Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic

“Cuffel's work, through its emphasis on the role of bodily functions in religious polemic, contributes greatly to our understanding of interfaith and intercommunal relations in late antique and medieval cultures. What is most compelling about Gendering Disgust is the sheer volume of provocative and entertaining examples Cuffel employs to illustrate these compelling theoretical points.” —Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

“Alexandra Cuffel succeeds in constructing a masterful analysis of the complex development of religious polemics among medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. . . . Overall, Cuffel has produced a seminal work in the use of gendered metaphors of the body in medieval religious polemics.” —Medieval Feminist Forum

“Alexandra Cuffel engages in extraordinarily incisive analysis of a chronologically and linguistically breathtaking range of texts that explore the rhetoric of physical disgust in the polemic literature of Christians, Muslims, and Jews against one another. One cannot help but be impressed with the breadth of Cuffel’s analysis and by the manner in which her command of the sources in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and various vernaculars enables her to see both surfaces of the polemics at hand.” —American Historical Review

“Alexandra Cuffel’s Gendering Disgust takes the evolving field of medieval religious polemics into welcome new directions that build on different scholarly traditions, which she has combined in new and exciting ways. Cuffel’s extraordinarily stimulating new book extends the discussion further precisely in intercultural directions. Overall, Cuffel is to be congratulated for a book that is a very welcome addition to the growing field of medieval body studies, gender studies, history of emotions, as well as of interreligious cultural polemics.” —Speculum

“. . . Cuffel ponders the psychologically disturbing fact that Islamic, Jewish, and Christian medieval polemic equated the feminine with pollution and then, in turn, gendered the despised Other as feminine. Through both her noteworthy ability to work with Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic texts and her skill for locating unsettling divisive polemic, Cuffel’s book in many ways has no peer. A necessary text for anyone interested in the subject of medieval Otherness because of the wealth of information amassed in one volume. . . . Cuffel’s Gendering Disgust offers a refreshing view of medieval religious polemic, and for this reason, Cuffel’s book should not be limited to readers interested only in gender studies.” —Church History

Alexandra Cuffel is assistant professor of history at Macalester College.