Englishness/Jewishness/Otherness: Teaching English National Identity

Abstract

Despite its ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse population, medieval England was religiously almost wholly Christian, both before and markedly after 1290. Religious difference, real and imagined, offered medieval texts a powerful set of discursive practices occurring around and through imagined Jewishness that worked to construct and reinforce both Jewishness and Englishness. Topics in literary and historical texts such as conversion, cartography, and the blood libel, which are set against and in conjunction with excerpts from documents that speak overtly to English identity, assist students in unpacking medieval notions of alterity in a twenty-first century undergraduate classroom.