Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (review)

Alexandra Cuffel’s Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic reexamines a well known and much-written-about topic: Religious polemic from late antiquity to the High Middle Ages. However, she does this from a new angle, that of the place of gender and body within Jewish, Christian and to some extent Muslim polemical rhetoric. While reading her book, I constantly was reminded of Caroline Bynum’s now-classic essay, “Why All the Fuss about the Body,”¹ in which Bynum surveyed and critiqued the different ways historians write about the body. Bynum’s bottom line that body matters (although not as a mind/body dichotomy) is nicely reiterated and affirmed by Cuffel’s work.² In and of itself, this is an important statement in the field of Jewish Studies, where debates about the place of the body in Jewish culture were still raging until very recently.³

Cuffel’s book points to the tremendous role the body played in religious polemic, often considered a purely intellectual and political pursuit. As noted by historians of medieval polemics, many of the areas debated had to do with theological principles, dogma and beliefs. Jews argued with Christians over their beliefs in the virgin birth, immaculate conception, the trinity and the resurrection of Jesus. They debated the efficacy of relics, those physical remainders of bodies of holy Christians and of the clothing and objects they owned and wore, and questioned Christian celibacy and the sanctity of the church. Many Muslims advanced similar arguments against Christianity and the belief that Jesus’ body actually was resurrected. Jews were attacked by Christians who doubted that they were a true continuation of the people God had chosen, and who scorned the Jews for marking their bodies in obedience to antiquated commandments that should no longer be interpreted literally. All these issues, and many others, were seen as part of a religious-intellectual tradition and presented as clean, non-corporeal topics.

With descriptions that at times make one cringe and want to stop imagining smells and images, Cuffel shows that many of these arguments actually use the body, body fluids and excrements to make the point. Following anthropological theorists such as Mary Douglas, she argues that filth and pollution functioned in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages to define the religious other and to separate members of the different faiths from one another by arousing disgust and revulsion. Impurity and dirt created theological and emotional distance between people. The female body in particular, she argues, was targeted by these discussions, as a result either of misogyny or of the centrality of Mary and her body in Christian theology.

The book’s first two chapters track evocations of the body and its excrements and impurity in Late Antiquity. Cuffel posits all antique cultures, monotheistic and pagan, as adhering to a soul/body dichotomy, seeing the human body as a barrier to the divine and, especially, associating women with dirt and impurity. The first chapter, aptly titled “The Stench of Humanity,” convincingly argues that the body’s excrements were considered signifiers of group and individual identity. However, the range of topics and issues discussed, from east to west and over the centuries, gave me an uneasy sense of having to contend with a whirlwind of notions and changes. How did the various polemics use notions of impurity? What differences existed among the ways each religion argued, and to what extent were members of the different religions aware of each other’s polemics? Cuffel calls on many authors and texts in responding to these questions, but her argument, nevertheless, is not clearly structured and fails to supply enough specific examples. While I agree in principle with many of her generalizations, it is hard to follow the connections between them in the specific historical contexts she addresses, as well as across times and places. After reading these chapters more than once, I couldn’t quite outline to myself what, precisely, she was arguing. Cuffel herself admits these two chapters were...