.163 [6] Bayless, The Devil in the Latrine, p. 7 [7] Bridget of Sweden, The Revelations, cited in Robinson, Smell in the Middle Ages, p. 204 [8] Pierre Bersuire, Reductorium morale, cited in Robinson, Smell in the Middle Ages, p. 196 [9] Jacobus de Voragine, Sermones quadragesimales cited in Robinson, Smell in the Middle Ages, p. 188 [10] Robinson, Smell in the Middle Ages, p. 201 [11] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: Seventeen Tales and the General Prologue, ed. V. A. Kolve, and Glending Olson (New York, 2018), p. 333 [12] Anon., Les cent nouvelles nouvelles, cited in Bayless, The Devil in the Latrine, p. 7 [13] Bayless, The Devil in the Latrine, p. 77 [14] Reyerson, ‘Urban Sensations’, pp. 60-61 [15] David R. Carr, ‘Controlling the Butchers in Late Medieval Towns’, The Historian 70:3 (2008), p. 458 [16] Robinson, Smell in the Middle Ages, p. 117 [17] Anon., ‘Ordinances of Sanitation, Pistoia (Italy), 2 May 1348’, cited in Jessica Goldberg, ‘Pistoia, Ordinances for Sanitation in a Time of Mortality. May 1348’, available at: http://middleagesforeducators.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/1348-Ordinances-of-Pistoia.pdf [18] Carr, ‘Controlling the Butchers’, pp. 460-461 [19] Thomas Forestier [untitled], cited in Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities(Woolbridge, 2013), p. 188 [20] Bayless, The Devil in the Latrine, p. 21 [21] Ibid., p. 158 [22] Ibid., p. 82 [23] Ibid., p. 40 [24] Reyerson, ‘Urban Sensations’, p. 46 [25] Bayless, The Devil in the Latrine, p. 42 [26] Valerie Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (New York, 2007), p. 92 [27] Bayless, The Devil in the Latrine, p. 31, pp. 59-60
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