Abstract
Miri Rubin’s translation and edition of Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Passion of William of Norwich facilitates the teaching of this seminal account of ritual murder to undergraduates. This essay approaches Life and Passion from a cultural studies hermeneutic that employs maps and spatial monstrosity (Augustine’s monstrare) to comprehend the construction of the Jew in a specific geographical and historical context. Students interrogate Jewish and Christian identity and ambiguity by mapping the space of the monastery, the Cathedral, and the city and environs of Norwich, thereby discerning the intersection of geography and cultural identity.
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Notes
- 1.
James Simpson, “The Rule of Medieval Imagination,” Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4–24, at 6.
- 2.
See Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Judith S. Neaman, “Positively Medieval: Teaching as a Missionary Activity,” Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. Sheila Delany (New York: Routledge, 2002), 237–45.
- 3.
Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, trans. and ed. Miri Rubin (London: Penguin, 2014); quotations cited parenthetically.
- 4.
Images are available at themappamundi.co.uk and “The Ebstorf Map,” Medieval Histories, medievalhistories.com; Web. Hereford Cathedral also features an interactive website of its mappamundi that my students enjoy. Useful print resources are P.D.A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) and Mappa mundi: The Hereford World Map (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1996).
- 5.
See David C. Lindberg, “The Medieval Cosmos,” The Beginning of Western Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 244–80.
- 6.
Augustine of Hippo, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. George McCracken et al., 7 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1966), vii, p. 57 (book 21, ch. 8); quoted in Sarah Salih, “Idols and Simulacra: Paganity, Hybridity, and Representation in Mandeville’s Travels,” The Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 113–33, at 113.
- 7.
Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, The Monstrous Middle Ages, 1–27.
- 8.
Andrew Gow, The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 1995).
- 9.
Bettina Bildhauer, “Blood, Jews and Monsters,” The Monstrous Middle Ages, 75–96, at 81–82.
- 10.
Miri Rubin, “Norwich and Norfolk during Stephen’s Reign,” The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, xxiv–xxxiii.
- 11.
My students use a clickable image map of Norwich ca. 1260, which provides detailed annotations on the city boundaries, the cathedral-priory precinct, the castle fee, the Jewry, and the marketplace (users.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/norwmap2.html). Vivian Lipman ’s classic study The Jews of Medieval Norwich (London: The Jewish Historical Society, 1967) offers a detailed reconstruction of the Jewish presence in post-Conquest Norwich, including maps and illustrations. William was never formally canonized or officially recognized in the Roman Martyrology, his local cult dying out before the Reformation. See Butler’s Lives of the Saints, edited, revised and supplemented by Herbert J. Thurston, S.J. and Donald Attwater (Maryland: Westminster, 1990), 671. His Feast Day, March 26, was removed from the Universal Calendar after the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints (a congregation of the Roman Curia established in 1588 to regulate the process of the canonization and veneration of saints) revisited canonization procedures in 1983.
- 12.
Also see Miriamne Ara Krummel, “Meir b. Elijah of Norwich and the Margins of Memory,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 27.4 (2009): 1–23; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich,” Speculum 79.1 (2004): 26–65; Denise L. Despres, “Adolescence and Sanctity: The Life and Passion of Saint William of Norwich,” Journal of Religion 90.1 (2010): 33–62; and Anthony Bale, “Fictions of Judaism in England before 1290,” Jews in Medieval Britain, ed. Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 129–44.
- 13.
See Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 23–65; see also Jacob Rader Marcus and Mark Saperstein, “Augustine,” Jews in Christian Europe: A Source Book, 315–1791 (Pittsburgh: Hebrew Union College Press, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 30–35.
- 14.
See Anna Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1995).
- 15.
See Miri Rubin, The Life and Passion, vii–xiv, for an efficient account of the “History and Historiography” of the ritual murder narrative. David and I post on the course website images from Ruth Mellinkoff’s comprehensive Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
- 16.
See Denise L. Despres, “Adolescence and Sanctity,” and “Adolescence and Interiority in Aelred’s Lives of Christ,” Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life, ed. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 107–25, for a discussion of the concept of adolescence in twelfth-century culture.
- 17.
See William Chester Jordan, “Adolescence and Conversion in the Middle Ages: A Research Agenda,” Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Michael Signer and John Van Engen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 77–93.
- 18.
See Aden Kumler, Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval France and England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
- 19.
For example, see Israel Jacob Yuval’s Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Johnathan Chipman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales; and David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). See also John McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Dissemination of the Myth,” Speculum 72.3 (1997): 701–17. Postings on our course website include earlier and later material for historical contextualization from Marcus and Saperstein, Jews in Christian Europe: A Sourcebook, 315–1791, including Solomon bar Samson, “The Crusaders in Mainz, May 27, 1096,” 74–83; “Innocent III and the Jews,” 109–19; Ephraim ben Jacob, “The Ritual Murder Accusation at Blois, May 1171,” 92–97; and “The Expulsion of the Jews from France, 1182,” 98–102.
- 20.
Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012); see esp. the chapter “The Medieval Church and Cemetery: The Quick and the Dead,” 169–215.
- 21.
Roberta Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral Close: The Evolution of the English Cathedral Landscape (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 66–106.
- 22.
Roberta Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral Close, 18.
- 23.
Roberta Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral Close, 95.
- 24.
Roberta Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral Close, 40.
- 25.
See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich,” 58–60; and Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
- 26.
Bettina Bildhauer, “Blood, Jews, and Monsters in Medieval Culture,” 77–85.
- 27.
This material is the subject of my essay “Adolescence and Sanctity.”
- 28.
Denise Despres, “Adolescence and Sanctity,” 33–62.
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Despres, D.L. (2017). Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich: Mapping Commemorative Violence. 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_14
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