Abstract
How are Jews marked and perpetuated as the Other in and by medieval English visual imagery? To answer this question, students study and discuss manuscript illuminations, prompted by Peter Miller on object as evidence and Margaret Miles on image as documentation in a challenge to seek medieval meaning. The scholarship of Ruth Mellinkoff, Sara Lipton, and Debra Higgs Strickland provides evidence of visual anti, with students scrutinizing examples created in England before and after the Jewish Expulsion of 1290, including Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiare divin, the Abingdon Apocalypse, and the Holkham Bible Picture Book. According to their interests and disciplines, students raise issues of interpretation, patronage, and access, assessing how images designate Jews as the Other while reflecting English attitudes and actions toward them.
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Notes
- 1.
Peter N. Miller, “How Objects Speak,” Chronicle of Higher Education 15 Aug. 2014, sec. B, 8; Web.
- 2.
Margaret R. Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 9.
- 3.
For early Christian imagery, see Jeffrey Spier, ed., Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
- 4.
Margaret R. Miles, “Santa Maria Maggiore’s Fifth-Century Mosaics: Triumphal Christianity and the Jews,” Harvard Theological Review 86.2 (1993): 155–75, esp. 162, 176.
- 5.
Robert Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 129–67.
- 6.
For imagery of Jews in European culture, see Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History (New York: Continuum, 1996); and Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 95–155.
- 7.
Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 15–54, 97–128, 171–99; Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Later Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1.59–94, 111–44.
- 8.
Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 21–28.
- 9.
Paul Hyams, “The Jews in Medieval England, 1066–1290,” England and Germany in the High Middle Ages, ed. Alfred Haverkamp and Hanna Vollrath (London: German Historical Institute; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 173–92; and Robert C. Stacey, “The Conversion of Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth-Century England,” Speculum 67.2 (1992): 263–83.
- 10.
Paul Hyams , “Jews in Medieval England,” 178, 190–91.
- 11.
There are useful on-line collections, such as those of the British Library, Pierpont Morgan Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and Warburg Institute.
- 12.
J. J. G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 179–83.
- 13.
Miriamne Ara Krummel, Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 23–47.
- 14.
Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. 1–8.
- 15.
Guillaume le Clerc, The Bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc, trans. George C. Druce (Ashford, Kent: Headley Brothers, 1936), line 2860.
- 16.
Anti-Jewish elements appear in a sixth-century Latin translation of the Greek Physiologus (“naturalist”), a Christianizing bestiary on which most northern European examples are based; see Physiologus, trans. Michael J. Curley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 10–12.
- 17.
M. C. Hippeau, Le Bestiaire divin de Guillaume, Clerc de Normandie (Caen: A. Hardel, 1852), esp. 67–72.
- 18.
Sara Lipton , Images of Intolerance, 21–28; Debra Higgs Strickland , Saracens, Demons, and Jews, 122–30.
- 19.
Robert Reinsch, ed., Le Bestiaire: Das Tierbuch des normannischen Dichters Guillaume le Clerc (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1892), lines 463–72; my translation.
- 20.
For a discussion of this image and the correspondence between the bronze serpent and the caladrius, see Herbert L. Kessler, “Christ the Magic Dragon,” Gesta 48.2 (2009): 119–34.
- 21.
Guillaume le Clerc , Bestiary, lines 491–503.
- 22.
This “violation of the frame,” as it is sometimes called, is often pointed out by art historians but almost never investigated; see an often-quoted passage by Meyer Schapiro in “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” Simiolus 6.1 (1972–1973): 9–19, esp. 11–12 (first published in Semiotica 1 [1969]: 223–42).
- 23.
Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art, 31–74.
- 24.
The questions here and elsewhere in this chapter reflect those formulated by both students and faculty in similar pedagogical settings, working together and building on one another’s contributions. One caveat: questions that we as faculty offer might lead to conclusions to which we have already come, having studied the material for a longer period of time, so it is important to encourage students’ involvement.
- 25.
Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries , 12–13.
- 26.
By the mid-thirteenth century, refusal to convert could mean imprisonment or death; see Robert C. Stacey, “Conversion of Jews,” 281.
- 27.
Debra Higgs Strickland , Saracens, Demons, and Jews, 211–39, esp. 212–21.
- 28.
Derk Visser, Apocalypse as Utopian Expectation (800–1500): The Apocalypse Commentary of Berengaudus of Ferrières and the Relationship between Exegesis, Liturgy, and Iconography (Leiden: Brill, 1996), esp. 87–103.
- 29.
Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 205–34.
- 30.
The Harlot is often portrayed as the personification of Luxuria (Lust), whose attribute is a mirror. Her yellow garment does not match the biblical text (Rev. 17.4), but this is underpainting; the manuscript was not finished.
- 31.
For identification of attributes and symbols, see James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2007); this section of Berengaudus ’s commentary is transcribed in Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images, 370 n. 349.
- 32.
Nigel Morgan, “Old Testament Illustration in Thirteenth-Century England,” The Bible in the Middle Ages: Its Influence on Literature and Art, ed. Bernard S. Levy (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 149–98, esp. 149–55.
- 33.
Michelle P. Brown, The Holkham Bible Picture Book: A Facsimile (London: British Library, 2007), 1–17.
- 34.
This sartorial requirement resulted from a decree by Henry III in 1217; see Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art, 305.
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Caroselli, S.B. (2017). Illuminating Difference: Christian Images of Jews in Medieval English Manuscripts. In: Krummel, M., Pugh, T. (eds) Jews in Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63748-8_12
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