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Abstract
The dissertation analyzes medieval Christian and Jewish, and, to a lesser extent, Pagan and Muslim polemical uses of gendered, visceral, bodily imagery and metaphors of impurity. Drawing from medical texts, bestiaries (compendia of physical and symbolic characteristics of animals), exempla (collections of moral stories for use in sermons), mystical and polemical literature, poetry, and theological tracts from the late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the author shows that contrary to previous scholarship Christians and Jews shared notions of the human body as distasteful; many writers from both groups viewed corporeality and communion with the divine as incompatible. Bodily functions seen as particularly antithetical to the divinity were closely linked to menstrual blood and the womb, making the woman's body and her effluvia the central point in a web of associations connecting excrement, foul smell, rot, leprosy, and menses. These bodily substances and states and the moral beliefs surrounding them became a set of polemical symbols through which authors marked their opponents as sinful and filthy. By using somatic imagery to create an emotional barrier between religious communities, “others” and their symbols are marked as producers and products of vile substances. The revulsion inspired by these images reassured audiences of the religious and even physical superiority of one group over another and encouraged oppressive measures and violence toward the minority. For Jews this imagery also functioned as a “hidden transcript”: a network of tales and epithets used by oppressed members of a society to reject the actions and claims of the dominant. Yet even in the midst of vehemently opposing one another, their very polemic demonstrates that Christians and Jews held basic cultural assumptions and symbols in common.