2015/10/01 by Heather Blurton · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Medieval Literature and History #Historical and Linguistic Studies #Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies
paper · doi:10.1017/s0038713415001682
openalex publication_date 2015/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
When Thomas of Monmouth first felt compelled to record for posterity the Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, the vita of a boy purported to have been ritually murdered by Jews in Norwich, England, in 1144 (thus becoming the victim of the first recorded accusation of ritual murder in Western Europe), he chose to do so in language replete with typological and liturgical resonance: Or, as I rather believe, because by the ordering of divine providence he had been predestined to martyrdom from the beginning of time, and gradually step by step was drawn on, and chosen to be made a mock of and to be sacrificed by the Jews, in scorn of the Lord's Passion. [Sed, quod magis credo, diuine nutu prouidentie ad martyrium ad quod a seculis predestinatus fuerat quibusdam ita paulatim gradibus trahebatur, et a iudeis in dominice passionis obprobium deludendus et immolandus.] This language is significant for the way in which it emphasizes William's typological relationship to Christ: just as Christ was anticipated by the Old Testament prophets, the passage implicitly claims, so too was the martyrdom of William of Norwich anticipated in Christ's own death. It has long been recognized that hagiography in general, and the Life and Miracles of William of Norwich in particular, construct both the personal characteristics and the life experiences of their protagonists ultimately on the model of Christ, and that these hagiographies are often informed by liturgical imperatives: as Beryl Smalley noted long ago, “both the language and the content of Scripture permeate medieval thought.” These liturgical imperatives depend in large measure on typological allegory. That is, they draw connections between the Old and the New Testaments, emphasizing the fulfillment of the promise of the Old in the New. In this hermeneutic perhaps lay the appeal of thinking the story of William of Norwich through liturgical language—the liturgy relies upon an established typological hermeneutic for making sense of the place of Jews in Christian society. However, this process has rarely been made explicit or systematically brought to light in the scholarship on the Life and Miracles of William of Norwich. This is in part because we are most used to thinking about the Life and Miracles of William of Norwich as a primary document in the history of anti-Semitism, and perhaps secondarily as a useful source for twelfth-century urban history. Scholars have been most interested in the historical aspects of the text: its origins, its possible sources, and the social function the work performed in its contemporary context. The seminal scholarship of Gavin Langmuir, John McCulloh, Israel Yuval, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has largely focused on discovering the origin of the accusation of ritual murder. For example, Langmuir located its origin with Thomas of Monmouth, Yuval with crusader massacres of Rhineland Jews, and Cohen with the need of Normans and English in post-Conquest Norwich to unite culturally against a common foe, while McCulloh uncovered what he argued to be the earliest evidence of the accusation not in England at all, but rather in a German martyrology. This study seeks to supplement these important analyses by suggesting that the articulation of the ritual murder accusation as it appears in the Life and Miracles of William of Norwich needs to be understood just as much as a response to liturgical expression in the long twelfth century as to socioeconomic or political friction between Christian and Jewish neighbors. In order to fully understand the Life we must be attentive to the ways in which it borrows consistently from the language and the context of the liturgy, especially in those moments when it is most at pains to make the case that William is truly a martyr and a saint.