Obscene comedy of both scatological and sexual kinds is a dominant feature of medieval discourse. Hundreds of written examples can be found in Latin and vernacular languages from at least the eleventh century, from exempla used in serious sermons to the rich fabliaux tradition of Old French. In England as well as on the Continent, humorously obscene images illustrate the margins of lavish manuscripts, while lewd figures abound in material culture: for example, strolling penises mimic the bearers of the pilgrim badges on which they are found, and a recently recovered misericord from Bristol Cathedral shows an archer aiming an arrow at the bared buttocks of a bearded man.

That misericord was previously assumed lost, as in the later nineteenth century a number from the cathedral were destroyed because of their obscene content. As Nicole Nolan Sidhu pithily puts it in her Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature, “Centuries of embarrassment over obscenity have meant that the study is still in a nascent stage” (2). There has been no systematic study of the genre, despite a great deal of attention being paid to specific obscene texts, particularly Chaucer's fabliaux, and even with the emergence of an impressive body of feminist literature on sexuality and the body in Middle English literature.

Sidhu confines her study to English and to the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which is a decision in large part made for Sidhu, as curiously there are very few extant obscene comic texts in English prior to the fourteenth century. Sidhu leaves largely unanswered the question of why this might be: were readers satisfied with reading such texts in Latin and other vernacular languages? Based on the overall argument of the book, I might conclude that the emergence of English vernacular obscenity simply parallels the increasing importance of English as a political as well as cultural language. As Sidhu argues, medieval obscenity provides a “rich dialectical atmosphere that facilitates scrutiny of social power relations” and as such represents an “important chapter in the history of English political thought and literary culture” (14).

Sidhu opens Indecent Exposure with an introductory chapter in which she offers some interesting parallels between medieval and modern society and the struggle to define the obscene. She closes it with a conclusion in which she makes a powerful case for medieval texts providing an impetus to addressing the misogyny of modern pornography, not through censorship, but rather through the liberation of women's sexuality, which despite advances in equality often remains subject to patriarchal authority. In this way Sidhu broadens the impact of her book beyond the sphere of medieval studies, and her reflections on the postmedieval legacy of obscenity offers food for thought for researchers in later periods.

Five chapter comprise the main body of the book. The first part, chapters 1 and 2, is concerned with William Langland and Chaucer, the fourteenth-century pioneers of obscene comedy. Sidhu argues that both authors used obscene humor to interrogate social and political authorities—and in the case of Chaucer, to destabilize the discourse of obscenity itself. In the second section of the book, chapters 3 through 5, Sidhu examines how fifteenth-century writers reacted to, adopted, and eschewed Langland and Chaucer's legacy. In chapter 3, Sidhu considers how John Lydgate takes the “spirit of playful experimentation” (31) provided by obscene humor and uses it to reaffirm misogynistic norms. In chapter 4 she makes imaginative use of the Book of Margery Kempe (composed in the 1430s) to argue that the text's obscene humor offers a sustained critique of the fifteenth-century English church. In the final chapter she continues this theme with an analysis of late medieval biblical drama, arguing that the traditional figure of the “unruly woman” is revised to allow for an outspoken attack on ecclesiastical and political authorities.

Sidhu's writing manages to be both dense in content and elegant in execution, and her argument for the radical potential of obscenity is convincing. Her study focuses almost exclusively on sexual comedy, excluding scatological humor. It is not possible for one author of a standard-length monograph to include all possible sources, but I would have liked a clearer explanation for why this form of obscene comedy was excluded, especially as the textual relationship between copulation and coprology seems an ideal place to explore the limits of obscenity. As Sidhu notes, women's excrement features quite frequently in fabliaux, often in the context of marital or sexual discord (107); the presence of shit seems to me a reminder that sex, too, is a messy bodily process, of extrusion as well as penetration. For although Sidhu celebrates the playful carnivalesque potential of the obscene, perhaps the only major complaint I have about this authoritative, engaging study is that it is too tidy: she focuses on the serious objectives of these Middle English texts rather than considering what actually made them funny, or in what ways the humor of obscenity sprawls beyond the limits of the discourse within which it is meant to be contained.