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.
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Notes
- 1.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). See also Kathleen Davis, “National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.3 (1998): 611–37.
- 2.
In an increasingly insular political climate, I note with sadness, but not surprise, the NEH’s 2014 policy change eliminating funding for overseas seminars, including the one that inspired this volume.
- 3.
I draw my definitions in part from Montserrat Guibernau, The Identity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
- 4.
N. Katherine Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” Profession 13 (2007): 187–99. For fixed concepts of nationhood as myth, see Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
- 5.
“The NCTE Definition of 21st Century Literacies,” National Council of Teachers of English, 2013, www.ncte.org; Web.
- 6.
I cannot claim sole credit for any of the philosophies, or indeed, the teaching ideas in this section. There is a rich resource of shared teaching materials out there, and I have borrowed liberally from others in workshops, conferences, and online forums, ever adapting, evolving, and jettisoning as I go.
- 7.
See, for example, Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Denise Despres, “The Protean Jew in the Vernon Manuscript,” Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. Sheila Delany (New York: Routledge, 2002), 145–64; Steven Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Sylvia Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew,” The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 243–60. Miriamne Ara Krummel shows that there were in fact individual Jews given permission to enter England for short periods after 1290 in her Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13.
- 8.
Andrew Scheil, The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).
- 9.
Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, in Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom (London: Phillimore, 1978), 87.
- 10.
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, Clarendon, 1969), I.xv. 53.
- 11.
Sarah Foot, “The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 6 (1996): 25–49.
- 12.
Alfred, King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. Henry Sweet, 2 vols. (London: Trubner, 1871), 1.45, 50.
- 13.
J.A. Giles, ed., “Nennius: Historia Brittonum,” Six Old English Chronicles (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 6.
- 14.
Robert Manning, The Story of England by Robert Manning of Brunne, ed. F.J. Furnivall (London, 1887), 513–15.
- 15.
Robert Manning, The Story of England, 516.
- 16.
Layamon, Brut, or Hystoria Brutonum, ed. and trans. W.R.J. Barron and C.S. Weinberg (New York, Longman, 1995), l.14297.
- 17.
Roger of Hoveden, Chronica, ed. W. Stubbs, 4 vols. (London, 1868–71), 3.97. A notable exception to this tendency to consider Arthur as king of the English rather than the Britons might be Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), always supremely sensitive to national distinctions. Giraldus writes disparagingly of the gullibility of Britons who expect Arthur to return and rule them once more, much as the Jews expect their Messiah. See Gerald of Wales, Speculum Ecclesiae, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J.S. Brewer, et al. (1873), vol. 4, II. 9.
- 18.
The texts selected for a course like this will not be readily available in a campus bookstore. However, the availability of both course platforms and online resources opens up multiple opportunities here.
- 19.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (New York: Palgrave, 2006), esp. 11–42.
- 20.
It is impossible to generate an accurate and comprehensive list of allegations. In claiming “at least a dozen,” I follow here Robert C. Stacey, “‘Adam of Bristol’ and Tales of Ritual Crucifixion in Medieval England,” Thirteenth-Century England XI, ed. Björn Weiler, Janet Burton, Phillipp Schofield, and Karen Stöber (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 1–15.
- 21.
Gavin Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder,” Speculum 59 (1984): 820–46, at 820.
- 22.
On this matter, see Miri Rubin’s Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
- 23.
Abraham Hume, Sir Hugh of Lincoln: or an Examination of a Curious Tradition Respecting the Jews, with a Notice of the Popular Poetry Connected with It (London: John Russell Smith, 1849); available online.
- 24.
This is not a course that depends heavily upon Middle English, but even in those that do, I have found it worthwhile to avoid assigning dense chunks of Middle English text. Options include assigning dual translations, finding a modular approach to assessing Middle English competencies, and spending time in class on close readings. Assignments might be shorter in terms of page count and focus more on research skills than on paper writing: for example, an analogue study, or a pursuit of a particular piece of Chaucerian wordplay and the light it sheds on the text—assignments that provide formative feedback for reconstructive, not reproductive, learning.
- 25.
I am thinking here particularly of Carolyn Dinshaw’s work in Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
- 26.
See Carleton Brown, “Prioress’s Tale,” Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 447–85. In most of the tales Brown categorizes as Group A and all of those in Group B, the Jews convert and are not (otherwise) punished.
- 27.
See, for example, Kate McGrath, “The ‘Zeal of God’: The Representation of Anger in the Latin Crusade Accounts of the 1096 Rhineland Massacres,” Jews in Medieval Christendom: “Slay Them Not,” ed. Kristine Utterback and Merrall Llewelyn Price (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 25–44.
- 28.
Roger of Hoveden, The Annals, Comprising the History of England and of Other Countries of Europe from AD 732 to AD 1201, trans. Henry T. Riley, 2 vols. (London: H.G. Bohn, 1853; rpt. New York: AMS, 1968), 2.117–19. This is in stark contrast to royal investigations of apostasy under Edward I after forced conversions during the Barons’ Wars in the 1260s.
- 29.
This part of my discussion draws heavily from the evidence of Robert C. Stacey, “The Conversion of Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth-Century England,” Speculum 67 (1992): 263–83, but see also Lauren Fogle, “Between Christianity and Judaism: The Identity of Converted Jews in Medieval London,” Essays in Medieval Studies 22 (2005): 107–16.
- 30.
Zefira Entin Rokeah, “Money and the Hangman in Late Thirteenth-Century England: Jews, Christians, and Coinage Offences Alleged and Real,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society 31 (1990): 159–218.
- 31.
Robert C. Stacey, “The Conversion of Jews to Christianity,” 278.
- 32.
Jonathan Elukin, “The Discovery of the Self: Jews and Conversion in the Twelfth Century,” Jews and Christians in Twelfth - Century Europe, ed. M. Signer and J. van Engen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 63–76.
- 33.
John T. Sebastian, ed., The Croxton Play of the Sacrament (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2012), 13.
- 34.
Miri Rubin’s Gentile Tales contains images of host desecrations associated with England: two in the Carew-Poyntz Book of Hours (Figs. 4 and 22) and another in the Lovel Lectionary (Fig. 5).
- 35.
John T. Sebastian, Croxton Play, line 964.
- 36.
Similar to the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The King of Tars presents grossly distorted versions of what followers of a faith other than Christianity might be expected to believe. The sultan in The King of Tars worships statues of Mahoun (Mohammed), Apollo, and Jupiter, among others, and expects his followers to respond to his demands: in the Croxton play, the Jews swear by Machomete and Jesus and are thoroughly schooled in transubstantiation. This can easily be an opening to discuss what we “know” about different religions in the twenty-first century. See The King of Tars, edited from the Auchinleck MS, Advocates 19.2.1, ed. Judith Perryman (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1980).
- 37.
The King of Tars, lines 928–29.
- 38.
The 2001 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies issue on “Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages” offers some useful readings: see, for example, Thomas Hahn, “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 1–37. See also Peter Biller, “A ‘Scientific’ View of Jews from Paris around 1300,” Micrologus 9 (2001): 137–68; and Irven M. Resnick, “Race, Anti-Jewish Polemic, Arnulf of Seéz, and the Contested Papal Election of Anaclet II (1130 A.D.),” Jews in Medieval Christendom: “Slay Them Not,” 45–70. On religious differences, see David Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
- 39.
John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, ed. and trans. C.W.R.D. Moseley (New York: Penguin, 1983), 166. On the subjects of English nationhood and imprisoning the Jews in Cathay, see Miriamne Ara Krummel, Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England, 69–88.
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Price, M.L. (2017). Englishness/Jewishness/Otherness: Teaching English National Identity. In: Krummel, M., Pugh, T. (eds) Jews in Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63748-8_3
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