Overview

One of the most fascinating aspects of medieval culture was the imaginary violence Christians believed that Jews carried out, and the subsequent violence Christians committed against Jews. Many Christians believed that Jews committed crimes against Christian children, Christ's body, and the Eucharist, leading them to conclude that Jews were out to destroy their religion and way of life. They retaliated with expulsions, riots and murders that systematically denied Jews the right to religious freedom and peace. In this book, Anthony Bale explores the Christian pain and fear so often blamed on Jews, and how the imagined violence caused Christians to retaliate with crushing violence of their own.

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9781861897619

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Reviews

'Anthony Bale has written another innovative and challenging book ... Bale encourages the reader towards subtle contextualising of the use of images ... Above all Feeling Persecuted - a beautifully produced book - reinforces the understanding, which several recent studies have manifested, of the centrality of the Jew to the devotional experiences and religious understandings of medieval Europeans. It leads the reader towards a new appreciation of late medieval religious culture.' - History Today '[a] brilliant study of the medieval iconography of violence ... Bale demonstrates the intertwining of the virtuous Christian and the malevolent Jew by reading a wide variety of medieval images and texts ... carefully constructed and interrelated readings ... he has given other historians crucial road markers of how to think about the relationship of a minority to a hostile majority.' - Reviews in History 'Bale seeks to understand Christian attitudes towards Jews and Judaism holistically, inviting consideration of the aesthetic, intellectual and devotional reasons for imaginary slanders. His emphasis, as might be expected, is on the authorizing nature of perceived persecution: victimhood as a peculiarly empowering form of subjectivity. Beyond this broad point, however, the chief strengths of his book lie in its often deft analyses of an array of texts and artefacts. Bale hones in on the most characteristically tangible and piercing qualities of medieval material culture - its appeals to somatic engagement. ' - Marginalia 'This book provides a useful angle from which to read - and teach - literary and other artifacts of the often tense co-existence of Christians and Jews throughout the Middle Ages. Bale does an excellent job of illuminating a lost aesthetic of persecution that valorized edifying fear. ' - Comitatus 'This sage book about medieval Christianity not only explores the value of pain and persecution for spirituality and subjectivity but demonstrates how religions and cultures construct and deposit their own virtual realities of experience and memory.' - Anthropology Review Database

Author Information

Anthony Bale is Reader in Medieval Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and the author of The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350-1500 (2006).

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