Anthony Bale

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"In Feeling Persecuted, Anthony Bale explores the medieval Christian attitude toward Jews, which included a pervasive fear of persecution and an imagined fear of violence enacted against Christians. As a result, Christians retaliated with expulsions, riots, and murders that systematically denied Jews the right to religious freedom and peace. Through close readings of a wide range of sources, Bale exposes the perceived violence enacted by the Jews and how the images of this Christian suffering and persecution were central to medieval ideas of love, community, and home. The images and texts explored by Bale expose a surprising practice of recreational persecution and show that the violence perpetrated against medieval Jews was far from simple anti-Semitism and was in fact a complex part of medieval life and culture. Bale’s comprehensive look at medieval poetry, drama, visual culture, theology, and philosophy makes Feeling Persecuted an important read for anyone interested in the history of Christian-Jewish relations and the impact of this history on modern culture."

This interdisciplinary study explores images of Jews and Judaism in late medieval English literature and culture. Using four main categories - history, miracle, cult and Passion - Anthony Bale demonstrates how varied and changing ideas of Judaism coexisted within well-known anti-semitic literary and visual models, depending on context, authorship and audience. He examines the ways in which English writers, artists and readers used and abused the Jewish image in the period following the Jews' expulsion from England in 1290. The texts are analysed in their manuscript and print contexts in order to show local responses and changing meanings. This important work opens up new texts, sources and approaches for understanding medieval anti-semitism and shows how anti-semitic stereotypes came to be such potent images which would endure far beyond the Middle Ages.

John Lydgate wrote the Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund at the request of his abbot, William Curteys, to commemorate the stay of the young King Henry VI at the Benedictine abbey of Bury St Edmunds from Christmas Eve 1433 to shortly after Easter 1434 when Henry was received into confraternity.

The work survives in thirteen manuscripts or fragments, and BL MS Harley 2278, on which the present edition of the Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund is based, was the copy of the poem presented to Henry VI, probably before 1444. The Lives consists of a prologue, the Life of St Edmund as books one and two, the Life of St Fremund as book three, a conc1uding prayer to St Edmund, an envoy, and an address to Henry VI. The volume also presents the three texts that make up the Extra Miracles of St Edmund which are found in four of the later manuscripts of the Lives and independently in one manuscript.

This edition of the Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund is the first to establish the text on the basis of the readings of all the manuscripts, and is also the first to include the Extra Miracles. The edited texts are followed by a commentary, textual notes, a glossary of proper names, and a selective glossary.

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St Edmund, king and martyr, supposedly killed by Danes (or `Vikings') in 869, was one of the pre-eminent saints of the middle ages; his cult was favoured and patronised by several English kings and spawned a rich array of visual, literary, musical and political artefacts. Celebrated throughout England, especially at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, it also inspired separate cults in France, Iceland and Italy. The essays in this collection offer a range of readings from a variety of disciplines - literature, history, music, art history - and of sources - chronicles, poems, theological material - providing an overview of the multi-faceted nature of St Edmund's cult, from the ninth century to the early modern period. They demonstrate the openness and dynamism of a medieval saint's cult, showing how the saint's image could be used in many and changing contexts: Edmund's image was bent to various political and propagandistic ends, often articulating conflicting messages and ideals, negotiating identity, politics and belief. CONTRIBUTORS: ANTHONY BALE, CARL PHELPSTEAD, ALISON FINLAY, PAUL ANTONY HAYWARD, LISA COLTON, REBECCA PINNER, A. S. G. EDWARDS, ALEXANDRA GILLESPIE

"Salthows" or Salthouse has long been acknowledged as the scribe of the unique surviving manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe. This article proposes a detailed biographical background of Salthouse, identified as Richard Salthouse of Norwich. The connections between Salthouse, Kempe and the city of Norwich are explored, to deepen our understanding of the context in which Kempe's reputation developed and the context in which the manuscript of the The Book of Margery Kempe was written.

According to a rubric by John Shirley (1366?–1456), who was respon-sible for identifying and preserving a great deal of medieval poetry, one July day in the fifteenth century John Lydgate (ca. 1370–1449) wrote a poem for “Quene Kateryn,” the widow of Henry V, “as in here ...

At the rear of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is a small chapel known as the Prison of Christ. This essay traces the history of the Prison, a site that has largely been overlooked in scholarship on imprisonment in the Middle Ages. The Prison of Christ reveals the interplay of western ideas and eastern space, and the ways in which Jerusalem was remade - both spiritually and materially - through cultural imperatives that concerned Christian society at large.

Today we largely take it for granted that every text has an author, but what is understood by the term ‘author’ was very different in the Middle Ages. Medieval English ideas of authorship were many and varied, and show some key changes from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. In manuscript cultures, like England before the late fifteenth century, the author has little control over the repetition of his text; in many medieval vernacular texts the author is represented as a craftsman and translator rather than a visionary or virtuoso. Texts in manuscript were inherently open to rewriting and were often anonymous. The role and status of the author was interrogated by poets and scholars, often revealing a remarkably open sense of who, or what, an author could be. In the later medieval period, traditions of depicting real (Geoffrey Chaucer) and imagined (Sir John Mandeville) authors developed, signalling a growing trend of attaching an authorial identity to a text worth reading. The development of mysticism and affective religion brought further transformations in the role of the author, given the anxiety over who has the right and access to represent divine communication; this issue is raised in The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Margery Kempe, both of which play with conceits of anonymity. After Chaucer, in particular in the poetry of John Lydgate, we can identify the development of the English ‘laureate’ poet. In the early era of print, especially in the prologues of William Caxton, one discerns the emergence of an author, through the posthumous image of Chaucer, similar to that known today: not only a writer but also a creator, a celebrity and an authority.

It has long been thought that Richard of Devizes' account of a ritual murder committed by the Jews of Winchester in the early 1190s refers to a ‘genuine’ allegation and crime. This article explores the ways in which the account is written and for the first time a literary source is suggested for Richard's account. Richard's Cronicon interrogates rather than

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the English mystic Margery Kempe (1373-1438) whose extraordinary life is recorded in a book she dictated, The Book of Margery Kempe. She went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to Rome and Santiago de Compostela, purchasing indulgences on her way, met with the anchoress Julian of Norwich and is honoured by the Church of England each 9th November. She sometimes doubted the authenticity of her mystical conversations with God, as did the authorities who saw her devotional sobbing, wailing and convulsions as a sign of insanity and dissoluteness. Her Book was lost for centuries, before emerging in a private library in 1934.