Text and Context: Tracing Chaucer’s Moments of Jewishness

Abstract

Through the pictures studied, the historical artifacts parsed, and the poetic voices heard (whether Jewish as with Meir or Christian as with Mandeville), I have introduced a variety of complex psychic imaginings, but throughout these various representations, there remains a motif that continuously (re)surfaces: the Jew signifies negatively. The manuscript pictorials portray Jews as physically Other, as not-Christian (which often means not-human); the 1275 Statute segregates the Jew from Christian society through legally decreed badges, taxes, and ghettoization that, in turn, cripple Jewish contribution to the dominant sphere; the poetry of Meir of Norwich emerges as a cry for justice from God to imbue Jews with a social parity for what they suffer at the hands of the Christians; Mandeville’s travelogue, consistently marveling over Jewish intransigence, peddles a legend of Jews who are buried alive in and eventually escape from the confines of the mountainous region in Cathay.