Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (review)

Bodily functions and corporeal effluvia are at the center of Alexandra Cuffel's Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic. To view her book merely as focusing on solely those themes, however, would do Cuffel a grave disservice. Relying on the research of scholars such as Mary Douglas, Anna Sapir Abulafia, Ivan Marcus, and W. I. Miller, Cuffel investigates how individuals from different groups from antiquity to early modernity relied on the common rhetoric and visual imagery of consumption, digestion, excretion, and menstruation to insult members of opposing religious communities. Pagans, Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike drew from "a shared pool of beliefs and values about the body, sickness, certain foods, and animals" (p. 3) in their written, spoken, and artistic polemics against other faiths to engender feelings of revulsion and disgust among the members of their intended audiences. In so doing, they termed their rivals unclean and delineated boundaries keeping the communities separate, thus preventing possible contamination. Cuffel draws upon a wide range of Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic sources for her analysis, notably piyyụtim, medieval Hebrew liturgical poetry sung in synagogues, but also medieval medical treatises, midrash, exegetical commentary, kabbalistic texts, and bestiaries.

Cuffel divides her work into two halves. The first part concerns late antique and early medieval polemical notions concerning the body and its products. In the first chapter, she regards pagan, Jewish, and early Christian writings that separated the notion of divinity from the stench, excreta, and dermatological ailments of the body. Menstruation, or niddah in Hebrew, was considered especially impure and "profoundly incompatible to divinity" (p. 35), and the menstruating woman was perceived as simultaneously revolting and dangerous. In her second chapter, Cuffel traces the wedding of revulsion to polemic during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Pagans, Christians, Jews, and Manicheans used the idea of pollution to foster horror among their coreligionists against members of rival, inferior faiths. Such polemic also functioned as resistance, as in Jews' declaration of gentiles as shereẓ meaning vermin.

Cuffel steeps the second half of her book thoroughly in the Middle Ages, as she investigates the intensification of polemical rhetoric from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. Although the body and its discharges continued to function as loci for oratorical exchanges among rival faiths, the style changed significantly, becoming more strident and divisive and sometimes resulting in physically violent confrontations. In chapter 3, Cuffel demonstrates how, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the arrival of Greek and Muslim learning laid an elaborate foundation for this more vociferous polemic and, in chapter 4, Cuffel fixes Mary's unclean womb at the center within Jewish, Christian, and Muslim polemic. In chapter 5, Cuffel investigates the appearance of "scientific" ideas concerning skin diseases and anal discharges within this discourse and notes that, toward the end of the Middle Ages, when religious identities were more firmly established, notions of contagion and disgust began to abate. In her final chapter, Cuffel regards how medieval people used bestiaries, and animal imagery and symbolism, as another way to establish their religious communities' boundaries. For example, Christians used pigs, hyenas, and owls to symbolize the supposed turpitude and impurity of Jews.

Cuffel's lucidly written and densely researched work is impressive, minus a few typographical errors. This is a minor criticism, however, which does not detract from the overall excellence of Cuffel's book. Her monograph, impressive in chronological scope and in the depth and range of sources, is a significant contribution to the study of medieval polemic, interfaith relations, gender notions, and corporeality. It should undoubtedly serve as a point of departure for future studies on those themes.