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

Jewish History

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 235-255

  Lampert, Lisa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

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EID: 52549114173     PISSN: 0334701X     EISSN: 15728579     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1014244920475     Document Type: Review

References (101)

1. Lines 57-60. All quotations the Croxton Play of the Sacrament will be from the standard edition, Norman Davis, Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, Early English Text Society, suppl. ser. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 58-89.
2. A facsimile edition can be found in Norman Davis, Non-Cycle Plays and the Winchester Dialogues (Leeds: School of English, 1979).
3. The text of the play survives in folios 338r-356r of Trinity College, Dublin, M.S. F.4.20 (Catalogue No. 652). The copy of the play appears to have been made in the mid-sixteenth century. For a discussion of the importance of the context of the play's copying and transmission with a very different emphasis than this essay, see Seth Lerer, "Represented Now in Yower Syght," The Culture of Spectatorship in Late Fifteenth-Century England," in Barbara Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds., Bodies and Disciplines; Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 29-62.
4. See also Michael Jones, "Theatrical History in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament," ELH 66 (1999): 223-260.
5. Here I echo Bernard Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes without Jews: Images of the Jews in England 1290-1700 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975). Glassman was among the first to attempt a large scale discussion of how a "shadowy image" of the Jews could be kept alive in England even after the 1290 expulsion.
6. David Bevington characterizes the play's Jews as generic doubters, "deplored not because of their particular ethnic origin but because they are heathens lacking faith in Christ's divinity." See his Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 754.
7. Cecelia Cutts pioneered the anti-Lollard reading with her "The English Background of the Play of the Sacrament" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1938) and "The Croxton Play: An Anti-Lollard Piece," Modern Language Quarterly 5 (1944), pp. 45-60.
8. Ann Nichols analyzes the play's use of "Lollard" language, "Lollard Language in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament," Notes and Queries 36.1 (1989), pp. 23-25.
9. Gail McMurray Gibson also argues that the play is directed at Lollards, seeing Jonathas and his men as "Jews," rather than referents to actual Jews; The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 34-41.
10. I would argue that a reading of the Croxton play as anti-Lollard doesn't preclude an anti-Jewish meaning, but rather draws upon it. I see the terms Lollard and Jew as connected in the Croxton play. See my "After Eden, Out of Zion: Jews and Gender from Paul to Shakespeare," Chapters 3 and 4, forthcoming.
11. Donnalee Dox, "Medieval Drama as Documentation: 'Real Presence' in the Croxton Conversion of Ser Jonathas the Jewe by the Myracle of the Blessed Sacrament," Theatre Survey 38 (1997), pp. 97-115
12. and "Representation Without Referent: The Jew in Medieval English Drama. An Exploration of Christian Alterity in The Conversion of Ser Jonathas the Jew by Miracle of the Blessed Sacrament" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1995).
13. Critics have made compelling arguments for a Bury provenance. See Gibson, pp. 34-35 and Bevington, p. 756.
14. Sarah Beckwith calls "the Bury St Edmunds connection...irrefutable, " "Ritual, Church and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body," in David Aers, ed., Culture and History 1350-1660: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writings (New York: Harvester/Wheatsleaf, 1992), p. 85 n. 25. Seth Lerer, reading the play as a "drama about drama," argues for a new perspective on the location and dating of the play that would take into account the play's Tudor reception, but while his is a very compelling reading, I do not find it successfully refutes the connection to Bury. The fact that the play likely traveled also does not preclude a Bury origin and, indeed, Gibson argues that this traveling feature is a point in favor of Bury as the original site of the play (34-35). On the play as travel ing see also Jones 226.
15. As R. Dobson asserts, the exact sequence of the "series of explosions" of violence that moved from town to town in 1190 is "badly documented." For a detailed discussion of the violence in York see his "The Jews of York and the Massacre of March 1190," Borthwick Papers 45 (1974), p. 25.
16. See also Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978).
17. Roth, p. 58.
18. Robin R. Mundill, England's Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion 1269-1290 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 52.
19. "Eodem tempore fuit sanctus puer Robertus martirizatus, et in ecclesia nostra sepultus, et fiebant prodigia et signa multa in plebe, sicut alibi scripsimus." See Cronica Jocelini de Brakelonda: de rebus gestis Samsonis, Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi, H.E. Butler, ed. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1949), p. 16.
20. o idus Junii, feria iiija." Cited in the notes to Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda: de rebus gestis Samsonis, Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi, J.G. Rokewode, ed. (London: Camden Society, 1840), p. 114.
21. Roth, p. 24.
22. Cronica, p. 45. Dominus abbas peciit a rege literas ut iudei eicerentur a villa Sancti Aedmundi, allegans quod quicquid est in uilla Sancti Aedmundi, vel infra bannam leucam, de iure Sancti Aedmundi est: ergo, uel iudei debent esse homines Sancti Aedmundi, uel de uilla sunt eiciendi. Data est ergo licentia, ut eos eiceret, ita tamen quod haberent omnia katalla, scilicet et precia domorum suarum et terrarum. Et cum emissi essent, et armata manu conducti ad diuersa oppida, abbas iussit sollempniter excomunicari per omnes ecclesias et ad omnia altaria omnes illos, qui de cetero receptarent iudeos uel in hospicio reciperent in villa Sancta Aedmundi. Quod tamen postea dispensatum est per iusticiarios regis, scilicet, ut si iudei uenerint ad magna placita abbatis ad exigendum debita sua a debitoribus suis, sub hac occasione poterunt duobus diebus et ii noctibus hospitari in uilla, tercio autem die libere discedent.
23. Jocelin of Brakelond, Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, trans. Diana Greenawayand Jane Sayers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 42.
24. In addition to the way it illuminates the political maneuvering of the Abbot and the Crown, Samson's request also echoes the ways in which the ceremony of the eucharist sets the boundaries of the Christian community, much as it does in the Croxton Play. Here the space of the town and its environs should be inhabited only by Christians, St Edmund's men, who partake in the beliefs and rituals of the Church. Those who do not belong must be expelled, along with those who collaborate with the Jews.
25. Antonia Gransdon, The Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds, 1212-1301 (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964), p. xiv
26. and David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 503-504.
27. Cronica, p. 10.
28. Chronicle, p. 10.
29. Even more interesting, I think, is the possibility that the ritual murder accusation surrounding the death of little Robert was forged in the heat of power struggles within the Abbey, as a part of those struggles, although my thoughts here must remain conjectural.
30. Joe Hillaby, "The Ritual-Child-Murder Accusation: Its Dissemination and Harold of Gloucester," Jewish Historical Studies 34 (1994-1996), p. 73.
31. On a possible rivalry with Norwich, see Robert Stacey, "Anti-Semitism and the Medieval English State," The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell (London: Hambledon Press, 2000), pp. 169-170.
32. Chronicle, p. xx.
33. On the relationship of the Abbey and the town of Bury see Robert Gottfried, Bury St Edmunds and the Urban Crisis: 1290-1539 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
34. The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Henry, Nobel MacCracken, ed., Early English Text Society, Vol. 117, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 138-139.
35. A version of the text can also be found in Hillaby, "The Ritual-Child-Murder Accusation," pp. 108-109.
36. Jocelin of Brakelond refers to his now lost history of little Robert in his Chronicle, see Greenaway and Sayers, p. 15.
37. Lines 37-38.
38. H. Copinger Hill also connects Chaucer to the legend of little Robert, speculating that Chaucer was familiar with his story. His reasoning is highly speculative and impossible to substantiate, and the article as a whole, which seems to take the ritual murder accusation as real rather than alleged, is deeply problematic. Of interesting note, however, is his reference to a page of miniatures that may refer to little Robert in a privately owned late 12th-century MS of "Life of Christ and of the Virgin." There are additional pictures added in the fifteenth-century, including the "Oracio Sancti Roberti" with four illustrated compartments, a photograph of which is included in the article. The first features a woman putting little Robert into a well with the scroll "Voluit set non potuit abscondere lucerna[m] dei" and the second shows little Robert martyred with arrows in the manner of St Edmund. Hill connects the well with the privy in Chaucer's tale. I do not find this reference in the well affects my reading of the Croxton allusion to little Robert. Rather it seems that these tales of alleged abuse by Jews are intricately related to one another, part of a discourse beautifully analyzed in Miri Rubin's Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
39. See Hill, "S. Robert of Bury St Edmunds," Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archae ology (1931), pp. 98-105.
40. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, in Larry Benson, ed., 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987). Subsequent references in the text refer to this edition.
41. Richard L. Homan, "Devotional Themes in the Violence and Humor of the Play of the Sacrament," Comparative Drama 20 (1986), p. 334.
42. For an excellent reading that does not emphasize the figure in the oven as a child, but as Christ see Sarah Beckwith, "Ritual, Church and Theatre," pp. 65-89.
43. Richard L. Homan, "Two Exempla: Analogues to the Play of the Sacrament and Dux Moraud," Comparative Drama 18 (1984), p. 241.
44. See note 2.
45. Gibson, p. 124.
46. Lines 33-40. For an account of the fire, see Gibson, p. 36.
47. The choir screen is now lost, but transcriptions of the verses are contained in MS Arundel 30, housed in the College of Arms, London (see esp. f 208). For transcription of some of what this MS contains, see also Montague Rhodes James, On the Abbey of S. Edmund at Bury (Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1895), pp. 190-191.
48. A fascinating link between these verses and an inscription on the late twelfth-century ivory cross now housed in the Cloisters Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is discussed in Sabrina Longland, "A Literary Aspect of the Bury St Edmunds Cross," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 2 (1969), pp. 410-429.
49. The cross is elaborately carved with figures and legends; some of which depict the Jews and their alleged role in the Crucifixion. Norman Scharfe and Thomas Hoving have both connected the Cross to Bury St Edmunds under Samson and to Samson's anti-Jewish stand. Thomas P.F. Hoving, "The Bury St Edmunds Cross," The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 22 (1964), pp. 317-340
50. and Scarfe, Suffolk in the Middle Ages: Studies in Places and Placenames, the Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, Saints, Mummies and Crosses, Domesday Book, and Chronicles of Bury Abbey (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1986).
51. Other scholars, most notably Ursula Nilgen, have argued against a rush to assume Bury as the site of origin. See "Das Grosse Walrossbeinkreuz in den Cloisters," Zeitschrift fu"r Kunstgeschichte 48 (1985), pp. 39-64.
52. For a comprehensive discussion of the Cross and the scholarly debates surrounding it, see Elizabeth C. Parker and Charles T. Little, The Cloister Cross: Its Art and Meaning (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994).
53. Rubin, Gentile Tales, p. 12.
54. These stories were both contained in an important collection created by Anselm of Bury St Edmunds no later than 1125, a collection which defined the corpus of Marian tales. See Rubin, Gentile Tales, pp. 7-10.
55. See Rubin, Gentile Tales, p. 10.
56. The story has many variations. For a detailed discussion of the major versions and their relationship to tales of host desecration, see Rubin, Gentile Tales, pp. 7-39.
57. Note also Rubin on the role of women in the host desecration narratives, pp. 73-76 and R. Po-Chia Hsia on the different treatment of Jewish women in ritual murder trials in his Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 105-116.
58. Robert C. Stacey, "From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration: Jews and the Body of Christ," Jewish History 12 (1998), pp. 11-25.
59. See Leah Sinanoglou, "The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christ Plays," Speculum 48 (1973), pp. 499-500.
60. See also Denise Despres, "Immaculate Flesh and the Social Body: Mary and the Jews," Jewish History 12 (1998), pp. 49-50.
61. R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 54-56.
62. Another representation of the story of the Jewish boy appears at Lincoln Cathedral, site of the shrine of Little Hugh, the famous child martyr mentioned by Chaucer's Prioress.
63. Denise Despres, "Mary of the Eucharist: Cultic Anti-Judaism in Some Fourteenth-Century English Devotional Manuscripts," in Jeremy Cohen, ed., From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1996), p. 380.
64. Cutts, "Croxton Play," 47. She continues, "It seems, indeed, as though the deliberate choice of a vague and foreign setting and the absence of the mention of any relic shrine were a conscious attempt to keep the doctrinal teaching on a high and spiritual plane."
65. Lines 37-38.
66. Sister Nicholas Maltman, O.P., "Meaning and Art in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament," ELH 41 (1974), pp. 150-151.
67. For a discussion see Clifford Flanigan, "The Roman Rite and the Origins of Liturgical Drama," University of Toronto Quarterly 43 (1974), pp. 263-284.
68. There have been countless attempts to explain and explore this temporality and in his magisterial treatise on the history of the Mass, Joseph Jungmann suggests that the "simplest solution" for explaining the "presence of the sacrifice of Christ" and the clearest "result of reasoning from tradition" is the concept of "Mysteriengegenwart, " developed by Odo Casel in the twentieth-century. Casel's ideas have been debated since their introduction, and a full examination of the term is beyond the scope of this essay, but what I do find useful about this term is the way that it illustrates, through its very linguistic components, not only the element of a "mystical presence" as Jungmann's English translator renders the German into English, but also the urgency of the way in which the Mass brings the past sacrifice of Christ into "the present" - "die Gegenwart," thus opening and creating a new temporal present that exists sacramentally. Joseph Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, volume 1, trans. Francis Brunner (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1950), pp. 177-178.
69. See Odo Casel, "Das Mysteriengedächtnis der Messliturgie im Lichte der Tradition," Jahrbuch für Liturgiewissenschaft (1926), pp. 113-124;
70. "Glaube, Gnosis, Mysterium," JbLw 15 (1941), pp. 155-305.
71. For translations of selected articles see, The Mystery of Christian Worship and Other Writings, Burkhard Neunhaeser, O.S.B., ed. (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1962).
72. For a discussion of Casel's concept see Louis Bouyer, Liturgical Piety (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1955), pp. 86-99.
73. The Mass: an historical, theological and pastoral survey. Trans. Julian Fernandes, S.J., Mary Ellen Evans, ed. (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1976).
74. Joseph Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, p. 184.
75. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 14.
76. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 111.
77. For an exploration of what lay people may have experienced during a Mass in late medieval England and the relationship of this ritual to dramatic experience see T.P. Dolan "The Mass as Performance Text," in John Alford, ed., From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1995), pp. 13-24.
78. Duffy, p. 119.
79. Ibid.
80. Lydgate's Merita Missae, Appendix V, in T.F. Simmons, ed., The Lay Folks Mass Book (London: EETS, 1879), p. 151.
81. "Langforde's Meditations in the Time of the Mass (Bodleian, Wood 17)," in J. Wickham Legg, ed., Tracts on the Mass (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1904), p. 25.
82. Cited in Marion Glasscoe, "Time of Passion: Latent Relationships between Liturgy and Meditation in two Middle English Mystics," in Helen Phillips, ed., Langland, the Mystics and the Medieval English Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S.S. Hussey (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 141-161. Glasscoe points to the centrality of the Passion in both "the Mass and the daily Office throughout the Year. Between them they enact and order for believers their commonsense of how an ultimate reality engages with the processes of time: in the Mass, by a corporate sense of all life being a divine gift sustained in time by processes of death and resurrection; in the Office by a daily pattern of worship, which commemorates the Incarnation in the yearly cycle of time and links the activities of the Church in the present time with the Saints" (141).
83. Despres, "Immaculate Flesh," 47.
84. Sarah Beckwith, Christ's Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 66-67.
85. See also Nicholas Love, Mirrour of the Blessyd Lyf of Jesu Christ, ed. Michael G. Sargent (New York: Garland Pub., 1992).
86. Beckwith, Christ's Body, p. 81. Duffy cites Kempe as an example of how far such visionary practice could be "carried," 119.
87. Margot Fassler, "Representations of Time in Ordo representacionis Ade," in Daniel Poirion and Nancy Regaldo, eds., Yale French Studies (1991), p. 98.
88. Karl Morrison calls this temporal mode the "eternal today." See his "The Church as Play: Gerhoch of Reichersberg's Call for Reform," in James Ross Sweeney and Stanley Chodorow, eds., Popes, Teachers, and Canon Law in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 114-144.
89. John Archer, "The Structure of Anti-Semitism in the Prioress's Tale," Chaucer Review 19 (1984), p. 48.
90. John Archer, "Chaucer Review 19 (1984), Ibid., p. 47.
91. Spector argues that the Croxton play is "fundamentally a story of conversion" and cites Bevington's categorization of the play as a conversion play; "Time, Space and Identity in the Play of the Sacrament," in Alan E. Knight, ed., The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), p. 189.
92. See Bevington, p. 754.
93. Spector, p. 190.
94. See Lampert, "After Eden, Out of Zion: Jews and Gender from Paul to Shakespeare," forthcoming.
95. Hillaby, "The Ritual-Child-Murder Accusation," esp. 85-97.
96. On the creation and dissemination of the ritual murder myth in England see John McCulloh, "Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Dissemination of the Myth," Speculum 72 (1997), pp. 698-740.
97. See note 5.
98. See Despres, "Immaculate Flesh" and "Mary of the Eucharist."
99. Versions of the story of the Wandering Jew existed by the fifteenth century; the beginnings of the legend are centuries older. We find accounts in the thirteenth-century chronicles of Roger of Wendover and his successor as chronicler at St Albans, Matthew Paris. One of the origins of the legend is Malchus, the figure from John 18:4-10, who is conflated with the high priest who strikes Jesus in John 18:20-22. There are also important connections to the story of Cain, who is connected to Jewish perfidy and to the murder of Christ as the murder of Abel corresponds typologically to the Crucifixion. See George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence: Brown University Press, 1965), p. 16.
100. Mircea Eliade, "Les mythes du monde moderne," Mythes, rêves et mystères (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 29.
101. Cited in Edgar Knecht, Le Mythe du Juif Errant: Essai de Mythologie Litteraire et de Sociologie Religieuse (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1977), pp. 8-9