Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic

<p>In <i>Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic</i> 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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p>