medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Kevin Teo wrote:
>
> For someone who is embarking upon his PhD research and presenting it
> at the Leeds IMC this July, I am wondering about the extant corpus of
> scholarship which has been done as pertaining to the medieval
> stereotypes of the Jew as defacers or mutilators of the sacred Host,
> or thieves of it. My research centers on the Croxton Play of the
> Sacrament as a test case, in which economic culture and the concerns
> over the gradually destabilising classes, followed by emerging guilds
> and all, are mapped onto the matrix(es) of race-religion,
> specifically the Jew-type. In this case, I am wondering when the
> first instance of a mercantile Jew appeared in medieval literature(it
> need not be in Middle English), outside of the Edict issued in 1290
> Ad against Jews in England.
Jews as defacers or mutilators of the host would presumably be from the 13th
century onwards, with the rise of transubstantiation and the Corpus Christi.
In the 12th century they were supposed to ritually murder boys, of course.
I would recommend the Chronicle of Richard of Devizes (supposed to be the
first to use the term 'holocaust'.) Richard satirises these ritual murder
stories with one of his own which gets more and ridiculous until he just
loses interest in it!
John Briggs
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