Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England Legally Absent, Virtually Present

In this book, Miriamne Ara Krummel complicates the notion of the English Middle Ages as a monolithic age of Christian faith. Cataloguing and explicating the complex depictions of semitisms to be found in medieval literature and material culture, this volume argues that Jews were always present in medieval England, and it is only in rereading the historical record that it has been consideredJudenrein--without Jews.

Miriamne Ara Krummel is Associate Professor of Medieval Literature and English at the University of Dayton.

Introduction: Outside Looking In: Re-Membering the Medieval English Jew * Categories of Race: “Judæis Notris Angliæ” and the 1275 Statute of Jewry * Where Curse, Refrain, and Identity Intersect: The Poetry of Meir B. Elijah of Norwich * Encountering Jews beyond the Kingdom of Cathay: Imagining Nation in Mandeville’s Travelogue * Text and Context: Tracing Chaucer’s Moments of Jewishness * Omissions of Antisemitism: Thomas Hoccleve and the Putative Jew * Impossible Desires and Fabulistic Dreams: Conversion in the Croxton Play * Epilogue: When Endings Are Beginnings