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

摘要

In her conclusion to Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic,nAlexandra Cuffel asks her readers, “What do our bodies and our effluvianreally mean to us that we should impose abstract connotations on themnsignifying both great power and great danger?” (244). With this question,nCuffel ponders the psychologically disturbing fact that Islamic, Jewish, andnChristian medieval polemic equated the feminine with pollution and then, innturn, gendered the despised Other as feminine. Studying a wide array ofnsources that include chronicles, poetry, scripture, art, and medical tracts,nCuffel documents the embodiment of religious and sexual difference.nGendering Disgust provides copious evidence of the ways that this “polemicnof filth” (7) separates the divine from the human by attributing humannfunctions, such as defecating, urinating, menstruating, and eating, to an un-ngodlike nature. Through both her noteworthy ability to work with AncientnGreek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic texts and her skill for locating unsettlingly divisive polemic, Cuffel’s book in many ways has no peer. A necessary text fornanyone interested in the subject of medieval Otherness because of the wealth ofninformation amassed in one volume, Cuffel’s Gendering Disgust can even benconsidered a type of reference text that provides a compendium of variousnsources featuring the “polemic of filth.” Gendering Disgust unfolds in sixnchapters, which Cuffel divides into two parts; a concise introduction andnthoughtful conclusion frame her book.