Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic

Alexandra Cuffel

In Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic, Alexandra Cuffel analyzes medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim uses of gendered bodily imagery and metaphors of impurity in their visual and verbal polemic against one another. Drawing from a rich array of sources—including medical texts, bestiaries, midrash, biblical commentaries, kabbalistic literature, Hebrew liturgical poetry, and theological tracts from late antiquity to the mid-fourteenth century—Cuffel examines attitudes toward the corporeal body and its relationship to divinity. She shows that these religious traditions shared notions of the human body as distasteful, with many believers viewing corporeality and communion with the divine as incompatible. In particular, she explores how authors from each religious tradition targeted the woman’s body as antithetical to holiness.

Alexandra Cuffel is assistant professor of history at Macalester College.

“With Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic, Alexandra Cuffel has produced a remarkably original, ambitious, and important book that sets the agenda for future discussions.” —Peter Biller, University of York

“Alexandra Cuffel’s bold study interprets the interreligious polemic of medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the context of late antique disgust for the body, especially the female body, shared by all three traditions. This will be a very influential book for medievalists in many fields.” —E. Ann Matter, University of Pennsylvania

“‘Filth,’ ‘putrid,’ ‘excrement,’ ‘foul,’ ‘bloody discharge,’ ‘stench,’—as these and other terms of physical and moral revulsion unfold, Gendering Disgust grabs our attention and refuses to let go. Alexandra Cuffel offers her readers a riveting and enlightening comparative socioreligious study of the body’s place in religious polemic from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages to the fourteenth century. It is a singularly engaging and disturbing study highlighting the polemical lexicon and registers shared by pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims.” —Ross Brann, Cornell University

Reviews

“Cuffel’s work, through its emphasis on the role of bodily functions in religious polemic, contributes greatly to our understanding of interfaith and intercommunal relations in late antique and medieval cultures. What is most compelling about Gendering Disgust is the sheer volume of provocative and entertaining examples Cuffel employs to illustrate these compelling theoretical points.” — Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

“. . . A full academic study of filth and impurity as religious insult in medieval Europe. Cuffel explores how particularly Jews and Christians, but also Muslims, used filth and ritual pollution to denigrate the religious other, and why it was so powerful among writers and artists.” — Research Book News

“Alexandra Cuffel’s book is ultimately about commonality among medieval Christians, Jews and Muslims. They shared the same insults against one another and understood them. Thus, according to Cuffel, they shared a common language of polemic, and their insults, based in a common vocabulary of bodily disgust, reveal underlying common beliefs about the body, sickness, gender, certain foods, and animals.” — Comitatus