"Blind" Jews and blind Christians: Metamorphics of marginalization in medieval Europe

Exemplaria

Volumn 14, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 351-382

  Wheatley, Edward ^a  

^a HAMILTON COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950233413     PISSN: 10412573     EISSN: 17533074     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1179/exm.2002.14.2.005     Document Type: Review

References (65)

1. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 60-65
2. On Augustine, see Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Semitism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 19-22; on Aquinas
3. see John Y. B. Hood, Aquinas and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995)
4. For a broader overview, see Elisa Narin van Court, "Socially Marginal, Culturally Central: Representing Jews in Late Medieval English Literature," Exemplaria 12 (2000): 293-326
5. For example, the bull Sicut Judeis non, which forbids forced baptism, violence against Jews, desecration of Jewish cemeteries, and other anti-Semitic activities, was endorsed "by six popes during the twelfth century,... by ten popes during the thirteenth, by four popes during the fourteenth (including an antipope), and by three during the fifteenth century"; Solomon Grayzel, "The Papal Bull Sicut judeis," in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict: From Late Antiquity to the Reformation, ed. Jeremy Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 231-59, at 231-32
6. For other protective measures, see Edward M. Synan, The Pope and the Jews in the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1965)
7. Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 125ff
8. See also Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1978)
9. Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 189
10. Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943), 50
11. In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961)
12. When deafness is mentioned, it is generally associated with blindness. See, for example, Matthew 13:10-17 and Mark 8:17-18, in which Jesus rebukes those who do not follow him for having neither eyes to see nor ears to hear. In his vitriolic Adversus judaeorum, Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, said that Jews' "willful hardness of heart made them blind, deaf, and insane"; see Karl Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 45-46
13. Holy Bible, Douay-Rheims translation, ed. Richard Challoner (Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books, 1989)
14. Quoted in Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, 144
15. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 28-54 44.2, trans. John W. Rettig (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1993), 175. This interpretation also appears in the Glossa ordinaria
16. Bede; On Tobit and on the Canticle of Habakkuk, trans. Séan Connolly (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), 41-43
17. The story of Tobias was particularly well-known in Matthew of Vendôme's version, comprising over 2,000 lines of elegiac verse, which was adopted as a curricular text. It was one of the so-called Auctores octo collection that dominated European grammar-school education in the later Middle Ages, and it was printed fifty times before 1500. Although the poem cites Bede's commentary on the Tobias ("exponit Beda," line 53), Matthew does not provide a consistent allegorical reading of the story. However, it is significant that he chooses the moment of the father's blinding to invite his readers to allegorize, using the conventional metaphor of the nut and the shell (lines 283-302). The edited Latin text of the Tobias appears in Mathei Vindocinensis, Opera, vol. 2, ed. Franco Munari (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1982), 161-255
18. for an English translation, see Ronald E. Pepin, An English Translation of Auctores octo, a Medieval Reader (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 79-148
19. Robert L. A. Clark and Claire Sponsler, "Othered Bodies: Racial Cross-Dressing in the Mistere de la sainte hostie and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999): 73
20. Quoted in Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews, 184, 186
21. In this context it should be noted that within a century following John's death (ca. 407), drama was banned in the Roman empire because of the disorderly, immoral nature of public performances. See David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 3
22. Quoted in Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews, 198
23. Lester K. Little, "The Jews in Christian Europe," in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity, ed. Cohen, 276-97, at 287
24. For fuller analyses of some of these episodes, see Gavin Langmuir, "Historiographic Crucifixion," in Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, ed. David R. Blumenthal (Chico, Cal.: Scholars Press, 1984), 1:1-26
25. "The Knight's Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln," Speculum 47.3 (1972): 459-82
26. and Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 266-71
27. Hood, Aquinas and the Jews, 105
28. Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 214
29. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales 7.490-91, from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987)
30. For a more detailed examination of the royal protection of Jews, or tuitio, see Stow, Alienated Minority, 273-74
31. Brigitte Gauthier, "Les 'aveugleries' médiévales, " Cahiers d'histoire (Lyon) 29.2-3 (1984): 97-118; for a brief history of the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, see 103-14
32. Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 152
33. In the case of the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, this resemblance would have been strengthened by the fact that the walled institution grew as donors provided funds for building and as residents built their own houses close to the original communal buildings. By the fifteenth century it had become "a veritable small city with residences, churches, a bell tower, a cemetery, a mill, a well, a bakery, a tavern, an infirmary,... schools for girls and for boys, a prison, and three courtyards"; Louis Guillaumat and Jean-Pierre Bailliart, Les Quinze-Vingts de Paris: Échos historiques du XIIIe au XXe siècle (Paris: Société francophone d'histoire de l'ophtalmologie, 1998), 6
34. Pierre Villey, L'aveugle dans le monde des voyants (Paris: Flammarion, 1927), 93
35. Mollat, Poor in the Middle Ages, 291
36. For a historical discussion of fourteenth-century anti-vagrancy laws in England, see Anne Middleton, "Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version 'Autobiography' and the Statute of 1388," in Stephen Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds., Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 208-317
37. Gauthier, "Aveugleries médiévales," 109. She also mentions that the residents of the Hospice des Six-vingts in Chartres wore fleur-de-lys badges with an added crescent moon (116)
38. Guido Kisch, "The Yellow Badge in History," Historia Judaica 19 (1957): 102
39. In lines 85-96 of his poem Ordres de Paris, Rutebeuf satirizes the blind beggars from the Quinze-Vingts first among the orders of licensed mendicants in the city: Li roi a mis en un repaire (Més je ne sai pas por qoi faire) Trois cens aveugles route a route. Parmi Paris en va trois paire; Tote jor ne finent de braire: "Aus trois cens qui ne voient goûte!" Li uns sache, li autres boute, Si se donent mainte çacoute, Qu'il n'i a nul qui lor esclaire. Si feus i prent, ce n'est pas doute, L'ordre sera brullee toute, S'avra li rois plus a refaire. The king has assembled in a residence (although I don't know what for) three hundred blind people in a line. Across Paris they go three by three; all day long they do not stop braying, "Give to the three hundred who don't see anything." One pulls, another pushes, they often give each other jolts because there is no one to guide them. If the fire took it, there is no doubt that the house of their order would be entirely burnt down, and the king will again have more to do. Oeuvres complètes de Rutebeuf, vol. 1, ed. Edmond Faral and Julia Bastin (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1969), 326
40. Bevington, Medieval Drama, 181
41. Norman Davis, ed., Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, EETS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). The Croxton Play will be cited by line numbers in the text
42. See Steven F. Kruger, "The Bodies of Jews in the Late Middle Ages," in James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher, eds., The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 301-23
43. The connection between the Jews of the Croxton play and the Lollards was first made by Cecilia Cutts in "The Croxton Play: An Anti-Lollard Piece," MLQ 5 (1944): 45-60, but she is so intent upon drawing this parallel that she denies the play's basic anti-Judaism
44. In "Ritual, Church, and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacred Body," Sarah Beckwith stresses the importance of the reintegration of the body of Christ, i.e., the Christian community, at the end of the Croxton play (in David Aers, ed., Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992], 65-89)
45. "[M]agis risum et clamorem causabat quam devocionem, et quandoque lites, contenciones et pugne inde proveniebant in populo"; Anna J. Mill, "The York Plays of the Dying, Assumption, and Coronation of Our Lady," PMLA 65 (1950): 867-68
46. The image of the monkey dangling from a coffin is reproduced in Herbert Read et al., English Stained Glass (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d.), black-and-white plate 41. In Les mystères. (Paris: Hachette, 1880), 2:470-71, L. Petit de Julleville describes an analogous episode in a fifteenth-century French "Assumption of the Virgin": Jews who want to interrupt the funeral are struck blind. This play evidently exists only in an incunable; it has not been printed in a modern edition
47. See, for example, the ironmongers' play in The Chester Mystery Cycle, vol. 1, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, EETS s.s. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 303-14. In this play the materialistic crucifiers crave disorder to the extent that they gamble for Jesus's clothing before crucifying him
48. Ludus Coventriae or The Plaie Called Corpus Christi, ed. K. S. Block, EETS e.s. 120 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 297
49. Several examples appear in The York Plays, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford:' Clarendon Press, 1885); see, for example, 338, line 34; 346, line 277; 351, line 61; 353, line 129
50. The Towneley Plays, vol. 1, ed. Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley, EETS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 286 and 265, respectively
51. MS Egerton 2658, cited in Rose Jeffries Peebles, The Legend of Longinus in Ecclesiastical Tradition and in English Literature, and Its Connection with the Grail (Baltimore: J.H. Furst, 1911), 109
52. A number of manuscripts of Piers do not call Longinus a Jew; see the textual note for this line in George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds., Piers Plowman: The B Version (London: Athlone Press, 1975), 2:611
53. Ludus Coventriae, 310
54. York Plays, 368
55. See Peebles, Legend of Longinus, 141
56. L. J. N. Monmerqué and Francisque Michel, eds., Théâtre français au moyen âge (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1879), 13
57. Arnoul Gréban, The Mystery of the Passion: The Third Day, trans. Paula Giuliano (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 1996), xiii. Performance of the play continued into' the next century
58. Arnould [sic] Gréban, Le mystère de la passion. ed. Gaston Paris and Gaston Raynaud (Paris: Vieweg, 1878), 346; trans. Giuliano, 174
59. In the fabliau Les trois aveugles de Compiègne, a clerk stages for himself a similar show. He tells three blind men that he is giving them a coin, and each thinks another has it. The four go to a hotel where the blind men indulge in a stereotypically gluttonous, drunken meal. When they must pay, confusion ensues as the three quarrel over who has the money, and the hotelier threatens violence. The clerk, who "splits his sides laughing" at the scene, agrees to pay, but later he tricks the hotelier out of the money as well. Again, the performativity of blindness is central to the work. See Philippe Ménard, Fabliaux français du moyen âge, vol. 1 (Geneva: Droz, 1979), 109-18
60. Le garçon et l'aveugle, ed. Roques, cited by line numbers in my text. Translations here are mine, but the play is available in English in Medieval French Plays, trans. Richard Axton and John Stevens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 197-206
61. Erik von Kraemer, Le type du faux mendiant dans les littératures romanes depuis le moyen âge jusqu'au XVIIe siècle, Societas Scientarum Fennica, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 13.6 (Helsingfors, 1944), part 2, "Le mendiant aveugle et son valet dans les littératures française et espagnole depuis le moyen âge jusqu'au XVIe siècle," 41-83
62. Stow, Alienated Minority, "The King's Jews," 273-80
63. See also Leonard B. Glick, Abraham's Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 156-58
64. Aside from individual refusals to repay debts, kings handed down edicts that invalidated loans. For example, a few months after taking the throne in 1223, Louis VIII of France stated that no extant loans from Jews could continue to accumulate interest, and any debt more than five years old was invalid (Glick, Abraham's Heirs, 163-64)
65. P. L. Jacob, ed., Recueil de farces, soties, et moralités du XVe siècle (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1882), 212