Immaculate flesh and the social body: Mary and the Jews

Jewish History

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 47-69

  Despres, Denise L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND   (United States)

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EID: 54649084863     PISSN: 0334701X     EISSN: 15728579     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF02335453     Document Type: Review

References (111)

1. See Denise Despres, "Cultic Anti-Judaism and Chaucer's Litel Clergeon," Modern Philology 91/4 (1994): 413-27.
2. See, e.g., Elisa Narin van Court, "The Siege of Jerusulem and Augustinian Historians: Writing about Jews in Fourteenth-Century England," The Chaucer Review 29/3 (1995): 227-48;
3. and Cecilia Cutts, "The Croxton Play: An Anti-Lollard Piece," Modern Language Quarterly 5 (1944): 45-60.
4. Carol M. Meale, "The Miracles of Our Lady," in Derek Pearsall (ed.), Studies in the Vernon Manuscript (Cambridge, 1990), 135;
5. M.R. James, The Bohun Manuscripts: A Group of Five Manuscripts Executed in England About 1370 for Members of the Bohun Family (Oxford, 1936);
6. Lucy Freeman Sandler, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, vol. 5, 1285-1385 (London, 1986), nos. 111, 135, 138, 140.
7. See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, A Study in Mediaeval Political Theory (Princeton, 1957), 193-206:
8. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, idem, "The Communion of Saints," in Richard P. McBrien (ed.), Catholicism (Minneapolis, 1981), 1155-56.
9. Increasingly, Mary assumed the role in late-medieval theology of Co-Redemptrix and Mother of the Church. Her ever-virginal body thus became a powerful symbol of Ecclesia as the Church Triumphant, the communion of Saints that in Christian eschatology will occur at the end of time, when the Jews convert and the faithful dead are raised in one final purgation and resurrection. The Eucharist "anticipates the eating and drinking at the Lord's table in the Kingdom" (585) at the end of time. Also see Despres, "Mary of the Eucharist: Cultic Anti-Judaism in Fourteenth-Century English Devotional Manuscripts," in Jeremy Cohen (ed.), From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought (Wiesbaden, 1996), 375-401.
10. On bodily resurrection in late-medieval devotional culture, see Caroline W. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity (New York, 1995), 318-41.
11. See Carra Ferguson O'Meara, "In the Earth of the Virginal Womb: The Iconography of the Holocaust in Medieval Art," Art Bulletin 63 (1981): 75-88;
12. and Despres, "Mary of the Eucharist," 391-393.
13. See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, 1992), 209-65.
14. Suzanne Lewis has also provided a radically new methodology of reading medieval words and images as both representing and creating cultural discourse in her Reading Images, Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge, 1995).
15. See Lewis, 240 and 259; Lewis explains the appeal of meditative books: "Liturgy is not only what is written in a liturgical book; it also inheres in the visual elements of a ritual space. In the Gothic illustrated Apocalypse, pictures, like those in a Psalter or Book of Hours, create a sacred space, comparable to the way that a relic or consecrated host converts a private chamber into a makeshift oratory" (259).
16. See also John Carmi Parson, "Of Queens, Courts, and Books: Reflections of the Literary Patronage of Thirteenth-Century Plantagenet Queens," in June Hall McCash (ed.), The Cultural Parr onage of Medieval Women (Athens, GA, 1996), 175-201.
17. Janet Backhouse, Books of Hours (London, 1985), 3.
18. See Roger S. Wieck, Time Sanctified, The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York, 1988), 103-6.
19. The term "professional readers" comes from Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres, Professional Readers in a Manuscript Culture: Politics and lconography in the Production of the Douce Piers Plowman (forthcoming).
20. My argument throughout has been influenced by David Freedberg's methodology in "Image and Pilgrimage," in his The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989).
21. On Jewish demonization, see Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion, and AntiSemitism (Berkeley, 1990), 275-305.
22. The methodology of the "New Art History" is discussed in a number of recent influential works, including Michael Camille, Image on the Edge, the Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)
23. and Michael Camille, idem, The Gothic Idol, Ideology and Image Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989);
24. Lewis, Reading Images;
25. David Freedberg, The Power of Images;
26. and Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, CT, 1989).
27. See Sandler's dating of the mists, A Survey, 144-5.
28. See "De festo corporis cristi" in Carl Horstmann (ed.), The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS., Part I, (London, 1892), 168-73, and my discussion of such sermon exempla in "Cultic Anti-Judaism and Chaucer's Litel Clergeon," 418-21.
29. This prefigural reading of Isaac's sacrifice as the Crucifixion commonly decorated "the initial P or 'per omnia' of the canon of the Mass in the Saturn missals" (the form of the Latin rite first used in the diocese of Salisbury and adopted throughout England and Scotland). An example is reproduced as figure 8 and discussed in Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi, The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), 137.
30. Leah Sinanoglou, "The Christ Child as Sacrifice," Speculum 43 (1973): 491-509.
31. Princeton University Library, Taylor Medieval Ms. I, the only surviving illustrated manuscript of the popular Manuel. See Adelaide Bennett, "A Book Designed for a Noblewoman: An Illustrated Manuel des Péchés of the Thirteenth Century," in Linda L. Brownrigg (ed.), Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence (Los Altos Hills, CA, 1990), 163-82. Illustrations of a popular story from the Vitae Patrum occur on folios 77v and f. 78, reproduced as figures 11 and 12.
32. Bennett, 171.
33. See Ruth Mellinkoff's encyclopedic Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, vol. I (Berkeley, 1993), 140-2.
34. This image, as the image of the Jewish Paschal feast, was popularized in Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Ca. 1310-1324) of which "at least three hundred and ninety-four fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts" have survived. See the illustrations on pp. 102 and 104 in the facsimile of The Mirour of Mans Saluacioun, A Middle English Translation of Speculum Humanae Salvationis, ed. Avril Henry (Philadelphia, 1987).
35. The literature on host desecration and ritual crucifixion is extensive. In addition to Gavin I. Langmuir's History, Religion, and AntiSemitism, see Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, the Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New Haven, CT., 1943), 109-55.
36. This tradition is succinctly set forth in Moshe Lazar's "The Lamb and the Scapegoat: The Dehumanization of the Jews in Medieval Propaganda Imagery," in Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz (eds.), Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis (New York, 1991), 38-80.
37. Although Lewis uses this language to discuss the reading dynamic of illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts, they are pertinent here as they suggest the beginning of a new reading tradition - contemplative reading outside the monastery.
38. David J. Malkiel has demonstrated how medieval Jewish artists, deeply sensitive to the iconographic tradition of Jewish ritual murder in Christian devotionalism, responded with representations of infanticide in the haggadah. This is particularly prominent in German and Northern Italian manuscripts illustrated between 1401-53, when there were thirty:seven ritual murder accusations made against Jews. David J. Malkiel, "Infanticide in Passover Iconography," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 97.
39. Mellinkoff, 141. Mellinkoff explains that even Joseph, Jesus's adoptive father, is occasionally marginalized and deprecated in the Holy Family being linked to the Jews through facial features (143).
40. Mary Minty explores the conflation of Eucharistic and Marian imagery in medieval Christian representations of the Massacre of the Innocents in "kiddush Ha'shem be'einei notzrim be'Germania bi'mei ha'beinayim," Zion 59 (1994): 209-66. Minty argues, however, that the binding of Isaac by Abraham was interpreted as a sacrificial image by both Jews and Christians; Ashkenazic Jews employed it to illustrate forcible baptism.
41. See R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder, Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, CT., 1988), 5. Hsia's reconstruction of the trial of Simon of Trent's killers demonstrates how fully developed the essential narrative of Jewish ritual murder was by 1475, and how a historical event is given specific meaning through "blood and word symbolism" whose meaning is known only to the accusers (85).
42. Lewis, 3.
43. One need merely open up any illustrated catalogue with reproductions from Books of Hours to see the tradition; for example, on ff. 68v and 69 of Jeanne D'Evreux's famous Hours, the pictures illustrating "Terce" are the Crucifixion and an adoration of the Magi scene with Eucharistic overtones, the illustration below depicting the Massacre of the Innocents. See The Hours of Jeanne D'Evreux, Queen of France (New York, 1973), 21.
44. Gilbert Dahan, "Les juifs dans les miracles de Gautier de Coincy (I)," Archives Juives 16 (1980): 42-45, "De l'enfant a un giu qui se crestiena [le petit juitel]. "
45. William Chester Jordan also contextualizes Marian miracles in "Marian Devotion and the Talmud Trial of 1240," in Bernard Lewis and Friedrich Niewöhner (eds.), Religiongespräche 'im Mittelalter (Wiesbaden, 1992), 61-76.
46. See Meale, 131-6; Despres, "Mary of the Eucharist", 385-387; these manuscripts are Copenhagen RL Thotts Saml. 547; Bodl. Auct. D. 4.4.; British Library Ms. Egerton 3277; British Library Ms. Egerton 2781.
47. R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987), 66-99;
48. Robert C. Stacey, "The Conversion of the Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth-Century England," Speculum 67 (1992): 263-83;
49. and see Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 231-5 for the relationship between Jewish persecution and the evolution of the Christian polity.
50. Lewis, 219-20.
51. See Figure 244 in Lewis, 324. Lewis provides a detailed discussion of this manuscript on pp. 309-36.
52. Wolfgang Kemp has argued recently that medieval narrative sequences represented in stained glass and tapestries were created with visual patterns to facilitate remembering and interpreting; accustomed to the mnemonic strategies in homiletic preaching and religious instructive art, medieval readers were capable of receiving arguments through a narrative matrix implementing "two mnemonic strategies, that of theme and schema." W. Kemp, "Visual Narratives, Memory, and the Medieval Esprit du System," in Suzanne Kuchler and Walter Melion (eds.), lmages of Memory, On Remembering and Representation (Washington, D.C., 1991), 90-108;
53. also see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory, A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), especially Chapter 5,
54. "Memory and the Ethics of Reading"; and Ivan Iilich, In the Vineyard of the Text (Chicago, 1993 ).
55. Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind (Philadelphia, 1982), 132-65;
56. on the English origins of the mariales, see Richard W. Southern, "The English Origins of the 'Miracles of the Virgin'," Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1958): 176-216.
57. Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, vol. 2 (New York, 1963), 210-319.
58. See Charles T. Wood, "The Doctor's Dilemma: Sin, Salvation, and the Menstrual Cycle in Medieval Thought," Speculum 56 (1981): 721.
59. A fascinating example of such scholarship is Thomas Bestul's study The Pressure of History and the Passion of Christ: The Cultural Context of Medieval Latin Devotional Writing (Philadelphia, 1996).
60. Such as the prohibitions against Jews employing Christian wet-nurses, selling Christians meat and wine considered unfit for Jewish consumption, and the mandate that Jews wear distinctive clothing. See # 82, 88, and 94 in Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492-1404 (Toronto, 1988), 86-7; 92-3; 99. On the "age of classification," see Moore, 88.
61. The Golden Legend ofdacobus de Voragine, trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger(New York, 1941), 464.
62. Wood, 723.
63. Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, Vol. 1, trans. H. Von E. Scott and C.C. Swinton Bland (London, 1929).
64. On Caesarius's representation of Jews, see Ivan G. Marcus, "Images of Jews in the exempla of Caesarius of Heisterbach," in Cohen (ed.), From Witness to Witchcraft, 247-256,
65. and on the theme of bodily fragmentation in his exempla, see Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 207-9.
66. Johannes Herolt, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, trans. C.C. Swinton Bland (London, 1928), 35-6.
67. See Despres, "Cultic Anti-Judaism";
68. Sinanoglou, "The Christ Child as Sacrifice";
69. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi, 135-9;
70. and Michael Camille, The Gothic ldol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: 1989), 215.
71. See Mellinkoff, Outcasts, 161-78.
72. Theresa Coletti, "Purity and Danger: The Paradox of Mary's Body and the Engendering of Infancy Narrative in the English Mystery Cycles," in Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (eds.), Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia, 1993), 67.
73. Caroline Bynum argues that twelRh-century artists, theologians, and spiritual writers revived an Augustinian notion of individuality, identifying "selves in heaven" with the jewelled reliquaries that linked holiness with crystallization, "each jewellike part was its own victory over corruption," Bynrin, The Resurrection of the Body, 200-10.
74. Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary (New York, 1991), 7.
75. Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary (Ibid., 266-7;
76. Thomas Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France (New Brunswick, N.J., 1983);
77. and Thomas Kselman and S. Avella, "Marian Piety and the Cold War in the United States," The Catholic Historical Review 72 (1986): 403-4. The Marian cult in Necedah, Wisconsin, although never formally sanctioned by Roman Catholic authorities, won the approval of some Catholic clergy; the visionary Mary Ann Van Hoof prophesied through the early 1960s. I am currently exploring the Jewish blood libel myth and Jewish conspiracy theme in her "revelations."
78. Brace Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York, 1989), Chapter 6, "Festivals and Massacres: Reflections on St. Bartholomew's Day," 97.
79. Lincoln, 98.
80. Zimdars-Swartz, 267.
81. Ibid., 270.
82. Although Nicholas Perry and Loretu Echeverria have little understanding of medieval Marian devotion, thereby ignoring its widespread cultural influence and function in favor of its political impact, they construct a strong argument linking Marian devotion to twentieth-century fascism. See N. Perry and L. Echeverria, Under the Heel of Mary (London, 1988).
83. Sander Gilman's recent study The Jew's Body (London, 1991) explores the feminization of the Jew in nineteenth- and twentieth- century psuedo-scientific ethnology; a thorough study of gender and Jewishness in the Middle Ages would be useful to provide a historical context for the myth that Jewish men, as well as women, menstruated and required Christian blood as a medicine.
84. See Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 149.
85. See my forthcoming essay on Jewish-Christian Polemic and The Romance of Identity in The Vernon Manuscript in Bodleian MS. eng. poet a. 1, ff. 301-2.
86. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), especially Chapter 4, "Medieval Memories," 146.
87. See R.S. Wieck, Time Sanctified, The Book of Hours in Medieval Life and Art (Baltimore and London, 1988);
88. Jonathan Harthan, Books of Hours and Their Owners (London, 1977);
89. L.M.J. Delaisse, "The Importance of Books of Hours for the History of the Medieval Book," in L. Randall (ed.), Gatherings in Honor of Dorothy Miner (Baltimore, 1974);
90. Christopher de Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (London, 1986), 168-99;
91. and Janet Backhouse, Books of Hours (London, 1985).
92. Sandler, 143.
93. See Felicity Riddy, "'Women Talking about the Things of God': a Late Medieval Subculture," and Carol M. Meale, "'alle the bokes that I haue of latyn, englishe, and frensch': Laywomen and Their Books in Late Medieval England," in Carol M. Meale (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1150-1500 (Cambridge, 1993), 104-27 and 128-58;
94. Hilary M. Carey, "Devout Literate Laypeople and the Pursuit of the Mixed Life in later Medieval England," The Journal of Religious History 14 (1987): 361-181;
95. Ann M. Hutchinson, "Devotional Reading in the Monastery and in the Late Medieval Household," in Michael G. Sargent (ed.), De Celia in Seculum, Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 1989), 215-28;
96. M.A. Hicks, "The Piety of Margaret, Lady Hungerford (d. 1478)," The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 38 (1987): 19-38.
97. I am borrowing "vernacular theology" from Nicholas Watson, "Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409," Speculum 70 (1995): 822-864; for a discussion of reception and professional readers, see Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Professional Readers in a Manuscript Culture.
98. Wieck, 107.
99. See Wieck's discussion in Wieck, 107-108, and the illustration reproduced as figure 80.
100. See Freedberg, 120-1. David Freedberg explores the relationship between religious archetypes and widely disseminated copies in "Image and Pilgrimage," Chapter Six of his The Power of Images, and includes an important discussion of the expulsion of the Jews of Regensburg in 1519 and its evolution as a pilgrimage site, marked in part by a complex tradition of icons of the Virgin.
101. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech, with Notes and Appendices by Meech and Hope Emily Allen (Oxford, 1940);
102. see p. 312 for notes 23 and 24 of p. 119.
103. The term is William Chester Jordan's, e.g. his The French Monarchy and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1993), 10,
104. and see, in particular, its use by Ivan Marcus, "Jews and Christians Imagining the Other in Medieval Europe," Prooftexts 15 (1995): 211.
105. See my essay "Ecstatic Reading and Missionary Mysticism: The Orcherd of Syon," in Rosalynn Voaden (ed.), Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1996);
106. and Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia, 1991).
107. The Book of Margery Kempe, 124:32.
108. R.B. Dobson, "The Decline and Expulsion of the Medieval Jews of York," Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society, vol. 26 (London, 1979): 48.
109. See William Chester Jordan, "The Last Tormentor of Christ: An Image of the Jew in Ancient and Medieval Exegesis, Art, and Drama," Jewish Quarterly Review 78 (1987): 21-47;
110. and Jeremy Cohen, "The Jews as Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition, from Augustine to the Friars," Traditio 39 (1983): 2; Ruth Mellinkoff's Outcasts is the most comprehensive treatment of the Jews in medieval Passion iconography.
111. See Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 329-41.