The Siege of Jerusalem and Biblical Exegesis: Writing About Romans in Fourteenth-Century England

Abstract

Almost sixty years ago, the role of the Jews in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament came into question as Cecilia Cutts suggested a metaphorical reading of the play's textual characterization;1 she argued that the Croxton Jews, in rejecting Christianity, were portrayed in such a way as to represent a different group which deliberately excluded itself from ortho dox Christianity?that is, the Lollards.2 Alternatively, Steven Kruger has suggested that the Croxton Jews are representative of the specifically body, and his reassessment links corruptions of the body to Christian bodily miracles.3 In interrogating the role of identity, Elisa Narin van Court has posited a paradoxical Jewish presence in medieval English narratives as literary, theological, and visual represen tations of Jews continued long after their expulsion from England in 1290.4 Likewise, Sheila Delany has shown that the Jews continued to influ ence English writers with their absent presence.5 Critics reading the late-fourteenth-century poem The Siege of Jerusalem vary similarly in their assessment of identity.6 While Mary Hamel has suggested that the Jews portrayed in the Siege represent a homoge nized group of Jews, Saracens, and heretics,7 Ralph Hanna III and Narin van Court have argued that the Jews portrayed in the Siege occupy a posi tion particular to medieval people. Setting the Siege in its textual environment of Yorkshire, Hanna suggests a Lancastrian reception of it wherein the Jews represent those killed in the Yorkshire massacre in 1190.8 In light of her research on Augustinian historians, Narin van Court argues for parallels between first-century and medieval Jews, explaining that the Jew ^wajew must be considered when reading the Siege.9 In these critiques of the Siege, two strands of thought regarding identity emerge: that of the literal, historical reading suggested by Hanna and Narin van Court, and that of the nonliteral, typological reading put for ward by Hamel and others.