Anti-Jewish Parody around Miracles of the Virgin?: Thoughts on an Early Nonsense-Cento in Berkeley, Bancroft Library, BANC MS UCB 92

Abstract

MOST of us are familiar with the conspicuous anti-Jewish content of Miracles of the Virgin by way of Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, and the brutality of that narrative is not atypical. Most collections of Miracles of the Virgin, whether Latin or vernacular, will include a handful of narratives in which violence against Jews is a crucial feature.2 Although such tales by no means make up the majority of these widely circulated medieval texts, they are among the most frequently repeated and long-lived,3 and it is an observable fact that the genre often calls for the punishment or conversion of Jews. While the usual scholarly introductions to vernacular Miracles of the Virgin explain that ‘devotion to the Virgin [was] of a universal and personal character’, that her miracles were ‘the stuff of popular homiletics’, or offer a ‘cross-section of medieval thought, culture, and narrative traditions’,4 in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin collections of Marian legends, which had their birth in English monasteries and which became the great source books of the late-medieval vernacular examples,5 these miracles functioned within the clerical domains of theology and parody.