The Roasting of the Rump: Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration England

Abstract

In a recent article for Past and Present Mark Jenner presented a rich and provocative reading of political symbolism in literary and ritual representations of the collapse of republican government in England. He illuminates a moment in which street carnival and scatological texts, in a variety of generic forms, came together to denigrate the degenerate 'Rump' parliament by invoking scato logical insult and images of cannibalistic dismembering, and through a gendering ofthe failed state.1 The article contributes an imaginative, scholarly and sophisticated addition to the litera ture and offers a methodological example by combining literary, political and medical approaches to the study of history.2 Jenner argues that, although such approaches are increasingly regarded as important for understanding the extent and nature of popular politics, 'understandable aesthetic reasons' have led to the 'languages of popular and not-so-popular politics' for this period being inadequately studied and 'methodologically [un]adventurous'.3 In contrast, by 'travers[ing] prose, verse and ritual practice', especially by focusing on 'popular' and 'accessible' roman-letter 'Rump ballad' broadsides, and some ofthe verses in the 1662 anthology Rump: or, An Exact Collection ofthe Choy cest Poems and Songs Relating to the Late Times, he proposes a linguistic