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Heather Blurton's Inventing William of Norwich is a fresh examination of one of medieval antisemitism's origin legends: the twelfth-century story of William of Norwich, a boy allegedly tortured and murdered by Jews in a grotesque mock-crucifixion...[A] lucid, erudite and sensitive study, and one that, in an era in which antisemitic conspiracy theories continue, dismayingly, to seep into public discourse, makes for instructive reading. * Times Literary Supplement * Blurton's book [is] critically important and...explains in detail the origins of the most hateful and outrageous of antisemitic lies: the fable of a 12-year-old boy named William whom Catholicism made into a saint because he supposedly performed miracles after dying a martyr's death in 1144 at the hands of malicious Jews who ritually murdered him as a mockery of the crucifixion of Christ...[I]t feels frighteningly fresh and familiar. QAnon and many related absurdities have been started with similar problematics and will likely remain similarly entrenched in human minds and souls. * The Christian Century *

Heather Blurton's Inventing William of Norwich is a fresh examination of one of medieval antisemitism's origin legends: the twelfth-century story of William of Norwich, a boy allegedly tortured and murdered by Jews in a grotesque mock-crucifixion...[A] lucid, erudite and sensitive study, and one that, in an era in which antisemitic conspiracy theories continue, dismayingly, to seep into public discourse, makes for instructive reading. * Times Literary Supplement *

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Heather Blurton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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