Immaculate flesh and the social body: Mary and the Jews

Abstract

Despite the fact that no practicing Jews were permitted to reside in fourteenth and fifteenth-century England, late-medieval English devotional culture is rife with images of Jews, from the Old Testament patriarches in the Corpus Christi Plays to the blasphemous, terrifying host desecrators dramatized in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and legitimized in Middle English sermons.1 Baffled by the paradoxical centrality of Jews to late-medieval English literature and art, scholars have acknowledged a continuing English tradition of anti-Judaism, while simultaneously asserting that Jews function in this literature to represent a generic "Other," or as a displacement for the Lollard sect that threatened religious orthodoxy with its iconomachia and reformist ecclesiology.2 The tension between these positions is obvious. The evidence of a continuous anti-Judaic iconographie tradition in lay devotional manuscripts necessarily challenges this theory of displacement, suggesting that Jews were not merely symbols of alterity in English culture, whether generic or specific, but rather that their presence was a necessary element in the devotional world of the later medieval English laity. Anti-Judaic images and ideas were particularly closely associated with the cult of the Virgin in late-medieval England. Marian devotional works, whether fictional like Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale" or liturgical like Books of Hours and devotional compendia, allow us therefore to investigate in some detail the significance of Jewish presence in late-medieval English religious culture. A number of the famous extant Middle English manuscripts, including the Bohun Hours and the Vernon manuscript, contain narratives and symbol clusters with a decidedly anti-Judaic thrust;3 but the most sustained program of anti-Judaic images I have found is in the elegant Carew-Poyntz Hours, Cambridge Fitzwilliam Ms. 48. In this encyclopedia of late-medieval religious imagery, a thread of cultic anti-Judaism - an anxiety about Jews violating the Catholic sacraments - links