French farce from the Middle Ages has long been dismissed as worthless and vulgar. In Pure Filth: ​​​Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Early French Farce (University of Pennsylvania Press, December 2019), French and comparative literature professor Noah Guynn shows that beneath the superficial crudeness and predictability can be found finely drawn, and sometimes quite radical, perspectives on ethics, politics and religion.

xNoah Guynn is a specialist in medieval and early modern literature, theater, and culture.  His first book, Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages, was published in The New Middle Ages Series at Palgrave Macmillan in 2007.  His second book, Pure Filth: Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Early French Farce, appeared in 2020 in The Middle Ages Series at the University of Pennsylvania Press.. Guynn is also coeditor, with Marilynn Desmond (Binghamton University), of a special issue of Romanic Review entitled Category Crossings: Bruno Latour and the Middle Ages, and with Zrinka Stahuljak (UCLA), of an edited volume entitled Violence and the Writing of History in the Medieval Francophone World.

View the book at the University of Pennsylvania Press