Gendering Disgust In Medieval Religious Polemic

Book Summary

"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 "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 "'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 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.

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