Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England

Abstract

two chapters have a bearing on her discussion of gender and religion in her final chapter?Does Shylock's conversion from Jew to Christian also threaten to undo the gendered difference Adelman tries to establish by immediately assimilating the now feminized Jew?Perhaps Adelman answers this final question earlier in the book when she notes Shylock's absence following his enforced conversion, but it seems to have particular relevance to her discussion here.Though she doesn't seem to be aware of it, her study relates in interesting ways to Jonathan Gil Harris's book Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) in which he discusses the Jew as one foreign body and uses a central motif of contagion to describe the English fear of being invaded by foreign others when the real threat or sickness is the other within England itself.The fact that Adelman's study raises such questions is a testament, I think, to its careful scholarship and thought-provoking readings.All in all, Adelman's latest book is a fine achievement.

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