Abstract
The Croxton Play of the Sacrament opens up when contemplated in a class on Jews and “Saracens” in medieval English literature through a pedagogical focus on genre. What difference, my students ask, does drama make when medieval Christians represent “the Jew”? Such a focus lends itself to addressing contradictions and instability when interpreting “the Jew” and seems especially pertinent to the concerns of the Croxton drama. Awash with an over-the-top theatricality, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament emphatically embraces its generic identity as a play. Drawing on both new historical information and intuitive student knowledge to open up this play, this lesson culminates in a careful look at the outrageous moment in Croxton when a Jew’s hand is nailed to a communion wafer and severed from his body.
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Notes
- 1.
Croxton survives in a single copy, Dublin, Trinity College, MS F.4.20, fols. 338–56. Although the copy was made during the sixteenth century and bound up in TCD MS F.4.20 in the seventeenth century, internal evidence indicates that the play was written as early as 1461.
- 2.
“Saracen” is a term that medieval Christians used to describe Arabs and/or Islamic peoples. Popularized partly by Jerome’s commentary on Genesis, the term refers to the idea that Arabs and/or Muslims misrepresent themselves as descendants of Abraham’s wife Sarah (“Sarah-cen”) when in fact they are described as Hagarenes or Ismaelites, i.e., the descendants of Abraham’s slave and concubine Hagar and her son, Ismael. See Katharine Scarfe Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18, 93–101.
- 3.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 112.
- 4.
See the language of a monastic sermon cited in Shlomo Eidelberg, trans., The Jews and the Crusaders (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 121; and Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 170.
- 5.
The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, ed. John T. Sebastian (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2012), line 149. Subsequent references to the play by line number are taken from this edition, which modernizes the original text in accordance with the conventions of the TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) series.
- 6.
Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 441–49. I discuss the utility of Hall’s approach further in “Ethnicity,” A New Chaucer Companion, ed. Peter Brown (London: Blackwell, forthcoming).
- 7.
Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). See also Bede, Commentarius in Genesim, ed. C.W. Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 1967), 201, translated by Katherine Scarfe Beckett in Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World, 18; and Ælfric, Lives of Saints, ed. W.W. Skeat, EETS OS 94, 114 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900), vol. 2, 66–124.
- 8.
Sarah Beckwith, “Ritual, Church, and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body,” Culture and History 1350–1660: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writings, ed. David Aers (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 65–89, at 75. Compare with Donnalee Dox, who views the “spectacular stage effects” in Croxton as believable and comparable to “the graphic and realistic detail characteristic of fifteenth-century East Anglian iconography” insofar as they were filtered through a “Christian imagination that accepted the possibility of” outrageous, horrifying events (“Theatrical Space, Mutable Space, and the Space of the Imagination: Three Ways of Reading the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000], 167–98, at 190).
- 9.
I have found suitable images for this exercise from thebloodproject.net/performance.
- 10.
For this portion of the lesson, instructors might show clips from Michael Radford’s 2004 film, starring Al Pacino as Shylock.
- 11.
Sarah Beckwith , “Ritual,” 75.
- 12.
Sarah Beckwith , “Ritual,” 78.
- 13.
Lisa Lampert [Lampert-Weissig], Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 101.
- 14.
Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, 101.
- 15.
Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, 104–8, 118.
- 16.
Peter Travis, “The Semiotics of Christ’s Body in the English Cycles,” Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama, ed. Richard K. Emmerson (New York: MLA, 1990), 67–78, at 67.
- 17.
Cecelia Cutts, “The Croxton Play: An Anti-Lollard Piece,” Modern Language Quarterly 5 (1944): 45–60.
- 18.
On the manner in which the Jews of Croxton refer to Jews, both real and imagined, see for example, Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, 109; Lampert, “The Once and Future Jew: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Little Robert of Bury, and Historical Memory,” Jewish History 15 (2001): 235–55; and Ruth Nisse, Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 113.
- 19.
On the use of the term “anti-Semitism” for medieval phenomena, see Anthony Bale, “Fictions of Judaism in England before 1290,” Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 129–44, at 129.
- 20.
On ideas of Mary’s Dormition, see Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews, and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2010), 92–93.
- 21.
Jacobus Voragine, “The Assumption of the Virgin,” The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 463–83 at 477–78.
- 22.
“Play 41, Assumption of Mary,” N-Town Plays, ed. Douglas Sugano (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), lines 423–25.
- 23.
BL Add. MS. 42130, f. 99r, Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted, 102; the window in York Minster appears on 108.
- 24.
Anthony Bale , Feeling Persecuted, 94–95, 112.
- 25.
Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, 104, 118.
- 26.
Anthony Bale , Feeling Persecuted, 112.
- 27.
Such an interpretation looks back to previous discussions about the dehumanizing effects of the Pauline idea of Christian siblinghood, as analyzed by Marc Shell in The End of Kinship: Measure for Measure, Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
- 28.
BL Add. Ms. 48985, f. 40r, in Anthony Bale , Feeling Persecuted, 80 and cover.
- 29.
As noted by editors such as John T. Sebastian, Croxton stresses the capacity of the host to embody Christ not only via this “crucifixion” but also via the overall movement of the host over the course of the play during which it follows “the path of the Son of God, whose body it encloses, in His descent to earth to redeem humanity, His rescue of the patriarchs from hell’s clutches during the Harrowing, and His glorious return to the Father after the Ascension” (John T. Sebastian, “Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Introduction,” 1–33, at 21). Greg Walker similarly observes how the host “symbolically repeat[s] each of the events of Christ’s passion in turn: being betrayed by the merchant Aristorius and handed over to the Jews, receiving the five wounds suffered by Christ on the Cross, being nailed to a post in a parodic crucifixion, being taken down and buried in an oven, and finally bursting forth once more in a symbolic resurrection” (The Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama [London: Oxford University Press, 2014], 20).
- 30.
See for example, Miriamne Ara Krummel, “Getting Even: Social Control and Uneasy Laughter in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” Medieval English Comedy, ed. Sandra Hordis and Paul Hardwick (Turnhout, Belguim: Brepols, 2007), 171–93.
- 31.
Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, 118.
- 32.
Richard L. Homan, “Devotional Themes in the Violence and Humor of the Play of the Sacrament,” Comparative Literature 20 (1986–87): 327–40, at 332.
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Lavezzo, K. (2017). Performing Jewishness in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament . 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_10
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