The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries): Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Speyer, 20-25 October 2002 (review)

Reviewed by: The Role of the Scroll: An Illustrated Introduction to Scrolls in the Middle Ages by Thomas Forrest Kelly Katherine Hindley scrolls, manuscript studies, drama, legal history, medieval Europe Thomas Forrest Kelly. The Role of the Scroll: An Illustrated Introduction to Scrolls in the Middle Ages. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. 208 pp., fully illustrated in color. $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-393-28503-1. In the standard, simplified narrative of book history, the codex replaced the scroll and is being replaced in turn by the e-book. However, just as the e-book seems unlikely to kill the codex any time soon, the codex did not eliminate the scroll. Although typical medieval examples work differently than ancient scrolls, opening vertically rather than horizontally, the form persisted through the Middle Ages and beyond. As Thomas Forrest Kelly points out in The Role of the Scroll, it persists even now: the scrolling action of online reading recalls the continuous text of a scrollformat manuscript. Placing the scroll (Kelly's preferred term) at the center of his investigation of medieval manuscript culture reasserts the importance of this neglected form. Kelly's preface sets out two key goals for the book. First, he aims to provide "an exploration, a set of highlights of some of the most interesting scrolls in medieval history, [putting] them in the context of the people who made them, commissioned them, and used them" (xiii). Second, he aims to answer the question, "Why make a scroll when you could make a book?" (xiii). The primary focus is on manuscripts produced in medieval western Europe, although the introductory chapter has a broader geographical and chronological reach, discussing scrolls om Asia, A ica, and the ancient world. The rest of the book is divided into chapters according to possible reasons for making scrolls: those that grow, those that represent continuous space or time, those used for performance, those intended for private or secret use, and those used in the conduct of a ritual. As Kelly notes, more than one of these reasons might apply to any given manuscript. Each chapter consists primarily of short case studies of particular manuscripts or manuscript types that illustrate that chapter's key reason [End Page 343] for choosing a scroll over a codex. The manuscript discussions provide glimpses of life in medieval Europe: scrolls containing the recipe collection The Forme of Cury introduce information about spices and feasting, for instance, while scroll-format inventories of New Year's gifts received in Elizabethan England spark paragraphs on gift exchange at court. The book therefore serves as a series of windows onto medieval European culture. This is both positive and negative in terms of Kelly's goals. It provides a clear and lively impression of the range of areas in which scrolls were used and, for a nonspecialist reader, an engaging introduction to an unfamiliar period. However, it also moves the focus om form to text, meaning that the emphasis on why to choose a scroll can be lost. The general reasons Kelly proposes for making scrolls are useful, and it is clear om the wealth of examples he provides that these are categories into which many surviving scrolls fall. However, the book's goal of showcasing especially interesting and extraordinary examples of scrolls is to some extent contradictory to its goal of explaining why a scroll might be made, since any explanation for why scrolls were chosen over codices requires equal attention to the most typical of surviving examples. While the reader is given a very welcome introduction to the richness of the scroll form, the book's arguments about individual scrolls occasionally fail to differentiate between things a scroll can do, and things a scroll can do that a codex cannot. For example, scrolls are said to be appropriate for recipe collections "partly because [the scroll] can grow, and partly because it can be opened to the recipe wanted" (53). While the possibility of extending a scroll may be important in the choice of form, it is surely not realistic to suggest that a scroll can be more easily opened to the desired recipe than a codex. A similar...

Reviewed by: Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe by Ephraim Kanarfogel Ahuva Liberles Ephraim Kanarfogel. Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 260 pp. In his exciting new book, Brothers from Afar, Ephraim Kanarfogel tackles one of the greatest challenges for the religious leaders of the Jewish minority in Christian Europe—the mild but constant seepage of Jews into the arms of the Christian religion, by choice or under threats and coercion. Focusing on medieval northern Europe, this book presents the diverse rabbinic approaches to apostasy and shows how these approaches were translated into rabbinic decisions. Kanarfogel also identifies the complexity of rabbinic attitudes toward individuals who sought to rejoin the Jewish community after their conversion, and how these judgments were challenged and changed over the course of the Middle Ages and in different geographic areas. This book is the conclusive outcome of the author's many years of extensive research on this subject. As the author clarifies in his introduction, this is a book about the history of Halakhah as it relates to apostasy and reversion, rather than a book about medieval converts or conversion per se. At the same time, it reveals much about actual acts of conversion and medieval converts. Drawing on an extremely impressive corpus of medieval Jewish manuscripts, many of which were previously unknown or had never been addressed, Brothers [End Page 164] from Afar examines the sources against the backdrop of the linguistic and legal context in which they were created. Throughout the monograph, the reader will find profound rabbinic discussions illuminating several aspects of the intricate religious identity of apostates. How was an apostate supposed to comprehend his or her religious affiliation according to Jewish law? Did he or she relinquish Judaism by undergoing baptism? It is important to distinguish between the social and economic distance that the Jewish community, according to its rabbinic leaders, was expected to maintain from apostates, and rabbinic expectations from the converts to continue to fulfill their obligations to their Jewish family regardless of their baptism and new religious affiliation. In this context, the act of religious immersion upon the return of a convert to the fold is justified as a communal necessity, to publicly demonstrate the return to the Jewish community, rather than as a religious requirement to overturn one's conversion. In the first chapter, "Assessing the Ashkenazi Context," Kanarfogel challenges the generally accepted thesis suggested by Jacob Katz in his work, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (1961), that Rashi was the first to understand the talmudic principle that "A Jew remains a Jew even if he has sinned grievously" (ʾaf ʿal pi she-ḥataʾ Yisraʾel hu) as holding halakhic significance for the individual Jew who converted to Christianity, rather than merely as a general attitude. Until now, it has been widely accepted that Rashi's perception of apostates as still belonging, in most respects, to the Jewish people, was an approach embraced by most rabbinic adjudicators in medieval Ashkenaz. Even though earlier scholars acknowledged that some rabbinic authorities suggested apostates should undergo ritual immersion upon their return, this position was deemed to result from a desire on the part of lay Jews to gauge the sincerity of the apostate. It was also seen as an expectation that stemmed from popular culture and served to undo the convert's previous baptism (6–8). One of the goals of Brothers from Afar is to demonstrate that some rabbinic approaches were much closer to this view than was previously thought and that ritual immersion was indeed demanded by some rabbinic authorities. Kanarfogel asserts that mid-thirteenth-century northern French Tosafists prescribed immersion for apostates returning to Judaism, in contrast to earlier scholarly claims that apostates were encouraged to return to the Jewish community without being required to undergo any special ceremony or act. In chapter 2, "Establishing Boundaries: Immersion, Repentance, and Verification," Kanarfogel paints a rich picture of medieval rabbinic scholarship by examining dozens of medieval Hebrew manuscripts dealing with halakhic questions concerning converts and conversion, closely noting and revealing variations in the choice of words and shifts in the order...

Sizeable Jewish and Muslim communities lived across large swathes of medieval Western Europe. But all the Muslim communities and almost all the Jewish communities in polities that correspond to present-day England, France, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were eradicated between 1064 and 1526. Most studies of ethnoreligious violence in Europe focus on communal, regional, and national political dynamics to explain its outbreak and variation. Recent scholarship shows how the Catholic Church in medieval Europe contributed to the long-term political development and the “rise of the West.” But the Church was also responsible for eradicating non-Christian minorities. Three factors explain ethnoreligious cleansing of non-Christians in medieval Western Europe: (1) the papacy as a supranational religious authority with increasing powers; (2) the dehumanization of non-Christians and their classification as monarchical property; and (3) fierce geopolitical competition among Catholic Western European monarchs that made them particularly vulnerable to papal-clerical demands to eradicate non-Christians. The extant scholarship maintains that ethnoreligious cleansing is a modern phenomenon that is often committed by nationalist actors for secular purposes. In contrast, a novel explanation highlights the central role that the supranational hierocratic actors played in ethnoreligious cleansing. These findings also contribute to understanding recent and current ethnic cleansing in places like Cambodia, Iraq, Myanmar, the Soviet Union, and Syria.

New Books across the Disciplines

This book explores a body of innovative Jewish literary works from the Middle Ages. In late twelfth- and thirteenth-century Ashkenaz—the Jewish communities in northern France, Germany, and England—Jewish authors translated several Old French and German stories into Hebrew. These stories are distinctly non-Jewish, drawing on the Christian romances of King Arthur and Alexander the Great and the classical fables of Aesop. The book argues that these translations—rather than adapting stories that reflected Jewish religious or cultural practice—represent a body of secular Hebrew literature in Ashkenaz and evidence of a shared literary culture between Jews and Christians in medieval Europe. Reading Hebrew animal fables, folktales, and chivalric romance, the book describes an intellectual climate that allowed the literati of medieval Ashkenaz to read across cultures. In these translations, produced by medieval Jews for entertainment and for wisdom, the book finds a new literary awakening in Ashkenaz.

This book demolishes the widely held view that the phrase 'medieval business' is an oxymoron. The authors review the entire range of business in medieval western Europe, probing its Roman and Christian heritage to discover the economic and political forces that shaped the organization of agriculture, manufacturing, construction, mining, transportation and marketing. Businessmen's responses to the devastating plagues, famines, and warfare that beset Europe in the late Middle Ages are equally well covered. Medieval businessmen's remarkable success in coping with this hostile new environment was 'a harvest of adversity' that prepared the way for the economic expansion of the sixteenth century. Two main themes run through this book. First, the force and direction of business development in this period stemmed primarily from the demands of the elite. Second, the lasting legacy of medieval businessmen was less their skillful adaptations of imported inventions than their brilliant innovations in business organization.

New Books across the Disciplines

The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages presents the proceedings of an international symposium held at Speyer (Germany) in October, 2002. The collection aims at a comprehensive (and comprehensible) overview describing the variety of historical experience for European Jewries from c. 1000 to c. 1500. Leading European historians firmly based in regional, archival research have here been brought together with a number of Israeli and American scholars who concentrate on legal and constitutional aspects of the Jewish community. Historians working on medieval Mediterranean Jewries (Sicily, Spain, Provence, etc.) and those studying the northern communities (England, Northern France, and Ashkenaz) present their findings in a single, one-language collection. Regional overviews are supplemented by studies on cultural, economic, social, and linguistic aspects as well as by portraits of individual (northern) Jewish communities. The collection highlights the similarities and differences among the various European Jewish cultures, demonstrating that these cultures were no less European than they were Jewish. At the same time, the Jewish heritage has deeply influenced medieval and modern European majority cultures. This cultural symbiosis was epitomized in the European Jewish community (kahal, aljama).

As a result of the role played in urban uprisings and conspiracies in late medieval and early modern western Europe, the butchers’ trade has been one of the most intensively studied food-related occupations. Recent research on medieval butchers has shown a renewed interest in the topic. This article begins by presenting a review and synthesis of the historiography of butchers’ revolts in late medieval cities across western Europe. It then moves on to an analysis of the specific case of Siena, based on original primary research. The aim of the article is to show how Sienese butchers rebelled more than once during the fourteenth century and to examine why it was inevitable that they failed, despite the long-standing alliances they built with part of the educated elite. Indeed, social and political tensions within the guild forced a two-way split within the guild and its elites. These findings definitively call into question the traditional view of the cohesiveness of the butchers’ guilds in medieval Europe and their supposed marginalization in medieval society, advancing understanding of fourteenth-century Siena, of its enduring popular regime and, more generally, of late medieval urban society, politics and revolts. Moreover, such a case study has the potential to enable further comparative analysis across medieval and early modern Europe.

Reviewed by: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng Celeste Chamberland The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. By Geraldine Heng. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 493 pages. $49.99 (cloth). Categories of race and ethnicity have long elicited heated debate about the complex ways in which structural conditions and differential access to power have shaped identity and social relations in the modern world. While such discussions have shed much light on contemporary racial paradigms, they have focused less on the pre-modern origins of racial thought. Canonical race theory, in particular, has provided crucial insight into the historical connections between systemic racism and cultural perceptions of race, but has typically focused on the construction of race as a modern phenomenon that emerged in tandem with colonial encounters alongside the Spanish Conquest and the Atlantic Slave Trade. While early modern [End Page 196] constructions of race undeniably aligned with practices of plunder and hegemony in the era of colonialism and imperialism, their ancient and medieval origins are generally overlooked by scholars who have typically regarded the category of race as too presentist to appropriately characterize categories of identity prior to the sixteenth century. As Geraldine Heng persuasively asserts in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, however, long before the advent of modern constructions of epidermal race, Europeans developed discourses of colonialism as ideological justification for occupying the territories of others and marginalizing Jewish and Muslim communities in their midst. Heng’s masterful analysis traces the nebulous formation of race alongside configurations of power and discourses of difference in medieval Europe. Identifying the development of pre-modern racial disparity and prejudice, as Heng asserts, is not only vital to our understanding of medieval history, but also illuminates contemporary categories of race, since the interplay of the past and the present continues to inform racial thought and the pervasiveness of systemic racism. By providing heretofore widely overlooked historical context through the lens of an innovative multidisciplinary methodological framework, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages will undoubtedly initiate crucial scholarly discussions about the pre-modern origins of race that will likely be of great interest to medieval scholars and critical race theorists alike. Inasmuch as the construction of pre-modern racial thought reflects the shifting intersections of religious dogma, legal theory, mercantile capitalism, and expressions of cultural belief, The Invention of Race adopts a thematic scheme of organization that effectively underscores the complex processes of othering that unfolded from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. As Heng incisively contends, ideas of race in medieval Europe were not only formed as a result of colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, but were also expressed in the cultural treatment of Jews, the conquest of neighboring Christian countries, and anti-Islamic sentiment in the high and late Middle Ages. By focusing on themes [End Page 197] of state, color, empire, slavery, and the European imagination across Europe, Heng’s analysis effectively reflects the complexities of numerous sites and contexts of racial formation. The book, moreover, assesses nascent pre-modern racial thought through the methodological lens of medieval studies and draws theoretical inspiration from an array of disciplines, ranging from Queer Studies to Postcolonial Theory. Rather than merely cataloguing or describing taxonomies of race and ethnicity in medieval Europe, Heng’s aim is to provide new paradigms and an appropriate model with which the notion of pre-modern race can be approached. By considering the construction of race within the context of early Christian Europe, Heng’s brilliant volume not only contributes a sorely needed dimension to the existing scholarship on race, but also sheds light on a central, but long overlooked, component of the socio-cultural history of medieval Europe. In recent years, some medievalists, notably Robert Bartlett and Peter Biller, have addressed the concept of race in medieval Europe, but they have generally focused exclusively on the somatic and biological features of race, such as bloodline, purity, and physiognomy. As Heng ably demonstrates in this shrewd work, however, such narrow focuses overlook the socio-cultural determinants of race in the Middle Ages, particularly religion and concepts of barbarity and civility...

The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages presents the proceedings of an international symposium held at Speyer (Germany) in October, 2002. The collection aims at a comprehensive (and comprehensible) overview describing the variety of historical experience for European Jewries from c. 1000 to c. 1500. Leading European historians firmly based in regional, archival research have here been brought together with a number of Israeli and American scholars who concentrate on legal and constitutional aspects of the Jewish community. Historians working on medieval Mediterranean Jewries (Sicily, Spain, Provence, etc.) and those studying the northern communities (England, Northern France, and Ashkenaz) present their findings in a single, one-language collection. Regional overviews are supplemented by studies on cultural, economic, social, and linguistic aspects as well as by portraits of individual (northern) Jewish communities. The collection highlights the similarities and differences among the various European Jewish cultures, demonstrating that these cultures were no less European than they were Jewish. At the same time, the Jewish heritage has deeply influenced medieval and modern European majority cultures. This cultural symbiosis was epitomized in the European Jewish community (kahal, aljama).

Reviewed by: Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321–1422 by Tzafrir Barzilay Arina Zaytseva tzafrir barzilay. Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321–1422. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Pp. 303. As its title implies, Tzafrir Barzilay's Poisoned Wells is focused on the peculiar phenomenon of well-poisoning accusations which took hold in the minds of fourteenth-century Europeans and, in some cases, led to devastating consequences. Barzilay pays particular attention to the infamous events of the year 1321 when entire communities of lepers in southern France and the kingdom of Aragon were accused of plotting to poison wells in order to destroy Christendom. Another time period that falls under scrutiny is 1348–1350, which saw a great outbreak of violence against Jewish communities in various regions of Europe. Throughout the years scholars held varied views on these historical periods, and Barzilay aims to clarify the discussion. In particular, he looks closely at the process of "the transfer of accusations" from one minority group to another. His analysis is holistic, as he considers "the violence against all minorities" which allows him to better recreate the social, political, and economic contexts of persecutions (72). His analysis is built on a great wealth of archival evidence—Barzilay addresses various legal, epistolary, and literary sources which mention the rumors of well-poisoning and subsequent persecutions. Barzilay opens his historical investigation with a brief account of the development of knowledge about poisons and poisoning in the Middle Ages. The idea of well-poisoning developed under the influence of three factors, [End Page 477] the first of which was rapid urbanization of the High Middle Ages. As people began to live closer to each other and establish workspaces in the cities, the threat of accidental—or deliberate—poisoning of public water sources grew ever higher. The High Middle Ages also saw a rise in individual poisoning cases, many of which were high-profile and politically motivated. The stories about the poisoning of nobles were hard to prove, but quite sensational and as such easy to weaponize in political affairs. The third factor was connected to the development of medical knowledge about various poisons, as well as the rise in numbers of medical treatises dedicated to poisons and poisoning. These texts "broadcast to contemporaries that it [poisoning] was a real medical danger" (17). Barzilay is careful not to single out any of these factors as the sole reason for the creation and spread of well-poisoning rumors. Rather these factors prepared grounds for later well-poisoning accusations. The image of evil outsiders guilty of poisoning wells did not appear overnight either. Prior to the rise of well-poisoning accusations, Jews, especially Jewish doctors, and lepers were regarded with suspicion by Christians. Already during the High Middle Ages, Christians expressed prejudices against Jewish doctors and some codices of laws explicitly prohibited Christians from accepting services from Jewish medics. Moreover, some Jewish doctors were explicitly linked to or suspected of poisoning Christian nobles. Lepers were also often treated with suspicion, as their disease was associated with sin. However, lepers enjoyed a somewhat secure status during the Middle Ages, and their demise in 1321 was brought about by unique "political and social circumstances" of the times (27). Additionally, heretics and Muslims were other minorities who were regarded with hostility, which later contributed to them being accused of poisoning. Lepers were the first minority to suffer major persecutions triggered by well-poisoning accusations. During 1321–1322, many lepers were tried and executed in southern France and Aragon. The powerful rumor had it that the lepers, jealous of healthy and prospering Christians, conspired to poison water sources to bring down the reign of Christianity. At times the narrative included Jews or Muslims who commissioned the lepers to poison public wells. Barzilay determines that the well-poisoning rumors were not the main reason for gruesome persecutions—rather it was the change in the social and political standing of lepers in the late thirteenth century. Previously lepers could lead autonomous lives in leprosaria, while in the late thirteenth century public management took control over these communities (57). Local municipal authorities became increasingly apprehensive of...

Bibliography of the Publications of R. W. Southern

Attitudes and impediments to pacifism in medieval Europe

Book Review| September 01 2022 Review: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment Fabio Barry Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2020, 432 pp., 214 color and 116 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300248166; $40 (paper), ISBN 9780300248173 Michael J. Waters Michael J. Waters Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2022) 81 (3): 373–374. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.3.373 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael J. Waters; Review: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 September 2022; 81 (3): 373–374. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.3.373 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search In his prose romance Il Filocolo (ca. 1335), Giovanni Boccaccio describes in detail a tower built by the ruler of Babylonia. Housing hundreds of virgins, this Orientalist fantasy features exterior walls “masterfully crafted” with “red, black, and bright white marble,” windows with golden colonnettes, crystal doors, and hundreds of luminous rooms, including one adorned with “twenty-four porphyry columns of various colors, some so clear you can see through them,” as well as ceilings set with “sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and innumerable other stones.”1 Incredible architectural descriptions of this kind abound in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance literature; so pervasive, in fact, are poetic accounts of buildings constructed of fantastic marbles and other precious materials, both real and imagined, that historians have paid them only limited attention. Fabio Barry’s Painting in Stone calls on the reader to take seriously such accounts, which often strain modern credulity. But this book is much more... You do not currently have access to this content.