Christian Anti-Semitism and Intermedial Experience in Late Medieval England

Abstract

The paradox underlying the topic of this essay comes from The Book of Margery Kempe (hereafter BMK), a fifteenth-century English spiritual biography. It is well known that the Jews were comprehensively expelled from England in 1290, but BMK’s protagonist, Margery Kempe (c. 1373—c. 1440) of Lynn (Norfolk), sees Jews all around her; her neighbours are cast as Jews, she is accused of being a Jew, she prays for the Jews, and Christ’s torments at the Jews’ hands are re-enacted both in her mystical visions and in her imitative manner of living. Curiously, on Kempe’s many opportunities to meet Jews, during her trips to Poland, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Italy and the Levant, she does not. This essay does not critique Kempe for her failure to include Jews in her book; rather, it examines the virtuality of late medieval Judaism through which Kempe’s intimate fantasies of Jewry could be more ‘real’, more true, than actual living Jews. Through such mediated fantasies, this essay, in part, seeks to query the title of the volume in which it is located, The Religions of the Book. Medieval Christians did often imagine their ‘religion of the book’ as configured around the codex (a volume, as a modern book): standard images of the Gospel authors or of St. Anne teaching the Virgin to read or of St. Jerome in his study or of Christ holding the Law, generally valorise these holy figures through their holding of a codex.1 This book, The Book, represents orthodoxy, authority and textual canonicity; indeed, such images of ‘the book’ establish Christianity as a ‘religion of the book’, based on the witness of scripture. However, the practice of medieval Christianity in England was by no means configured thus around ‘the book’: later medieval Christianity was practiced in conversation with aesthetic and emotional cues, unofficial and semi-orthodox narratives and memories and, the topic of this essay, richly intermedial artefacts. ‘Reading’ in the Middle Ages means the intellectual interaction with a text, but this was not necessarily done through a book, and was often mediated through vision, hearing or memory.2 It is such multimedia and intermedial artefacts, rather than The Book as such, that led to Kempe’s aesthetic construction of Jewry and in doing so ensured that Judaism remained a topic of crucial debate in late medieval English devotion, long after the Jews’ expulsion from England.

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