Pucellina of Blois: Romantic myths and narrative conventions

Abstract

On 26 May 1171 (20 Sivan 4931), between thirty-one and thirty-three Jews were burned at the stake in the northern French town of Blois. Although the Hebrew prose texts describing the event give a central role to one of the martyrs, Pucellina, 1 that role is gradually revised to suggest Pucellina was the paramour of Count Thibaut of Blois. An "amorous relationship gone sour," in Robert Chazan's description, "bore the seeds of disaster" for the prosperous Jewish community. 2 Thwarted by the jealous Countess Alix and popular animosity, Pucellina's fairy-tale fall from favor ended in death for herself and more than thirty other Jews. As the first case of a murder libel vigorously prosecuted by the secular authorities - in this case Count Thibaut, with an Augustinian advisor Blois set an ominous precedent for persecutions to come. 3 Pucellina herself marks a milestone of sorts: as the medieval conventions of Jewish martyrology took shape, the depiction of independent activity by Jewish women decreased. This development contrasts sharply with the prominence of women martyrs in the earlier prose chronicles of the 1096 persecutions. The shift is markedly evident in Blois; where most of the martyrs were women. In the following pages I will focus on three Hebrew prose texts describing Pucellina's role in the events leading up to the Blois libel: the Orl6ans letter written following the martyrdom; 4 the account of Ephraim of Bonn, written in the late 1190s; 5 and Yosef HaCohen's Renaissance version. 61 am ~ concerned here with the ways in which, beginning with Ephraim of Bonn, accounts of the Blois story increasingly strive to conform Pucellina to a type of failed romantic heroine. Despite this, the earliest account, the Orl6ans letter, suggests a more complicated reality: Pucellina's provocative actions imply a figure of considerable power in Blois, a power derived from what I believe was her activity as a moneylender. The literary preference for stereotypical characters illustrated in these texts