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, Muslim apocalyptic
texts, 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. Foul smell, bodily fluids
and states, and animals were employed by these religious
communities as powerful tropes, which they used to mark their
religious opponents as sinful, filthy, and unacceptable. By
defining and denigrating the religious "other," each group wielded
bodily insult as a means of resistance, of inciting violence, and
of creating community boundaries. Representations of impurity or
filth designed to inspire revulsion served also to reassure
audiences of their religious and sometimes physical superiority and
to encourage oppressive measures toward the minority. Yet, even in
the midst of opposing one another, their very polemic demonstrates
that Jews, Christians, and Muslims held basic cultural assumptions
and symbols in common while inflecting their meanings differently.
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