Abstract
In the days following the coincidence of Easter and Passover in 1389, violence broke out in Prague. It was of the sort that was of ten referred to in contemporary Latin chronicles as a tumultus.1 This tumult was set in motion when, on the Saturday before Easter, Jews allegedly threw stones at a priest walking through the Jewry. One account says that the stone-throwers were children.2 The priest was carrying a pyx, or the container with the consecrated Host. The priest shouted at (“abused”) the children, and the children’s parents came. The priest claimed that the Host had fallen and had been desecrated.3 In their Easter sermons the next day, several priests took the event to their congregations and talked about it “tearfully” in their sermons, preaching that Jews had vandalized the Eucharist and had tortured the Host.4 Mob violence ensued. As one chronicle puts it, “The people, hearing of such a terrible act, raised their voices, saying: Jewish perversity, from the blasphemy of which such enormity has sprung up, must indeed be annihilated.”5 And annihilation did indeed follow. The people of Prague, or more exactly, the Christians of Prague, descended as a mob on Jewish homes, slaughtering men, women, and children and burning the synagogues. Some Jews were of fered the choice of baptism or death. Some Jews committed suicide, taking the option of “kiddush ha-shem,” the sacrificial martyrdom historically glorified at Masada.6
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Notes
Alexandr Putik and Olga Sixtovâ, History of the Jews in Bohemia and Moravia: Exhibition Guide: From the First Settlements until Emancipation (Prague: Jewish Museum, 2002).
Eli Valley, The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1999), p. 8.
Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 138.
Lee Patterson, “‘The Living Witness of Our Redemption’: Martyrdom and Imitation in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modem Studies 31.3 (Fall 2001): 507–60.
Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 274.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, ed. Beverly Boyd, in A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 2, pt. 20 (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), pp. 26–27 [3–27].
Sheila Delany, “Chaucer’s Prioress, the Jews, and the Muslims,” in Chaucer and the Jews, ed. Sheila Delany (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 43 [43–57].
Iain Higgins, Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 117.
John Freeman, “More’s Place in No Place: The Self-Fashioning Transaction in Utopia,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 34 (1992): 197–212.
Sadakat Kadri, Cadogan City Guides: Prague (London: Cadogan Books, 1991), pp. 165–66; Rubin, Gentile Tales, p. 39 and, for a translation of Rabbi Kara’s lament, pp. 196–98.
The large retinue is mentioned in Walsingham, as cited in David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 361. On Anne, see also the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, supplement 1, ed. William Chester Jordan (New York: Scribner’s, 2004), s.v. “Anne of Bohemia.”
Alfred Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 2.
F.M. Bartos, Cechy v dobe Husove, 1378–1415 (Prague: Jan Laichter, 1947), pp. 99–103
Ruben Ernest Weltsch, Archbishop John qfjenstein (1348–400): Papalism, Humanism and Reform in Pre-Hussite Prague (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 65–66.
Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1894), 4: 165.
For Matthew Paris’s history of the incident, see the classic study by Joseph Jacobs (1896), “Little St. Hugh of Lincoln: Researches in History, Archaeology, and Legend,” repr. in The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 41–71.
Denise L. Despres, “Cultic Anti-Judaism and Chaucer’s Litel Clergeon,” Modern Philology 91 (1994): 413–27, esp. 419.
Kathleen M. Oliver, “Singing Bread, Manna, and the Clergeon’s ‘Greyn,’” Chaucer Review 31 (1997): 357–64; Patterson, “Living Witnesses,” 510.
See, for instance, Louise O. Fradenburg, “Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale,” Exemplaria 1 (1989): 69–115
Steven F. Kruger, “The Bodies of Jews in the Late Middle Ages,” in The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard, ed. James Dean and Christian Zacher (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 301–23.
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© 2006 Bonnie Wheeler
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Stanbury, S. (2006). Host Desecration, Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale,” and Prague 1389. In: Wheeler, B. (eds) Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08951-9_15
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