from the annals of Edu-Babble:

On Farting: Bodily Wind in the Middle Ages
Valerie Allen, Professor, Department of English, John Jay College of
Criminal Justice and John Thompson, Professor in the Department of Modern
Languages and Literature, California Polytechnic State University

               The study of the fart in medieval culture
               participates in the widespread and
               productive contemporary study of the
               body, its practices and its hermeneutics.
               As a consequence of the cultural
               materialist interest in the quotidian,
               recent criticism has moved away from
               an abstracted conception of selfhood
               toward an appreciation of how the
               concrete daily regimens of bodily habits
               generally taken for granted, shape the
               horizon of our cultural and individual
               consciousness. The fart, in its parodying
               of language and its logic of affinity, leads
                 us ultimately to the problem of hermeneutics,
                 of the art of interpretation itself.

               -- Palgrave publishers catalogue



Sacco-Vanzetti Chair
of Excellent Edu-Babble