John Cleland's notoriety depends on his sexually explicit Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a work which stimulates and celebrates the satisfaction of carnal appetites through a series of erotic encounters. However unconvincing Woman of Pleasure's 'tail-piece of morality', its paradigm of healing surfeit recurs in Cleland's Memoirs of a Coxcomb a companion piece to his infamous novel. Cleland's evocation of the low-life world of London shows the contradictory interface between desire, the aspirational and self-legitimating discourse of taste and the self-incriminating emotion of disgust. Both Cleland's dietetic writings and his fiction ostensibly lambast prodigal or voracious appetite, and counsel the conventional wisdom of control. Sir William Delamour, the eponymous 'coxcomb' or 'vain, superficial man' of Cleland's novel, has few depths, apart from the instinctive stirrings of appetite. Though a self-styled 'coxcomb' or 'vain, superficial man', Sir William is not constitutionally effeminate.

In eighteenth-century, London excremental horror was overlaid with a more pragmatic sense of why women might dispose of a dead child in a bog-house. As Sawney in the Bog House reveals, the visitor had not grasped the cultural logic of a multi-seater privy. Although the spatial symbolism and social situation of the privy in earlier centuries were very different, its cultural resonance was no less far-reaching. In The Political Bog-House Fox sits uncertainly, clad half in tartan and half in English clothes, half in and half on the double privy. The privy, convenience, necessary-house, bog-house, house of office belonged to the city's 'backstage'; it was a place to which one withdrew; it was emptied by a lowly, often stigmatized group, the nightmen. Modern historiography instinctively sees the privy as liable to mephitic malfunction. But the London privy did more than veil metropolitan arses.

This chapter aims to analyse the faces of the intestinal workings of Paris. The entrails of Paris, and the work of the entrails within Paris, became an object of general concern. Paris became the leading source of saltpetre in Europe during the last third of the eighteenth century. In Paris the mephitis of the cemetery of the Saints Innocents, which had long been notorious, 'was complicated by miasmas or by a sort of cadaverous and genuinely poisonous gas, whose principal effect is on the nervous system'. Several master catgut-makers who specialised in strings for musical instruments were working in Paris around 1770. In 1775, a family from Barcelona settled in Paris and London to tap the gut market on a large scale. Once an item of low economic value, gut then became a source of substantial profit for tripe-merchants.

The eighteenth century witnessed a discernible shift towards explaining bodily functions with scientific, in addition to theological, methods of investigation. Eighteenth-century pathological anatomy had gleaned some insights into the dead stomach. In the eighteenth century, philosophers and scientists mostly dethroned the stomach from its prime position as the 'seat of the soul' as they gradually came to agree upon consciousness and imagination as residing in the brain, not the belly. In the long eighteenth century, ideas on digestion shifted dramatically. Throughout the period, the stomach was understood in various ways; as guided by mechanical, chemical and nervous forces and as intimately connected to a plethora of body parts. The corporeal dangers of the stomach had never seemed as evident as they had become by the end of the long eighteenth century.

In Catholic countries, the healing and fertilising caves, springs and stones had been replaced by a variety of saints of the bowels, to whom their devotees similarly prayed for restoration of their intestinal health. Eighteenth-century parishioners suffering from various bellyaches still fervently prayed for the intercession of the saints. The common denominator is the mechanism of disembowelment used to tear out the entrails of the earth and those of the saint. The etymology of the various forms of St Agapit's name explains why he was endowed with the power to heal. The devotion to the healing saints of the entrails therefore points to a dual level of symbolic references: the belly of the martyr and the belly of the earth. The life of St Mammès illustrates of this dual background.

The city of Paris was born of a mineral wealth now found in the different layers of the modern city. Unlike its rival London, the French capital was built with material taken from what constitutes the hole-ridden foundations of the city. In fact, beneath the epidermis of Paris run all sorts of pipes and tunnels that are comparable to the ensemble of the circulatory, vascular, respiratory, digestive and nervous systems necessary for the life of any organism. The cemetery of the Saints Innocents had for more than ten centuries received the dead from twenty-two Parisian parishes, the corpses from the morgue and the numerous dead from the Hôtel-Dieu. While the Saints Innocents was the first cemetery from which the remains were transferred to the ossuary at La Tombe-Issoire, between December 1785 and 1814 seventeen further cemeteries took the same steps.

Throughout eighteenth-century Europe, epistolary consultations constitute an important archive in which to explore the experience of any illness in the Enlightenment. This chapter provides an analysis of the patients' discourse, in order to show the diversity of the expressions they marshal as they draw attention to the link between their entrails and their soul. The patients peer into the deepest recesses of their bodies to catch sight of their impressions and sensations, and describe them in their own words with determined accuracy. The aerial element, in conjunction with the circulation of the humours and the pathways of the nerves, contributes to the formation of sensations. The aerial, or more precisely the hydropneumatic element, is not limited to the abdomen. The experience of the sick, then, is set against a medico-scientific landscape, which emphasises the connection between the abdomen and the operations of the mind.

In this chapter, the author examines what was at stake in the signification of the stomach through two opposing aesthetic models: the 'beau idéal' and the grotesquery of caricature. She interrogates the significance of excess, outrage and intemperance in comical representations of the belly, by reading them in light of both aesthetic norms and medical discourses. The meaning of bodily health was particularly important during the eighteenth century, a period when authors paid close attention to the healthy body and medical pedagogy. The protuberant belly was often a central feature of satirical prints, where it carried social or political weight or expressed ideological tensions. Caricaturists used the contours of the stomach to evoke contemporary political tensions and tell the story of the shifting seats of power and wealth. To the bodily taxonomies was added a new conception of adiposity, which now became a pathology.

In late eighteenth-century France, at the seeming height of neoclassicism in the arts with its goal of idealised form al'antica in the depiction of the human figure, an intensified fascination with the visual experience of viscera emerged. This chapter examines a few salient examples that reveal the new importance of depictions of the interior of the body and especially its presence in and significance for Revolutionary France. It addresses the extent to which idealised form and corruptible flesh are conjoined and become prominent in the visual culture of the period and the possible impact of political ideas and ideals on the production of this imagery. The écorché, valued since the Renaissance as a basic pedagogical tool for artists and known in two-dimensional as well as three-dimensional formats, was revitalised in France in the eighteenth century by the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon.

Audience participation consists of the deceptively simple act of around twenty people pitching tents on the site, spending the night there and leaving the next morning after sharing breakfast together. Participation is a central concept to Nomad City Passage, which explores lived experiences of urban spaces, asking how the sites of a city are experienced by its inhabitants. The curatorial concept of the documentation in 'Normality' emphasizes participation in spatial terms. 'Normality' is a collage of images and ambient sounds from the camping sites in Linz. Access to such documents, given the absence of an opportunity to participate directly in the event, provides a rich archive for analysing various aspects of people's participation in the artwork and the artwork's participation in public life. The participation is presented as the positively connoted response to two interconnected problems: to the absence of autonomous artistic value and to the commercialization of modern art.