The once and future Jew: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, little Robert of Bury and historical memory

Abstract

The Jews who purchase and attack the host in the fifteenth-century East Anglian drama, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, have long been regarded by critics as referents to Lollards or to doubters more generally, not to Jews. However, the play does refer to the history of Jews in Bury St. Edmunds, where, most likely, it was performed, and more specifically, it refers to the 1181 ritual murder accusation surrounding Little Robert of Bury. This accusation was commemorated in a variety of forms in Bury well into the fifteenth century. Further, in its representation of host desecration as a literal reenactment of the Passion, the play creates a temporal mode in which the Jews re-enact the Passion in the present, just as the Mass is a re-enactment of the Crucifixion. The play simultaneously makes the audience witness to the murder of little Robert and to the Crucifixion, with both existing in a kind of “eternal present,” a temporality central to the Mass and also to related late-medieval English devotional practices. The story of little Robert comes to exist not only in historical memory, but also in the eternal present in which the Crucifixion and its re-enactments are joined. This powerful temporality creates a conception of the Jew as perpetual murderer, guilty not only of crucifying Christ in the historical past, but in the present, and until the Parousia in the future, thus enabling a particular aspect of the negative stereotype of “the Jew,” the perpetually present enemy, ever plotting against Christ and Christendom.