Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic. By Alexandra Cuffel. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. xviii + 430 pp. $45.00 paper (original) (raw)

Alexandra Cuff el's highly original and enlightening study of medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim uses of gendered bodily metaphors of impurity shows how these religious traditions all agreed on viewing corporality as distasteful and largely incompatible with divinity. In particular the female body was seen as polluted and antithetical to holiness. Th e focus of the book is on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but Cuff el's study traces medieval views on the body, sickness, and pollution back to late antiquity, where they formed a strategy for establishing boundaries between pagans, Jews, and Christians. By describing the religion of their opponents as disgusting and polluted, polemicists evoked emotional antipathy: contempt, fear, and repulsion, so as to prevent anybody from crossing the religious divide. Th e consequences of polemic based on bodily images changed from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, as images of fi lth increasingly became an incitement to verbal or physical violence. During the Middle Ages western Christians and Muslims used such imagery to convince listeners to join in holy war. In that case, metaphors of pollution were meant to provoke violent action. Interestingly, Jews used similar tactics to demonstrate their superiority, but as a minority religion they had to disguise the negative portrayals of their opponents. When medieval Christian authors suggested that Jews suff ered from diseases that required a Christian child's blood or the host to cure them, this often resulted in the death or injury of Jews. Jews, on the other hand, who accused Christians of being worshippers of a putrid corpse, endangered themselves and their entire local community. Similar dangers faced Jews and Christian who openly criticized Islam while living under Muslim rule (pp. 6-9). In her book Cuff el investigates how such polemics functioned within each group, but one of the main themes of the book is that Muslims, Christians, and Jews used similar tactics, and that all three traditions were drawing from a shared pool of beliefs about the body, pollution, and sickness. Traditionally the superiority of Muslims' treatment of their religious minorities has been seen in contrast to the status of Jews and Muslims in medieval Christendom. Cuff el, however, shows that much the same kind of social and cultural sharing that was previously thought peculiar to the eastern Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula also took place in northern Europe, and that cultural sharing and friendly relations in the Mediterranean coexisted with outbreaks of physical and verbal violence against Jews and other minority religions. Cuff el's central focus, however, is the perception of the female body, especially of the womb and menstrual blood. She argues that the "dirt, waste, and rot" (p. 26) of the female body was an integral part of the polemic between Jews,