Standing before an audience of about 25 academics, all professors and graduate students specializing in the Middle Ages, in a chilly classroom on the vast campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Jeff Persels, a lanky associate professor of French and director of European studies at the University of South Carolina, was reading aloud a scholarly paper at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies. The paper's title was "The Wine in the Urine: Managing Human Waste in French Farce." The paper was about, well, the wine in the urine, or perhaps the urine in the wine. Its topic is a 15th-century farce, or lowlife comic drama, about an adulterous wife who uses a wine bottle as an impromptu chamber pot, with predictably gross results involving her husband and her lover.
