A shocking image

Here's an image I wasn't expecting. In fact, I had to look twice to really believe it: had this medieval manuscript illustrator really chosen to depict this saint up her neck in her own shit?

It doesn't come out of nowhere, of course. Thais's penitential enclosure in an alarmingly tiny cell is supposed to give you pause: it's supposed to make you ask - as I've noticed students and others being introduced to medieval religious enclosure often do - what do they do when nature calls? Thais asks her self-appointed spiritual director the same question, looking apprehensively at the cell set aside for her, and is told bluntly that she'll just have to deal with it - it's what she deserves. 

But I've never seen a picture of the story which leans into this aspect quite so unmistakably. Other manuscript illuminations exist of Thais in the penitent phase of her life, several clearly identifying her as an enclosed anchorite by showing her face looking out of a window, sometimes with her converter Paphnutius outside. See for example this one from Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS Esp. 44 (external link) f. 219v, which features a knowing smile on the wimpled Thais's face, or this one from New York, Morgan Library M.675, f.137v (external link). 

In the Arsenal manuscript, this expected visual arrangement is troublingly subverted. Thais, Paphnutius, and the cell window all feature, but the window shows a water jug rather than Thais's face; Paphnutius reaches his hand through, perhaps placing the jug, reflecting the point in the story where he orders that Thais be kept on bread and water in her enclosure. Thais is shown below the window, as if inside the cell, her face rising out of a muddy brown mass which spills beyond the boundary of the cell structure, under Paphnutius's feet. 

It's hard to know quite what to do with the humiliation encoded in this dimension of the story. It's upsetting, and it's supposed to be. One possible response could be to deny the shame, write back against it: to reverse the idea that the Middle Ages were caked in shit, or even reclaim it, as the theatrical collective Good Friends for a Lifetime (external link) do in their wild and gruesome play The Netherhole Martyr (external link). There's nothing shameful about the workings of our bodies, or needing accommodation for them. 

But ignoring or redeeming the role of disgust and shame in the Thais narrative is not, I think, really an option. There's clearly a strand of medieval adaptors who found it too much and excised it. But it remains in the mainstream tradition of the story, as in this image - deliberately mortifying, expressing a lurid, nearly comical disgust with Thais's commercial sexuality that can't be avoided or inverted. What do we do about that? Is it possible to read anything real, true, or important about women's lives and how they were represented, through this thick layer of shit?