Man is the Pasture of Being, Part 1: Evilmerodach

by KARL STEEL

This series of posts is going to be about sky burial, ecomaterialism, edibility, and birds vs worms as eaters of bodies, and it’s going to be the rough draft for the first section of my “worms” chapter for my second book. Hang tight if that’s what you want. If the first thing you want, however, is a deep dive on the cultural afterlife of one of the less famous Babylonian kings, then you, my friend, my perhaps avian friend, are in for a treat.

This is the story of Evilmerodach, who cut up his father's corpse and fed him to 300 birds.

Sometime in the early fourteenth century, the Speculum humanae salvationis (The Mirror of Human Salvation) hit Latin Christendom like a ton of allegorical bricks. Available in more than 380 manuscripts from 1324 on, a typical page looks like this:

BnF Lat 512 34r - non-allegorical bricks?

Above, we have two illustrated scenes from the Bible, and below, an interpretation in Latin verse (or, as the fourteenth century wore on, still other languages: English, French, Dutch, Czech, and especially German, but oddly not Italian). For the most part, the SHS illustrates expected scenes: Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden; Noah’s ark; Jonah’s slithering out from the whale; Abraham’s interrupted sacrifice of Isaac; the misery of Job. More surprising are the many historical scenes, largely drawn from the life of David and the Book of Judges: Ehud kills Eglon; Samson pulls apart a lion’s jaws; Benaiah (whom you might remember as a son of Jehoiada) also kills a lion; and, in illustrations as horrific as Goya’s Disasters of War, David punishes his enemies.

BL Sloane 346 18v

And, in every illustrated version I’ve seen (17 so far), Evilmerodach (elsewhere also spelled Evilmarodach, Awel-Marduk, and, less likely, Amel-Marduk) is dismembering the exhumed corpse of his father, Nebuchadnezzar the great, and feeding his limbs to the birds. He is supervising, alone or with his retinue; or he’s standing over a slab or table or down in the sarcophagus, doing the dirty business himself; he has an ax, a knife, or a falchion, presumably coded as the weapon of an “eastern” tyrant. We know he’s the king because he’s wearing a crown; his father’s also crowned, although his head’s likely to be lying on the ground, staring up blankly at his son; or it might be the meal of one hungry bird. Or, it might be hoisted aloft, slung between two. Like a cocoanut (BnF Latin 512, 27r or especially BL Sloane 346 18v).

This would clearly seem to be a bad thing. This is how, for instance, Jacopo de Cessolis’ kingship manual-cum-commentary on chess takes the story: though I don’t know why Friar Jacopo made Evilmerodach his exemplary bad king (research is ongoing, but my eye's on you Giles of Rome), this exhumation is chief evidence that our Bablyonian king needs moral instruction: for Evilmerodach was “a jolye [vigorous] man without justyce and so cruel that he did do hewe his fader’s body in thre hondred pieces and gaf hit to ete and devoure to thre hondred byrdes that men calle voultres” (Caxton’s translation; for the medieval French, see here). I would be astonished if this late thirteenth-century work (surviving in more than 100 manuscripts) were not the immediate source for SHS’s Evilmerodach moralization. But I’m just as certain that neither treatment is quite fair to our king.

The earliest account dates to Jerome’s early fifth-century commentary on Isaiah (for 14:18). He ascribes the story to the Jews (narrant Hebraei huiusmodi fabulam; PL 24: 162C-D), but Josephus’s history, for example, confines itself only to the Biblical account of Evilmerodach’s involvement in Joachin’s triumphal return (Jeremiah 52:31-34, essentially the same as 2 Kings 25:27-30); the Biblical history in pseudo-Philo (middle of the 2^nd c?) doesn’t go any later than the Book of Judges; the twelfth-century traveler Benjamin of Tundala sticks to the Biblical account; so the earliest extant written Jewish version of it belongs to the fourteenth-century Rhineland. Or so says Louis Ginzberg. It may be that the tradition passed, in fact, from the Christians to the Jews.

In Jerome, Evilmerodach gets what Jacopo doesn’t grant him: a motive. Evilmerodach had reigned during the seven years his father lived as a beast, and, when Nebuchadnezzar returned to sanity, he, in his gratitude, flung his son in prison, where he (along with the Jewish king Joachin, aka Jeconiah, aka Coniah) languished until the old king finally died. But Evilmerodach’s counselors needed convincing that Nebuchadnezzar was really gone (metuebant ne viveret qui dicebatur exstinctus); so Evilmerodach had him dragged from the tomb with hooks and ropes, and, with all the moral authority of a just king, proclaimed: “Sepultis omnibus qui a te interfecti sunt, tu solus insepultus iacebis” (all will be buried whom you killed, and you alone will lie unburied). End of story. Quite the opposite of tyranny.

The story shows up next in one of Agobard of Lyon’s (d. 840) many treatises against the Jews, where this Johnny One-Note uses it to prove the truth of Christ’s resurrection. Of course. Still hooks and a rope (unco et funibus); no dismemberment; no birds. These we first get in Haymo of Auxerre’s (d. 855) roughly contemporary Isaiah commentary. Evilmerodach is certain his father will come back: “my father dies when he wants, he rises up again when he wants!” (Pater meus quando vult moritur, quando vult resurgit). Joachin – now coming into his own as a clever courtier – knows just the trick: get 300 birds from various parts of the world, exhume the body, cut him into tiny pieces, and tie every part to a bird (ligaret unicuique avi partem suam), saying: whenever these very birds gather together, then your father will resurrect (Cum hae simul aves quandoque convenerint, tunc resuscitabitur pater tuus). Hugh of St Victor’s (d. 1141) commentary on Joel, like Jerome, ascribes the story to the Jews (Hebraica docet), and simply has Evilmerodoch, still scared, concoct the idea on his own. Here he burns his father to cinders, which he splits into four bags: tying the bags to the necks of four eagles, he releases them to travel to the four corners of the world (Quo in quatuor marsupiis dispertito ad quatuor aquilarum colla ligagavit, quibus per quatuor orbis climata dispositis eas avolare permisit).

It would take Peter Comestor’s (i.e. Peter the Eater’s) enormously successful Historia Scholastica (1173) for Evilmerodach story to get close to its final form: king, 300 parts, 300 birds, and, finally, birdfood. Peter’s version also benefits from an admirable directness:

When he began to reign, he raised up Joachin, whom he had a companion in prison, and fearing that his father would resurrect, who had returned from being a beast into being a man, took Joachin into counsel; at whose counsel, he exhumed the corpse of his father, divided it into 300 parts, and gave the 300 parts to 300 vultures. And Joachin said to him, “Your father will not resurrect until these vultures return together”
 [Cumque regnare coepisset, elevavit Ioachim, quem socium habuerat in carcere, timensque ne resurgeret pater suus, qui de bestia redierat in hominem, consuluit Ioachim. Ad cuius consilium cadaver patris sui effossum, divisit in trecentas partes, et dedit eas trecentis vulturibus. Et ait ad eum Ioachim: “Non resurget pater tuus, nisi redeant vultures in unum.”]

All that Peter misses is the accusation of tyranny. For my friends in English departments, one last, less recherché citation: Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, which is basically Peter Comestor’s version, with its English translations having Nebuchadnezzar’s diced corpse going to “þre hondred vultures” for “etynge” (in Higden’s Latin, “devorandas”), and in the other, as well, to “iij c. gripes” [300 vultures; def. C], presumably also for eating.

To look at this with more charity than Jacopo de Cessolis did, Evilmerodach is simply doing what any king must do. He must secure his rule, both against other present claimants, and against his own lineage, which must neatly, definitively swap him in for the previous king. The previous king really needs to be gone: the king is dead (“are you sure?”); long live the king (“but only this one, for now”)! Faced with this, Evilmerodach, like any king, does what he must. Antique psychoanalytic interpretations of the primal hoard, with everything that follows from that (non/nom/nomnomnom du Père), should also be suggested: the dismembered father, made really dead, is all at once an overcoming of Nebuchadnezzar’s tyranny, a perpetuation of it (by dishonoring the dead), an act of power (who else can get away with desecrating a king’s corpse?), an act of fear (“is dad really dead?”), and of course something that looks more than a little like butchery. As if Evilmerodach were planning to eat his father’s corpse.

Like a ferocious beast. Recall that the story is also one about humans and animals: being with the beasts is like being dead; and being returned to the beasts simply reverses what he had been in his madness. He ate grass as an ox (Daniel 4:30), and now he himself is fodder.

Evilmerodach makes his father a bird feeder.

But Jacopo de Cessolis made him a tyrant, and the Speculum humanae salvationis piled on, so that, even in published scholarship, Evilmerodach’s sometimes charged with having killed his father (this post is, among other things, a resource to ensure that no one else makes this mistake). The Middle English verse explains:

King Evilmeredach of swilk / some tyme gaf for lyknesse
When he in his dede fadere / exercised his wodenesse
Whas body dolven out of the grave / in thre hondreth gobets he kitte
And to thre hondreth voltoures / forto devoure dalte itte
So in thaire fadere crist for thaym dede / haves fals cristen thaym wodely
What thay wilfully synnyng hym est sones crucifye
And thay synne more wreching / crist in his deitee
Then they yt crucified hym lyving / here in humanitee.

That is, Evilmerodach’s treatment of his father is like those who through their sin crucify him over and over again. And that would seem to be that: Evilmerodach is now just plain Evil.

Except that Evilmerodach normally shares his page with Absalom, David’s rebellious son, captured and killed when his long, beautiful hair tangles itself in a tree.

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1806 31v

 For the SHS interpretation, Absalom is no bad son. Instead, he’s a symbol of Christ: Absalom is stabbed by three spears as he dangles from the tree, just as Christ was stabbed by three lances, that is, three pains, namely, the severity of the pain, the bitter grief of his mother, and carrying the weight of the sins of the damned.

This delirious allegorization, like nothing so much as the modern habit of finding Christ in any given thing (warning: dog), reminds us that allegory does not completely overwrite the vehicle. Instead, the sometimes shocking inadequacy of the vehicle to tenor forces us to remember the vehicle’s continued material existence. Though allegory is sometimes -- especially in the Middle Ages -- held to be the “nut” underneath the shell of a literal reading, in this case, the “nut” is the historical referent, available for, and grounding, unceasing and mobile interpretation. In this case, though he is temporarily read as Christ, Absalom remains behind the SHS interpretation what he must still be, a bad son; though he is temporarily read as a figure for blasphemous, false oaths, or just sin in general, Evilmerodach likewise remains a frightened king, doing what he must. And whatever the interpretation, his father’s corpse remains a corpse, dismembered, and the birds remain hungry birds.

We should not lose track of the material business of Evilmerodach. If we remember that, we can pay better attention to the Evilmerodach’s craft. Certainly, sometimes the SHS just throws the new king into the tomb with his father, losing itself in the specificity of this weird solution to royal succession (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. germ. fol. 245 48r; similar, but less odd, BnF Latin 511, 26r). At times, Evilmerodach wields a sword, a royal weapon, and just hacks away at his father’s corpse as he would any other human body (Ms Douce 204 25v or Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 206(49) 25r). Sometimes, however, he uses an ax (BnF Latin 9585, 30v), sometimes with the body on a wooden table, working like a butcher (Sarnen, Benediktinerkollegium, Cod. membr. 8, f 26r).

Sarnen, Benediktinerkollegium, Cod. membr. 8, f 26r

We can compare it to this butcher, for example, from Caffaro di Rustico da Caschifellone’s groundbreaking annals of Genoa, one of whose manuscripts features this worker among its many other civic marginalia (BnF Latin 10136, 6v).

BnF Latin 10136, 6v

As I observed in How to Make a Human (208-10), medieval people were fully cognizant of the similarity between animal and human flesh (after all, the Latin carnis doesn’t differentiate between the two), and the concomitant similarity between butchers and, well, people butchers. Like soldiers. And not only soldiers.

But the distribution of the royal body to the birds also recalls a ritual that has captured the love of ecocritics, me among them. This is the Tibetan ritual of “sky burial,” which, regardless of its variations, always sees corpse fed to wild birds. I’ll have much more to say about this in my next post: about the sometimes ahistorical enthusiasm for this ritual in ecocritical art, in what would have been known about it in Latin Christendom, what this has to do – and doesn’t have to do – with late medieval Christian burial practices, and what is at stake, from an ecocritical perspective, between being esca vermibus (food for worms) and esca avibus (food for birds). And I’ll also have something to say about Heidegger (a sneak preview: I’ll argue that der Mensch ist das Futter des Seins, Man is the fodder of beings).

For now, though, I’ll leave you with this: the connection of Evilmerodach with sky burial seems to be a stretch, and, indeed, for most of the manuscripts I’ve been able to examine, it is. Evilmerodach is a bad, bad king, and he’s doing a bad, bad thing, although he is also, in some manuscripts, being a perfectly good butcher, albeit with an unusual carcass. It may be too much to see this as intimating any kind of sky burial.

Except that at least one German illustrated adaptation of the Bible, Morgan M.0268, fol. 021v, features – surprisingly – Alexander the Great arriving (naked?) through the woods, and, in the middle, a dinner party with Roxana of Bactria, and then, in the right, what I think might be mistakenly labeled as Evilmerodach, dismembering his father and feeding him to the birds. Whoever he is, he's not wearing a crown; but the Morgan believes him to be Evilmerodach; notably, he is in the east, where this late fourteenth-century artist would have expected to find sky burial. And in at least one German Alexander, Evilmerodach’s shrine [“sarc”], green as grass, makes an appearance (3563-67) .

Morgan M.0268, fol. 021v

 I may just be on to something. Part two will arrive in several days.

Jewish/Christian/Queer

by J J Cohen

The amazing Queer Interventions series at Ashgate (ed. Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke) has just published a collection of essays entitled Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities. Edited by Frederick Roden, the volume

investigates three forms of queerness; the rhetorical, theological and the discursive dissonance at the meeting points between Christianity and Judaism; the crossroads of the religious and the homosexual; and the intersections of these two forms of queerness, namely where the religiously queer of Jewish and Christian speech intersects with the sexually queer of religiously identified homosexual discourse.

If you follow the link above, you may browse the table of contents and download Roden's excellent introduction. MOR was kind enough to send me a copy of the "Series's Editors Preface." "Cross-Identifications" is short but quite rich, with observations like this, about openness and neighboring:

What Jewish/Christian/Queer shows us is that the deconstruction of seemingly mutually exclusive identities need not necessarily be a violent operation. Rather, it can make generous and generative space for a kind of openness, to others, to alterity, to racial, gendered, sexual and religious difference. If the Jew, the Christian, and the queer can be shown to neighbour each other, as each of the essays which follows demonstrates, then we can begin to foster ways in which it is possible, in the current politico-historical conjuncture, to love one’s neighbour. The very ethical stakes of the encounter the title of this collection stages hinge upon nothing less.

Cross-identification can foster a "non-assimilating openness to alterity." But the move is not without risks: "Such critical and identificatory porosity is a huge risk, of course, because it gives up on what seem like hard-won identities in favour of impure, mongrel, hybridised identity positions." Following Jean-Luc Nancy, O'Rourke and Giffney call this process dis-enclosing: an "opening up, a blossoming."

I want to quote the ending paragraph of the Preface because it captures eloquently how neighboring might be thought in terms larger than those of mere spatial adjacency. In my current research I have been exploring how the region between Christian and Jew can become in the Middle Ages a space (however volatile, however fragile) of interchange and mutual transformation, a place where heteropraxis undermines orthodoxy. O'Rourke and Giffney write of the necessity of such spaces for neighboring today:

For both Judaism and Christianity the commandment in Leviticus 19:18 to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ is canonical and an ethico-moral imperative. Alain Badiou has reworked the question of the neighbour in terms of what he calls ‘neighbourhood’. As Kenneth Reinhard explains it ‘rather than a definition based on topological nearness or shared points of identification, Badiou describes neighbouring in terms of “openness”. A neighbourhood is an open area in a world: a place, subset, or element where there is no boundary, no difference, between the inside of the thing and the thing itself’. For Badiou we choose, we decide, for the sake of universality, to construct a common open area, a ‘new place of universality’. This forcing open, this love, is ‘the decision to create a new open set, to knot two interiorities into a new logic of world, a new neighbourhood’. Roden’s knotting of the Jew, the Christian, and the queer creates an even more expansive open set and for Reinhard ‘an unlimited number of open sets can be united without being closed or totalized. Hence, the neighbourhood opens on infinity, endlessly linking new elements in new subsets according to new decisions and fidelities’. Jewish/Christian/Queer’s refusal to solidify identities, to promiscuously mix disciplines, theories, positions, is a subjective act in the Badiouian sense, a decision to create a new logic of world, one which has never been so urgent as today.

The Jew of Unbelief / The Jewish Neighbor

by J J Cohen

More Leeds-directed and still rough thoughts, following upon this post. A portion of the introduction that I'll likely condense, it's probably the last piece of the keynote I will share here. Let me know what you think.

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By the twelfth century Ashkenazic Jewish communities cohabitated with Christians in cities across France, Germany, and England. As in Gerald of Wales’s narrative of the mocking Jew, literary and historical texts suggest that these Jews could offer through their rituals and their words a sharp challenge to Christian self-assurance. Pulled into contemporary deliberations over epistemology and religious faith, the Jews became a community intimately involved in questions of orthodoxy and unbelief.

In his groundbreaking essay “The Jewish Minority in Mediaeval England” (1974), Paul Hyams observed that “No devout Christian could see a Jew at Eastertide … without an uneasy feeling that his very presence cast doubt on the fundamental dogma that the Messiah had come.” Christians were fascinated with Jewish incredulity, partly because Jews got to say what Christians sometimes thought but could not safely express. “Jew” might therefore function as a synonym for “heretic,” for the kind of person who might declare -- as does Simon of Tournai earlier in Gerald of Wales’s text -- “God Almighty! How long will this superstitious sect of Christians and this modern invention endure!”

Thus when Margery Kempe is interrogated about her orthodoxy by the archbishop of York, “sum of the pepil askyd whedyr sche wer a Cristen woman er a Jewe” (1.52). The Jew, in other words, could function for Christians as a vehicle useful to express apprehensiveness about their own creed, uncertainties that could be vanquished as the Jew receives his inevitable comeuppance. Now, medieval Jews really did disparage Jesus as “the Hanged One.” They questioned Mary's virginity. They insisted that God had engendered no son, that the messiah was yet to arrive. But I don’t think we possess in examples like the one Gerald provides cases where Christians were listening attentively to their Jewish neighbors. The mocker of Saint Frideswide’s miracles perishes, after all, with his final imprecation unrecorded. For Gerald it suffices that his dying words constituted a blasphemy; their specific content was irrelevant. The Jew of Unbelief is mainly a Christian fantasy. He exists within and for the Christian imagination.

The Jew of Unbelief is a figure frozen in time, enacting in the modern day a script inherited from the New Testament Passion. Just as biblical Jews disbelieved and murdered Christ, modern ones will repudiate and perhaps sacrifice the children of Christ. The Jew of Unbelief may therefore join the other Christian-imagined Jews so well detailed in recent scholarship: the Spectral Jew (Steven Kruger), the Hermeneutic Jew or “living letter of the law” (Jeremy Cohen), the Virtual Jew (Sylvia Tomasch), the Protean Jew (Denise Despres), the Jew of the Book (Anthony Bale). Such fantasy figures enabled Christianity to envision itself as distinct from its Judaic source (a difficult and ongoing project: see especially Daniel Boyarin’s work on the partitioning of Judaism and Christianity). In all of these imaginings the Jew is not coeval: he is an intrusion into modernity of a superceded past. The real life extension of such excision of the Jew from contemporaneity and lived reality is physical and property-directed violence. Negative representation and temporal distancing cannot be divorced from the pogroms that marked the last decade of the twelfth century in England. No coincidence, I think, that Gerald of Wales could be writing in Lincoln in the 1180s about the punishment of a saint-doubting Jew, and that the city could witness violence against its Jewish residents in 1190.

In the “Prioress’s Tale,” Jewish agency in the death of the litel clergeon is made evident through divine revelation – as it must be, for the Jews in Chaucer’s imagined Asia live in geographic separation from the Christians, in a ghetto that demarcates and bounds a purely Jewish expanse. According to Gerald the suicide of the Jew who cast doubt upon saintly efficacy is revealed in the most ordinary of ways: by the Christian servants and nurses who form a part of his family’s household. The religious quarantine that Chaucer described was never the historical experience of the England in which he wrote. Although Jewish families might have clustered in an area, no ghettos existed. Until the Expulsion of 1290, Christians and Jews shared urban space. They lived alongside each other and were domestic intimates. Coinhabitation meant that Jews were necessarily a living people, contemporaries, to their Christian business relations, employees, neighbors. I make that obvious statement because I think we do not acknowledge it enough. We tend to adopt the perspective of the medieval stories we interpret, narratives that may not be able to enact a geographical separation like Chaucer did, but offer textual orderings of the world undergirded by temporal and cultural partition.

So, to return to the domestic employees who ratted out the Jewish parents in Gerald’s story of the mocking Jew: did the Christian nurses, servants and neighbors who dwelled with and alongside the Jews see their employers and business relations and acquaintances as locked in another time, a time that is not (as Gerald would say) “in modern times”? At Oxford, Lincoln, York, Norwich, London – in all of those large cities where Jews and Christians cohabitated, shared more than simply space – could something happen between Christian and Jew that might yield a narrative other the timeless one provided by the Jew of Unbelief, whose narrative is by, for and about Christians alone? How do we free medieval Jews from their freezing in typological amber? How do we escape the temporal tyranny practiced against them, and give medieval Jews the possibility of a fully inhabited, living and changing present, as well as an unpredetermined future? How do we restore to medieval Jewishness the same mutability discernible in Christian identity and belief? Can we find places where orthodoxy and orthopraxy break down, to discover an improvised space of relations where the relations that unfold within a heterogeneous community might be rather different from officially produced and publicly professed creeds? Can we glimpse in lived praxis a coinhabited space where Christian and Jewish convivencia is not detemporalized but extemporalized, unfolding differently from what orthodox narratives might suggest?

Gerald’s narrative of Jewish-Christian difference, for example, is also a narrative about Christian reliance upon Jews – in this case, not only as doubt-expressing doppelgangers, but for employment as nurses and servants. Within Gerald’s text exists oblique acknowledgment of a mixed (if stratified) household, one in which Jews and Christians tangibly and mutually depend upon each other. Antisemitic texts often reveal a fuller domain than they intend to depict, a sublunary world in which we might witness, however fleetingly, narratives of coinhabitance more vivacious and complex than the reductive, hostile, and historically frozen representations at their surfaces.
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After this opening I move to two antisemitic texts from later periods: Matthew of Paris's narration of the Hugh of Lincoln story, and the Mandeville-author's fantasy of the Jews enclosed in the Caspians who await the freedom Antichrist will bring. My key terms are conjunction and coinhabitance. We'll see how this all plays out ...

"And the fervor of his devotion increased so much within him that he utterly transformed himself into Jesus through love and compassion."

by KARL STEEL

A young man, disrespectful of institutional religion, is hailed by two women as Jesus. He allows himself to be crucified, wounded in five places. Elsewhere, another pious soul, caught up in the new fervor of imitatio Christi, crucifies himself on a hilltop on a Good Friday, is taken down half dead by passing shepherds, and recovers fully in a few days.

The first is a familiar story, somewhat muddled, but it takes place in the 1222, in Oxford, rather than the first century. Instead of Mary Magdelene and another Mary (Matthew 28:1; but cf. Mark 16:1, Luke 24, and John 20:1), it's simply "duabus mulieribus," one an old practitioner of the dark arts, and the other the young man's sister. The second story, from Jacques de Vitry's Sermones Feriales et communes, likewise recalls Gospel narratives both deliberately--the hilltop and Good Friday--and accidentally--the shepherds, the return to (full) life after a few days.

The latter exemplum may in turn recall another thirteenth-century pious self-mortification, that recorded by Margaret of Oingt in her life of Beatrice of Ornacieux (d. 1303) in acts meant for our admiration rather than disgust:

She evoked the Passion of Our Lord so strongly that she pierced her hands with blunt nails until it came out at the back of her hand. And every time she did this, clear water without any blood gushed out. Soon after, the wound closed and healed so well that nobody could see it any more. (49)

I bring these stories together as a companion to Jeffrey's post below, on the mocking Jew of Lincoln, whose heckling, as Jeffrey suggests, "seems to be speaking a thought likely on more minds than his own." The Jew is made by Gerald to bear the burden, and to materialize the problems, of dissension and uncertainty within the Christian community. Might we do something similar with the crucifying Jews of the thirteenth century, those accused of reenacting the Passion upon stolen Hosts and kidnapped Christian children? Considered within the field of the pious (and excessively pious--and what perfect piety is not excessive?) stories above, within the field of the various imitatio christi of the thirteenth century, what role are Jews and their purported crimes made to play?

I ask in part because of the first story, from Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicon Anglicanum, appears sandwitched within two other stories, one about a Christian who mutilates himself to become a Jew, and another about a Jew who mutilates the dead, with the help of an employee (a Christian (?) boy), to learn the future, the very temporal realm from which Jews--witnesses of the past--should be barred.

Presented without any further comment, because I have no further thoughts yet, here's a fuller picture:

Anno Dominicae incarnationis MCCXXII, dominus Stephanus, Cantuariensis archiepiscopus, tenuit consilium suum apud Oxoniam post Pascha; ubi inter caetera exordinavit quemdam diaconum apostatam, qui pro amore cujusdam mulieris Judaicae se circumciderat: qui exordinatus, a ministris domini Falconis combustus est. Adductus est ibidem quidam juvenis incredulus cum duabus mulieribus in concilio, quos archidiaconus ejusdem provinciae accusavit crimine pessimo incredulitatis; juvenem scilicit, quod nollet ecclesiam intrare, nec divinis interesse sacramentis, nec patris catholici adquiescere monitis, et quod se crucifigere permiserit, quinque vulnera in corpore adhuc apparentia gestans, Jesumque se vocari a mulieribus illis gaudebat. Accusabatur una mulierum veterana, quod maleficis incantationibus ex longo tempore esset dedita, et quod juvenem praedictum suis magicis artibus ad tantam dementiam ac talem convertisset. Unde ambo, de tali crimine convicti, jussi sunt inter duos muros incarcerari quousque deficerent. Alia vero mulier, soror praedicti juvenis, libera dimissa est, quia impietatem illorum revelavit.

Eodem anno, quidam Judaeus nigromanticus puerum quemdam pretio conduxit, quem in cute recenti cuiusdam mortui collocavit, ut sic, per quasdam incantationes nigromantiae, futura posset prospicere; puero ad interrogata respondente de quibusdam futuris quae ei quasi praesentialiter apparebat. (190-91)

In the Year of the Incarnation of Our Lord 1222, Lord Stephen, Archbishop of Canterbury, held his council at Oxford after Easter; when among others he judged a certain apostate deacon, who circumcised himself for love of a certain Jewish woman: after being defrocked, he was burnt by the servants of the Lord of Falco (?). There was led forward into the hearing a certain unbelieving youth with two women, whom the archdeacon of that province had accused of the crime of the worst unbelief; namely, that the youth refused to enter a church or to take part in the divine sacraments or be content with the warning of the Catholic fathers and had allowed himself to be crucified, bearing the appearance still of five wounds on his body, and that he was called Jesus by these women who praised him. One of the women was accused, because she had been dedicated to wicked incantations for a long time and because she had converted the aforesaid youth by means of her magic arts to such insanity. As for these two, having been convicted of such a crime, they were commanded to be imprisoned between two walls until they died. But the other woman, the sister of the aforesaid youth, was set free, since she had revealed the impiety of the others.

In that same year, a certain Jew, a necromancer, paid a certain boy to collect the skin of those who had recently died, so that he might, by certain necromantic incantations, see into the future; the boy, when interrogated, spoke about future things that appeared to him as if happening presently. [my lousy translation]

(thanks to Gavin Langmuir, "Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder," Speculum 59 (1984): 820-846, at 836 n55 for directing me to Ralph and Jacques).

Medieval Jew Punks Medieval Christians

by J J Cohen

From some work in progress:

The twelfth-century cleric Gerald of Wales tells a story about a Jew who doubted Saint Frideswide of Oxford.

The narrative appears in his Gemma ecclesiastica ["Jewel of the Church"]. This text on canon and moral law seems to have been composed during Gerald’s studies at Lincoln towards the close of the twelfth century – a time when Jews and Christians were living in the city together, sometimes quite peacefully, sometimes not. In a long arc of examples illustrating God’s propensity to strike those who question Christian dogma deaf, dumb, paralyzed, or defunct, Gerald supplies an episode “which took place in modern times,” when the body of the city’s patron saint was translated from the monastery in which she died to a shrine church.

The event took place in 1180, and may have been witnessed by Gerald himself. This moment of civic celebration was marked by frequent miracles worked by the Anglo-Saxon virgin, drawing a stream of worshipers to her new tomb. A certain young Jew infiltrated the crowd, with hands and legs tied by cords as if he were paralyzed. After “mockingly” begging the saint for help, he would unbind his ropes and declare himself healed, shouting “Behold, what great miracles the holy Frideswide can work! She has cured others in the same way as she has just now cured me.”

This nameless Jew, in other words, undermined through histrionic excess the marvels supporting the saint’s revitalized cult. Riffing on what Judith Butler called “gender insubordination,” we might call this irreverent Jewish imitation “dogma insubordination”: a parodic overperformance of an orthodox norm that empties that norm of self-evidence, that erodes its foundation by exposing its status as effect “disingenuously renamed” as cause, a fabrication susceptible to disruption. The Jew’s confrontational parody of saintly healing was meant to cast doubt on the veracity of the Oxfordian efflorescence of cures. Can an obscure virgin from five hundred years ago really be so powerful “in modern times”?

The Jew, in other words, seems to be speaking a thought likely on more minds than his own. He pays a price for his lampooning of orthodoxy, hanging himself in his father’s cellar by the same cords with which he faked a divinely given mobility. He dies uttering an unspecified blasphemy, a last and a lost protest against the narrative vengeance machine that swallows him, that engulfs every Jew in Gerald’s text who dares poke a lance against a crucifix or hurl a rock at an image of Christ or desecrate a host. Although his parents attempt to conceal their son’s suicide, the event is quickly made public by “the Jewish family’s servants and nurses, who were Christians” – to the “great joy and rejoicing” of the Christians, and the “great shame and confusion” of the Jews (Jewel of the Church 1.51, p. 118).

[An early instance here of Jewish humor. Nowadays Christians just laugh at Jewish jokes, or groan, or throw a tomato. Back then God forced you to kill yourself. No one likes a yid punk].

Coexist?

by J J Cohen

Some time ago I posted about an exhibition at the British Library called Sacred, and noted Mary Beard's dubiousness about its injunction to tolerance. In general I agree with Beard: most religions, in their orthodox manifestations, assert an inviolable and singular claim over truth. Tolerance is therefore possible only to the extent that this Truth is held silently or not insisted upon. Actual practitioners of many religions will often therefore choose not to live their faith in its most orthodox manifestation. They will opt for a quiet, ad hoc and adaptable heterodoxy which enables a living together with others.

I've been returning to this question of tolerance and coexistence as I prepare my lecture for Leeds, since I'm interested in orthodoxy, praxis, and coinhabited space -- a fancy way of saying that I am mapping something of what happens when Jews and Christians dwell as unsecluded neighbors. What passes between the groups? What middle space might be formed in which the othodoxies and orthopraxes cease so much to matter? Neighborliness and violence are so far my keywords, because they meet in strange ways: sometimes with horrendous results (propinquitous Jews are blamed for the deaths of Christian children), sometimes with a heroic ones, sometimes in mutedly affirmative ways, and sometimes even in a complex relationship that allows violence to be part of something more than a strategic coexistence, allows violence to be heard as a minority's complaint. More on that last point at a future date, but for the time being I want to stress that this coinhabited space is hybrid both culturally (a mutable network of Christian-Jewish exchange) and temporally (stereotypy inherited from the past comes up against an adaptive present heavy with several possible futures).

So I've been meditating a bit on Matthew Paris's narration of the murder by Jews of young Hugh of Lincoln. This little boy's death enabled the flourishing of the most successful of the child martyr cults in England, the only one to gain royal sanction. You can find the whole episode in a pretty good English translation here.

Matthew Paris is no friend of the Jews. He's the one who gives us, for example, the infamous (and no doubt spurious) story of Abraham of Berkhamsted, who kept a statue of Mary in his privy so that he could defecate upon it every day. His narration of Hugh's martyrdom never hesitates for a moment to wonder if the nineteen Jews executed for the murder might have been innocent. For Paris, the Jews practice upon contemporary Christian innocents the same tortures that they practiced upon Jesus, for no other reason that they are Jews, and Jews do such things, eternally. Jewishness, in other words, is a temporally frozen identity.

Yet there is a line in Paris's martyrdom narrative that has always struck me. Hugh's mother is frantically searching for her missing son:

The boy's mother had been for some days diligently seeking after her absent son, and having been told by the neighbours that they had last seen him playing with some Jewish boys of his own age, and entering the house of one of that sect, she suddenly made her way into that house, and saw the body of the child in a well into which it had been thrown.

We know that Hugh was kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured in that house. Here he was crowned with thorns, beaten, made to drink gall. All of this happens, of course, against his will. Yet in the narration of the abduction, a few words from Paris open up the possibility of glimpsing another world: "they had last seen him playing with some Jewish boys of his own age, and entering the house of one of that sect." The Jews of medieval Lincoln did not live in segregated space: they were not, like the Hebrayk peple of Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, inhabitants of a ghetto. The Lincoln Jews lived with and among their Christian neighbors. They shared urban space, and to some degree they shared lives.

Sometimes, Matthew Paris quietly admits, Jewish and Christian children even played together, on the streets and in each other's homes.

Identities and Impurities

[illustration: Winter Shack with Child, photo by author]
by J J Cohen

The close of December is a difficult time of year for anyone whose identity is pure. The holiday that looms tomorrow is too secular; is being warred against; is too Christian; is too commercial; carries with it too much paganism; distracts from Easter; doesn't matter; matters too much; carries a weight it does not merit; should be replaced by the ten days of Newton; and so on.

I was going to compose a long post about hybridity versus purified identities, modern and medieval, Christian and Jewish. Some notes (or at least some URLs) towards that post are collected here. I thought I had the duration of The Care Bears Movie to get those words assembled, but a series of phone calls involving an unexpected saving of a stranger's life and the complications of a surgery have conspired to leave me with about three minutes before those polychromatic ursines save the day. Then I've obligated myself to construct a house out of frosting, graham crackers, and leftover Halloween candy.

So I'll say this. Over the past year I have been engaged in two simultaneous reading projects, some small fruits of which have appeared on this blog: surveying new work in the history of Jewish-Christian identities (e.g. Boyarin, Yuval, Elukin, Horowitz), and researching contemporary [youth] reinventions of Jewishness via media old (Heeb, Nextbook) and new (Jewschool, Jewdas, Jewcy and the like). The two projects have much in common, though I'm not certain that the scholars from group one would agree that they have fellow travelers in group two. Both movements redefine what Jewish identity means in the past or the present (and in Boyarin's case, both at once, especially in Border Lines. If Gloria Anzaldua read Talmud and patristics, she'd have composed Border Lines). Both groups have seen strong public reactions against what they propose: Boyarin condemned as anti-Jewish, Yuval having been informed it would have been better had he never published his research, contemporary movements feeling a backlash as in this article from n+1 or the predictable identitarian comments to this story. Two common emphases within this criticism are (1) the border line must be drawn somewhere in order to provide coherent identity, so why not draw the line where it has always been drawn? (2) those who refuse the inherited identity paradigm are actually rejecting the hard work that it takes to merit such an identity.

Neither of these seem to me particularly cogent critiques: if the identity border is arbitrary, then why retain the same-old same-old after all? This same-old same-old is typically NOT the timeless and unchanging identity it has passed itself off as being. A longer historical view provides effective counter arguments to both. And what could be more labor intensive than forging an identity out of inherited and new pieces? Nothing facile about that process...

You'll hear more about this history of hybridity and mutability in the future (though in a way you've heard quite a bit about it from me already, here and here). For the time being, though, I simply offer this thought, appropriate to the ending of the year and the completion of another twelve months of this blog.

The medievalist identity advocated at ITM, often implicitly, always with passion, is an impure one: practicing a contingent rather than a known-in-advance Medieval Studies, touching present and past, embracing the creative potential of both. We've never argued that codicology or paleography or philology or any other -gy ought to be denefestrated from the House of Medieval, but we do want to keep our doors open wide enough to welcome whatever rough beast, Tiny Shriner, Muslim punk, mestizo, or monster slinks our way. We want -- I want -- not so much to change the field, but to acknowledge that medieval studies has already been deeply and enduringly transmuted. If it ever had a stable and well bounded identity, that went out the window some time in the 1980s, when feminism changed its rules, made it a space more welcoming to strangers. Maybe the welcome arrived even before that, when atheist Marxists were grumbling against allegory-mad Robertsonians (or maybe that was just one doctrine replacing another; it is hard for me to tell). I've suspected that sometimes in my own work I've imported new shibboleths, turns of phrase and schools of theory implicitly necessary to belong to the reconfigured field: if you can't say extimité you can't drink mead in this hall, buddy. On this blog and in my work, I've now attempted to submerge the theory somewhat rather than cite it as frequently as I did in some of my earlier publications. I have worked towards a more congenial prose style, one that invites rather than simply sorts its readers, one that develops that lingua franca et jocundissima that I mentioned in my Kzoo paper.

This blog is an ongoing part of that project, and I thank you for being among its community this year. Whether you are in the midst of celebrating Hanukkah, or hanging your stocking for Christmas, or festivating at the solstice, or doing the Saturnalia or holding a Molochmas or even if you are just enjoying the trickling away of the last month of 2008, Wæshail.

So, how are you celebrating? And if you feel like answering a much harder question, for what [medievalist] identity do you yearn?