Kontextmaschine

21st December 2022

Post reblogged from left unity with 298 notes

“Girardo Cagapisto [a twelfth-century Milanese civic official] is significant for another reason, too: his name. It has not been stressed by most historians that so many of the Milanese political leadership had surnames beginning Caga- or Caca-, that is to say ‘shit.’ The niceties of earlier generations of scholarship led them to neglect this, and older historians at most refer to it glancingly and uneasily […] but it was certainly important for Milanese identity and self-representation. Cagapisto probably means 'shit-pesto’ – as, for example, in the pasta sauce. In the case of the two brothers Gregorio and Guilielmo Cacainarca, again both iudices and active consuls between 1143 and 1187, their surname means 'shit-in-a-box’. That of Arderico Cagainosa, consul in 1140 and 1144, means 'shit-in-your-pants.’ Other prominent families included the Cagalenti, 'shit-slowly,’ the Cacainbasilica, 'shit-in-the-church,’ the Cacarana, 'shit-a-frog,’ the Cagatosici, 'toxic-shit,’ and there were many more…. It is important to recognise that shit-words were not taboo in Europe in this period; medieval Europe did not ever match the squeamishness of polite society in the years 1750-1950 in this respect. The Investiture Dispute, for example, has clear examples of Hildebrand being called Merdiprand and similar by ecclesiastical polemicists on the opposing side. But this in itself shows that shit-names were at least insulting, in many contexts, in our period. Not always in Milan, though, evidently. The earthy sensibility shown by local naming, I would go so far as to say, is one of the major Milanese contributions to the 'civic’ culture of the twelfth century; and it was both new and, as they must have soon realised, aggressive to outsiders.”
- Christopher Wickham, Sleepwalking into a New World (2015), p.51-2