Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic

Book Reviews / Journal of Religion in Europe 2 (2009) 199–210 203 Alexandra Cuff el, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 448 pp., ISBN 978-0-268-02367-6, $45.00. Alexandra Cuff el’s highly original and enlightening study of medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim uses of gendered bodily metaphors of impurity shows how these religious traditions all agreed on viewing corporality as distasteful and largely incompatible with divinity. In particular the female body was seen as polluted and antithetical to holiness. Th e focus of the book is on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but Cuff