Chaucer and the Jews

271 Pages·2013·1.837 MB·English

by  Sheila Delany

C J
HAUCER AND THE EWS
THEMULTICULTURALMIDDLEAGES
Sheila Delany,Series Editor
CHAUCERANDTHEJEWS
Sources,Contexts,Meanings
edited by Sheila Delany
C J
HAUCER AND THE EWS
S , C , M
OURCES ONTEXTS EANINGS
EDITED BY SHEILA DELANY
ROUTLEDGE
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Published in 2002 by
Routledge
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Copyright ©2002 by Routledge
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the Library of Congress.
Chaucer and the Jews/edited by Sheila Delany
ISBN 0-415-93882-1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Editor’s Introduction
SHEILADELANY viii
Part I Chaucer Texts 1
CHAPTER1
THE JEWISH MOTHER-IN-LAW:SYNAGOGA
AND THE MAN OF LAW’S TALE
CHRISTINEM. ROSE 3
CHAPTER2
THE PARDONER’S “HOLY JEW”
WILLIAMCHESTERJORDAN 25
CHAPTER3
CHAUCER’S PRIORESS,THE JEWS,AND THE MUSLIMS
SHEILADELANY 43
CHAPTER4
“JEWES WERK”IN SIR THOPAS
JEROMEMANDEL 59
CHAPTER5
POSTCOLONIAL CHAUCER AND THE VIRTUAL JEW
SYLVIATOMASCH 69
Part II Chaucerian Contexts 87
CHAPTER6
CHAUCER AND THE TRANSLATION OF JEWISH SCRIPTURES
MARYDOVE 89
v
vi Contents
CHAPTER7
READING BIBLICAL OUTLAWS:THE “RISE OF DAVID”
STORY IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
TIMOTHYS. JONES 109
CHAPTER8
ROBERT HOLCOT ON THE JEWS
NANCYL. TURNER 133
CHAPTER9
THE PROTEAN JEW IN THE VERNON MANUSCRIPT
DENISEL. DESPRES 145
CHAPTER10
THE SIEGE OF JERUSALEMAND AUGUSTINIAN HISTORIANS:
WRITING ABOUT JEWS IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
ELISANARINVANCOURT 165
CHAPTER11
“HOUSE DEVIL,TOWN SAINT”:ANTI-SEMITISM AND
HAGIOGRAPHY IN MEDIEVAL SUFFOLK
ANTHONYP. BALE 185
Part III Chaucer,Jews,and Us 211
CHAPTER12
ENGLISHNESS AND MEDIEVAL ANGLO-JEWRY
COLINRICHMOND 213
CHAPTER13
TEACHING CHAUCER TO THE “CURSED FOLK OF HEROD”
GILLIANSTEINBERG 229
CHAPTER14
POSITIVELY MEDIEVAL:TEACHING AS A
MISSIONARY ACTIVITY
JUDITHS. NEAMAN 237
Contributors 247
Selected Bibliography 251
Index 257
Acknowledgments
First and foremost I want to thank the contributors to this volume,especially
the authors of new essays, who rose heroically to the several challenges of
early deadlines, editorial exigency, and press requirements. At Routledge,
Anne Davidson has been warmly supportive of this project, and before the
volume was transferred to Routledge via its parent company’s purchase of
Garland,Paul Szarmach,director of the Medieval Institute at Western Michi-
gan University, and Chris Zacher, of Ohio State University, welcomed the
volume into a Garland series.
Preparation of the manuscript could not have proceeded smoothly with-
out the invaluable aid of my techie research assistants,Margot Kaminski and
Blair Leggett; I fervently thank them for their time,effort,perfectionism,and
electronic wizardry. Aeron Carre and Ken Kaminski provided technical sup-
port and advice at crucial moments. Also essential were the marvelously
helpful staff at Simon Fraser University’s Bennett Library, especially Mark
Bodnar and Emily Sheldon.
Acknowledgment is due to Mary Hamel at theChaucer Review for per-
mission to reprint Elisa Narin van Court’s essay from vol. 29 (1995); to St.
Martin’s Press for Sylvia Tomasch’s chapter from The Postcolonial Middle
Ages, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (2000); to Maud McInerney and Routledge for
Christine Rose’s chapter in Hildegard of Bingen...(Garland,1998); to Brill
Publishers for my article from Medieval Encounters (vol. 5, 1999); and to
Frank Cass Company for Colin Richmond’s chapter in The Jewish Heritage
in British History:Englishness and Jewishness,ed. Tony Kushner (1992).
vii
Editor’s Introduction
SHEILA DELANY
When Sir Edmund Hillary was asked why he climbed Mount Everest, he
replied, “Because it’s there.” My impulse for this project was the opposite:
because it isn’t there. Such a book, whether in collection or monograph for-
mat,hasn’t existed,but is needed for many reasons. In part,this project grows
out of the same realization that inspired a previous one,my guest-edited book-
length issue of Exemplaria (12.1, 2000), titled “Turn it again”: Medieval
Jewish Studies and Literary Theory. My then-recently developed attention to
medieval Jewish culture had indicated little mutual awareness between con-
ventionally trained medievalists and their Jewish studies colleagues. The
Exemplaria issue was meant to help bridge that gap by publishing the work of
a group of theoretically informed Jewish studies medievalists. The present
volume does something similar with a canonical English author:to recuperate
a side of his work and culture that has usually been occluded.
In a real sense it was Chaucer that turned me to Jewish studies—more
precisely, teaching Chaucer’s poetry—because of the impatience I increas-
ingly felt when, of necessity, ventriloquizing Catholic doctrine in order to
render his work accessible and comprehensible to my (mostly Christian sec-
ular) students. The problematic that Gillian Steinberg and Judith Neaman
address in their discussions of teaching this material to Jewish students is not
limited to the Orthodox. A secular,even atheistic Jew might well feel just as
troubled by the ethico-theological underpinnings of Chaucer’s or other
medieval Catholic poetry as an observant rabbi-to-be. I wonder how many
readers bridled at the phrase “Catholic poetry”in the previous sentence:Do
we think of Chaucer as exemplifying Catholicpoetry? Do we offer courses in
“Renaissance Christian drama” when teaching Shakespeare and others; in
“the Anglo-Catholic sonnet sequence”; in “medieval Catholic lyric,” or
“European Catholic romance in translation”? That we generally do not—
despite an abundance of Jewish or indeed Islamic material in all these gen-
viii
Editor’s Introduction ix
res—is precisely the point. We would probably be asked,or feel compelled,
to specify if teaching a course in medieval Jewish literature (an exhilarating
experience that I strongly recommend to any medievalist),but the other label
is invisible because—as Colin Richmond’s essay documents—it is culturally
normative, hence requires no specification. This has been the case even
when,as Richmond argues,the Jews,whether present or absent,were crucial
to the formation of Anglo-Saxon attitudes and the concept of “Englishness”
itself.
“Tell it like it is”: a difficult imperative for historians or historicists,
especially those working in medieval studies. “Alterity” and “presentism”
come to mind as signals of the shoals: do we dare to impose our sense of
things on a much earlier period,which may have been irredeemably differ-
ent from our own? Yet if there is one thing that hasn’t changed down the
ages, surely it is the attempt to manufacture consent (in Noam Chomsky’s
phrase). David Aers has reminded us how very manufactured is the consent,
the consensus, around religious matters, how demanding of the powers not
only of the holy but of the state,its armed forces,its judiciary,its cooperat-
ing intellectuals.1
Those are the sorts of powers examined here,as the writers collected in
this volume contemplate the paradox of what Gloria Cigman some time ago
called “an absent presence.”2 She meant the absence and presence of Jews,
expelled from England in 1290 by royal mandate (though no official docu-
ment has been found,any more than for the French expulsion of 1394). The
English expulsion occurred only about a half century before Chaucer’s birth,
so that during his early lifetime there might still have been a few converted
Jews in England,3and certainly old folk who,as children,had lived alongside
them and who remembered them—much as middle-aged or elderly Hungari-
ans today remember the Jews who were taken from their villages during
World War II and who never returned. Only late in the seventeenth century,
after years of inconclusive national debate,did Jews begin to enter England
in significant numbers (although a few had emigrated there earlier, whether
after the Spanish expulsion of 1492 or as employees at court).4
Despite their physical absence,the literary,theological,and visual repre-
sentation of Jews continued; hence the questions animating this volume are
“How?” and “Why?” By what channels were late medieval English writers
enabled to represent Jews,and for what motives—personal,political,or cul-
tural—did they wish to do so? Timothy Jones and Mary Dove examine the
legacy of Hebrew scripture as reinterpreted and retranslated during the
fourteenth century. Denise Despres explores the significance of the late-
fourteenth-century Vernon manuscript, produced during Chaucer’s lifetime,
as a vehicle for ambivalent attitudes toward Jews; a similar approach is taken
in Elisa Narin van Court’s contextualized study of the late-fourteenth-century
alliterative historical romance The Siege of Jerusalem. The peculiarity of the