REVIEWS 251 three chapters of the second part are divided on themes rather than chronology. She never loses the focus of her thesis. Cuffel’s Gendering Disgust is a valuable contribution to a growing area of research. Much research has been done on the commingling of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, although more still needs to be done. Recent monographs like Josef Meri’s The Cult of Saints among Muslims an Jews in Medieval Syria (Oxford 2002) are relevant and cited by Cuffel. Valerie Ramsayer’s The Transformation of a Medieval Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy: 850–1150 (Ithaca 2006) draws some attention to the interfaith exchanges on Sicily where the comfortable commingling of Jews, Muslims, and Christians bothered the elites from all three religions. Revisionist historians have also begun to question the status of Jews as perpetual victims. Cuffel’s work is relevant to both of these approaches because the intellectual patterns she explores are relevant to both. Medieval Jews were intellectually involved with their surroundings and intellectually on the offensive. Still, the commingling was rarely positive, and Jews did not have the political power to persecute either Muslims or Christians. All these faith groups reduced their enemies to filth as a way to completely disparage them. It is a discouraging legacy and not all that alien to modern culture. Nazi propaganda films like Der Ewige Juden attempted to reduce Jews to filth, and such is a similar pattern in genocide throughout the world. Cuffel points out that filth is a very vivid, easily understood image even for an illiterate listener. The writers of these texts, themselves the literate elite, knew how to strike a visceral chord with their audience. That is perhaps the depressing legacy of these texts and the intolerance that came from above, from the literate and educated elites. Cuffel highlights the long history of mutual disparagement, but the sad reality is that when such disparagement combines with political power, the results can be disastrous. Even in the Middle Ages, persecutions against Jews and the excesses of the Crusades could be linked to notions that the pious were just cleaning up filth. Pestilence and plague were thought to be caused by Jewish perfidy, a well researched topic, but one that still receives only passing mention by Cuffel. Cuffel’s strength is that she stays focused and never veers into moralizing, but at times one wishes that she might have provided something more of context. Still, it is a work of clear scholarship, and other scholars may want to use her work to explore the social ramifications of a gendered polemic of disgust. BENJAMIN DE LEE, History, UCLA Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and R. Pochia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007) ix + 252 pp. This collection of essays on translation in the early modern period joins a growing interest in the field. There are a wide variety of subjects, both geographically —ranging from the Ottoman Empire to Scandinavia—and also methodolgically, as evidenced in the contributors’ differing approach to key terms like translation and vernacular. One of the richest essays in the volume is Peter Burke’s survey of rise and fall of translations made from vernaculars into Latin (Burke contributes two other chapters: an enumerative pan-European view and a study of histories in translation), revealing what languages were deemed too local for the broader humanist community, and why certain works REVIEWS 252 were chosen. It is especially interesting to see how translators handled recently created concepts; when an Italian text is rendered in a classicized version of Latin, the word cortegianía is paraphrased as ‘negligently and (as is commonly said) in a careless manner’ (negligenter et (ut vulgo dicitur) dissolute) (79). Feza Günergun, similarly, elucidates the respective positions of Turkish and Arabic as languages of learning in the Ottoman Empire; Arabic, like Latin, has a broader and more classicizing effect. Hsia’s essay on Jesuit translation into Chinese provides a fascinating view of textual contact across a more profound cultural gap. If a Jesuit reads a text and a local convert composes a Chinese version of the content that he hears, is that translation or interpretation? In many cases this...