Abstract

ABSTRACT The universal Christian subject at the center of The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of Manhode is a figure dependent on racist difference for a coherent experience of self. This essay focuses on the allegorical scene of perception, in which the deformed body of a personified figure becomes an exercise in pedagogical explanation. Taking claustrophobia as symptomatic of the poem’s investment in sensory information, the essay explores a neglected figure, a bishop with horns referred to as “Moses” or “like Moses,” whose depiction is the moment where Jewishness enters the poem’s field of vision: subordinate to the demands of Christian allegory and yet condensing a historical significance that exceeds it.

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