The Revolting and the Erotic

There's two strands of this, sort of the revolting and the erotic. They do sort of overlap interestingly so a couple of really fascinating examples from the time would be Angela Felligno who was an Italian mystic born around 1248 we think died around 13009. She's most famous for caring for local lepers which was a wonderful thing to be doing because lepers in the middle ages are really stigmatized and treated quite badly. One of the horrible things that she ends up doing is drinking the bath water of one of the lepers in her care. Her biographer describes how she felt one of the scabs lodged in her throat and that catapulted her into a sort of ecstatic