| Paper 1707-a | Sisters and Wives, Converts and Cleaners: Polemical Representations of Medieval Anglo-Jewish Women
(Language: English)
Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Department of English, University of Victoria, British Columbia
Index terms: Gender Studies, Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English, Language and Literature - Latin |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
Anglo-Christian treatment of Jewish women is marked by what I call a 'polemic of sameness', that is, a cluster of rhetorical strategies that blur the lines between othering and 'saming'. If, as others have argued, the Jewess has seemed absent from or undetectable in medieval illustration, or present in narrative roles only to the extent that she is pliant or seducing, I argue that this is because her similarity to non-Jewish (Christian) women is as much a matter of caricature as are the more readily identifiable tropes of Jewish male grotesqueness. Before and after the dates at which art historians identify a consistent visual repertoire of villainy and difference around Jewish men, Anglo-Christian authors were pointing out and exploiting Jewish women's similarity to Christians, such that the Jewess was either an unseeable enemy or a sign of the always-convertible self. This paper will demonstrate how such polemical representations work and how they reveal distinct gendered dimensions in a now otherwise well understood canon of English anti-Jewish texts. I will use the late 13th-century 'Passion of Adam of Bristol' as my central case study, but other examples will enter the discussion too (e.g., Matthew Paris’s story of Abraham of Berkhamsted, the 'Judas Ballad', and the myth of the Jewish seductress).
Paper b:
I will focus upon the Pforzheim account: the claim that in the year 1267 in Pforzheim an old woman sold a seven-year-old girl to the Jews. The Jews gagged her to keep her from crying out, cut open her veins, and surrounded her in order to catch her blood with cloths. The child soon died from the torture, and they weighted her down with stones and threw her into the Enz River. When the body was discovered later, suspicion fell upon the Jews, and they were all summoned to appear. As they approached the corpse, blood began to stream from its open wounds.
I am interested in the tale for its connection to a larger group of accounts in which a murder victim's body identifies its murderer by spontaneously bleeding. Of special interest for me is Albert the Great's attempt to explain the natural causality behind the phenomenon. So, if I treat this in a paper, much of it would be devoted to other instances (which typically do not involve Jews), and the debate over its causes.
Paper -b:
Numerous scholars, beginning with Cecilia Cutts in 1943, have read the Jews in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament as stand-ins for Lollards. While much recent scholarship has rejected that view, the idea still prevails. While I agree that the play expresses concerns about heresy, to argue that the play's Jews are mere stand-ins for Lollards strikes me as irresponsible and potentially dangerous, as it glosses over hundreds of years of violence against Jews based on accusations of ritual murder and host desecration. Furthermore, as the recent events of Charlottesville have shown, social tensions can often cause dormant antisemitism to resurface. This essay re-examines the play, taking into account the 15th-century audience's cultural memory of Jews and Judaism to examine issues of economic stress and xenophobia in 15th-century East Anglia.
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