Inventing William of Norwich: Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200 9780812298536

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Inventing William of Norwich

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Inventing William of Norwich Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200

Heather Blurton

U n i v e r si t y of Pe n ns y lva n i a Pr e ss Ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Blurton, Heather, author. Title: Inventing William of Norwich : Thomas of Monmouth, antisemitism, and literary culture, 1150-1200 / Heather Blurton. Other titles: Middle Ages series. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Series: The Middle Ages series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021042924 | ISBN 9780812253924 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780812298536 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: William, of Norwich, Saint, 1132 or 1133-1144—In literature. | Thomas, of Monmouth, active 12th century. | English literature—Middle English, 11001500—History and criticism. | Antisemitism in literature. | Blood accusation. | Antisemitism—History—To 1500. Classification: LCC PR255 .B57 2022 | DDC 820.9/3529924—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042924

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Inventing William of Norwich

1

Chapter 1. The Language of the Liturgy

24

Chapter 2. Ritual Crucifixion in the Age of the Hermit

58

Chapter 3. William at the Age of Twelve

87

Chapter 4. William of Norwich Between History and Fiction

122

Afterword. Afterward

157

Notes 167 Bibliography 205 Index 227

Acknowledgments

This book had its long-­ago origin in a project on the representation of cannibalism as a political trope in medieval English literature. In the process of writing that book, I asked for feedback on what I might include, and the frequency with which I got the answer that the book should have a chapter on accusations of Jewish cannibalism led me to turn to the sources for the history of antisemitism in twelfth-­century England, and it was there that I found the strange story of William of Norwich. It is out of the chapter I initially began to write then, on the moment in Richard of Devizes’s Cronicon where a boy hysterically screams out the accusation “you’ve killed my friend and you’ve eaten him too!” that this book has taken its shape. Therefore, my first debt of gratitude is to these interlocutors, chief among them, Joan M. Ferrante, Robert W. Hanning, Robert M. Stein, Haruko Momma, Carmela V. Franklin, and Christopher Baswell. Since then, this project has traveled far and wide with me, and in the process I have accumulated many debts of generosity that this book does not go far enough in repaying. I wish to thank Hannah R. Johnson, Lisa Lampert-­Weissig, and Kathy Lavezzo, who offered stimulating and supportive critiques of most of the chapters. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Miri Rubin for including me in her AHRC research scheme on William of Norwich, Youth, Violence and Cult, as well as to the scholars I was lucky enough to meet through it, including Sara Lipton, Robert Stacey, and Simon Yarrow, each of whose scholarship has shaped the project. Conversations with Anthony Bale, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, William F. MacLehose, and Emily Rose have offered inspiration at key moments. Heartfelt thanks are due to Jessica Zisa for research assistance. This book was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK; the University of York, Department of English and Related Literature; the University of California Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship; the University of California Regents’ Humanities Faculty Fellowship; University of California, Santa Barbara, Emmons Grant; the National Endowment of the Humanities (any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this

viii Acknowledgments

publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities) Summer Institute 2010, “Representations of the ‘Other’: Jews in Medieval Christendom,” led by Irven Resnick, and 2015, “Negotiating Identities: Expression and Representation in the Christian-­Jewish-­Muslim Mediterranean,” led by Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita; the University of Iowa, Obermann Center for Interdisciplinary Studies; the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, and the University of Wisconsin Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Solmsen Fellowship. I am grateful to Jerry Singerman for his support of this project and to everyone at the University of Pennsylvania Press for their efforts in guiding this book to publication. I would particularly like to thank the anonymous readers for the press who generously offered extremely thoughtful and useful advice. A portion of the first chapter has appeared in Speculum 90, no. 4 (2015), and I also owe thanks to the anonymous readers for the journal. My thanks are also due to Cambridge University Library for the images of the William of Norwich manuscript. Over the past decade of writing this book I have been lucky to have had more friends than I can list here offer support, laughter, and cocktails: thank you! It is a source of sadness that among those who provided support and encouragement along the way three scholars and friends whose opinions I most value are no longer here, Carol Braun Pasternack, Bill MacLehose, and Bob Stein. I hope that their influence on this project is clear. Finally, my greatest thanks are due, as always, to my parents and to Brian Donnelly, to whom this book is dedicated.

Introduction

Inventing William of Norwich

Toward the end of the twelfth century, a sick child named Agnes of Crombe has a dream vision. In her dream she sees a young boy walking through the woods, carrying a cross. Identified as “Saint William,” the boy enters a chapel in the woods where, joined and aided by Agnes and another boy, he celebrates a mass in English. Once finished, William turns to Agnes and offers her a cure of water rinsed by the foot of the crucifix that hangs over the church’s altar. Agnes awakens, cured. The “Saint William” of Agnes’s dream is William of Norwich, infamous as the central character of the first ritual murder accusation in the Christian West, an originary moment in the history of antisemitism. Agnes’s dream is the penultimate miracle of his story as it is imagined in the late twelfth-­century The Life and Passion William of Norwich by the Benedictine monk Thomas of Monmouth.1 In the middle of the twelfth century, for the first time, Christian writers invented the idea that Jews ritually crucified Christian children in memory and in mockery of the Crucifixion of Christ and would do so again.2 The earliest— and by far the longest—source of this libel is this twelfth-­century Latin saint’s life, Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. In this Life, Thomas tells a story about the young William, a skinner’s apprentice in the town of Norwich. He describes how William is lured under false pretenses to the house of one of his Jewish neighbors to be tortured and murdered—as the story will later claim, ritually crucified—by Jews in mockery of the Passion of Christ. Attempting to hide the body, the murderers dump it in the nearby Thorpe Wood, where various locals stumble across it in a far-­fetched series of events before it is finally identified both as the boy William and as a child murdered by Jews. The remainder of the Life narrates Thomas’s own attempts to get the community of monks at the Benedictine priory of Norwich Cathedral to recognize William as a saint and to provide him with an appropriate cult.

2 Introduction

The Life concludes with a long collection of the miracles worked by this “saint.” These miracles include healing the sick and punishing the unfaithful, as well as visions of heaven and hell. Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is a highly rhetorically embellished literary work, drawing on biblical citation and allegory, classical rhetorical theory, conventional miracle stories, the forms and themes of hagiography, and the emerging tropes of narrative realism characteristic of romance. This is not surprising, as the High Middle Ages are an exciting moment in literary history that saw the emergence of new literary forms, the most famous and enduring of which is romance, in an atmosphere of multilingual international literary exchange. Ian Short characterized the literature of twelfth-­century England as precocious.3 At the same time, however, other, more sinister developments were taking place, which led the historian R. I. Moore to influentially characterize this period as “the formation of a persecuting society”: these developments included the increasing demonization of out-­groups, such as women, heretics, lepers, Muslims, and Jews.4 Indeed, scholars have often pointed to precisely this moment in the twelfth century as a moment when a cultural and theological “anti-­Judaism,” that is, a mode of discrimination that is based on religious difference but not on essentialized or embodied difference, morphs into a more recognizably modern version of antisemitism, which assumes some sort of inherent characteristics.5 Much has been written about the emergence of new literary forms and cultures in post-­Conquest England, often from a point of view that congratulates a multilingual, multicultural England on its literary achievements. It is less often noted that the invention of literary antisemitism is one of these “achievements” or asked how this stunning growth of a brilliant literary culture maps onto the concomitant “formation of a persecuting society.” Inventing William of Norwich: Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200 is situated at the intersection of these two phenomena— the birth of new literary genres and forms alongside the birth of a persecuting society. It focuses on one aspect of both—a literary moment that has traditionally been pointed to as the origin of the modern form of antisemitism in western Europe: Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. With the term “inventing,” I mean inventio in both its medieval sense of the rediscovery of something that has always/already been there and also in the modern sense of something ingenious that has been created all new.6 This double, contradictory meaning is, of course, the paradox of antisemitism, with its tenacious combination of the authority of antiquity and a protean ability to find new forms and meanings. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is the first

Introduction 3

of its kind, but it is followed by a veritable explosion of literature that initially narrates several relatively obscure ritual murder accusations. The story quickly catches on and produces more widely known versions, such as those of Hugh of Lincoln, Simon of Trent, and Werner of Oberwesel, before it mutates into other genres, such as tales of host desecration and other exempla. Simultaneously, it expands also into the dramatic and visual arts. It is a narrative that has left its trace in some of our most beloved and most canonical works of literature, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. For this reason, studies of the ritual murder accusation, as of representations of Jews in the Middle Ages more broadly, often tend to operate in a teleological frame, surveying different places and times in order to trace the development of persecution of the Jewish people in a European context. This is to say that scholars have tended to approach The Life and Passion of William of Norwich on its own terms and to frame their arguments within the logic of the text. Indeed, with the benefit of historical hindsight it is difficult to do otherwise, and in an afterword, “Afterward,” I, too, consider several aspects of the legacy of these twelfth-­century accusations. Inventing William of Norwich, however, adopts an approach that is both self-­consciously literary and strictly synchronic. Considering only the period from about 1150 to 1200, this study attempts to redirect critical attention from the origins and development of the ritual murder accusation to the literary genres and tastes that shaped its forms and themes as well as provided its immediate context of reception. Despite the growing body of work that explores various aspects of the representational strategies of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, overall, scholars have tended to treat the emergence of antisemitism in the twelfth-­ century as a sociopolitical, economic, or devotional event rather than as a literary one.7 The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and texts like it have long been mined for historical details (particularly about twelfth-­century urban life) and for twelfth-­century Christian attitudes toward their Jewish neighbors: which is to say that these narratives have most often been treated as a question for political history or economic history or intellectual history rather than one for literary history. And yet, as Anthony Bale has persuasively argued, “it is more useful to think of ritual murder as a textually generated ‘event’ (or perhaps ‘non-­ event’ that can only happen once the story has been written and told), rather than as a historical ‘crime’ with victims, criminals and a body of evidence.”8 The point of departure for Inventing William of Norwich, therefore, is the proposal that Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in particular and the ritual murder accusation in general are shaped as much by literary

4 Introduction

history as by political or economic history. It seeks not to discover an originary actor (as Gavin Langmuir does in Thomas of Monmouth and Emily Rose does in the bishop who defended Simon de Novers), nor to elaborate a political context (as Israel Yuval has done for the Crusades and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has done for post-­Conquest Norwich).9 Instead, it hopes to add to the picture that these studies have painted of the emergence of antisemitism in the Christian West by focusing not only on what, as Emily Rose frames it, “certain Christians did, thought, said and believed,”10 but rather on what they read, on what kinds of literature they composed and consumed. This focus is why I begin by highlighting Agnes’s story alongside William’s, and why each chapter briefly returns to her story. It stands as the penultimate miracle of the Life, and, I believe, was intended to be the final miracle, had not Thomas Becket’s unanticipated murder and immediate posthumous celebrity necessitated the addition of a final miracle firmly putting him in his place. For me, a focus on the miracle episode that contains Agnes’s story most clearly articulates the literary investments of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, and it casts both the author’s intentions and the immediate context of reception in a fresh light.11 Agnes’s dream feels more obviously central to scholarship on twelfth-­century literary culture than the story of William’s murder, and for that reason it has helped me to consider The Life and Passion of William of Norwich as mainstream to medieval literary culture in ways that it has not been to scholarly interpretations of that culture. Agnes’s dream is, for one, in many ways more interesting to the literary scholar. Rather than rehearsing tired tropes of hate, it gives us an affective and affecting story of a child’s sickness and cure. It gives us a female point of view: not simply because Agnes is a girl, but because she laments her exclusion from full liturgical participation by virtue of her gender. Most interesting, perhaps, and counter to the conventional wisdom that liturgy is synonymous with Latin, the mass celebrated by Agnes and the ghostly saint is in English. Finally, the almost overdetermined literary framing of the miracle— it is a dream recounted in a letter written not by the author of the Life but by an anonymous “monk of Pershore”—is just the sort of self-­referential mise en abyme that literary critics enjoy the most.12 Most important for my reading of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, the dream of Agnes of Crombe serves to throw into relief—or, at least, I am using it to throw into relief—the intersections of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich with medieval literary forms, genres, and tropes that are not, as the dream of Agnes is not, interested in the first instance with anti-­Jewish rhetoric or with policing appropriate boundaries of Jewish existence in Christian society. In telling the story of William of

Introduction 5

Norwich this book focuses on the literary culture of twelfth-­century England, particularly those aspects of twelfth-­century literary culture that seem to have shaped the form that the Life took and thus ensured the survival of the ritual murder accusation. When The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is studied as a literary text, it is most often considered alongside the short chronicle notices of the other twelfth-­century purported ritual murder victims, such as Robert of Bury St. Edmunds and Harold of Gloucester; later purported victims, such as Hugh of Lincoln and Simon of Trent; and largely thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­century antisemitic exempla and Marian miracle tales, rather than alongside contemporary, late twelfth-­century, literary production.13 In this regard, the seminal nineteenth-­century edition and translation of the Life by Augustus Jessopp and M. R. James has been extremely influential and to a great degree has helped to determine for better or for worse what the intertexts of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich would be. Although the editors remark in their long preface that their translation will be a “unique contribution to English Hagiography, and indeed to Hagiography in general,” none of the chapters they offer to contextualize it discuss hagiography, or, indeed, any literary genre—all deal with the sociopolitical context of twelfth-­century Norwich or with the history of medieval antisemitism.14 From the pioneering work of Jessopp and James, that is to say, we have inherited an extremely restricted and prescriptive sense of how to read The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, one that cordons it off from other innovations of twelfth-­century literature. If, however, we view the ritual murder accusation through the lens of developments in twelfth-­century literary culture rather than exclusively through the lens of the long history of antisemitism, we get an altered picture of both the ritual murder accusation and of twelfth-­ century literary culture. This is particularly true, I argue, if we are attentive to the claims and affordances of literary genre. Inventing William of Norwich: Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200 therefore situates The Life and Passion of William of Norwich within a new and different set of intertexts. It considers texts and genres that are contemporary to The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, and which the internal evidence of the Life itself as well as its manuscript context suggest are the intertexts that a contemporary audience would have identified. These new intertexts encompass the explosion of Anglo-­Latin hagiography—the lives of saints such as Christina of Markyate, Kenelm, Godric of Finchale, Wulfric of Haselbury, Thomas Becket, Edmund, and Faith; the emergence of history writing as one of the key literary genres in twelfth-­century England; the devotional

6 Introduction

texts of high medieval affective piety, alongside concurrent innovations in the liturgy; and the emergence of fictionality as articulated in medieval rhetorical treatises and exemplified in vernacular romance. The term “intertextuality” here works to remind us of the most basic claims of literary theory: of the relationality of all signifying systems; that any work of literature is realized within a network of textual relations; and that the signifying system of any given text references, in the first instance, the literary system out of which that text emerges rather than any transparent world external to it. In the words of Roland Barthes, a “text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”; it is “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-­between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the ‘sources,’ the ‘influences’ of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas.”15 In other words, new texts are born not out of transparent renderings of new experiences but at the interstices of other texts and other genres. These new intertexts for The Life and Passion of William of Norwich proposed here might be unexpected, in that they are not texts that explicitly center anti-­Judaism as a theme. It is the contention of Inventing William of Norwich, however, that being attentive to the discursive nature and generic protocols of these texts, and situating The Life and Passion of William of Norwich within a different set of intertexts, will surface new intellectual connections within a broader literary tradition. The first half of Inventing William of Norwich: Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200 thus considers The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in its manuscript context, in the sole manuscript in which it is extant, Cambridge University Library Additional MS 3037 (CUL Add. MS 3037), in order to ask, what were the literary expectations of this earliest audience, and how did these tastes and expectations come to condition the horizon of expectation for narratives of ritual murder specifically, and antisemitic literature more generally? In this, it participates in recent trends that enjoin us to take seriously the principle of selection underlying manuscript codices, treating them as anthologies rather than as miscellanies. “By preserving traces of the activities of actual readers,” Andrew Taylor has noted, “the manuscripts take us back to the complexities of human behavior and human desire, bringing us not firm answers, but new questions.”16 Resituating The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in its “manuscript matrix,” Inventing William of Norwich suggests that in approaching

Introduction 7

this text with fresh eyes the first step is to take seriously the manuscript context as a record and trace of one textual community’s encounter with the earliest literary form of the ritual murder accusation. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich appears in its unique manuscript as one of a collection of contemporary English saints’ lives. According to M. R. James in the 1896 edition and translation of the vita, it was “part of a Library bequeathed about the year 1700 to the Parish of Brent Eleigh in Suffolk by a certain Mr Edward Colman, sometime of Trinity College, Cambridge.”17 Miri Rubin’s more recent appraisal of the manuscript has identified it as a Cistercian production, and she suggests Sibton Abbey as a possible origin.18 James described this late twelfth-­century manuscript as composed of a libellus containing Thomas of Monmouth’s Vita et Miraculi Sancti Willelmi Martyris Norwicensis, Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass, and a short excerpt beginning “Smaragdus preciosus lapis est in sua natura,” bound with a second libellus containing John of Ford’s Life of Wulfric of Haselbury and Walter’s Life of Godric of Finchale.19 James described the first libellus as written entirely in the same hand, with the exception of the excerpt on the smaragdus, written in a very similar contemporary hand.20 Of the three texts that open the manuscript, there is very little evidence that The Life and Passion of William of Norwich was well known in the Middle Ages. In contrast to the lack of evidence of circulation of William’s vita, the following text, Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass, was very popular in the High Middle Ages. Isaac was an English Cistercian and abbot of the monastery of Stella (L’Étoile) in Aquitaine. He died sometime between 1167 and 1169, having written just over fifty sermons, including two in letter form. Almost nothing is known of Isaac’s biography, with the exception of his apparent support for the archbishop Thomas Becket, a support signaled by John Bellesmains, bishop of Poitiers, in a letter of 1164 to Becket assuring the archbishop that both he and Isaac of Stella were struggling in Becket’s cause.21 His Letter on the Office of the Mass appears in twenty-­one manuscripts in addition to the Cambridge manuscript.22 Finally, the short allegory on the smaragdus, the emerald, which follows the Letter on the Office of the Mass, is in fact an excerpt from the even more popular Haimo of Auxerre’s Commentary on the Apocalypse of John, which exists in 130 manuscript witnesses.23 The excerpt in CUL Add. MS 3037 allegorizes one of the stones described in the Apocalypse as decorating the foundation of the Celestial Jerusalem. The Life is by far the longest text in the libellus, filling seventy-­seven folios, with the Letter on the Office of the Mass filling three and the allegory of the smaragdus only a column and a half, completing the gathering. James proposes that the manuscript was written before 1200, so within a generation of the composition of the texts it contains.

8 Introduction

The first chapter, “The Language of the Liturgy,” considers the Life of William in the context of its libellus, and particularly alongside its companion texts there, Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass and the excerpt from Haimo of Auxerre’s commentary on the Apocalypse. The relative popularity of these two texts compared to Thomas of Monmouth’s suggests that their presence alongside The Life and Passion of William of Norwich works in some sense to stabilize the meaning of the new and somewhat experimental story that Thomas tells. Both Isaac’s Letter on the Office of the Mass and Haimo’s reading of the Apocalypse’s description of the emerald in the foundation of the Celestial Jerusalem are explicitly allegorical, and I argue that allegory in fact offers an interpretive frame for all three of these texts: in particular, allegory as it was deployed by the liturgy through the typological practice of bringing texts from the “Old” and “New” Testaments together to create new meanings. Each of these three texts, I suggest, represents the body of Christ in a different allegorical mode: The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in the literal, historical mode; the Letter on the Office of the Mass in its typological mode; and the excerpt on the emerald, interpreted here as representing Christ, in its eschatological mode. Together, I argue, these texts suggest that the story told in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich was shaped by competing impulses of liturgical change and that allegory—rather than historicism— is a key theoretical paradigm through which the Life should be read. Chapter 2, “Ritual Crucifixion in the Age of the Hermit,” considers Thomas of Monmouth’s Life in the context of the manuscript anthology as a whole, which includes two other saints’ lives: those of the twelfth-­century recluses Wulfric of Haselbury and Godric of Finchale. Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass serves as the conceptual bridge between the manuscript’s two libelli: just as its theoretical consideration of Christ’s body sacrificed in the mass connects the Letter to the new version of ritual reenactment of the Passion imagined by The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, its emphasis on penitence and purity of heart connects Isaac’s Letter to the lives of the hermit saints. Indeed, as a guide for contemplatives, the Letter is uniquely suited to be addressed to these two hermits. The collection of these three saints’ lives together—William, Wulfric, and Godric—suggests the extent to which new trends in contemporary hagiography underlie some of the formal and thematic aspects of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. The manuscript is an up-­to-­date collection of fashionable saints’ lives. The connection between these three saints is both socioeconomic and theological. Reimagining the cultural significance of the Crucifixion, I argue, is a motif The Life and Passion of William of Norwich shares with the vitae of Wulfric of Haselbury and Godric of Finchale, as, in the twelfth century, the eremitic lifestyle gained immense cultural

Introduction 9

importance and was theorized as being Christlike in the nature of its devotional sacrifice. In this manuscript context it is clear that The Life and Passion of William of Norwich draws strength from its generic and thematic association with two historical, famous, and recently deceased saints. Having considered The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in its manuscript context as one record of twelfth-­century engagement with the text, and in the context of the genres of liturgy and hagiography, the second half of Inventing William of Norwich broadens this scope to consider how the Life participates in two of the most central innovations of twelfth-­century literary culture: first, the consideration of the humanity of Jesus through the metaphor of the Christ Child in the literature of affective piety and, second, the emergence of fictionality in twelfth-­century imaginative literature. Chapter 3, “William at the Age of Twelve,” explores why the ritual murder accusation, if modeled on the judicial murder of the adult Jesus, should take as its focus a child rather than an adult man. This chapter considers how theological attitudes toward children and their literary representation, rather than theological attitudes toward Jews, subtend and sustain the fantastical narrative of a boy ritually murdered by Jews. Here, I place The Life and Passion of William of Norwich alongside its contemporary work, one of the seminal works of affective devotion, the Cistercian monk Aelred of Rievaulx’s Jesus at the Age of Twelve (De Jesu puero duodenni). Both of these texts figure devotion to the figure of the child alongside anti-­Judaism, and they both frame childhood not only as an object of devotion but as a posture of devotion in a style of affective devotion in which the initial step is to imagine oneself “as a little child.” In this way, they demonstrate the literature of affective devotion and the literature of antisemitism to be mutually constituting in their earliest instantiations. A fourth chapter, “William of Norwich Between History and Fiction,” turns to the intersections of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich with imaginative literature. It considers The Life and Passion of William of Norwich alongside classical and medieval rhetorical theory, as well as scholarly arguments about the emergence of fictionality in the twelfth century, arguing that trends in theorizing fictionality inflected the Life in much the same ways that they were animating other works of imaginative literature, such as romance. Recognizing this, I argue, should significantly impact our assessment of the historicity of some of the claims the Life makes. Until we come to grips with the protocols of medieval fictionality in this context, we risk misrecognizing what this text is trying to tell us. Finally, an afterword resituates The Life and Passion of William of Norwich back among its familiar intertexts, those other twelfth-­century narratives of the

10 Introduction

ritual murder accusation. There are five twelfth-­century accusations of ritual murder that have come down to us—or, better, there are five surviving stories that are often pointed to as belonging to this same genre. Of these, only The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is cast as hagiography. Indeed, the ritual murder accusation is remarkable in its generic diversity. The purported ritual murder of Richard of Paris (or Pontoise) (1179) is recounted in a royal chronicle; the “martyrdoms” of Robert of Bury St. Edmunds and Harold of Gloucester (in 1181 and 1168 respectively) are contained in local monastic chronicles (although there was evidently a saint’s life written for Robert that is no longer extant); there is (what is almost certainly) a satire on the accusation in Richard of Devizes’s chronicle of the state of England during the Third Crusade; and multiple accounts are extant of the purported martyrdom of a boy in Blois in 1171 that resulted in the real-­life martyrdom of some of the community of Jews in Blois. The afterword suggests that these other texts be treated as literary analogues rather than as more or less transparent accounts of historical accusations. This perspective will enable us to recognize how similar tropes function across these texts and contribute to the spread of the libel. While each of these chapters considers a different aspect of the twelfth-­ century literary culture of which The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is a product, there are several important threads that run through them all and connect the readings offered here. The first is the importance of the work of genre, and particularly, since The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is a saint’s life, of the generic norms of hagiography. As Michel de Certeau has noted of hagiography: “we encounter here a poetics of meaning that cannot be reduced to an exactitude of facts or of doctrine without destroying the very genre that conveys it.”24 Genre has its own protocols, it enables certain things to be said while silencing others, and it is worth being attentive to the demands and constraints exercised by different generic affiliations, as well as by the attractions of proximate genres. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich’s unique status and its literary form of a prose Latin saint’s life are significant in this regard. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is by far the longest narrative account of the ritual murder accusation, and it is the only saint’s life (although, as noted above, Jocelin of Brakelond tells us he wrote a life of the purported boy martyr Robert of Bury St. Edmunds). At the same time, there are other versions of the story. The story of William of Norwich is more commonly encountered by far in the twelfth century in chronicle reports—in the vernacular of the Peterborough Chronicle and in Latin monastic chronicles. The purported murder of a boy named William by Jews in Norwich, England, is mentioned by several twelfth-­century chronicles

Introduction 11

from England, northern France, and southern Germany. The notice varies from the terse “The boy William was crucified by Jews in England during Easter in the city of Norwich” of the chronicle of the Abbey of Mortemer, to the slightly more elaborate notice in the Peterborough Chronicle: In his [King Stephen’s] days, the Jews of Norwich bought a Christian child before Easter, and tortured [pineden] him with all the same torments [pining] with which our Lord was tortured [pined]. On Good Friday they hanged him on a cross because of his love for our Lord, and afterwards buried him. They thought that his death would be concealed, but our Lord showed that he was a holy martyr: and the monks took his body and buried him with great ceremony in the monastery church, and wonderfully, and in various ways, he performs miracles through our Lord. He is called St William.25 All of these chronicle reports are short. None of them report any other of the names of Thomas of Monmouth’s vast cast of characters.26 None of them describe any of William’s miracles. They all hew far more closely to the Gospel versions of Christ’s Crucifixion in describing what happened to William than Thomas of Monmouth, whose version seems more indebted to the judicial tortures of the late antique saints’ lives. This similarity of the story as recounted across monastic chronicles, and its differences from the story told by the Life, should be read as a function of genre (rather than of proximity to the facts or lack of interest in the story). Chronicle is a form that claims to record events that actually happened, and one of its chief formal characteristics is a resistance to narrativizing. As Hayden White has taught us, “The chronicle . . . often seems to wish to tell a story, aspires to narrativity, but typically fails to achieve it. More specifically, the chronicle usually is marked by a failure to achieve narrative closure. It does not so much conclude as simply terminate. It starts out to tell a story but breaks off in media res, in the chronicler’s own present; it leaves things unresolved, or rather, it leaves them unresolved in a storylike way.”27 The sparse chronicle accounts that contain our only other English versions of the ritual murder accusation lack the teleological impulse of hagiography. They disembed the story from a plot that might give it meaning, and they focus attention on a bare-­bones account of the murder of William, leaving to one side both the “life” and the “miracles” that are the key components of Thomas of Monmouth’s Life. If narrative, in Barthes’s words, “ceaselessly substitutes meaning for the straightforward copy of the events

12 Introduction

recounted,” these chronicles purport to give the “straightforward copy.”28 They do so as a function of their genre, not of their greater historicity. This is not to say that these chronicle entries would not benefit from literary approaches. The artistry of the Peterborough Chronicle’s notice of the murder of William is hardly ever discussed, even in the context of scholarship on the ritual murder accusation. Facing it across the page, however, in Oxford, Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 636, fols. 89v–90r, is an entry that is frequently discussed. Indeed, it is famous for its poignant discussion of the depredations of the Anarchy, when the rule of law, the entry suggests, was in abeyance, when King Stephen’s soldiers pillaged and murdered at will, and when, as the chronicler famously laments, “men said openly that Christ and his saints slept.”29 This entry is famous also for its place in linguistic history. It is often included in textbooks of the history of the English language as a moment when it is possible to watch Old English morph across the page into early Middle English. Moreover, both sides of the page are surrounded by French: an Anglo-­Norman Brut has been copied into the margins of the chronicle, by a scribe in need of parchment (or perhaps possessed of a healthy sense of historical irony). As the two entries face each other across the manuscript page, they are connected thematically as well. The technique used by Stephen’s soldiers to torture their innocent victims—a rope twisted around their heads until it sinks into their brains—is the same torture the Jews use on their innocent victim, William of Norwich, in Thomas of Monmouth’s Life. The physical location, then, of the annalistic account of the murder of William of Norwich directly across from the chronicle’s famous account of the Anarchy is silent testimony to the centrality of the story of William of Norwich to English literary history. Another way to think of the implications of genre to our understanding of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is through the trope of the “skeptics,” which is a key example of how ignoring hagiographic conventions has misled our reading of certain aspects of the Life. It is a truism of the scholarship on the accusation of the ritual murder of William of Norwich that it was not initially widely believed. It is frequently asserted in the scholarship on the ritual murder accusation that the main reason The Life and Passion of William of Norwich was written and exists in the form that it does was not because the monks of Norwich believed that the Jews had kidnapped and ritually murdered a Christian child—but precisely because they did not believe it. As Hannah Johnson notes, the Life realistically portrays a number of “sceptics who are featured in the course of Thomas’s narrative, and their motivating resistance directly influences the grounds of his claims about the dead boy and shapes the course of his work.”30 Indeed, the spotlight that the Life seems to cast on these skeptics has been important for the way

Introduction 13

their presence potentially allows us to trace a counter narrative for Thomas’s one of antagonism and murder in Jewish/Christian relations: might twelfth-­century Norwich have in fact contained a quorum of cooler heads who prevailed?31 Discussing Thomas’s “skeptics,” Monika Otter suggests that since the accusation that William had been killed by Jews does not seem to have been widely believed, “one thing Thomas can do to strengthen his case is to pattern the narrative on standard hagiographic models.”32 Indeed Thomas does just that: but one key hagiographical pattern modeled by the Life is precisely the presence of skeptics, and the rhetorical address to those who disbelieve, doubt, and detract is absolutely characteristic of twelfth-­century hagiography. Alongside words of humility and fear that the marvelous deeds of the saint will be lost and forgotten if not recorded straightaway is the construction of detractors, rhetorical straw men, whose harsh and unaccountable disbelief saddens and wounds both the hagiographer and his saint. As Rosalind Love has pointed out in her discussion of eleventh-­century saints’ lives, protestations of this kind “are one of the conventional features of hagiography.”33 In fact, hagiographers often seem self-­consciously to strive to outdo each other with rhetorical flights of fancy in finding the perfect mixed metaphors with which to describe these loathsome creatures. Bernard of Angers, the author of a twelfth-­century vita of Saint Faith, complains, “Not only have I been afflicted by the hypocrisies of my enemies’ hatred but because of the slanders they have launched against me I have been hampered in my writing. I hadn’t been torn to pieces by the attacks of abusive people until I began to be involved in pursuits like this.”34 Eadmer of Canterbury likewise identifies the presence of skeptics in his Life of St Dunstan: “I was also drawn into this because of the accusations of certain men who frequently complained and continue to object that the author of those writings did not concur in every respect with the history of events as it is widely known.”35 This is the pattern that Thomas was following when he writes: “Let those hear, who impress upon our simplicity a canine tooth, who injure the reputation of the most glorious martyr William by belittling the enhancement of his praise as praise unworthy of holiness and so persecute him by diminishing him. Let them hear, I say, the truth of the matter” (41). This literary convention in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich plays a more crucial role than usual, however, because it is so important for us to be able to know the extent to which this first accusation of ritual murder was believed. (Although it is worth remembering that the skeptics of the Life do not so much disbelieve that William was murdered by Jews; rather they are skeptical that this misfortune confers sanctity.) The fact that the presence of skeptics and detractors in any given saint’s life is absolutely typical of the genre does not in itself prove that the people of twelfth-­century

14 Introduction

Norwich were not themselves skeptical of the claims of Thomas’s text. It does, however, shine a light on the extent to which the protocols of genre must be taken into account when reading these texts and how fundamentally they can shape our understanding of the history of prejudice. In this context we might contrast the deployment of this theme in hagiography against its absence in all the chronicle accounts: the chronicle accounts of the purported ritual murder of William of Norwich do not at all open a space for the counter narrative of immediate local disbelief. For these reasons, Inventing William of Norwich: Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200 will argue that it is important to be attentive to the different sets of generic claims of hagiography and chronicle, as well as how they have colluded to guide our reception of the accusation. Another thread that weaves through this book is that of the relation of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich to Cistercian spirituality, as well as to Cistercian contexts of production and dissemination. William of Norwich’s cult is most often connected with the imperatives of Benedictine monasticism, and in particular with Norwich Cathedral’s perceived need for a (potentially lucrative) saint’s cult. Norwich Cathedral was a fairly recent, post-­Conquest foundation, and it was dedicated to the Holy Trinity. Indeed, Thomas of Monmouth admits to this very motive when he describes his vision of Norwich Cathedral’s former bishop Herbert of Losinga appearing to him in a dream. Herbert reminds Thomas of how the monks used to demand that he beg the papal curia for some relics for their cathedral, and how he would refuse to do so, predicting that “it would soon happen that they would have so many and such venerable relics that the church of Norwich would be much exalted and become famous in the whole of England and venerated in foreign parts.” Herbert asserts of the body of William, “These are, I say, the relics whose transfer I have foretold” (77).36 Notwithstanding the importance of these claims, however, the evidence of the manuscript compilation suggests that at least one key context of reception for William of Norwich’s strange story was not local and Benedictine at all, but rather Cistercian and reformed. Miri Rubin, as noted above, has proposed that the Life was produced in a Cistercian abbey. That this should be so is no wonder, really, given the fact that two of its texts are authored by Cistercian monks. The Life of Wulfric of Haselbury is by the Cistercian John of Ford. Although Wulfric himself never joined the Cistercian order, John insists that “he clasped all the members of the Cistercian order to him in a close embrace, like sons of his own body, or rather of Jesus Christ’s. He lauded the order to the skies and had no doubts in directing to it any who came to consult him about reforming their lives.”37 Similarly, Isaac of Stella is an English Cistercian, and Dominique Iogna-­Prat describes the works

Introduction 15

of Haimo of Auxerre as being particularly common in Cistercian libraries in the twelfth century.38 In addition to these two Cistercian authors, the Life of Godric of Finchale has strong Cistercian connections. The version of the life of Godric of Finchale in the manuscript is attributed to a certain “Walter” about whom nothing is known. His Life, however, represents an epitomizing of an earlier and longer Life of Godric by Reginald of Durham.39 Reginald was himself a Benedictine monk, as well as a fairly prolific hagiographer, but the vita was sponsored jointly by Prior Thomas of Durham and Aelred of Rievaulx, a very famous Cistercian, who was a frequent visitor of Godric.40 Tom Licence points out that one time-­honored method of publicly demonstrating—or indeed creating—a close relationship between hermits and more traditional ecclesiastical institutions was that of providing the putative saint with a hagiographer. Thus while the Cluniac monks of Montacute provided Wulfric with food, it was the Cistercian Ford Abbey that offered commemoration: “Similarly, the joint Benedictine-­Cistercian initiative to collect material for Godric’s hagiography well before his death may conceal the fact that both orders were still engaged in a rivalry as to which of the two held the stronger claim to the hermit and his land.”41 There was, of course, spiritual interest as well: Godric’s vita circulated widely in Cistercian monasteries. The Cistercian motherhouse of Cîteaux and its elder daughter Clairvaux both owned lives of Godric by the beginning of the thirteenth century, as did Fountains Abbey, and he is commemorated in the chronicles of the British Cistercian abbeys of Ford, Margam, Melrose, and Rievaulx.42 Indeed, the Cistercian connection with Godric was to be so enduring that a seventeenth-­century copy of Walter’s Life of Godric of Finchale is prefaced with an impassioned reminder to its audience to remember that Godric was not, in fact, a Cisterican but a Benedictine.43 In this company, William of Norwich is an outlier: not a hermit and not initially a Cistercian cult. Thomas of Monmouth was a Benedictine monk, and there are many indications within his text that the primary audience he envisioned was, in fact, his own monastic brothers. However, it is worth noting that although the ritual crucifixion accusation is commonly associated with a primarily Benedictine provenance (Norwich Cathedral Priory, Bury St. Edmunds, and St. Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester, all housed Benedictine monks), several of the earliest notices of William’s martyrdom appear in (continental) Cistercian chronicles: Mortemer, Ourscamp, the chronicle of Hélinand of Froidmont.44 Moreover, Thomas of Monmouth signals to a Cistercian audience thematically with his proposal of a hermeneutic of simplicity as the appropriate posture for reading the Life of William: “Let them hear, I say, the truth of the matter, those who reckon we are mad, and, looking at it with the eye of innocence

16 Introduction

[simplicitatis], stop at once detracting from the glory of the saints” (41; 61). This concept of simplicity, simplicitas, was a key aspect of Cistercian self-­identity across media—in art, architecture, and liturgy.45 As Henry Mayr-­Harting has described the Cistercian desire for simplicity: “If only, went the idea, a man could shake himself free of the involvements of land, administration, legal complexities, logic-­chopping, careerism, flattery, relic-­mongering, and all the things which seemed to have so signally developed or expanded in the twelfth-­century church, and instead concentrate the gaze of his mind directly, simply, on God, then he could cut the Gordian knot of every entangled social and spiritual problem.”46 Or, to think of it in more spiritual terms, in the words of the important theologian William of St. Thierry—originally a Benedictine monk who became a Cistercian at the end of his life: For properly speaking simplicity is a will that is wholly turned toward God, seeking one thing from the Lord with all earnestness, without any desire to disperse its energies in the world. Or again, simplicity is true humility in conversion, more concerned with the inner reality of virtue than with a reputation for it. The simple man does not mind seeming foolish in the eyes of the world that he may be wise in the sight of God. Or again simplicity is the will alone fixed on God, not yet formed by reason so as to be love (for that is what a formed will is), not yet enlightened so as to be charity, that is, the delight of love.47 When Thomas of Monmouth invokes this category, therefore, we see him inscribing a certain kind of reader, a Cistercian reader, or, at least, a reader compelled by the new modes of reformed spirituality. Thomas here presents simplicitas as the appropriate posture of composition, describing his work as “acts of simplicity and pure conscience” (42); and later insisting “those who deny the devotion of our simplicity [simplicitatis nostre deuotionem] and the pious deference of our devotion, whether out of presumption or rashness, should quickly be silent and realize the guilt of their error and their own presumption and rashness” (42; 62). Simplicitas, moreover, is simultaneously the appropriate posture of interpretation. Thomas demands that his reader look at the facts “with the eye of simplicity” (41) and asserts: “To be sure, if the diligent eye of simplicity [simplicitatis] runs through the truth of the matter even superficially, what else would it see in beholding or perceive while paying attention, that the boyhood and innocence [pueritiam et innocentia] of the blessed William saves and that the purity of his virginity commends?” (44; 64). Here, the author, the reader,

Introduction 17

and the saint are intimately connected through the shared ethos of simplicitas: simplicitas produces the truth that may be properly perceived only by a reciprocal simplicitas. The ethos of simplicity connects The Life and Passion of William of Norwich generally to an implied Cistercian readership, but also more specifically to the Life that follows in CUL Add. MS 3037, John of Ford’s Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, and it connects them both with the theme of childlikeness. In John of Ford’s account of the life of Wulfric of Haselbury, the saint is defined by his simplicity. This simplicity is an essential characteristic of Wulfric from childhood: This purity of faith was refined, and one might say overlaid with gold, by a certain holy and sincere simplicity [sincera simplicitas] which had been his from his mother’s womb, but by the sanctification of the holy spirit this gift of nature was made a gift of grace. For it was through this loyalty and gentleness of his that the Lord made him holy, so that the grandeur of faith might be tempered by the humble simplicity [humilitas . . . simplicitas] engrafted on it, and that in the distribution of graces the second might be shored up by the first, the first hidden and safeguarded in the other.48 When no less a personage than Bernard of Clairvaux approaches Wulfric to pray for his sins, Wulfric’s “splendid simplicity” is compared favorably to Bernard’s “high humility.”49 Most important, John compares Wulfric’s simplicity to the simplicity inherent in childhood. John writes of: those qualities which blessed Wulfric had in so singular a degree and which freed him from all trace of pride and boastfulness, namely, simplicity and truthfulness [simplicitatis veritatisque] in all their purity. Children in their simplicity [simplicitas parvulorum] are, as we know, left free to speak their minds without restraint, and bodies still immature may display their nakedness unblushingly. And clearly this man too, child that he was, spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child, setting no value on these phenomena, nor on himself in relation to them, quite oblivious as he was of being revered.50 This connection between simplicity and childhood is often made by Cistercian authors. Aelred of Rievaulx, for example, writes: “Let us be like new-­born infants. Infants in innocence, in simplicity.”51

18 Introduction

The shared Cistercian-­style spirituality of the texts in CUL Add. MS 3037 is, of course, common to the twelfth-­century climate of reformed spirituality more generally.52 It therefore perhaps draws too strict a distinction between Benedictine and Cistercian spirituality in this period of reform to insist that the spirituality displayed by this manuscript is distinctively “Cistercian.” Nevertheless, the many signs in this manuscript that point toward a Cistercian-­style spirituality— and a Cistercian appropriation of Benedictine saints—suggest that this context is an important one for The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. The shared language of simplicitas between The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and the Life of Wulfric of Haselbury shows the two texts to be engaging with the same kind of spirituality and obliquely addressing each other in their extended textual community. This shared language also suggests why The Life and Passion of William of Norwich might be appealing to a Cistercian audience—not only because of its representation of anti-­Judaism—but also because of other shared intellectual and spiritual interests and language. The most obvious of these, of course, is in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich’s attendance to the humanity of Christ, a humanity most clearly articulated theologically by his suffering and death on the cross. This Cistercian connection is important because the Cistercians, as Brian Stock has argued, formed an incredibly far-­reaching and influential textual community in twelfth-­century Europe. “Textual community,” that is, in the sense that “through the text, or, more accurately, through the interpretation of it, individuals who previously had little else in common were united around common goals. Similar social origins comprised a sufficient, but not necessary, condition of participation. The essential bond was forged by means of belief; its cement was faith in the reality of belonging. And these in turn were by-­products of a general agreement on the meaning of a text.”53 Considering this possible Cistercian connection of the manuscript is significant because it introduced the ritual murder accusation into a textual community capable of authenticating it and giving it a wide international audience. Also characteristic of Cistercian textual communities is the representation of Jesus not only as a child but also as a mother and the feminization of devotional language.54 The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is situated at the intersection of multifaceted and evolving currents of gender representation in the twelfth century, particularly as they pertain to priests, men and women religious, and Christ himself. Representations of gender are therefore an important matrix for thinking about the ritual murder accusation at the moment of its emergence. Steven Kruger identifies an important issue in this regard when he notes that “many texts that stage the confrontation between Judaism and Christianity

Introduction 19

do not thematise gender or sexuality in very explicit ways.”55 He warns: “It is, I believe, partly the strict delimitation of feminist and queer medievalist work to explicit depictions of gendered and sexualized subjects and bodies that leads to our repeated failure adequately to confront the ways in which gender and sexuality are wrapped up with categories like race, religion, and class.”56 Kruger’s diagnosis holds true for The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, which stages its representations of gender in complex ways that are nevertheless paradigmatic of this period. William is a child, but specifically a boy, and the Life represents him at one point posthumously requesting that his body be moved to the chapter house, where the monastery’s boy oblates would be taught, so that he might be “a boy among boys” (79). The three male saints’ lives collected in this manuscript represent a monastic culture that is specifically and exclusively male. But it is also a culture that emphasizes virginity, devotional childlikeness, and spiritual rather than physical warfare. If representations of masculinity in the Cambridge manuscript are multivarious but mainly focused on the professed religious life, the representation of women in the Life is profoundly liturgical in the way it draws upon exegesis on the biblical figure of Rachel mourning her children; and also deeply quotidian in its representation of William’s mother and aunt, and in the women who come to his tomb for help with childbirth and illness. As William MacLehose has shown, the “nuclear” family is a central theme of the ritual murder accusation, as of other anti-­Jewish exempla.57 In addition, many critics have pointed to the Life’s representation of a married priest, precisely at the moment when such practice was being banned. These representations of familial life, in which women are very visible, are held in tension with the primacy of masculine religious identity in the Life. And then there is Agnes of Crombe who, by means of her gender and vernacularity, becomes a cipher for lay culture in the Life: it is her subject position that the reader of the text is implicitly invited to assume, and it is through her eyes that we witness one of the most significant scenes of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. If, as Kruger’s analysis invites us to recognize, the Life seems not to explicitly thematize gender, gender is nevertheless an important category through which its representations operate. A final thread that runs through Inventing William of Norwich: Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200 connecting the chapters is my treatment of the Jewish characters in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. Just as I am interested in the relationship of the Life to the literary history of the twelfth century rather than to socioeconomic or political history, so too I am committed to treating all the characters in the Life as just that, literary characters in a fictional text. There was a Jewish community in Norwich in

20 Introduction

the twelfth century. Indeed, as Elizabeth Rutledge notes, “the Jewish community at Norwich is first recorded in connection with the murder of St. William in 1144.”58 By the end of the twelfth century that community had produced two of the most important financiers in England, Jurnet of Norwich and his son Isaac.59 One sign of Isaac’s high profile is his memorialization in “the first antisemitic caricature,” the “doodle” at the top of a 1244 tallage roll.60 However, in the Life, Jewish characters appear only briefly, in only a couple of chapters, to kidnap and murder William and to dispose of his body. As Bale has noted, “it may seem strange, given that the entire project of William of Norwich’s cult is based on the idea of Jews murdering Christians, but Jews occupy only a few pages of Thomas’s long text, and we gain little sense of Jewish life in medieval Norwich from it as a source.”61 None of the miracles that fill the majority of pages of the Life mention Jewish characters. None of the Jewish characters who are mentioned, such as Eleazar, the moneylender, or Theobald, the convert, can be verified independently of this text. Moreover, many of the interactions between Jews and Christians described in the Life are specifically presented by the text as fictional (such as the Jews who crack a joke about wanting to be thanked for having produced a martyr for the Christians) or are heavily influenced by liturgical tropes (such as the man who buys William for three pieces of silver). Therefore, in an attempt not to read with the text but rather to read against its grain, and so as not to reify the antisemitic tropes this text encodes, I follow scholars such as Jeremy Cohen, who has coined the term “the hermeneutical Jew” to describe the way that the figure of the Jew in the Christian imagination performs a function that is not referential of any historical reality. Cohen defines the “hermeneutical Jew” as “the Jew as constructed in the discourse of Christian theology, and above all in Christian theologians’ interpretation of Scripture.”62 This categorization seems to me the most apt way to think about the Life’s representation of Jews who ritually crucify a Christian child in mockery of the Crucifixion of Christ. This is not to argue that the representations in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich did not have historical ramifications: as Steven Kruger has pointed out, “the lack of a clear correspondence between fantasy constructions of Jews and lived experience does not mean that these constructions do not themselves constitute a crucial part of lived experience.”63 However, as Anna Sapir Abulafia has noted about the ritual murder accusation, “different scholars have studied different aspects of the accusatory tales. What unites their often very different conclusions is the fact that the stories consistently reveal more about the religious, cultural, and indeed socio-­economic or political realities of the accusers than the realities of the accused.”64

Introduction 21

Reading The Life and Passion of William of Norwich alongside this set of intertexts that includes contemporary saints’ lives, romances, and treatises of affective piety serves to highlight the way we have constructed the archive to which The Life and Passion of William of Norwich belongs as primarily the history of antisemitism rather than the history of hagiography or of devotional trends or even twelfth-­century literary culture more generally. Thus the Life, at first glance, seems to us to sit more comfortably alongside Chaucer’s fourteenth-­century Prioress’s Tale than alongside the contemporary vitae of Wulfric of Haselbury and Godric of Finchale with which it was originally collected and anthologized. Indeed, from the evidence of the manuscript, which shows more marginal commentary and other signs of use in the Life of Godric than in any of the other texts, it seems that The Life and Passion of William of Norwich may owe its survival to the popularity of Godric of Finchale rather than to any groundswell of antisemitism in the late twelfth century or to the attractiveness of the new devotional options it offered.65 By no means, however, is it my intention to suggest that the intertexts explored in the chapters here are more important than those discussed in the afterword. Nor do I wish to suggest that they are the final word. Quite the opposite, I hope that the new horizons opened up here will provoke more new ways of situating The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and other texts like it. For example, one key set of intertexts that is missing here is the Hebrew poetry of Jewish poets living in England—indeed, in Norwich—such as that of the celebrated thirteenth-­century poet Meir ben Elijah of Norwich. Miriamne Ara Krummel and Miri Rubin, among others, have provided compelling arguments in favor of including Jewish voices in studies of Christian antisemitism, as well as practical examples of what this might look like.66 It is one of the contentions of this book that a failure to focus adequately on literary methodologies has produced some misrecognitions and misunderstandings about the nature of the Life’s claims. As Christopher Prendergast has written in another context, “Literary fictions do not simply portray or reflect the world. They elicit, precisely by way of their fictional modes of representation, attitudes to the world that enable—or disable—forms of understanding.”67 Inventing William of Norwich: Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200 uses Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich as a lens through which different aspects of twelfth-­century literary culture come into focus and, in particular, the ways in which that focus is sharpened on those aspects that, perhaps unwittingly, participated in the institutionalization of antisemitism. Scholars of the ritual murder accusation have, by and large, accepted that the construction of the accusation is “discursive,” by which is broadly meant

22 Introduction

that texts such as The Life and Passion of William of Norwich cannot be relied on as a straightforward historical account, but rather must be understood as rhetorically constructed. Anthony Bale, for example, writes that The Life and Passion of William of Norwich “is not, and never was, a ‘legal’ or ‘factual’ indictment of the Jews, but rather a treatise on divinity and martyrdom as understood by a medieval monk” and that “recollection of the murder of William is not of an event, but of a set of discourses and cues, to the death of Christ and to saintly martyrdom.”68 We have been less precise, however, about the nature and definition of the discourses that underwrite the truth claims made by this text and how they operate within a matrix of other—competing and yet mutually constituting—discourses to assert an accusation that was at the same time completely original and fully compelling. It is the contention here that when viewed in their contemporary literary context, aspects of the Life that previously seemed attributable to Jewish/Christian relations may also be revealed as more broadly characteristic of twelfth-­century literary culture. Inventing William of Norwich: Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200 is nevertheless also attentive to the ways in which antisemitism may have been an animating creative force. As Anthony Julius noted in his study of the antisemitism of T. S. Eliot’s poetry: “To assert that Eliot’s poetry merely reflected the anti-­Semitism of the times is as fatuous as asserting that his poetry merely reflected the Christianity of the times. Eliot’s poetry engages creatively with both.”69 The same is no doubt true of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. In the chapters that follow, I resituate Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich within twelfth-­century literary culture—specifically alongside innovations in liturgical and devotional practices, the emergence of vernacular romance, and the popularity of hagiography and historiography as literary forms—in order to argue that these accusations of ritual murder are at least as imbricated in twelfth-­century literary culture as they are in Christian/ Jewish relations and the emergence of racially based discourses of antisemitism in the High Middle Ages. In de-­emphasizing the history of racially based prejudice in this context, I do not intend to diminish its importance. To the contrary, I hope to emphasize the ways in which all forms of twelfth-­century literary culture are deeply implicated in the acceptance and spread of these hatreds. As Anna Sapir Abulafia has noted, “Too many histories of Latin Christendom treat the Jews as an optional extra, if at all, rather than an integral part of the medieval Christian experience.”70 In shifting the focus away from the history of antisemitism and toward literary themes and genres, this book makes an argument not for the origin of the ritual murder accusation but for why it was then, and

Introduction 23

continues to be, so compelling. Once made, what were the literary forms and rhetorical devices that gave it life and enabled it to mutate to outlive its original forms and to continually inhabit new ones? Although the stakes are high when discussing the origins of antisemitism, to explore the literary nature of the ritual crucifixion accusation is not to suggest that the violence it ultimately engendered, and continues to engender, is not all too real.71 Many of the most enduring tropes of antisemitism are present already in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich: it coins the term “Christ killers”; it imagines the death of the Jewish moneylender; it dramatizes the conflict of jurisdiction between royal and ecclesiastical power over Jewish communities.72 The attacks against English Jews that followed the coronation of Richard the Lionheart in 1189, and which spread throughout England, were surely influenced at least in part by the kind of stories that were in circulation.73 Nevertheless, as Robert M. Stein has described, “it is only through the protocols of representation that people decide to take sides, take action, understand and assert the significance of the action they take, and justify themselves to themselves and to others. Thus changes in the structure of representation are themselves primary phenomena, and their analysis can provide us with as direct an entry point into the lives of real social actors as quantitative or other hard evidence can.”74 As questions about the origins and rhetoric of cultural intolerance are currently at the forefront of political and media attention, more fully articulating the cultural context for the earliest texts of medieval antisemitism is essential to a more clear understanding of the contemporary cultural contexts of intolerance. It is my hope that a better articulation and understanding of the roots of antisemitism in its relation to medieval literary history will enable us to move productively toward dismantling the ideologies that hold it in place. Inventing William of Norwich: Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200 tells a story about a medieval saint’s life that shaped a seminal moment in the history of antisemitism and about the power of literary cultures in shaping our lived reality.

Chapter 1

The Language of the Liturgy

When Agnes of Crombe dreams of William of Norwich, she envisions him as a cipher of the multiple bodies of Christ. In Agnes’s vision, she sees William walking through the woods as a Christ-­like figure—bloody, bearing a cross—but as soon as he enters his own chapel of St. William in the Wood he transforms into a priest, putting on priestly vestments to celebrate mass (“ut missam celebrat, uestibus se induit sacerdotalibus”).1 This transformation of the signification of William’s body is at the heart of the Life’s representational strategies, and particularly of its engagement with the liturgy of the mass. This extraordinary miracle, concluding Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, helpfully frames the question of why, when Thomas first felt compelled to record for posterity the vita of a boy he describes as having been ritually murdered by Jews in Norwich, England, in 1144, he chose to do so in language replete with liturgical resonance. Thomas claims: “But I think it is more likely that by the wish of divine providence he was already destined centuries ago for martyrdom and so was drawn to it step by step by degrees; and so he was chosen by the Jews as less wise and more fitting to be mocked and sacrificed, in disgrace of the Lord’s Passion [a iudeis in dominice passionis obprobium deludendus et immolandus]” (13; 15). This language is significant for its emphasis on 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. This chapter explores how these typological connections are used to make meaning within the Life and also how they connect it conceptually with the two texts anthologized alongside it in the libellus that constitutes the first part of the sole manuscript in which it is extant, Cambridge University Library Additional MS 3037. These two texts, the Cistercian abbot Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass and the short



The Language of the Liturgy 25

excerpt from exegete Haimo of Auxerre’s Commentary on the Apocalypse of John, by far exceeded the popularity and circulation of Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in the Middle Ages. The organization of the opening libellus of CUL Add. MS 3037 suggests that the way the manuscript is structured has implications for the way in which these texts may have been read by their immediate audience and for the way in which it may be profitable to read them now. It has long been recognized that hagiography in general and The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in particular construct 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 M. Cecilia Gaposchkin notes, “The liturgy . . . provided the language of expression and structure of thought for the clerical class.”2 These liturgical resonances depend in large measure on typological allegory. That is, they draw connections between the “Old” and the “New” Testaments, emphasizing a fulfillment of the Old in the New. Typology as a hermeneutic asserts that Old Testament events hold meaning and value chiefly insofar as they predict and underwrite the events of the New Testament. In this hermeneutic perhaps lay the appeal for Thomas of Monmouth of thinking the story of William of Norwich through liturgical language. If the liturgy establishes a typological hermeneutic for making sense of the place of the Israelites of the Old Testament in light of the New, it might also offer a template for making sense of the place of the Jews in Christian society. The liturgy encompassed “the formal and ritualized prayer of the Church, which includes the Eucharistic service (the Mass), the Divine Office (the opus dei), and a host of other public rites, including processions, blessings, and other formal prayers.”3 The Divine Office involved the chanting of the psalms, framed by other texts that allegorized their interpretation toward a Christ-­centered worldview and punctuated by the celebration of the mass, in which Christ’s presence and body were ritually remembered. Thomas’s descriptions of what happened to William in the spring of 1144 are as much influenced by his lived experience of the liturgical ritual of Benedictine monasticism as by his lived experience of Jewish/Christian relations in Norwich. Thus when he sets out to narrate this entirely new kind of story he uses a language replete with typological allegory and liturgical cues in order to explain it by means of a familiar paradigm. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich 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.

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The typological allegory that animates the liturgy, and which the Life draws on to support its claims, also structures the manuscript collection. While each of the three texts that form this libellus has its own cultural and institutional context, assembled together they articulate an overarching narrative of salvation history: from the sacrifice of Christ on the cross; to his ritual remembrance in the mass; to the final days, the time of the Apocalypse, when the Celestial Jerusalem will descend from the sky (Apoc. 21:4). The juxtaposition of Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass, following directly upon Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, for instance, invites the reader in retrospect to read Thomas’s narrative as more invested in liturgical thinking than it may initially appear. Read in apposition, the Letter on the Office of the Mass and The Life and Passion of William of Norwich communicate the two central themes of medieval Christian culture as it came to be articulated over the course of the long twelfth century: the death of Christ at the hands of the Jews and the commemoration of this sacrifice in the mass. Like the Life, albeit in a different register, the office of the mass reenacts the events of the Passion. Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass allegorizes these events and, in so doing, retroactively provides a hermeneutic frame for the events in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. The short excerpt allegorizing the emerald, drawn from Haimo of Auxerre’s commentary on the Apocalypse that ends the libellus, continues the allegoresis of the Letter on the Office of the Mass. In moving the reader into the end-­time of the Apocalypse, and up to the gem-­studded walls of the Heavenly Jerusalem, it completes the allegorical movement through sacred history begun by The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. The way in which it draws attention to the idea of the fulfillment of the Passion in Christ’s return in the Last Judgment and the inauguration of a new era reminds the reader of the importance of the Jews in that narrative. The allegory of the emerald thus fulfills the themes of the libellus—not least when it refers to the emerald as a figura for Christ. The way in which this narrative is expressed in CUL Add. MS 3037 is connected to broad trends in twelfth-­century theology—particularly those that theorize the body of Christ, which determine the representational domain of the libellus precisely at a moment when the body of Christ was itself the focus of a heated debate and a transformation in institutional status. Indeed, it is precisely the question of figura, of representation, of how to represent the body of Christ and under what conditions it is even possible to represent that body at all, that animates all three of these texts. They implicitly respond to shifting conceptions of eucharistic theology and to the seeming multiplicity of Christ’s body, visible and invisible, historical, sacramental, and



The Language of the Liturgy 27

eschatological. Indeed, not only is the representation of Jews ritually crucifying a child new to the Life, but representing the body of Christ through the imagery of crucifixion was similarly innovative. This is an innovation to which Roland Recht has drawn our attention: “A relatively abundant literature began to grow up around 1200 that would enable Christians to visualize what was conveyed, historically, by the simple words of the Evangelist, ‘they crucified him’ (crucifixerunt). Previously this historical problem had not been given such attention.”4 In his discussion of shifting representational practices in the twelfth century, Michal Kobialka speaks of a “ternary discourse on the Eucharist”: “corporeal, spiritual, and ecclesiological,” pointing to Guibert of Nogent’s threefold description of this second aspect, the “mystical approach to the Eucharist.” Guibert, he writes, “argued that there were three bodies of Christ: (1) the body of Christ who died and suffered on earth, (2) that which is present on the altar, and (3) that which ascended to heaven. . . . Thus, even though the true body was present on the altar during the Mass, the function of the Sacrament was to direct attention away from the physical presence and toward the mystical presence in heaven and in the hearts of the worthy until that time when they joined God in heaven.”5 An analogous thinking underlies the first three texts of the William of Norwich manuscript, each of which models a different mode of representing the body of Christ. Thomas of Monmouth in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich reimagines the Passion in its literal, historical aspect. Isaac of Stella allegorizes the rituals by which the liturgy remembers and makes visible Christ’s body as a sacrament. Haimo of Auxerre reflects on the eschatological meaning of Christ’s body. The reading of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich below, then, will consider it as a text that serves in part to introduce the Letter on the Office of the Mass and the allegory of the emerald, and in which we can find anticipations of the allegorical method and liturgical concerns of these two texts. More specifically, it will consider the scenes of William’s birth, his abduction, murder, and his final (attempted) apotheosis by Thomas of Monmouth for their engagement with a rhetoric of persuasion grounded in the selfsame typological associations made by the liturgy. The relationship of the representations pioneered in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is particularly important because, as Denise Despres has argued in a series of articles, “medieval English Christians participated in Jewish persecution because they identified Biblical Jews through typological, iconographic traditions with contemporary Jews who participated in host desecration, ritual crucifixion, ritual cannibalism, and well poisoning.”6 The liturgy is an important interpretive frame for the original audience of the Life, and its influence in shaping the narrative of The Life and Passion of William

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of Norwich is unmistakable. Indeed, this typological hermeneutic must have resonated quite differently with the original twelfth-­century audience, giving the Life another level of meaning than the one scholars tend to focus on today.

“Quid credas allegoria”: Allegoresis, Typology, and The Life and Passion of William of Norwich The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is not, on the surface, an allegorical text. Indeed, its practices of verisimilitude have long been interpreted as, at least in a medieval sense, historical. “Allegory,” however, can designate a kind of text but also a reading practice that is attentive to different kinds of meaning within a text, and the literal, historical level is its point of departure.7 In The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, the literal level is quite clear: certain Jews of Norwich have killed William in mockery of the death of Christ, and the mode of his death has transformed him into a miracle-­working saint. At the same time, however, the text also engages with the tropes of allegory through its typological understanding of the role of the Jews in Christian society, and it uses typology as an indispensable rhetorical tactic of persuasion. As a mode of reading, a hermeneutic allegory seeks to decipher various—but equally true—aspects of meaning in a text. As the popular medieval couplet has it: “littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.”8 The second level of meaning here, allegoria, also termed “typology,” which teaches “what to believe,” is the aspect of allegory that serves to present an argument about the ways in which the events of the New Testament specifically, and of salvation history more generally, were purportedly predicted and prefigured by the events narrated in the Hebrew Bible, in this interpretive mode firmly temporally displaced as the anterior, the Old Testament.9 In Augustine’s words: “For what is that which is called the Old Testament but the veiled form of the New? And what else is that which is called the New but the unveiling of the Old?”10 Indeed, with this formulation Augustine took his inspiration directly from the words of Christ, who is represented in the Gospels on several occasions as identifying himself as the fulfillment of prophetic traditions, as, for example, in John 3:14: “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”11 Likewise Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, explains the different meanings of Abraham’s sons: “which things are said by an allegory: for these are the two covenants” (Gal. 4:24).12 Thus in the Middle Ages, this typological hermeneutic was used specifically to articulate the theology of supersession, whereby



The Language of the Liturgy 29

it was argued that, through Christ’s fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament and his sacrifice on the cross, the truth of the Old Testament is subordinated to the truth of the New, and Christianity supersedes Judaism. Supersessionism comes to be a primary way in which Christian culture understands its relationship to the Jews living in its midst. These supersessionist typologies take place across media and genres. One crucial example of this practice in the twelfth century is the development of biblical glosses with the standardization of the Glossa ordinaria, which systematically identifies the typological connections between New Testament and Old. Both Kathleen Biddick and Michael Signer, for example, have described the role of the Glossa ordinaria in the “transmission of medieval anti-­Judaism.”13 Kathleen Biddick notes particularly: “Since the Glossa ordinaria was developed as a schoolbook—indeed, in 1179, Pope Alexander III ruled that the Bible should not be taught without the Gloss—it had the effect of standardizing the kind of typological thinking expressed in the interlinear gloss.”14 This “typological thinking” was disseminated not only in monastic productions like the Gloss, but visually through the art and decoration of churches, which often “present[ed] allegorical exegesis in visual form.”15 This typological model of interpretation is not only broadly available in medieval culture, it is practically unavoidable and profoundly conditions how people go about interpretation of all kinds. As Erich Auerbach noted, “the attitude embodied in the figural interpretation became one of the essential elements of the Christian picture of reality, history, and the concrete world in general.”16 Although not explicitly allegorical in the mode of Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass or Haimo of Auxerre’s Commentary on the Apocalypse, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is nevertheless deeply imbued with the typological mode of allegory. Indeed, this is particularly true in Thomas of Monmouth’s more theoretical discussions of his methodology. In the prologue to his work, for example, Thomas defends himself against the slander of those opposed to his project through quotation of the work of Saint Jerome, likewise defending himself against those who opposed his own project, in the preface to his translation of the book of Joshua: “So let the scorpion stop rising up against us, coiled to strike us, and let the poisonous tongue cease injuring the holy work” (5).17 This recourse to Jerome might simply be proverbial, but it offers an insight into Thomas’s own conception of his project. The project Jerome is defending here is his translation of the Hebrew Bible, a translation that attempted to end and replace the proliferation of unscholarly Latin Bibles by returning to the Hebrew text. In his preface to the book of Joshua, Jerome suggests that the Hebrew

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Bible is a necessary proof of the events recounted in the New Testament: “How could they prove the testimony in the New Testament which was not in the old books?”18 And he worries that the existence of these unscholarly texts presents opportunity for Jews to libel and mock Christians. Here, Jerome is not just writing history—he is writing sacred history. Moreover, it is sacred history of a sort that Jerome cites as underwriting Christian truth. When Thomas frames his own work in Jerome’s words as a “sanctum opus” in this context, might it not indicate that he too understands himself to be writing something closer to a sacred text than to the reportage of recent events in the city of Norwich? Of course, in an obvious sense Thomas is writing about a saint’s life and miracles and so clearly must imagine himself to be transcribing an event that takes its place in sacred history. But the vita he is writing is without precedent: the narrative of the murder of a Christian boy by Jews in explicit mockery of the death of Christ. Thomas’s modeling himself on Jerome and his project on that of biblical translation draws our attention to the fact that the language he uses and the tropes with which he casts his story are often allegorical, typological, and reliant on the ideology of supersessionism.

“Significat Christum”: Haimo of Auxerre and Isaac of Stella Thomas of Monmouth often has recourse to the typological mode of allegory to draw the connections between the world of scripture and exegesis and the world of twelfth-­century Norwich that might make his story of the murder of a young boy meaningful. Allegory is also a key animating spirit of Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass and Haimo’s Commentary on the Apocalypse. In what follows I will argue for the importance of allegory in general as a mode of exegesis in CUL Add. MS 3037 and as one of the key ways in which each text retroactively glosses the others. By reading from the end to the beginning of the libellus—from Haimo’s allegorization of the place of the emerald in the walls of the Heavenly Jerusalem, to Isaac’s allegorization of the ritual of the mass, and finally to Thomas of Monmouth’s description of the first alleged ritual murder—I hope to set the stage for reading the implicit allegoresis of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in light of the two texts that follow it. While, on the one hand, this reverse movement through the texts belies the soteriological logic of the libellus, which can be read as proceeding chronologically through sacred time, on the other hand, it may usefully serve to emphasize the eternal present of eschatological time. Just as the end is always present in the beginning,



The Language of the Liturgy 31

so the allegorical figuration of William of Norwich as a lamb to the slaughter, invoking simultaneously the Lamb of God and the Lamb of the Apocalypse, anticipates the libellus’s conclusion in the apocalyptic vision of the descent of the Heavenly Jerusalem, dressed as a bride in preparation for her wedding with the Lamb, at the end of time in the commentary of Haimo of Auxerre. Haimo of Auxerre was a prolific and popular commentator on the Bible.19 He wrote important and popular homilies and commentaries, especially on the letters of Paul, on the Song of Songs, and on Ezekiel (which exists in a famously illustrated manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) MS lat. 12302), as well as on the Apocalypse. Indeed, Johannes Heil describes Haimo’s commentary on the letters of Paul as “one of the most successful medieval biblical commentaries of all time.”20 Beryl Smalley’s seminal work The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages identified him as a scholar whose work anticipated scholastic methods.21 Scholarship has continued to resituate Haimo as an important figure in Carolingian biblical exegesis. Composed in the mid-­ninth century, his works continued to be used and circulated through the twelfth century, and in some cases his interpretations have been absorbed into the Gloss.22 The portion of Haimo’s Commentary on the Apocalypse that is excerpted in the William of Norwich manuscript participates in a long and extremely popular tradition of texts that allegorize the gems described in the Bible and which do so by appropriating the descriptions of the magical and curative properties of stones found in the classical lapidary tradition.23 Although precious stones are mentioned throughout the Bible, those in the foundation of the Celestial Jerusalem captured the imagination of medieval Christian exegetes. The excerpt copied into CUL Add. MS 3037 is only the discussion of the smaragdus, or emerald, as it decorates the walls of the Celestial Jerusalem: “the foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with all manner of precious stones; the first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald” (Apoc. 21:19). It is short enough to quote in its entirety: The emerald is a precious stone in its nature, but more precious in its figural interpretations of the elect. The stone is so green that it surpasses all green grasses, and even changes the surrounding air green. If it is very big, it even changes the images of those looking at it. There are many kinds of this stone but the most precious of the emerald stones are to be found in Scythia, a desert region, because they are guarded by griffins, fearsome and ferocious animals, which have the body of a lion, but the feet, the beak and the wings of an eagle. And because of this they run

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over the earth like lions, and they fly through the air like birds. These beasts keep them in the desert regions, and they guard these stones, which they do not convert to their utility, but they take them away from men. They make war with a certain Arimaspasians, men having only one eye, and they take the stones away from them. Which thing contains in itself a beautiful mystery. Indeed, the emerald stone, which, as we have said, is excessively green, represents Christ, who will feed the faithful with eternal refreshment. And that desert in which the stones are found signifies the heart of the saints, who made themselves so far from the earth and from the cares of this world in order to be able to serve God in the secret quiet of their heart. Whence one of them said: Lo, I have gone off far flying away, and I abode in solitude. In whose hearts is discovered the emerald stone, because Christ dwells in them. But the griffins are present, that is, the malignant spirits, who strive to take Christ away from the faithful, not so that they may have him for themselves, but they take him away on account of envy. But the Arimaspasians have only one eye, that is, the elect possesses one eye of the mind, who fight with the griffins, that is, with evil spirits, and they take Christ for themselves, which is the precious stone. And just as God is designated by this stone, so are the elect, whose faith never withers. For they also are placed in the foundation of the Church, since they enlighten others by their examples and teachings, and they comfort them with the teaching of Christ. (Smaragdus pretiosus lapis est in sua natura, sed pretiosior in electorum figura. Qui lapis tantae viriditatis est, ut omnem virorem herbarum superet, et aerem etiam circumfusum viridem reddat. Reddit etiam imagines aspicientium, si moles ejus fuerit ampla. Hujus lapidis genera sunt multa, sed pretiosissimi smaragdinei lapides reperiuntur in Scythia, regione deserta, quos tamen custodiunt gryphes, animalia terribilia et ferocia, quae corpus habent leoninum, pedes autem, rostrum et alas, ut aquila: ideoque per terram currunt ut leones, per aera volant ut aves. Quae bestiae custodiunt ipsam deserti regionem, et servant ipsos lapides, non quod ipsae in suam eos convertant utilitatem, sed hominibus eos auferunt. Cum quibus Arimaspi, homines unum oculum habentes, bellum gerunt, ipsosque lapides ejus auferunt. Quae res pulchrum in se continet mysterium: Lapis quippe smaragdus, qui, ut diximus, nimiae est viriditatis, Christum significat, qui pascua



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aeternae refectionis suis daturus est fidelibus. Porro desertum illud in quo lapides reperiuntur, significat corda sanctorum, qui se a terrenis et hujus mundi curis longe faciunt, ut in secreta cordis sui quiete Domino servire possint. Unde unus eorumdicit: Ecce elongavi fugiens, et mansi in solitudine. In quorum cordibus invenitur lapis smaragdus, quia in ipsis habitat Christus. Sed adsunt gryphes, id est maligni spiritus, qui Christum nituntur tollere fidelibus, non quod ipsi eum habeant, sed causa invidentiae hominibus eum auferunt. Sed sunt Arimaspi unum oculum habentes, id est electi unum oculum mentis possidentes, qui bellantur cum gryphibus, hoc est, cum malignis spiritibus, Christumque sibi rapiunt, qui est lapis pretiosus. Et ut Dominus designatur per hunc lapidem, ita electi, quorum fides nunquam marcescit. Nam et ipsi in fundamento Ecclesiae ponuntur, quia alios et exemplo et doctrina erudiunt, et in Christi doctrina confortant.)24 Although the excerpt may have been chosen to fill out the manuscript column, the appearance of precisely the same extract in another manuscript—Universitätsbibliothek Salzburg MS II 341, fol. 1r—suggests that the presence of this particular excerpt in a liturgical context was not unusual, and that the specific choice was deliberate. The mid-­fourteenth-­century Salzburg manuscript preserves the extract on the smaragdus as the first item in a manuscript that also contains various sermons and other liturgical readings.25 As elsewhere in his Commentary on the Apocalypse, in his treatment of the emerald, Haimo brings together the historical interpretation of Bede with the allegorical interpretation of an eighth-­century Italian monk by the name of Ambrosius Autpertus, one of only two exegetes before him to offer an allegorical reading of the Apocalypse.26 So while he borrows the narrative of the struggle between the griffins and the Arimaspasians over Scythian gold from Bede, Haimo’s interpretation follows the model of Autpertus in allegorizing it; indeed, he quotes the first three sentences of Autpertus’s treatise verbatim. However, Haimo subsequently diverges from his sources entirely and gives an interpretation that is uniquely his: a Christian allegory of the war between the Arimaspasians and the griffins.27 Haimo offers a standard threefold allegorical reading: At the historical level of meaning, the griffins are at war with the one-­eyed Arimaspasians over possession of Scythia’s precious emeralds. At the allegorical level, the emerald represents Christ, Scythia represents the desert of the heart, and the battle between the griffins and the Arimaspasians represents the struggle of the faithful with evil spirits. Finally, on a tropological level, the struggle over

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the emerald demonstrates the way in which God elects the faithful, who are the foundation of the church, represented by the New Jerusalem.28 Of all the stones in the walls of the Heavenly Jerusalem, the emerald was most likely chosen for these contexts because it is typically a symbol of faith and salvation: thus Bede writes that, “accordingly, it represents souls always flourishing in faith.”29 The emphasis in Haimo’s version that the emerald represents the elect of the church is also a commonality in the tradition of Apocalypse commentaries, where the stones in the foundation of the Celestial Jerusalem also represent the individual Christian—the building blocks of the church. By the twelfth century the predominant interpretation of the Apocalypse was as an allegory of the church. This ecclesiological aspect of the allegory of the emerald follows naturally in CUL Add. MS 3037 from Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass, which emphasizes the traditional association of the altar and Jerusalem: the Letter on the Office of the Mass describes in great detail the typological relationship between tabernacle and altar, anticipating Haimo’s theme of the Heavenly Jerusalem, which is often exegetically linked to the Temple.30 The exegetical connection between the Temple and the altar also points to Haimo’s evocation of eucharistic imagery with the representation of the emerald as Christ: “Which thing [res] contains in itself the beautiful mystery [mysterium]: the emerald stone .  .  . represents Christ [Christum significat], who will feed the faithful with eternal refreshment.” This image of Christ feeding the faithful is deeply eucharistic—signaled by the term mysterium, which often describes the eucharistic sacrifice—reflecting theological developments that interpreted Christ’s body in the Eucharist as a sign pointing toward his heavenly body.31 The representation of the emerald as a sign of Christ, then, attempts to represent the body of Christ in its “real” nature, as well as in its sacramental aspect, and it imagines a more fully mystical representation of it as a bookend to The Life and Passion of William of Norwich’s more literal version. Haimo’s interpretation of the emerald as signifying the elect, whose faith never withers, and who mine their hearts for Christ, is an apt conclusion to the libellus, providing a counterpoint to Thomas of Monmouth’s more literal rendering of the struggle between good and evil, between the faithful and the faithless, in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. Haimo’s interpretation is also interesting in its thematization of allegory: “The emerald is a precious stone in its nature, but more precious in its figural interpretations.” The figural interpretation is the more precious aspect of the stone, as of the text. The emerald, with its ability to tinge the air green and to make things appear differently, functions as a symbol of allegory itself. The emerald is also Christ, whose contested nature



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is also conceived of as multiple, both historical and divine, both real and sacramental. Indeed, the place of this allegory of the emerald following The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass is a culmination of the concern running through the manuscript about the possibility, and, indeed, the necessity, of the interpretation of difficult and obscure events, and of the desire to make meaning present and immanent. Thus, the allegory of the emerald in Haimo’s Commentary on the Apocalypse joins those preceding texts in thinking about the difficulty of representing Christ in both his humanity and his divinity. This conceptual difficulty of representing the body of Christ, which had become a pressing cultural interest by the twelfth century connects Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass to both Haimo’s Commentary on the Apocalypse and Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. In Haimo’s commentary, Christ is fully allegorized—as the emerald—and he is represented in a fully allegorized landscape. The body of Christ that Isaac of Stella allegorizes is the body that is sacrificed in the mass, so for him real and historical, but simultaneously symbolic, sacramental, and mediated. With his story of the martyrdom of William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth takes yet another approach: through William, Thomas presents a reenactment of Christ’s death—literally and historically, by the present-­day Jews of Norwich, here avatars of their biblical progenitors, who are represented as crucifying a Christian boy “in mockery” of the Crucifixion of Christ. The minutiae of their actions differ from those of their putative ancestors, but their intentions are the same: Thomas describes them as “bloodthirsty” and “Christ killers.” This last term, perhaps more than anything else in Thomas’s text, nakedly reveals its intentions— to collapse the distinction between biblical and contemporary Jews and to lock both into the infernal cycle of Jewish animosity and Christian sacrifice, which, according to Thomas of Monmouth, is repeated literally, historically, and in the present day. For Isaac of Stella, on the other hand, Christ is represented sacramentally in the mass as the sign of a spiritual reality. He adduces layer upon layer of typological meaning, all of which works to construct the sacramental body of Christ. Indeed, among twelfth-­century commentaries on the mass, Isaac’s is distinguished by its representation of the mass as a commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice.32 Thus Isaac’s approach is quite different from Thomas’s, while nevertheless responding to the same cultural impulse. All that is known for certain about Isaac of Stella is that he was a Cistercian abbot of English descent and the author of a cycle of sermons as well as several in the form of letters.33 The manuscript evidence suggests that the Letter

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on the Office of the Mass was by far the most popular of his writings among his contemporaries. Isaac of Stella’s treatise on the mass takes the form of a letter addressed to John, bishop of Poitiers, where Isaac sets himself to the task of articulating “what our purpose is in the sacred canon when we are celebrating the holy mysteries.”34 It presents an allegorical reading of the mass, dependent on asserting the typological relationship between the tabernacle and the altar and offering an elaborate allegory of the threefold action of the sacrifice of the mass: “In the sacred canon we can distinguish three principal actions which, one might say, take place on three altars, served by a priest performing three functions and offering a threefold sacrifice.”35 Isaac bases his triads on the description of three altars: the altar of bronze, the altar of gold, and the holy of holies, which represent in turn compunction, devotion, and contemplation. In this schema, “compunction corrects those who have gone astray; devotion directs those who are corrected; and contemplation raises up those who are directed and makes them live with the angels.”36 Isaac continues to elaborate this reading as it pertains to the central action of the mass, the eucharistic sacrifice. The first sacrifice of the altar of bronze, that of man’s whole earthly life in compunction, penance, and confession, is represented visibly in the offering of bread and wine: “Therefore, since bread and wine are the staple food and drink, without which physical life cannot persist, it is appropriate that the power of physical life be offered through the offering of these elements. For these staple elements make up part of this life, and they symbolize the whole of it [totum figurant].”37 The second altar, the altar of gold, is represented in the canon of the mass by the consecration of the host, which occurs “above all human reason, by divine power, but with full human responsibility, new food is made for the new man from the food of the old man.”38 Finally, through the mass, it is made possible to approach the third altar. Isaac writes: “The first offering separates us from the world, the second joins us to Christ, the third unites us to God. . . . The first action is the passion, the second is the resurrection, the third is the glorification.”39 Isaac’s emphasis in this treatise is on the spiritual rather than the bodily. There is little contemplation of Christ in his human form. Rather, Christ is the high priest who serves God, who is “the head of Christ.”40 So while Isaac’s initial description of the third altar emphasizes its connection with the body of Christ—“this is the body of Christ, which in this mystery also is nailed to the cross and naked”41—the contemplative goal of the mass for Isaac is to move beyond the bread and wine, which is the first step, and the flesh and blood, which is the second, to the third step, which is the mystical union of the purified soul with God: “in so far as we are united through One and in One, we are made one spirit with him.”42



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While Isaac’s purpose is to articulate the Cistercian goal of contemplation within the forms of the mass, perhaps not surprisingly for a theoretical articulation of the mass, Isaac’s vision is deeply supersessionist and at the same time quite conventional. Moses, for example, is described as a “prototype” who “foreshadows.”43 The Old Testament offering of rams on the sacrificial altar is replaced with the intercession of the apostles and martyrs.44 The priest Melchisedech is replaced with the priest Jesus: “We have a new priest, not the old Melchisedech of old; he is not flesh born from flesh, he does not produce by his own sweat, nor from the earth which he serves in a wretchedness which multiplies. We have a new man, Jesus, spirit born from spirit.”45 The treatise begins with the assertion that divine grace “infuses ancient doctrines with a total newness of meaning” and ends with the assertion that “the promise made to Abraham [was] realized by the grace given to Mary.”46 Thus Isaac’s allegory is thoroughly dependent on typology for its exegesis of the mass. Isaac’s treatise resolves the problem of how to remember the Crucifixion by presenting a simultaneously sacrificed and sacramental Christ. Isaac’s Letter on the Office of the Mass participates in a twelfth-­century vogue for such treatises, spurred on in large part by the eucharistic controversy that had suggested that, at the very least, the ritual of the mass required more thorough explanation. The influential theologian Rupert of Deutz, for example, noted that “celebrating the rites without understanding them is like speaking without interpreting what is being said.”47 Allegorical tracts on the mass were penned by such luminaries as Rupert of Deutz, Ivo of Chartres, Honorius Augustodunensis, William of St. Thierry and Pope Innocent III.48 Commentaries on the mass had existed before controversy broke out: in the ninth-­century, even before the celebrated exchange between Ratramnus and Paschasius Radbertus on the nature of the body and blood of Christ, Amalarius of Metz had provided a thoroughgoing allegorization of every aspect of the mass in his extremely popular and well circulated Liber officialis.49 Although this allegorical interpretation was initially condemned, it would become by the twelfth century the dominant mode of interpretation of the mass.50 As Donnalee Dox describes: Through allegory, Amalar explains the theological complexities of Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection by describing how the ceremonial commemoration of the Last Supper assures the immediacy of Christ’s presence and promise of salvation. In the celebration of the Eucharist, the body of the priest extends the historical body of Christ into the present moment, just as the Eucharistic elements extend the promise of Christ’s mystical, risen body. The liturgy, so interpreted,

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becomes a method of scriptural exegesis, a way of presenting the scriptural accounts of Christ’s death and resurrection.51 This move toward allegorical understanding of the liturgy of the mass is itself a mode of “scriptural exegesis.” The allegorization of the ritual actions of the mass, combined with the increased theological insistence on the teaching of “real presence,” encouraged further allegorical contemplation on the Eucharist: no longer simply shared bread or shared sacrifice, but now also the living and historical body and presence of Christ. This contemplation on, and reanimation of, the body of Christ was in part what the allegorization of the ritual of the mass (especially as an orthodox response to eucharistic controversy) aimed to achieve. As Honorius Augustodunensis wrote in his own allegorical treatise on the topic, the mass is celebrated so that “the memoria passionis might remain alive amongst the faithful.”52 The allegorization of the mass, however, could be a very literal kind of re-­membering. This is the case in Honorius Augustodunensis’s celebrated comparison between the priest and the tragic actor of classical antiquity. Honorius writes: “our tragedian represents to the Christian people in the theatre of the church, by his gesture, the struggle of Christ, and impresses upon them the victory of his redemption. So when the priest says Pray, he expresses Christ placed for us in agony, when he admonished the apostles to pray. By the liturgical silence, he signifies Christ as a lamb without voice being led to the sacrifice. By extension of his hands, he delineates the stretching out of Christ on the cross.”53 As Dox has pointed out, this language of “dramatic mimesis” is anticipated by Amalarius in the prologue to the Liber officialis, when he writes, “the priest is like Christ, as the bread and liquid are like the body of Christ. So is the sacrifice of the priest at the altar therefore like the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.”54 Petrus Pictor, in his allegorical treatise on the mass, describes “the priest and his gestures [as] the figura of Christ in his passion.”55 As a genre, the twelfth-­ century commentaries on the mass offer an extended commentary on the problem of understanding the presence of Christ in the mass. Interpreted in this light, Thomas of Monmouth’s representation of the murder of William of Norwich presents a kind of popular dramatization of the work of the ritual of the mass. The priest, announcing “hoc est corpus meum,” reenacts the events of the Last Supper in a manner that intends to be no less real, but simply in a different register, than Thomas’s text. When the sacrifice represented in the mass is celebrated, historical time is collapsed into sacred time, or rather, timelessness. The events of the Passion—but more important, the meaning of the Passion—are radically imported into the current moment.



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As Lisa Lampert-­Weissig has argued about the ritual murder accusation more generally, the “ritual murder accusation presents another type of reenactment of the Passion. . . . Ritual murder accusation, by providing another instance of treacherous Jews murdering an innocent young Christian, reenacts the Crucifixion, bringing that moment of sacrifice in the master narrative of the Passion into the present in a grisly and perverse way just as the Mass does in a sacramental way.”56 The Life and Passion of William of Norwich presents the Jews murdering a Christian child “in mockery” of the death of Christ; the Letter on the Office of the Mass interpolates this act into Christian sacred and sacramental history. When Thomas of Monmouth compares William to Saint Edmund, martyred at the hands of pagans, he notes that William’s claim to sanctity is that he “endured the Jews, who were repeating, as it were, the death of Christ” (159; 240; pertulit iste iudeos in se quasi mortem Christi reiterantes). The Life serves to replay the sacred character of the event and to insist that it is and will be repeated—not only sacramentally in the mass, but historically, in the towns, among the people. However, the history that Thomas presents is nevertheless dependent on the tropes of liturgy, and not only because, as Jean Leclercq has written, “liturgical themes permeate [medieval monks’] entire conception of what takes place in time.”57 Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich depends on typological allegory and liturgical allusion as its key strategies of persuasion. These are not its only strategies of persuasion. Thomas adduces “eyewitness” evidence against the Jews that includes the young girl who follows William as the cook leads him off; the maid who gives Thomas a tour of the crime scene; Aelwerd Ded, who touched William’s body with his own hand; the convert Theobald who knows all about such plots.58 There is, however, another type of evidence built into the text—that of the liturgical echoes, which, perhaps, had the power to be far more deeply, perhaps even subconsciously, persuasive than the otherwise scandalously flimsy evidence on which Thomas rests his case, particularly if we imagine that his immediate audience was intended to be the Benedictine monks of Norwich Cathedral Priory.

“Novitatus concinunt canticum”: The Liturgy and The Life and Passion of William of Norwich Thomas of Monmouth’s story of William’s life draws on common hagiographical tropes that link the life of the saint to the life of Christ, tropes that also reflect typological references that figure in the liturgy. William’s mother’s and

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aunt’s prophetic dreams evoke a series of typological references informed by the language of the liturgy: blood sprinkled on white robes, silver coins, the Agnus Dei. Similarly, the representation of the mourning of these two women is animated by innovations in liturgical drama in the planctus Mariae and the representation of Rachel’s mourning over the Massacre of the Innocents. A final miracle shows Thomas engaging not just with the language of the liturgy but with the formal aspects of liturgical celebration, as William the saint transforms into William the priest. In the reading of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich that follows, I argue that the Life is responsive to theological change in its framing of the events in the life of William and that it simultaneously relies on liturgical references as an authenticating strategy for the new kind of story that it tells. The text begins to weave these connections by providing William with a conception parallel to that of Christ. Much like the divinely cuckolded Joseph, William’s father, Wenstan, has almost no place in the narrative. Instead, the primary parental role is filled by his mother. William’s mother, Elviva conceives him, “according to divine will” (10), and her lack of awareness that she might be pregnant is emphasized (10). In a dream she is alerted not only that she is pregnant but also of “the great holiness and dignity that existed within her womb” (10). This divinely announced pregnancy connects William’s birth to a genealogy of typological fulfillment: just as Mary fulfills the typological promise of Abraham’s wife Sarah whose son Isaac is represented as a prefiguration of Christ, so too Elviva extends the genealogy of divinely announced sons into the present. In her dream, it seemed to her, indeed, as she slept, that she was standing on a road with her father Wulward the priest, who was a famous man at that time, standing together on a road, when they observed a light on the ground before their feet and a fish—commonly called a lux—turning. The fish indeed had twelve red fins, as if sprinkled with blood. So she said to her father: “Father, I see a fish, but I wonder greatly how it reached here and how it can live in such a dry place.” Her father said to her: “Take it daughter, take it and put it in your bosom.” Once she had done so the fish was seen moving in her bosom and growing little by little, until the bosom could no longer contain it. And so it slipped away and, coming out of her sleeve, suddenly sprouted wings and flew away, passing through the clouds, and the open heaven received it within. (10)



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In this dream, conception is represented as something that occurs between fathers and daughters rather than between husbands and wives, a further marginalization of Wenstan in William’s conception. Elviva’s father, the priest, presides over this conception, offering an appropriate interpretation of her dream. The fish that Elviva takes up and which subsequently turns into a bird and flies away is a common trope of twelfth-­century hagiography, reminiscent of the dove that nests in the sleeve of the mother of William’s contemporary (almost) saint, Christina of Markyate. Christina’s mother is standing by a window one day looking out over a local monastery when a dove flies directly out of the monastery and in through the window, nesting in her sleeve. She later recounts to Chris­ tina’s hagiographer that “the dove stayed quietly with her for seven whole days, allowing itself to be stroked with her hands, showing no sign of uneasiness, and nestling comfortably and with evident pleasure first in her lap and then in her bosom.”59 Although the dove as represented in Christina’s vita is perhaps more literally evocative of the visual iconography of the Holy Spirit, the iconography of the fish, with its connection to Christ through the acronym “ICTHYS,” points to the Christology of Thomas’s text. Wulward’s encouragement to Elviva to “take it up” (tolle) recalls the biblical and liturgical response of the Jews to Pilate: “Take him up, take him up and crucify him” ( John 19:15; tolle tolle crucifige eum) and thus encourages Elviva to take up the cross of William’s predestined martyrdom and links William’s experience to Christ’s.60 But if the fish here represents the Holy Spirit, it clearly also represents William himself. The redness of the fish’s scales, red “as if sprinkled with blood” (10), refers both to Christ’s and to William’s future martyrdom. It also may allude to the verses of Isaiah 63:2–3: “Why then is thy apparel red, and thy garments like theirs that tread in the winepress? . . . their blood is sprinkled upon my garments.” These verses were regularly a part of the liturgy during Lent and Easter because of their common typological interpretation: the figure in the passage, which begins “Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bosra, this beautiful one in his robe, walking in the greatness of his strength” (Isa. 63:1), was interpreted to be a prefiguration of Christ, to gesture to both the blood and the triumph associated with the Crucifixion in the medieval Christian tradition. In addition to its role in the liturgy, this typological understanding of Isaiah 63 is popular in the visual arts. In the Stammheim Missal, a twelfth-­century service book from the monastery of Saint Michael in Hildesheim, for example, the full-­ page illustration depicting the Crucifixion makes the typology visually explicit. At the bottom of the image, and directly below the cross, is a youth treading

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grapes holding a banner reading “I have tread the winepress alone” in response to the figure to his right, whose banner reads “why are [your] garments red?”— their represented discussion quoting Isaiah 63. Above the arms of the cross are represented Ecclesia and Synagoga, a typical representation of the supersession of the Old Covenant by the new, with Ecclesia’s banner reading: “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law” (Gal. 3:13).61 These lines from Isaiah also appear on the Bury Cross, a twelfth-­century ivory cross, where they are inscribed in a scroll in the central roundel that represents Moses raising the Brazen Serpent, a traditional typological expression of the Crucifixion (“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the son of man be lifted up” [ John 3:14]).62 Isaiah 63:2 is also a reading for the mass on the Wednesday of Holy Week. William, too, is represented as having bloodstained garments by Thomas, who comments that “he, who already had two stoles, that is of innocence and of virginity . . . painted red by the blood of the martyr” (43). So William’s birth and martyrdom are represented as participating in a genealogy of typological fulfillment: just as Christ’s coming is prefigured by the prophecies of Isaiah, the Life suggests, so too William’s is prefigured by Christ and participates in and fulfills the selfsame messianic prophecies. Moreover, the fish’s twelve fins, although evocative of the twelve apostles, according to Wulward symbolize William’s martyrdom at the age of twelve.63 As he explains to Elviva: “when the boy is twelve years old [puer duodennis] he will ascend to the pinnacle of his greatest glory” (11; 12). As Thomas of Monmouth’s account subsequently suggests, after an exemplary childhood during which he fasts three days a week and learns his psalms, William goes up to Norwich to be apprenticed to the skinners where, at the age of twelve, he catches the attention of the town’s Jews who favor him above all other skinners “either because they saw him as simple and skilful or because—led by miserliness—they reckoned they could pay him a lower wage” (13). Thomas favors instead the interpretation that William’s death was predestined. Thus William’s destiny is collapsed with Christ’s, both “to be mocked and sacrificed by the Jews,” in William’s case “in disgrace of the Lord’s passion” (13). The archdeacon’s cook, who comes to lure William away from his mother, pretending to want to hire him in the kitchen, is characterized as the “emulator in almost every way of Judas the traitor” (16). Thomas notes of this cook that he is not sure “whether he was a Christian or a Jew” (14), but that he was perfect for the role because of his treachery. And, indeed, the cook is consistently characterized as a “traitor” in a language that recalls the typological fulfillment of Psalm 40, where the speaker laments that his close friend has betrayed him, by John 13,



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where Jesus predicts the betrayal of Judas. This new Judas betrays William into the hands of his enemies for three coins: “so the traitor took three shillings [tres solidos] out of his purse, in order to undermine maternal sentiment” (15; 18). Here again, William’s experience plays out in typological fulfillment of the prophetic tradition from Zechariah 11:12–13 (“they weighed for my wages thirty pieces of silver [triginta argenteus]”) and Amos 2:6 (“he hath sold the just man for silver [argento]”) through Matthew 26:15 (“they appointed him thirty pieces of silver [triginta argentos]”). This typology also finds its expression in the liturgy for Holy Week, where one responsum echoes Amos: “Oh Judas . . . for thirty pieces of silver you have sold the blood of the just [triginta argenteis vendidisti sanguinem justem].”64 While William himself is sold rather cheaply, for only three coins (tres solidos), this new Judas ironically reappropriates the language of the prophecy to prove his own faithfulness to his mission: he will not wait the three days William’s mother requests before taking the boy, not even “for thirty pieces of silver [pro tringinta argenteis]” (15; 18). The elaborately rhetorical verbal contest between the cook and William’s mother (“on the one side was the traitor, on the other the mother”; “he begs; she refuses”) for control of the boy is redolent with the allegorical imagery of the lamb, imagery that connects the Paschal Lamb, Agnus Dei, and the Lamb of the Apocalypse in a complex intertwining of images moving both forward and backward in sacred time and informing the abduction of William with an aura of presentiment: “Between her and him, as between a sheep and a wolf, who first would you think the strongest, in the fight over a third? The lamb was in the middle, the sheep on one side, the wolf on the other. The wolf stands in order to tear and devour; the sheep stands forth to rescue and save” (15). Finally, Elviva acquiesces to the cook’s and William’s desires, and “the lamb was handed over to the wolf ” (15). The lamb imagery culminates as William is seen entering the house of “a certain Jew” by the girl Elviva has sent to follow him: “Then the boy, like an innocent lamb, was led to the slaughter” (16). This figurative connection between betrayal and lamb is likewise represented in the liturgy for Holy Week and may find some of its inspiration there. For example, one of the responsa for Maundy Thursday is chanted: Judas the wicked merchant betrayed the Lord with a kiss: He just like an innocent lamb did not deny the kiss of Judas For a number of coins Christ was betrayed by Judas It would have been better had he not been born.65

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A further exegetical connection may be the common reading of the scriptural episode of Rachel mourning her children ( Jer. 31:15; Matt. 2:18); here, following Jerome’s On the Interpretation of Hebrew Names, many homilists noted that “Rachel” means “sheep.” Thus Bede, in his homily for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, writes: “Now, figuratively speaking, Rachel, which means ‘sheep’ or ‘seeing God,’ stands for the church.”66 This connection perhaps makes sense of the representation of sheep as protective mother in the Life. A liturgical influence need not necessarily be read here: the image of a sheep facing down a wolf is a rather obvious allegory for the weak opposing the strong. Indeed, William MacLehose has aptly described the conversation between Elviva and the cook as “an inverted fable, filled with ‘animalized’ humans.”67 MacLehose further notes of William’s mother that “she is portrayed in a negative light, although Thomas attributes her failings more to the general conflict of her two roles in the narrative—as sinning woman and loving mother, Eve and Mary—than to any personal failing.”68 Indeed, the representation of William’s mother here as the brave sheep seems somewhat absurd, as she will shortly succumb to avarice and release her son for a few coins, but its explicit turn into an allegorical mode draws attention to the biblical echoes of Matthew 10:16—“I send you as a sheep in the midst of wolves”—and ultimately Isaiah 53:6–7—“All we like sheep have gone astray, every one hath turned aside into his own way: and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was offered because it was his own will, and he opened not his mouth: he shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and he shall not open his mouth.”69 Above all, the representation of William as a lamb led to the slaughter evokes the representation of Jesus as the Lamb of God. The Agnus Dei is simultaneously eucharistic and apocalyptic, and as such, it is an image that is commonly visually depicted at the center of the crossbar on crosses. In the liturgy, the quotation from John, “Ecce Agnus Dei” ( John 1:36), is associated with the consecration and elevation of the Eucharist. The repeated reference to William as a lamb in this passage, precisely at the moment when he moves into the custody of the Jews, suggests a correspondence between William’s vulnerable body and the sacramental body of Christ. The repeated references to William as a lamb also highlight his role as Paschal Lamb, in addition to his role as Agnus Dei: the typological fulfillment of the Paschal Lamb, the Old Testament prophecies of the sacrificial lamb, and also a prophecy of the Lamb of the Apocalypse. As the Paschal Lamb, William will be “sacrificed” by the Jews at Passover. The incredibly detailed timing of William’s abduction, murder, and discovery further maps it onto the Passion of Christ.70 William is bargained for on the Monday



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after Palm Sunday and taken off to Norwich on Tuesday. He is well treated until the day before Good Friday, which was also Passover, when he is tortured and killed. On Good Friday William’s body is dumped in Thorpe Wood, and it is also on Good Friday that the first signs of his sanctity appear in the beam of light witnessed by Henry de Sprowston, the stabler, and Legarda, the devout widow. William’s body lies in Thorpe Wood until Easter Monday, before being buried in the wood by William’s uncle, the priest Godwin Sturt.71 The placing of William’s disappearance and murder to a week in which Passover and Holy Week coincide maps William’s death onto Christ’s, while its timing to the beginning of Passover on the Thursday evening, rather than to Good Friday itself, simultaneously frames it as a Jewish ritual performed by the Jews for their own ends. The representation of the actual death of William at the hands of the Jews is perhaps one of the most strikingly original aspects of Thomas’s narrative— original, that is, in the way in which it both courts and refuses identification with the Passion. On the one hand, William is described as being “mocked and sacrificed” (“delunendus et immolandus” [13; 15]), immolare being the term commonly used to describe the sacrifice of the mass.72 On the other hand, the Jews torture William with a rope and a teasel, and only half-­crucify him—“And they did this with such care, of course, that if he was at any time found with nails fixed into him from this side and that, it would not be indicated that he had been killed by Jews, but rather by Christians” (17). This is in stark and rather strange contrast to the brief notice of the event in the Peterborough Chronicle, in which the Jews are said to torture William “with all the same torments [pining] with which our Lord was tortured.”73 While it is certainly the case that every martyr has his or her own mode of martyrdom, it may be the case that the narration of William’s “crucifixion” owes some of its distinctiveness to the role of allegory in the text. That is, allegory depends upon holding its literal and metaphorical levels in tension: an overly literal correspondence between the allegorical representation and its object threatens to collapse the allegoresis. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich nevertheless offers a fairly elaborate narrative that asserts some high stakes truth claims and is difficult to account for. In conflating William with Christ through the imagery of the Agnus Dei, however, the text is nevertheless careful not to conflate the sacrifice of William with the sacrifice of the mass to which it may gesture and explain, but which it is not intended to replace. In the end, William’s death turns out to have been prophesized, revealed in a dream to his aunt Liviva, the wife of Godwin Sturt, who had a dream on the very day that William was killed, which only in retrospect is she able to interpret:

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“I saw myself, perchance in the middle of the marketplace, when suddenly the Jews charged at me from everywhere; running they surrounded me as I escaped and caught me as I was encircled. And as they seized me, they broke my right leg with a club and tore it off the rest of my body and without delay escaped, and they seemed to be taking it away with them. Oh, what a true foretelling in a true vision!” (29). Presumably the anecdote is intended to dramatically express that Liviva dreamt that Jews would take something she valued from her and that in this context the loss of her right leg is the equivalent of the modern understanding of the “right arm” as a metaphor for what is most dear and useful.74 Narratively, then, the dream serves as proof that the Jews are indeed William’s murderers. Jeffrey Cohen has glossed this passage as a reimagining of what the Jews have already done to William: that is, Liviva’s body figures the corpus Christianum to which the Jew is a constant threat.75 The word “leg,” crus, however, is an editorial emendation. The manuscript clearly reads instead crux, cross. Accepting this reading sees the Jews of Liviva’s dream breaking her cross and tearing a relic (reliquo) from her body (40). While crus seems a more plausible reading in the context of the passage, it might also be worth remembering that dreams, medieval and modern, need not always be realistic. If crux is, however, a scribal error, it may reflect a reflex belief that Jews attack the cross, a belief that so often animates medieval accusations against them. The invocation of the cross at this crucial moment makes sense: it is, on the one hand, a reminder of William’s mode of death; on the other hand, as rumors are already circulating that the Jews are guilty of William’s murder, Liviva’s dream serves as a prophetic reminder that the Jews are, in any case, always implicated in attacks on the symbols and confessors of Christianity. This, indeed, is a key point of contact between William’s martyrdom and the liturgy of the mass: both serve as ritual reminders and reanimations of the Passion. For, as Thomas insists, “the dispensation of divine grace willed that what it had disposed to the praise and glory of God’s martyr, and for the repetition of the memory of His own Passion [ad iterandam passionis sue memoriam], should not be forever hidden and should be revealed in manifold ways shortly after” (22; 29–30). The extent to which liturgical influences underlie Thomas’s description of William’s martyrdom is highlighted finally by the representation of the excessive grief of his mother and aunt upon learning of William’s death. Both women weep, lament, and faint in their grief (41). William’s mother, “tore at her hair” and ran “like a lunatic, crying and wailing through the streets” (30). While these are typically feminized representations of grief, as William MacLehose has written, “the image of a mother expressing sadness and anxiety over her young child



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Figure 1. “De planctu matris,” CUL Add. MS 3037, fol. 12v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

derives from a complex series of typological connections—Rachel crying in the desert ( Jeremiah 31:15), the Massacre of the Innocents (Matthew 2:16–18), and Mary searching frantically for the twelve-­year-­old Jesus who had been left behind in Jerusalem (Luke 2:41–52).”76 The title of the section in the manuscript describing the reaction of William’s mother to the discovery of his dead body, “De planctu matris” (Figure 1), however, recalls not the biblical texts, which never explicitly represent Mary mourning her son, but rather contemporary developments in liturgy and liturgical drama in the genre of the planctus Mariae.77 This genre of lyric elaborates Mary’s imagined affective response to the Crucifixion as she mourns and laments the death of her son at length. First appearing in the eleventh century, by the twelfth century the genre was fully articulated, and in the twelfth and thirteenth century appears as an element of liturgical drama.78 The planctus thus participates in the wider cultural phenomenon of emphasizing the humanity and suffering of Christ across the arts. As Sandro Sticca has noted, “in the twelfth century in particular, the dramatization of Christ’s Passion was marked by a more intimate, vibrant and pervasive participation of the Virgin in her Son’s redemptive sacrifice. This was accomplished through the creation of a new and intensely powerful iconography of the Passion in which a highly sensitive dramatic language heightened the tragic character of the divine sacrifice. This sacrifice in turn was reflected and detailed with incisive and tortured etching in the mother’s heart.”79

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The theological turn to consideration of Mary’s role in Christ’s sacrifice, which reached full articulation in the twelfth century, relied in part on creating such a heightened affective mood by contrasting Mary’s loss to the cruelty of the Jews at the Passion. The twelfth-­century Planctus ante nescia, for example, which was subsequently absorbed into the Benediktbeuren Passion play, begins with Mary lamenting her grief—“planctus ante nescia” (I did not know the lament before)—but quickly moves to an indictment of the role of the Jews in the Crucifixion.80 Indeed, several moments of the Planctus ante nescia are devoted to demonizing the Jews for their role in the Passion; for example: What crimes, what evil deeds The savage race has done: Chains, rods, wounds, Spitting, thorns, all else He, without guilt, endures.81 and Blind race, lamentable race, do penance while Jesus may be swayed to grant you pardon.82 Another twelfth-­century planctus expresses similar sentiments: You, Jews, through error You have killed the redemptor He healed the world through love With his holy Passion.83 The Jews in the planctus tradition are consistently framed as Mary’s antagonists in a representation that accords with Miri Rubin’s insights into the Marian miracle tale: “One of the cultural frames within which stories about the conversion of Jews were elaborated was the powerful world of the Marian tale. . . . Within this context, Jews were to acquire a poignant identity, as this benign discourse, which crystallized in the twelfth century into a formidable repertoire, embraced the Jew as the opponent of the Virgin’s grace, but also as the needy recipient of



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her mercy.”84 In the twelfth century, the mourning of the Virgin was thoroughly associated with the condemnation of the Jews. These associations perhaps underlie the startling rapidity with which, in The Life and Passion of St. William of Norwich, the section on “de planctu matris” descends from a mother’s grief into angry blame and accusation of the Jews. Although “she could learn nothing more for certain, only that he had been killed in an unusual manner . . . out of many and credible conjectural arguments she was able to conclude that it was not Christians, but in truth Jews, who had dared to commit the crime in that way” (30). Having moved to this accusation with no evidence at all, William’s mother runs through the streets and “accosted everyone with horrible cries and asserted that her son had been seduced by fraud, kidnapped from her by cunning, and killed by the Jews” (30).85 The characterization of William’s mother’s mourning as “de planctu matris” in the manuscript rubric is probably a response to liturgical developments that would have been part of the lived experience of a Benedictine monk. With its connection to liturgical drama, or, at least, the dramatization inherent in the performance of the liturgy, the evocation of the planctus demonstrates the extent to which Thomas’s thinking about the Passion takes place in response to, but also perhaps as a further elaboration of, the liturgical impulse to literally reenact the Passion, which is precisely the representation at the heart of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. Thomas leaves his reader at the end of book 1 of the Life with the image of William at last ceremoniously entombed in the monk’s cemetery: “That being finished, and God remaining there as guardian, the convent of monks returned to the church, chanting psalms; others indeed returned to their own homes glorifying God’s great deeds” (38). At the beginning of book 2, however, this fragile peace has fractured, and Thomas represents himself in the beleaguered position of having to defend his account and his saint against the disbelief of his community: “before we go on to his miracles and translation I would like to confront some of those whom I know not what malice or jealousy leads to verbose chatter. Since for some while I cannot bear the shamelessness of their insolence and the insolence of their shamelessness, I attempt to pierce it through with the spear of satire, and curb it with the reins of reason” (40). Here, however, instead of satire or reason as promised, Thomas once again turns to liturgical reference as his most compelling strategy of persuasion, recasting the story of William’s martyrdom entirely in the language of supersession and, especially, of the Apocalypse. With his invocation of the tropes of the Apocalypse, Thomas turns away from

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the historical present to the eternal present, where an entirely different set of truth claims apply. To justify William’s presence among them, Thomas begins by describing the different ranks of martyrs, beginning with an allusion to John 14:2, “in the house of the heavenly father there are many mansions” (43). In the first rank is Peter, who presides, and the only other martyr specifically named is Stephen, the first Christian martyr and, perhaps more important, the first to be martyred by Jews, whom he indicts in his dying speech: “Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted, and they have slain them who foretold of the coming of the Just One, of whom you have been now the betrayers and murderers” (Acts 7:52). The diversity of these mansions reflects the diversity of the martyrs who will inhabit them. Judgment belongs not, as Thomas has previously pointed out, to those among his contemporaries who would set themselves up as “alter Paulus” (61), but rather to the apostles, “seated together on twelve thrones to judge the world” (43). This reminder, which echoes the words of Christ (Matt. 19:28; Luke 22:30), simultaneously points forward to Apocalypse 20:4: “I saw seats; and they sat upon them; and judgment was given unto them.” The judgment described here in the Apocalypse is the “first resurrection” (Apoc. 20:5) in which “the souls of them that were beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God . . . they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years” (Apoc. 20:4). These martyrs are divided by Thomas into three ranks of apostles, martyrs, and confessors, who “reign together in infinite glory and—like the sun—shine without end for ever and ever” (43). The subsequent description of the Lamb of God, “who grazes among the lilies [pascit inter lilia]” (43; 62), quotes the Song of Songs (“qui pascitur inter lilia”), but also invokes the Lamb of the Apocalypse: “And I saw: and behold in the midst of the throne . . . a Lamb standing as if it were slain” (Apoc. 5:6). To confirm this association, Thomas quotes from the Apocalypse, as those who worship the Lamb “sung a new song saying: Thou art worthy, O Lord, to take the book and to open the seals thereof, because thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God, in thy blood” (Apoc. 5:9).86 In Thomas’s rendition, the martyrs “sing the most excellent new song” (43), and William joins the other virgin martyrs: “We are confident that the glorious martyr William lives among their holy communities, marked by a triple stole and counted among the illustrious. He deserves indeed the badge of the triple stole, he, who already had two stoles, that is of innocence and of virginity, so that he should claim the third, painted red by the blood of the martyr” (43). This passage is dominated by a language drawn from the Apocalypse that works to insist that William is indeed a saint not through any recourse to new information or



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new witnesses, but rather through a series of reminders that while Christ is a fulfillment of the typological promise of the Old Testament, the saints and martyrs in their turn are the fulfillment of Christ’s own promise. Indeed, through his invocation of the “new song,” Thomas draws attention to this set of associations; for in these words, Apocalypse quotes Psalms 95 and 97, both of which begin: “Sing to the Lord a new song.” In this context, the “new song” represents the new covenant, which supersedes the old. This is the standard interpretation of these psalms in the two probably most influential collections of commentaries on the Psalms in the twelfth century: those of Augustine and Peter Lombard. In his influential interpretations of the Psalms, Augustine explicitly connects the “new song” to the supersession of the Old Testament by the New in his commentary on Psalm 95: “The lust of the flesh sings the old song: the love of God sings the new. . . . Hear why it is a new song: the Lord says ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another’ ( John 15:12). The whole earth then sings a new song: there the house of God is built. All the earth is the house of God. If all the earth is the house of God, he who clings not to all the earth, is a ruin, not a house; that old ruin whose shadow that ancient temple represented. For there what was old was destroyed, that what was new might be built up.”87 This connection drawn by Augustine was decisive in medieval thought. Peter Lombard’s twelfth-­century Commentary on the Psalms makes the connection between the “new song” and the supersession of the Old Testament even more explicit. Peter explains: “Indeed the two Testaments just like two days make a single light, one does not illuminate without the other.”88 And he glosses the third verse of the psalm, “Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples,” with the comment: “skipping over the Jews because of their stubbornness.”89 Kathryn Zieman has shown how the iconographical tradition of illustrating this psalm will come to visualize the exegetical traditions of its interpretation. Zieman describes how the illumination of the initial C of the psalm’s opening cantate in the fourteenth-­century Derby Psalter is illustrated with clerics singing inside the initial, while at the margins are two figures marked as Jews by their hooves and hats, and each reading a book, serving “as a reminder of the ‘old song.’”90 Moreover, in addition to (or perhaps precisely because of ) being replete with the language and ideology of supersessionary typology, this passage is deeply redolent of the language of the liturgy of the Holy Innocents. This liturgy commemorates the Massacre of the Innocents as recounted in Matthew 2:16–18, where Herod sends out an order to kill all children under the age of two in Bethlehem in an effort to eliminate the threat he imagines posed by Jesus,

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prophesized to be “king of the Jews.” This passage is self-­consciously framed as a typological fulfillment of the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more” (Matt. 2:18; Jer. 31:15). The Holy Innocents enjoyed a fixed feast day of December 28.91 So while its placement in the liturgical year does not align with Thomas’s representation of William’s martyrdom as being intimately connected with the events of the Easter season, nevertheless, as one of the most important feasts of the liturgical year the echoes of its language and themes would have been immediately recognizable to the monks of Norwich Cathedral Priory. Indeed, by the end of the twelfth century, like the planctus Mariae, the Massacre of the Innocents had made its way into liturgical drama such as the Fleury Interfectio puerorum and the Freising Ordo Rachelis.92 The feast provided an obviously useful model of sanctity for a young child who could not have chosen the crown of martyrdom for himself. The Holy Innocents were imagined to enjoy special crowns in heaven because they gave their lives to protect the vulnerable infant Jesus. They are the “choirs of virgins” to whom Thomas refers when he describes: “In this truly inestimable glory that lamb of the Lord, who grazes among the lilies, is followed by a choir of virgins wherever He may go. To them alone is given the special privilege that they sing the most excellent new song that is His alone, because they preserve, pure and unblemished, the stole of their virginity, and have offered to the Lord a pure and undefiled celibacy” (43). This passage, in its representation of virgin martyrs as having the unique right to “sing the new song,” draws on Apocalypse 14:1, the epistle reading for the mass of the Holy Innocents:93 And I beheld, and lo a Lamb stood upon mount Sion, and with him an hundred and forty-­four thousand, having his name, and the name of his Father written on their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven, as the noise of many waters, and as the voice of great thunder; and the voice which I heard, was as the voice of harpers, harping on their harps. And they sung as it were a new canticle, before the throne, and before the four living creatures and the ancients; and no man could say the canticle but those hundred forty-­four thousand, who were purchased from the earth. These are they who were not defiled with women: for they are virgins. These follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. (Apoc. 14:1–4) Through what C. Clifford Flanigan describes as “the incorporation of John’s apocalyptic vision of the martyrs at the heavenly liturgy into Matthew’s narrative,”



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the massacred innocents are mapped onto the choir of virgins who sing the new song in the presence of the Lamb.94 Sermons on the massacre “were sympathetic towards the murdered infants, arguing, in the case of St. Bernard, that the infants should receive crowns to attest to their full status as holy martyrs.”95 Theresa Tinkle has argued compellingly that the association between the Massacre of the Innocents and the crucifixion of Christ was made precisely through their shared representation of Jewish violence and was made very early on in the exegetical tradition; and she suggests that this exegetical tradition may underlie the ritual murder accusation. Of course, reading the Innocents as martyrs to Jewish violence relies in the first instance on an allegorical move that understands the Innocents not in their historical context of Hebrew children murdered by Romans, but rather as Christian proto-­martyrs. Pointing out that Herod himself is crucially identified as a Jew by the Glossa ordinaria, Tinkle argues: “The Glossa is, moreover, hardly innovative in modelling the Slaughter on the pattern of the Crucifixion . . . exegetes from the eighth century to the thirteenth similarly read the scene as a narrative about Jewish anger and Christian suffering, wherein the Innocents witness to a violent Jewish hatred of Christ that begins with his birth and extends to the contemporary persecution of the saints.”96 The liturgical echo of the Feast of the Holy Innocents in The Life and of William of Norwich thus provides the crucial connection that Thomas manipulates in his reinvention of the massacred child as the martyred virgin. And, indeed, Thomas will ultimately be far more explicit in drawing upon the Holy Innocents as a proof text of William’s sanctity. Railing against those who struggle to believe that a poor boy with no visible merits should have been chosen as a martyr, Thomas insists: “I put in opposition the innocents ‘of two years old or less’ who were not distinguished by the merits of a lifetime, but whom God’s grace alone glorified” (58).97 Thus the set of associations Thomas articulates between William, the Holy Innocents, and the violence of Jews is completed. Thomas’s understanding of William’s place in heaven is deeply inflected by his liturgical experiences. This is not necessarily to say that Thomas did not think that he was describing a true event: the murder of a Christian boy by the Jews of Norwich. It is rather to draw attention to the ways in which his belief about the place of murdered children and their role in salvation history is profoundly influenced just as much by his annual experience of the liturgical commemoration of the Massacre of the Innocents as by any forensic investigations into the death of William. And to draw attention also to the fact that his representation of Jewish crimes is influenced just as much by his cultic experience of the sacrifice of Christ in the mass as by his lived experience of the Jews of Norwich (with

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whom he had assumedly very little interaction as a newcomer to town). It is at moments when Thomas is at most pains to frame or explain what is purported to have happened that he has the greatest recourse to this liturgical rhetoric that serves to endorse the “truth” of the events that took place in Norwich in 1144.

Conclusion: William of Norwich and the Language of the Liturgy The extent to which thinking about the text’s engagement with the liturgy is crucial to understanding The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is nowhere clearer than in the penultimate miracle of the Life, which recounts the experience of Agnes, the daughter of Adam of Crombe, who suffers from seizures. In the midst of one, she enters a trancelike state, in which she sees “a most beautiful youth, bleeding, bearing a cross” (189) walking through the woods. The youth, subsequently identified as “William, whom they call a saint,” enters a chapel, puts on priest’s robes, and begins to celebrate mass. Agnes frets that she is unable to assist because of her sex, when a youth named Robert comes along to do so.98 Agnes attends William’s mass, making the appropriate responsa, giving a donation, and receiving the sacraments “of the body and blood of Christ, the salvation of all the orthodox.” When the mass is completed, William heals Agnes at her request, with advice that is exemplary in its orthodoxy: “‘You will be cured,’ he said, ‘but pay careful attention to the manner of your cure. You will take the material of which the great sacraments are made—that is, holy water—and wash the feet of the crucifix in the name of God the Father almighty, and the Son, who is consubstantial with the Father, and the Holy Spirit, coeternal with the Father and Son. In it you will crumble morsels of bread and consume it in good faith and without delay and you will acquire health’” (190). Simon Yarrow has interpreted this miracle as one of a series that “underline [the] theme of the redemptive power of priestly sacraments.”99 Indeed, the sacraments of communion and confession are emphasized in two of these miracles, as is the importance of compunction and repentance. More specifically, the cure of Agnes is cited as one of four miracles that take place at the newly consecrated chapel of St. William in the Wood, on the site of the discovery of William’s body. In this privileged location, the miracle becomes an occasion for reflecting upon the relationship of William’s body, and his story, to the complex symbolism of the mass. William’s body becomes Christlike when tortured and killed by Jews. It becomes eucharistic insofar as it is a figura of Christ’s body: like the sacrament of the Eucharist



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it is a sign that points to a spiritual truth. Moreover, in becoming Christlike, William’s body becomes priestly. Here Thomas of Monmouth is echoing treatises like the one by Amalarius of Metz discussed above, which liken the role of the priest in the mass to that of Christ: “the priest is like Christ, as the bread and liquid are like the body of Christ. So is the sacrifice of the priest at the altar therefore like the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.”100 The Life thus is completed not with William’s martyrdom but with his priesthood. At the chapel of St. William in the Wood, William is not only a martyr with a dedicated altar but also a priest who consecrates the sacraments at the altar of Christ. He is simultaneously ­martyr, priest, and Christ. This complicated and multivalent representation of the body of William—and thus the body of Christ—functions simultaneously as a symbolic explanation of William’s martyrdom and of the sacrifice of the mass. This miracle shows Thomas of Monmouth not simply using liturgical language to persuade but also engaging with the forms of the liturgy as they were in the process of being theorized. The manuscript context of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, collected in CUL Add. MS 3037 with two explicitly allegorical texts, helps us to understand the ways in which it is a text that is deeply engaged with the language and form of the liturgy. From this vantage point, a certain logic behind the compilation is discernible. Together these three texts trace an overarching narrative of salvation history: from the death of Christ on the cross, to its ritual commemoration in the mass, and its final redemption in the emerald as a symbol of pure faith and as one of the foundation stones of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Insofar as allegory expresses temporal relationships—the typological concerns a text’s relationship to its past, the tropological to the present, and the anagogical to the future—the libellus as a whole can be read as having an overarching allegorical structure. In juxtaposition with Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass and Haimo of Auxerre’s allegory of the smaragdus, Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich looks much more invested in thinking about the ritual of the mass than it might otherwise. Indeed, it makes sense to think of this libellus as belonging to that class of manuscripts that David Dumville has identified as deserving to be characterized as “liturgical,” or, at least, as “para-­liturgical”: The hagiographical libellus containing a vita (or sometimes two vitae) of a saint (perhaps with an account of a translation or of posthumous miracles) is one of the well known genres of mediaeval manuscript. It is perhaps to be expected that such a book would be particularly associated

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with a person or a community especially devoted to that saint. It is a nice question whether the usual role of such a book, when owned by a community, would have been in refectory or library or church. The last must be considered a strong possibility and we may wonder whether a copy of the patron-­saint’s vita might reside on the tomb of a saint or (in the absence of the holy body) on his principal altar.101 In this context, appending Isaac of Stella’s treatise on the mass to Thomas’s text may have been done with the intention of it functioning as a kind of control text on an entirely new kind of saint’s life, intended to help guide its interpretation. It is evocative to imagine this libellus being read sequentially in any of the locations Dumville evokes, as each text retrospectively offers a gloss on the prior text and introduces the subsequent one. Reading The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in its manuscript context frames it as a document deeply invested in twelfth-­century monastic concerns: allegory, the liturgy, the meaning of the office of the mass, the representation of Christ. Indeed, each of the three texts in CUL Add. MS 3037 offers its own representation of Christ: William, the Eucharist, the emerald. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich perhaps attempts to visualize Christ in a way that these other representations cannot, yet nevertheless strive to—in a profoundly literal way—as they all respond to the urge to give “physical shape to the invisible.”102 It has become common to think about the way in which the theoretical articulation of eucharistic theology in the period in question had grave, and perhaps unanticipated, repercussions for the representation of the relationship between Jewish and Christian bodies. Thinking not just about the theoretical ramifications of articulating the Eucharist as the historical body of Christ, but thinking about the office of the mass as a ritual that produces that body might enable us to better understand the literary and rhetorical forms that The Life and Passion of William of Norwich took, as well as the acceptability and tenacity of those forms. This might, in turn, help us to better understand the element that Gavin Langmuir identified as the central mystery of the text: that is, not who killed William, but why the accusation took the form that it did: “The most significant question to be put to the Life, therefore, and the one that is not directly answered by it, is not who killed William but who first accused Jews of crucifying a Christian child out of religious hatred, and why that accusation was made.”103 Considering The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in its manuscript context enables us to reframe this question to ask not who first launched the accusation, but why the accusation took a quasi-­liturgical form.



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And it offers, I believe, one possible answer: that the Life is not entirely intended to account for the murder of a child; it is also intended to account for changing forms of liturgical expression. That is, we might read Thomas as not only using the tropes of liturgy to underwrite his narrative of the murder of a boy, but he is using the “truth” of that narrative as implicit validation of the ritual forms of the sacrifice of the mass. This chapter has thus attempted to seek not the origins of the accusation of ritual murder but a partial explanation for why the Life took the form that it did within the shifting liturgical context of the twelfth century, a context that is obsessed with the meaning of the body of Christ.

Chapter 2

Ritual Crucifixion in the Age of the Hermit

In a miracle recounted in book 4 of Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, a woman called Botilda, a devotee of William’s who appears in several of the Life’s miracle stories, is caught in a tempest at sea while returning from pilgrimages to the shrine of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela and Saint-­Gilles. She prays to William for rescue, and he replies to her: “And you, Botilda, when you reach Norwich, you will encounter your son—whom you have placed from his birth under my patronage—sick, and you will hasten to my hermitage [locum heremiticum] in Thorpe Wood. As you and he approach the tree where once I was thrown by the Jews, where I lay for a while under the sky, dig around its roots a little and when you find water there, drink it. Having drunk it, you will be freed from the ailment you suffer, and so will your son from his.”1 Here, instead of sending Botilda to Norwich Cathedral, William directs her to his chapel in Thorpe Wood, “where once I was thrown by the Jews,” which he describes not as a chapel but as a “hermitage.” The Life’s identification of the site of the discovery of William’s body as a “hermitage” is significant: it draws upon the cultural prestige of the hermit in the late twelfth century, and it provides a point of conceptual connection to the other two saints anthologized alongside William of Norwich in Cambridge University Library Additional MS 3037, the anchorite Wulfric of Haselbury and the hermit Godric of Finchale. Indeed, such was the prestige of the lifestyle of the hermit that throughout the twelfth century, when hagiographers updated the vitae of older saints, they tended to emphasize the saints’ eremitical aspirations, or even to include such aspirations if they had previously been lacking.2 That William’s cult is validated by reference to eremitical ideals rather than vice versa suggests that greater cultural prestige was attached to recluses than to boy martyrs.



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Indeed, the reclusive lifestyle flourished in the early twelfth-­century English landscape and in its literature. As Tom Licence rather poetically describes: an obscure picture of a landscape peopled by anchorites begins to emerge more clearly, as if an invisible map, gradually appearing, were starting to reveal networks of secret portals by which medieval men and women could access the heavens. The huts and cells of anchorites are the buzzing communication centres, sending and receiving messages via channels linking them to each other and to nearby towns and villages, and also via vertical channels linking them to God above. Far from being eccentric loners cut off from society, medieval anchorites were connected to this living network, using it to escape the suffocating conventions which society imposed and to conduct their lives in accordance with God’s will.3 This interest in the eremitic lifestyle is reflected in literature, particularly in romance, where the hero usually manages to bump into a helpful hermit as he wanders through the forests.4 It is also reflected in CUL Add. MS 3037, in which Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich was copied and bound together with John of Ford’s Life of Wulfric of Haselbury and Walter’s Life of Godric of Finchale. From the evidence of this manuscript, at least, it seems as if the most popular of these vitae was the final one, the Life of Godric of Finchale, as the margins of this text are the most heavily marked by annotations. John of Ford’s Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, however, was itself a popular text, as its manuscript record attests.5 At first glance, the relatively unpopular William of Norwich, as a child saint martyred by Jews, might seem to have little to do with these other two saints, Wulfric and Godric, both men who had prominent and interesting careers before capping off lives well lived with even better deaths as recluses.6 This chapter, however, will focus on their similarities and consider the significance of the emergence of William’s cult in the age of the hermit. All these three saints initially seem to have in common is that they are somewhat unlikely candidates for sanctity. The vitae of Wulfric of Haselbury and Godric of Finchale, at least, seem to belong together, both native English saints and both recluses. Their lives are anthologized together elsewhere, in British Library, Harley MS 322, for example, also a compilation of the lives of English saints that includes lives of Bede and Wulfstan of Worcester, alongside Aelred of Rievaulx’s life of Edward the Confessor. Wulfric began his career as a priest in the service of the household of William fitzWalter near what is now Compton

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Martin. Like his near contemporary Thomas Becket, as a young man Wulfric demonstrated a greater passion for hawking and hunting than for the priesthood. However, one day while hunting a miraculous encounter with a peasant began Wulfric’s conversion: a poor man stopped Wulfric on the road, asking for a new coin and insisting Wulfric would find a newly minted tuppence in his bag. When Wulfric searched the bag, the coin was located and duly handed over.7 For a while, this experience encouraged Wulfric in abstemious behavior in the world: “For the blessed man, who aspired now with his whole heart after solitude and purity of life, made these his own in that very hall—even on feast days, which was yet more remarkable, being harder; and as he prepared to leave Egypt he was already girding his loins and eating the Passover lamb—in other words innocence and holiness—in Egypt itself ” (99). Ultimately, however, Wulfric chose to enclose himself (uncanonically, his hagiographer notes, but with the help of his patron William fitzWalter) in an available cell attached to the parish church of Haselbury, where he remained until his death. This biography is dealt with in short chapters; the greater part of the life is devoted to Wulfric’s enclosed life, his asceticism, his visions, and his relationships with both locals (the cellarer of Montacute Priory is a particular foe) and magnates (King Stephen is a frequent visitor). Wulfric thus has much in common with Godric of Finchale: Godric was a merchant and ship’s captain (whose activities have suggested piracy to more than one historian) and ultimately steward to a wealthy man. Godric traveled on pilgrimage, and perhaps also business, to St. Andrews in Scotland, to Jerusalem, Rome, and Saint-­Gilles in Provence. The visit to Saint-­Gilles, the shrine of an early hermit whose church was an important stop on the pilgrimage route to the shrine of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela, perhaps suggests the way Godric’s thoughts were turning, because following a final pilgrimage to Rome with his mother, Godric divested himself of all possessions and retired to live an eremitic life—first near Carlyle, then near Durham with the hermit Aelric. Finally, following Aelric’s death, a vision of Saint Cuthbert advised Godric to make a final pilgrimage to Jerusalem (“to be crucified with the Lord”) and subsequently to retire permanently to the solitude of Finchale. As with Wulfric, Godric experimented with differing forms of the life of religious poverty before settling on his hermitage. As Wulfric’s hagiographer notes of Wulfric: “he worried away about bringing to birth the purposes he had conceived through the Holy Spirit and had for some time been carrying within him, and was held back, as often happens with those striving after higher things, by doubts about which form of religious life would best nurture his brood of aspirations” (100). This trajectory was probably not



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uncommon—the Life of Christina of Markyate follows a similar pattern of trial and error before its final resolution in an eremitic community. Godric and Wulfric further have in common ascetic practices, and they perform similar healing miracles for those in need. Alongside these two very similar saintly profiles, that of William of Norwich stands out as anomalous: a child rather than a man, a martyr rather than a recluse. Nevertheless, this chapter will argue that these three saints, and the hagiographical texts that construct them, have more in common than not. In the first instance, they are all roughly contemporary to one another: William was “martyred” sometime around 1144, Wulfric died about a decade later, and Godric in 1170. Their vitae, moreover, were also being produced around the same time, and shortly after their subjects’ deaths. Thomas of Monmouth completed his vita of William shortly after 1171; John of Ford was writing circa 1185; and, Godric’s chief biographer Reginald of Durham began writing in the 1160s and 1170s, with the shorter version of the vita found in CUL Add. MS 3037 attributed to Walter and finished sometime after 1181 (in the preface to this work Walter claims to have undertaken it because the existing life was “opera tediosa et prolixitas”—too long and boring).8 Taken in its entirety, this manuscript anthology is a timely and up-­to-­date record of contemporary—and perhaps even fashionable—English saintly male figures.9 Moreover, William emerged out of, and was venerated by, the same socioeconomic and cultural context that produced Wulfric and Godric. If William of Norwich, Wulfric of Haselbury, and Godric of Finchale share a great deal in terms of socioeconomic background, they share still more from a devotional point of view. The manuscript’s twin themes of eremitism and devotion to the Crucifixion would have had broad appeal to the reformed spirituality of the twelfth century, and more specifically in the Cistercian contexts of the authors of several of the texts anthologized here and for whom the manuscript was evidently produced.10 In the twelfth century, recluses imagined their penitential lifestyles as performing a kind of imitatio Christi, that of being crucified with Christ, in their hermitages and anchorholds. This is precisely the attraction for a Cistercian audience, which also imagined its spirituality as a version of eremitism and which was focused on the humanity of Christ. Most important, I argue here that all three of these vitae share a commitment to devotion to the cross, and this devotion is the animating impulse underlying the collection of these three texts together. Through association with the Life of Godric of Finchale and the Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, the new claims made in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich gain authentication, and they infiltrate the textual communities of Cistercian monasticism.

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Medieval people literally adored the crucifix. They kissed it, embraced it, drank its milk, and lapped up its blood. In return, it embraced them, nursed them, advised them, and bowed its head in sorrow when they went to war. Crucifixes were often miraculous, as in the one that prompted the vision of the Monk of Eynsham, which “was found freshly bleeding from the great wound in the right side, and also at the right foot.”11 They can even be punitive: William of Malmesbury describes a monk who had a dream in which King William Rufus takes up a church’s crucifix and begins to chew on it. The crucifix promptly kicks William Rufus across the room.12 This devotion to the cross was shared across genres and media. Consider, for example, the scene in Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide (ca. 1165) where the two lovers visit a church in celebration of their marriage: The couple first came to the church, where they were devoutly received in procession. Erec prayed before the altar of the crucifix, where he donated sixty silver marks, which he could not have put to better use, and a cross of fine gold, which had once belonged to King Constantine. It contained a piece of the true cross on which the Lord God was tortured and crucified for us: he delivered us from prison where we were all captive because of the sin Adam long ago committed on the devil’s counsel. The cross had considerable value, for it contained precious stones of immense power. Gold carbuncles of unseen equal had been wondrously mounted in the center and on each side. Just like the morning sunlight, each carbuncle gave off so much radiance during the night that their glow made it unnecessary to burn lamp, candle, or candlestick in the church.13 Here, as Erec donates to the cross a cross that itself contains the cross, the interplay of multiple versions of the cross merge in a thick description in which each aspect gains enhanced significance from the other. One compelling example from the mid-­twelfth century of the extent to which the crucifix had come to be seen as symbolic of access to salvation is in the celebrated vision of the Monk of Eynsham, who sees the souls in purgatory gathered around an image of the Crucifixion and, subsequently, the cross as a literal portcullis, sealing the gate to the heavenly city—the cross rises to admit the saved and drops to exclude the rest.14 William’s Life clearly participates in this climate of devotion to the cross. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is innovative in its representation of a young Christian boy crucified in explicit substitution and repetition of the Passion of Christ. As Thomas of Monmouth insists, “by the ordering of divine



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provenance [William] 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” (15). And, insofar as it is the first of its kind, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich introduces a new aspect of this devotion in the idea that the Crucifixion is being replayed in real time—not only allegorically and liturgically in its ritual repetition in the office of the mass, but also actually and historically in towns and villages by Jews who threaten Christian children. In Chapter 1, I argued that the three texts of the opening libellus of CUL Add. MS 3037, which contains The Life and Passion of William of Norwich followed by Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass, and an excerpt from Haimo of Auxerre’s Commentary on the Apocalypse of John, constitute three differing but complementary allegorical theorizations of the body of Christ: of the body of Christ on the cross in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, of the body of Christ in the mass in Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass, and of the body of Christ in its eschatological aspect at the Last Judgment in Haimo of Auxerre’s Commentary on the Apocalypse of John. Although the representation of William’s crucifixion in this text is somewhat circumscribed by epistemological doubt, there is no question that the concept of it is central to the ways in which the Life is invested in thinking about the unique claims it makes. Indeed, Thomas of Monmouth’s pithy statement “they judged him to the gallows of a cross” (21) is the central claim of both the Passion narrative and of Thomas’s Life. In this chapter I argue that the second libellus of CUL Add. MS 3037, containing the vitae of Wulfric of Haselbury and Godric of Finchale, is just as interested in theorizing the Crucifixion, although in a different mode, and that the manuscript as a whole is keyed to an audience interested in devotion to the cross, and more specifically, to penitential imitation of Christ’s crucifixion as a posture of devotion. In this light, Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass, framed as a treatise of advice to the contemplative, may be read as the hinge on which the collection turns. The manuscript as a whole thus carries its reader through the theoretical articulation of these ideas to their practical application. If, as John Munns has persuasively argued, “the life of the recluse .  .  . becomes the extreme example of conscious identification with the Passion in twelfth-­century England,” with The Life and Passion of William of Norwich another model emerges, similar in its theological underpinnings and devotional praxis, yet radically different in its implications. This model relies more explicitly on anti-­Judaism, particularly on the construction of Jews as the “enemies of the cross,” a concept borrowed from the Pauline epistles and elaborated across

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medieval literature, theology, and visual arts. A final section of this chapter will briefly explore the way in which this idea of the figure of the Jew as uniquely threatening to (and threatened by) the symbol of the cross is articulated in the literature of the Crusades, providing another point of contact between the three vitae of CUL Add. MS 3037: as loricati, that is, penitents who wore chain mail next to their skin as an aspect of their devotional practice, Wulfric and Godric thought of themselves as soldiers of Christ, as analogous to crusaders. Although scholars of medieval literature do not normally consider Wulfric of Haselbury and Godric of Finchale in the context of medieval anti-­Judaism, their inclusion in this manuscript suggests that these kinds of hagiographies cannot be considered totally innocent of it either, as here they are literally adjacent to it. Indeed, John of Ford contrasts Wulfric’s impulse to eremitism with its depth of true faith to what he suggests is the shallow and useless faith of the Jews: And so the man of God, having entered into the rock to hide from the face of the Lord and the glory of his majesty, began to build for himself an inner solitude, straining to penetrate to the hiddenness of that face as to a still farther solitude, and, panting with open mouth, to draw the Holy Spirit into the very depths of his being. Otherwise, to condemn the body to such close confinement while leaving the soul outside, as is the way of some, is a deplorable folly. Solitude of that sort is the shadow of the Jews, not the truth. That was not blessed Wulfric’s way, indeed not. (100)15 The “shadow of the Jews” haunts the vitae of Wulfric and Godric in CUL Add. MS 3037, as the flip side of their cross-­centered devotion.

“You Will Hasten to My Hermitage”: William of Norwich and the Functions of a Twelfth-­Century Recluse As Tom Licence has noted, “the omnipresence of anchorites in England by the early twelfth century bears witness to the universal appeal of the anchorite as a cultural reference point: as a type of imagined persona by which society gave form and substance to notions of virtue, holiness, and renunciation.”16 Indeed, England boasted more recluses than any other country in Europe except for Italy.17 The predilection for the eremitic lifestyle among the English—and particularly among native English and Anglo-­Scandinavian religious in the



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post-­Conquest years—has been the topic of two well-­known articles by Henry Mayr-­Harting and Susan Ridyard, both of which consider the “function of a twelfth-­century recluse.” Considering the case of William of Norwich in the context of “the function of a twelfth-­century recluse” highlights the similarities of socioeconomic and devotional context, as well as the ways in which the most recent trends in scholarship that consider The Life and Passion of William of Norwich predominantly from the point of view of anti-­Judaism have obscured the similarities among these saints’ lives that would have been far more self-­evident to a contemporary twelfth-­century audience. Henry Mayr-­Harting, in a study of Wulfric of Haselbury, and subsequently Susan Ridyard, in her follow-­up study of Godric of Finchale, used the paradigm pioneered by Peter Brown to conceptualize the rise of the “Holy Man” in late antiquity to think about the rise of the eremitic lifestyle in twelfth-­century England.18 Although Ridyard placed more emphasis on the spiritual services that hermits provided, both authors emphasized the ways in which the recluse and his local community forged a mutually beneficial relationship with each other in the political aftermath of the Norman Conquest, and especially in response to the new economy of the twelfth century. In Mayr-­Harting’s words: “Dimly discernible, then, is the fact that Wulfric could fulfil many needs, resolve many tensions, and exercise all kinds of control in the village for a foreign and distant lord at a less formal level than would have been possible in a manorial or archidiaconal court, and that in some sense he could help the villagers adapt to the social and economic changes occurring above them without their losing entirely their traditional values. Thus did this recluse play his part in the fundamental social mechanics of the Norman Conquest.”19 In this model the hermit is seen as someone who, rather than engaging with the clash of competing post-­Conquest power structures, withdraws from them entirely, and in providing a locus of authority outside of normative power structures “helped greatly to tear down the social barriers between English and Normans.”20 Although Licence has challenged the consensus of adherence to Mayr-­Harting’s model, noting both the increased attention of scholars to pre-­Conquest hermits and the concomitant rise of the eremitic lifestyle on the Continent, the hermits of Anglo-­Norman England are most often analyzed in this context: for the way the eremitic lifestyle allowed some women and men to recapture a measure of the status and sociocultural functions that would have been theirs before the Conquest. However, treating the rise of hermits and anchorites chiefly in terms of their “function” as mediators of community life has not been conducive to drawing connections between the vitae of Wulfric and Godric and that of William. This

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lens of analysis treats their vocation as second best, rather than focusing on ways in which it was also forward-­looking, trendy, theologically innovative, and not all that unlike those of their cloistered brothers. For these reasons, while the lives of Wulfric and Godric have much in common with one another, and indeed with other twelfth-­century English hermits, on the face of it, neither seem to have much in common with the life of William of Norwich as conceived by Thomas of Monmouth. Neither the vita of Wulfric nor the vita of Godric engages even remotely with accusations of ritual murder. Neither Wulfric nor Godric were martyred, except in the sense of the “white martyrdom” of the recluse: both died in ripe old age.21 William, on the other hand, is a child who, although his Life represents him in retrospect as having been marked out as holy, was not evidently so to his friends and neighbors during his short lifetime. In contrast, both Wulfric and Godric were considered holy during their lifetimes: Henry of Huntingdon describes Wulfric’s sanctity as “spread among all the people and . . . commonly known everywhere.”22 Considered alongside one another, however, striking similarities among the three emerge. At the most basic level, all three lives articulate the work of commemoration, prestige building, and fundraising common to all hagiology. The texts all seem to perform a similar cultural work: that is, they bolster the prestige and real claims of the monasteries and cathedrals associated with each saint—Norwich Cathedral for William, Durham Cathedral for Godric, and Ford Abbey in the case of Wulfric.23 The wonderful story about the monks of the neighboring Cluniac abbey of Montacute arriving en force to steal Wulfric’s body only to be foiled by the angry villagers of Haselbury underlines the desirability of the relics of the saint—indeed both the bodies of William of Norwich (which the abbot of St. Pancras offers to take off the hands of the monks of Norwich Cathedral Priory) and the early thirteenth-­century hermit Robert of Knaresborough (which the monks of Fountains Abbey attempt to forcibly dress in their own habit and carry off home with them) are similarly desired.24 Nevertheless, Rachel Koopmans has argued that the authors of twelfth-­century miracle collections—a point that might be usefully extended to much hagiology—were less worried about the economic and political traction they might gain for their cathedrals and monasteries through the underwriting of cults by means of hagiography than they were about the simple expedient that their saints and the miracles not be forgotten. She contends that “twelfth-­century collectors express little anxiety about what their contemporaries think of the saintly status or miraculous powers of their saints. They worry volubly about forgotten



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stories and what posterity will remember in the future. What they were seeking to defend themselves against with these texts, it appears, was the weight of time and the fragility of human memory.”25 It is certainly the case that both John of Ford and Thomas of Monmouth are upfront about their concerns for posterity and their aggravation that a saint’s reputation is falling into neglect. Both of John of Ford’s prefatory epistles express concern that Wulfric’s memory will be forgotten, particularly since his grave is unmarked: John laments that it is “almost as though he had never been” (92). This eye to power and posterity is shared by most, if not all, hagiography. The vitae of Wulfric, Godric, and William, however, share a more specific historical context. The three saints are all from similar socioeconomic milieus—bourgeois, mercantile, fairly well connected, but non-­Norman families. All three lives seem to offer a similar snapshot of the same post-­Conquest, not Norman yet prospering, social stratum. Both William’s and Godric’s parents are described in their respective lives as being very poor, but this seems likely to be a rhetorical mode of highlighting the saint’s humilitas, as the actual representation of the families’ social context seems to belie this description.26 William of Norwich’s family, for example, is portrayed as “abundantly supplied with all those things needed for living” (10). This socioeconomic milieu is common for twelfth-­century English hermits: Bartholomew of Farne, Godric of Throckenholt, Christina of Markyate, and the slightly later Robert of Knaresborough were all born into relatively prosperous English or Anglo-­Scandinavian families. Mayr-­Harting notes that “every single recluse of this period in England was, where the fact is ascertainable, English or Anglo-­Danish.”27 Christina of Markyate’s father, Autti, is well connected and well respected in his community (although perhaps not quite as well connected as Christina’s aunt Aviva, who is the mother of Ralph Flambard’s lovechild). Robert of Knaresborough’s parents Toki Flos (Tocco Flore) and Sunniva (Siminima) are counted among the nobility of the city, and one of his brothers is a lay brother at Newminster, a Yorkshire Cistercian monastery that had close ties to Godric of Finchale.28 Bartholomew of Farne was born “Tostig,” but was so embarrassed by his name that he changed it to the more trendy (and more Norman) “William” and subsequently to the apostolic “Bartholomew” when he entered monastic orders at Durham.29 Godric of Throckenholt, a hermit near Thorney in Cambridgeshire, was a successful fisherman, judging by his ability to give away “estates and possessions.” He was also well connected in the local village, being related to the smith and having a niece who was known to brew the best beer around.30 The point of emphasizing the comfortably wealthy family backgrounds may be linked

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in part to the relationship between cultural anxieties about the developing money economy of the twelfth century and the new popularity of the eremitical lifestyle, but the similarities are nevertheless striking.31 Like British Library, Harley MS 322, in which John of Ford’s Life of Wulfric of Haselbury and Walter’s Life of Godric also appear together, CUL Add. MS 3037 is a collection of the lives of English saints. More than one critic has suggested about these hermits that “it is possible that such people acted, sometimes quite literally, as interpreters between monolingual Englishmen and their foreign rulers.”32 Notably, all three of these lives emphasize their participation in this shared social milieu through an emphasis on its multilingualism—with both Wulfric and Godric being comfortable communicating in French, English, and Latin—and particularly its use of English in liturgical and paraliturgical contexts.33 Indeed, this emphasis is common in Latin lives of late twelfth-­century English saints. Thus the story about the canons of Canterbury who, wishing to sing an antiphon in honor of Thomas Becket despite the fact that he was not yet canonized, sang in English instead of Latin.34 John of Ford’s Life of Wulfric of Haselbury contains the wonderful story of the frustration of Wulfric’s friend, the priest Brihtric. Brihtric becomes enraged when Wulfric, in curing a dumb man, gives him the power of speech in both English and French. “Look, I have served you all these years,” Brihtric shouts, “and today I’ve proved plainly that it’s been a waste of time. It would have been enough to loosen this stranger’s tongue so that he could speak; instead you have kindly provided him with a double function for it. You have never given me the use of French, and when I come before the bishop and the archdeacon I have to stand as mum as any mute” (115).35 That this is a story as much about power and class as it is about linguistic fluency suggests the extent to which language circumscribed communal, and political, identity. The friend to whom Wulfric recounted this episode, a lay brother of Ford Abbey, treats it as a hilarious joke. However, for Wulfric the use of the vernacular was serious business as well. In a passage replete with scriptural allusion, John of Ford describes Wulfric worshipping in English: “with a special tenderness and intimacy of love, he called the Lord God his Lord in his native tongue [patria lingua]. This purity of faith was refined, and one might say overlaid with gold, by a certain holy and sincere simplicity which had been his from his mother’s womb, but by the sanctification of the Holy Spirit this gift of nature was made a gift of grace” (101; 16). Here, instead of being treated as an inconvenient stumbling block that might prevent one from reaching into the halls of power, Wulfric’s choice to pray in English is framed as an essential aspect of his holiness, as proof of the purity and simplicity that is the leitmotif of living sanctity. The Life of the



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contemporary recluse Christina of Markyate similarly frames devotion in the vernacular, with the hermit Roger referring to Christina as “myn sunendaege dohter.”36 At times, the use of English in these twelfth-­century saints’ lives seems to cross over from contexts of private devotion to more explicitly liturgical contexts. The antiphon in honor of Thomas Becket is one example of this. So too are the famous songs of Godric of Finchale—the earliest English-­language songs to survive with musical notation. A series of three short songs of praise in English come to Godric in visions. In perhaps the most striking of these, the Virgin herself teaches Godric to sing: she taught him a certain new song, which the Mother of Mercy herself sang before him, as if before a boy learning, and she taught him to sing it by means of harmonius chant with musical measure, [Godric] often subsequently sang it after her, and he remembered the song’s melody for the rest of his life. The true text of the words of which that song was composed was woven out of words in the English language; all of which were woven together with a rhythmical tenor and the tune of the song seemed to those listening to imitate the sounds of music. The text of the words may be described in this way: Saint Mary, virgin mother of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, receive, shield, help your Godric. Received, bring him with you on high into the kingdom of God. (118–19)37 I have argued elsewhere that in these vernacular songs we see evidence of Godric “engaging with the monastic literacy of his hermitage to experiment with producing liturgical song in the vernacular.”38 Although these songs appear connected with all three versions of Godric’s vita—those of Reginald, Geoffrey, and Walter—the short version of the life by Walter collected in CUL Add. MS 3037 does not contain the English-­language versions of the songs, giving them only in Latin.39 Nevertheless, both their vernacularity and their liturgical context are cast into relief when juxtaposed to a similar episode in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. This is once again the episode of the miraculous healing of Agnes, the daughter of Adam of Crombe. Agnes has a vision in which she sees William put on the vestments of a priest to officiate a mass at the altar of the chapel of St. William in the Wood. Agnes is initially devastated that she is not able to help William on account of her gender, but she ultimately does bring herself to participate in the service—in English: “After this she kept quiet for a while and listened most intently; and, after a while, taking a deep breath, in a quiet but very prayerful voice, she responded: Misereatur vestri, etc., and Confiteor

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deo and the rest, which, according to the Church’s usage, is said in prayer before the beginning of the Mass in English [Anglice]” (181; 286). The Latin here can accommodate the sense either that Agnes responds in English and/or that it is customary for everyone to do so. The representation of vernacular devotional culture in these lives emphasizes their sense of shared vernacular communal identity. As Christopher Harper-­Bill notes, “during the twenty-­five years of miracles recorded around 1169 by the monk Thomas of Monmouth, St William provided all that could be required by every level of East Anglian society.”40 In these communities, priests are important, but laypeople also frequently testify to the efficacy of the saints’ miracles. These priests are often married: when the Council of Westminster attempted to ban clerical marriage in 1102, Bishop Herbert of Losinga evidently claimed “that if all the married clergy in his diocese of Norwich were ejected, it would not be possible to serve in any of the churches.”41 But although William’s uncle Godwin and Wulfric’s parish priest Brihtric are both married, and the fact of these marriages is presented unproblematically by the texts, at the same time the importance of extravagantly performed chastity by these saints goes without saying. Both Godric and Wulfric were in the habit of mortifying their flesh in various ways, including spending long hours immersed in frigid water to guard against the sin of lust. John of Ford writes of Wulfric: “At night he plunged himself cold and naked in a tub filled with cold water and there, like Christ’s little slave-­boy, would offer to the Lord the psalms of David from start to finish, singing to him with drum and psaltery” (104).42 William’s youthful age is important in no small part because it testifies to his virgin chastity, which itself underwrites his saintliness. Thomas writes that he dyed with the blood of martyrdom “the two stoles of innocence and virginity” (43). All three of these lives share a focus on the thaumaturgic powers of the saint, exemplified through healing miracles: they make the lame walk and the mute talk.43 When their secondary relics are mixed with water, they transform it into what Diana Webb has referred to as a sort of “homeopathic” medicine.44 She describes how “the curative and purifying properties of water . . . played an important part in many cults of unquestioned respectability. A tincture of Becket’s blood in a phial of water, the water in which Cuthbert’s relics, Dunstan’s walking-­stick, or Ecgwin’s arm had been washed, water in which chippings from a tomb had been mixed, all had curative powers.”45 Christina of Markyate’s only healing miracle recommends water blessed by her hands.46 Loops from Godric’s lorica are dipped in water that cures a sick girl of dropsy.47 Hairs from Godric’s beard transform water into medicine in the same way. Godric of Throckenholt’s hauberk similarly infused water with healing properties. Links



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from Wulfric’s lorica are also used to heal, although there is no mention of them being used with water.48 The dust from Wulfric’s grave, however, was dissolved in water, and, when it was, its power “was so vital and efficacious that the man, only half alive, or more properly half dead, rose on the third day from virtual death” (216). William of Norwich’s uncle Godwin, the priest, uses the teasel with which William was purportedly tortured in this way. Likewise, the wife of the monks’ cook drank water imbued with a fern she had taken from William’s shrine to help with childbirth. Indeed, many of William’s healing miracles are effected through water connected, in some way, with his shrines. When Agnes of Crombe has her vision of William at his chapel in the woods and is cured of her illness, the cure is effected by water in which the crucifix has been washed: “‘You will be cured,’ he said, ‘but pay careful attention to the manner of your cure. You will take the material of which the great sacraments are made—that is, holy water—and wash the feet of the crucifix in the name of God the Father almighty, and the Son, who is consubstantial with the Father, and the Holy Spirit, coeternal with the Father and Son. In it you will crumble morsels of bread and consume it in good faith and without delay and you will acquire health’” (190). Agnes subsequently takes some of this holy, medicinal water home with her to cure fellow sufferers. Not to be left out, Thomas of Monmouth himself procures William’s teeth and rinses them with water for a healing cure. The characters within the texts, particularly those represented as seeking healing at the saints’ shrines, are virtually interchangeable. Indeed, the ideals of renunciation, simplicity, and faith embodied by the hermit had so permeated the conventional characteristics of saintliness that even though William is not a hermit, Thomas of Monmouth describes the location of the discovery of his body as if he were. Thus, in the miracle story with which this chapter began, William tells his devotee Botilda to “hasten to my hermitage”: “As you and he approach the tree where once I was thrown by the Jews, where I lay for a while under the sky, dig around its roots a little and when you find water there, drink it. Having drunk it, you will be freed from the ailment you suffer, and so will your son from his” (117). It is significant that William’s resting place is in a forest, the natural habitat of the hermit. Here, the term “hermitage” is almost synonymous with “place of healing,” and the miracle William offers of a magic spring is typical of the miracles associated with his contemporary hermits and other saints. It is imagined as a space where William continues to lie, crucified with Christ like a hermit, and thus as the privileged locus of his thaumaturgic power. There is perhaps no better way to demonstrate the contemporaneity of these three saints’ lives, their sense of a shared response to a shared culture, and

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the shared norms of twelfth-­century hagiography, than in their response to the cult of Thomas Becket. As Harper-­Bill and many others have noted: “The martyrdom of Thomas Becket in 1170 transformed the geography of intercession and thaumaturgy.”49 In this newly changed landscape, where Becket is crowned almost immediately as king of the martyrs, hagiographers found themselves in the unenviable position of competing with the cult of Becket for attention, just as shrines found themselves in competition with the cult of Becket for pilgrims and donations.50 At the same time as there was undoubtedly a sense of competition, however, there is simultaneously a sense of devotion and an eager sharing in the devotional riches of the Becket phenomenon. As Thomas of Monmouth himself notes: “In the realm of the highest city there are many and varied mansions for the citizens, but one and only joy radiates upon all in the vision of its king. And those who in their multiplicity are gathered in the glory of one joy are equally connected by a single harmony of charity. And so I do not wonder that some who I believe to be colleagues in pious merits also equally work together in many miracles; and sometimes it happens that they are participants in a single miracle, even if they are not equal in merits” (192). And indeed, it is common in the lives of twelfth-­century saints for Thomas Becket to make an appearance: Rachel Koopmans notes that he “appears in the collections written for Godric of Finchale, William of York, Frideswide, Oswine, Cuthbert, William of Norwich, the Hand of St. James, Æbbe of Coldingham, and others.”51 In John of Ford’s letter of dedication of his Life of Wulfric of Haselbury to Baldwin, archibishop of Canterbury, he compares Wulfric to Godric of Finchale, on the one hand, and to the murdered archbishops Saint William of York and Thomas Becket on the other. For his part, Godric of Finchale is described by his hagiographers as seeing Becket in dreams and prophesizing his future. Becket, in return, is described as attentively listening and requesting Godric’s prayers. In the Life of Godric of Finchale several pilgrims approach the shrine of Saint Thomas at Canterbury first before being healed at Finchale instead.52 The final miracle of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich appears to have been added to the end of the collection precisely as an aspect of this trend. It tells the story of Geoffrey of Canterbury who is such a glutton that despite a terrible toothache he cannot resist feasting on a fat goose. As a result of his overindulgence, his head swells up to grotesque proportions, and his friends take him to the shrine of Thomas Becket. Becket appears to him in a dream but offers him advice instead of healing: “Get up and go home, have a candle made in the name of Saint William the martyr of Norwich, and then roll it round your whole head in a circle, and immediately you will receive a cure. Once you are cured, hurry to Norwich, where you will



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offer the candle to him, your liberator” (193). Cured, Geoffrey embarks upon a pilgrimage to Norwich. Meeting up with two fellow travelers of extremely distinguished appearance along the way, they turn out to be Thomas Becket and Saint Edmund. “Know then,” explains Thomas, “that I am Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, and this other is the blessed Edmund, king and martyr. We have sent the blessed martyr William ahead to Norwich, and you will find him there” (194). Geoffrey stops at Bury St. Edmunds where he prays at Edmund’s shrine, and then on to Norwich, where he thanks Thomas and Edmund for their company and William for his health. Thomas of Monmouth attests that he personally went to Canterbury to inquire into the facts of the case, and the Life ends on that note of authentication. Attention to these shared generic tropes and devotional ideals shows how William’s Life fits more comfortably alongside the lives of the recluses Godric and Wulfric than it might initially appear.

“Sanctify All Hours with Christ’s Suffering”: Cistercians, Hermits, and imitatio Christi Thomas of Monmouth’s identification of the chapel built on the location of the discovery of William’s body as William’s “hermitage” clearly intends to draw on the cultural prestige of the eremitical lifestyle in the twelfth century. This invocation of a hermitage serves to highlight the ways in which William of Norwich, Wulfric of Haselbury, and Godric of Finchale participate in a shared devotional culture. They come from similar backgrounds, and they perform similar healing miracles for their followers. However, it is devotion to the cross and to the Crucifixion that is the key aspect of a concatenation of ideals shared by the intended audience of the Life and Passion of William of Norwich and the new hermits of the twelfth century, who increasingly imagined their vocation as a particular kind of asceticism: as being crucified with Christ. Like the interest in the Crucifixion on display in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, twelfth-­century hermits and anchorites in England were distinctive for their impassioned devotion to the cross, and Wulfric of Haselbury and especially Godric of Finchale were exemplary of this trend. They follow the model of the Gospels, where when Jesus tells those who follow him to take up the cross (Matt. 16:24), he intends it as a symbol of self-­abasement. In this context, the cross is a symbol of humility before it is a symbol of exaltation; hence its propriety for the recluse. The cross articulates the link between suffering and redemption that the recluse attempted to embody. In general, “twelfth-­century monastic and canonical preachers . . .

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defined the religious life as a metaphorical crucifixion of body and soul with Christ. Increasingly twelfth-­century preachers and devotional writers associated this inner crucifixion with meditation on relics of the True Cross, crucifixes, and Christ’s passion.”53 An intense interest in the Crucifixion and in the recluse as metaphorically “crucified” with Christ in his or her hermitage or anchorhold draws the shared devotional culture of the three saints of CUL Add. MS 3037 into sharp focus as a shared intense interest in what it means in a devotional sense to be crucified with or for Christ. Devotion to the cross is at once a key link between all three texts, I suggest, and also the principle of selection underlying the compilation of this manuscript, and it suggests also the appeal of this manuscript compilation to a Cisterican community of readers. As Brian Golding has noted, “twelfth-­century spirituality has been described as typified by a sense of ‘eremetic experimentation,’ and the Cistercian Order shared in this experimentation.”54 While scholars of medieval monasticism have sometimes styled the hermit movement as the opposite of the growth of monastic orders, with Hermits and the New Monasticism, Henrietta Leyser convincingly revised our understanding of the relationship between the two, arguing instead that the rise of the eremitic ideal and the rise of the monastic reform movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were intimately related.55 Tom Licence has elaborated upon Leyser’s arguments, noting that the Cistercian order, “overtook eremitism, by yoking eremitic ideals of simplicity, austerity, and solitude to the cenobitic safeguards of collective scrutiny, a regulated regime, and a hierarchical system of discipline. The Cistercian order, in this respect, was the happiest synthesis to emerge from the eleventh-­century dialectic between the eremitic and cenobitic vocations, for it combined the best qualities of both.”56 Indeed, for the Cistercians, the ideal of the eremitic lifestyle underlay their sense of vocation. The founding narrative of Cîteaux, the Exordium Cistercii, memorably describes the site of the new monastery as “heremus”—the desert or waste of the hermit—and in a phrase drawn from Deuteronomy that would echo throughout the literature of Cisterican foundation narrative: “a place of horror and vast solitude.”57 Many of Cîteaux’s daughter houses (and granddaughters as well) had been initially founded by hermits before succumbing to the Cistercian spell: for example, two of the four “elder daughters” of the order, Pontigny and Morimond, were founded in this way.58 In England, Kirkstead, Kirkstall, Radmore, and Sawtrey, among others, are examples of Cistercian monasteries that began as hermitages. So while the eremitic objective had by the twelfth century transmogrified from “a flight into desert places undertaken by individuals under



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the stress of a strong conviction” to “the expression of the corporate religious ideals and needs of a whole community,” the eremitic ideal of extreme renunciation, of utter poverty, and of constant prayer and reflection remained at the very heart of Cistercian spirituality.59 These ideals were not the exclusive domain of the Cistercians: throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries the ideal of the hermit as a key aspect of sanctity was prevalent in the British Isles.60 So the recluses of CUL Add. MS 3037 would have had a broad appeal to the reform spirituality of the twelfth century, but perhaps particularly to the Cistercians, for whom the particular style of purity and renunciation displayed by the hermit was fundamental. Moreover, like other reform movements of the twelfth century, the Cistercians were caught up in the impulse of devotion to the crucifix. As Munns describes, “The encouragement of a reclusive ideal in twelfth-­century England, for which an imaginative engagement with the crucified Christ provided the essential inspiration, was given theological coherence by members of the Cistercian order in particular.”61 Bernard of Clairvaux himself, in his Sermo de conversione, compared monastic discipline to a kind of crucifixion. Aelred of Rievaulx went so far as to characterize the Cistercian order “as the cross of Christ.”62 Perhaps the most famous example of this style of devotion is the exemplum recounted in Conrad of Eberbach’s Exordium magnum cisterciense, a narrative about the origins and early years of the Cistercian Order, in which Bernard of Clairvaux is witnessed lying on the ground worshipping a crucifix that lies before him: the corpus reaches off its cross and embraces Bernard, returning his kisses.63 Intense devotion to the cross was an aspect of twelfth-­century theology and society in general, but it was particularly characteristic of twelfth-­century recluses, who imagined themselves in their hermitages and anchorholds as being crucified with Christ. As John Munns has persuasively argued: an increased tendency towards reclusion in Anglo-­Norman society, of which the Cistercian ethos was a formative part, was driven by affective mimetic devotion to the suffering Christ. The practices explored here are primarily those of a spiritual elite, but the eremitic vocation was the ultimate expression of an ideal to which many aspired. . . . Too readily characterised by words such as “personal” and “introspective,” the spiritual attitude fostered by the affective turn was, in truth, deeply social and performative. Its inspiration, after all, was found in an act of profound public humiliation.64

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The life of the recluse was understood to be an extreme form of imitatio Christi: thus it is that twelfth-­century hermits and recluses are often represented as being particularly devoted to the cross. Like Godric of Finchale, discussed below, the twelfth-­century hermits and anchorites Henry of Coquet Island, Bartholomew of Farne, Robert of Knaresborough, Christina of Markyate, and Eve of Wilton all take the cross as central to their devotional practice. Munns notes that for all these recluses “the iconographic focus in their devotional lives was provided by a crucifixion image in their cells,” following Aelred of Rievaulx’s advice in Rule for a Recluse, that the recluse should “have a representation of our savior hanging on the cross.”65 Hermits and anchorites are often represented lying prostrate on the ground with arms outstretched in the shape of a cross to pray, a traditional penitential posture. In the Liber confortatus, written for the recluse Eve of Wilton, Goscelin of St. Bertin tells the story of the recluse Brihtric, who refused to leave his anchorhold to escape marauding pirates, and whose body was later found in the burnt-­out shell of the church, still lying in the shape of the cross.66 Likewise, while Christina of Markyate lives with the hermit Roger, she spends her days immured in a wall, but comes into the chapel at night to lie on the floor in the shape of a cross and pray, and Godric of Finchale prayed similarly. In the thirteenth century, Ancrene Wisse will recommend this posture as good penitential practice.67 Bartholomew of Farne slept on a cross of wooden beams.68 Robert of Knaresborough dedicated his chapel to the Holy Cross.69 Christ comes to Christina of Markyate in a vision, reminding her that “I was the first to bear that same cross. All who wish to travel to Jerusalem must carry the cross.”70 The foundation legend of Selby Abbey describes a monk of St. Germanus at Auxerre fleeing to the wilds of Yorkshire to live as a hermit and erecting a large cross by the banks of the river Ouse.71 Henry of Coquet Island was confirmed in his desire to remain a hermit by a crucifix that spoke to him and said, “Play the man and strengthen thine heart, and in nowise abandon this place of solitude unto thy life’s end.”72 Goscelin of St. Bertin invites his tutee, the recluse Eve of Wilton, to imaginarily structure her day around the hours of Christ’s crucifixion, treading in his steps at every hour: “Sanctify all hours with Christ’s suffering. In the middle of the night adore him captured and incarcerated, in the morning as he is being flagellated, in the third hour as he is handed over to be crucified. Shouting, ‘Let him be crucified,’ they crucified him with their tongues. In the sixth hour venerate him as he is being nailed to the cross, in the ninth hour venerate him dead, in the evening as he is being buried. Then, at cock’s crow, when the morning star rises, greet the Lord’s resurrection with a morning prayer



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of praise.”73 The imitatio Christi of the recluse was intensely oriented toward a figurative and literal inhabitation of the cross. As Munns notes, “being removed from the world, the recluse was participating in the passion and death of Christ, the rewards of which were not in this world, but in the resurrection life of the next.”74 Thus Goscelin of St. Bertin admonished Eve of Wilton: “You think of yourself as buried here, and consider your cell a tomb? If you carry your cross after Christ, you will rise from the tomb. Burial does no harm to those who will rise again.”75 This is a trope in anchoritic literature; anchoritic cells often featured a grave that the anchorite might pray in, and the liturgical rites for enclosure often featured the Office of the Dead.76 In this regard, William of Norwich, in his tomb, acts like a hermit, requesting that a cross be placed where he can see it: “On my behalf, tell the sacrist Giulfus that he should have a cross made for me of the size that pleases him and put it at the foot of my tomb. Since I have long laid on my left side, I wish to have constantly before my eyes the sign of the Lord’s Cross, which I myself have carried on my body. It should be fixed where I have said, so that without the effort of turning my neck I am able to see it” (141). Writing about Wulfric’s experience of his anchorhold, John of Ford imagines him to be living fully in imitation of Christ: buried, crucified, and resurrected. “There in a cell abutting the church,” writes John, “he buried himself with Christ, shortly to be transformed with him in a sort of resurrection glory” (100). On several occasions, John describes the punishing aestheticism of Wulfric’s lifestyle as analogous to crucifixion. For example, Wulfric’s diet is abstemious, but he takes the small nourishment of a drink called bersisa: “in case all this should cause his strength to fail him (or rather, so that it might ebb slowly, by degrees, as though he were left hanging on a cross), he drank a sort of beverage which we call ‘bersisa’” (103). A strange encounter with a snake in his bath leaves Wulfric with scars that John likens to the stigmata (105). And when Wulfric fears that he has accidentally consecrated the wine without first mixing it with water, he articulates his anxiety and atones for his possible mistake by imaginatively inhabiting Christ’s crucifixion: “And so, to atone for his negligence in respect of the holy sacrifice, he proceeded to immolate his soul to God, along with the blood of bitterest sorrow and the pure water of penitence seemingly wrung from his heart into the chalice of the Lord. For a while he hung thus on the cross of anxiety and doubt with Christ (153).” Although this vision is extraordinarily affective, the sentiments it expresses are deeply conventional for anchoritic devotion. Nevertheless, it is in the vitae of Wulfric’s contemporary, the hermit Godric of Finchale, that we see devotion to the cross being fully inhabited and integrated

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into the life of the recluse. As Michael Clanchy has noted, Godric’s early travels as a merchant merged seamlessly into his later travels as a pilgrim.77 Indeed, Jerusalem, as the historical location of the Crucifixion, played a large role in Godric’s devotional imagination: a vision of Saint Cuthbert advised Godric to make a final pilgrimage to Jerusalem “to be crucified with the Lord.” (Similarly, the hermit Roger, mentor and protector of Christina of Markyate, founded his hermitage upon returning from Jerusalem, guided by angels.) Later in life, Godric made two pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and he formally “took the cross” before both of them: “on his second journey he bore both ‘the banner of the Lord’s cross’ (Dominicae vexillum cruces) on his clothes and carried a small cross before him. Godric understood himself to be a crusader, but despite his biographer’s military terminology, there is no reliable evidence to suggest that he ever fought or bore arms. His evidence suggests that following the earliest crusades . . . it was not unusual for English travellers to the Holy Land to formally join the ranks of the crucesignati.”78 When he was visited by a pilgrim returning from Jerusalem who gifted Godric with some souvenirs, Godric spontaneously composed a song about it: “he sang these verses in a deep voice and a clear tone: Jerusalem is built as a city strongly compact. / It is there that the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, / As it was decreed for Israel to give thanks to the name of the Lord.”79 As John Munns has noted, Godric’s “spirituality was notable for being both cross-­ centered and martial. His warfare with devils and demons was legendary even in his lifetime, and his victory as often as not involved repelling them with the sign or image of the cross.”80 Moreover, the architectural space of Godric’s hermitage was organized around his devotion to the cross, which, in Godric’s case, seems to have been positioned on a beam, perhaps flanked by statues of John and Mary as in the paradigmatic twelfth-­century Crucifixion scene, as Aelred of Rievaulx had suggested to his recluse sister: “If you like . . . a picture of the Virgin Mother and one of the Virgin Disciple may stand on either side of the cross.”81 Or the crucifix may simply have been accompanied by an image of Mary. Her presence, at least, is suggested by the Life’s description of the series of Godric’s extraordinary visions in which crucifix-­centered theology is fully manifest. In one dramatic scene, for example, Godric has a vision of the crucified Christ that emphasizes the human embodiedness of Christ through an emphasis on his bleeding wounds: “Sometimes He also appeared in the other form of Christ hanging on the cross, and then it brought forth the feet attached with nails, and after that, little by little, it showed, moving up the body, the blood flowing from both the hands and the sides.” In this vision, in a sort of reverse blazon, Godric’s gaze, and the reader’s,



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is invited to travel from Christ’s feet, which bear the marks of the nails, upward to a full view his body, streaming with blood from the wounds on his hands and side. In another series of visions Godric sees Christ in the form of a child. In one, echoing the emphasis of the above vision on the bleeding wound in Christ’s side, Godric sees a small boy emerge from the wound and wander around the chapel: “Another time, while he prayed alone, he saw the limbs of a little boy [puerulum] emerging from the side of that same crucifix: first, it seemed, the head, and after the shoulders, and so on the rest came out in sequence. The little boy first sat on the altar, afterwards he descended and walked around the oratory. He was ruddy and shining and he wore snowy-­white clothing. Passing toward Godric, he raised his right hand and blessed him with the sign of the cross.”82 The little boy then returns to whence he came, climbing back into the wound on the side of the crucifix. In a similar vision, Godric sees the Christ Child again emerge from the crucifix, this time from the mouth: One day Godric was sitting on the steps of the altar, singing the psalms from a psalter the he was holding in his lap [in gremio]. When he looked up, he saw the crucifix and the cross both shaking; and after a little while, he saw a little boy [puerulum] come out of the mouth of the crucifix, not all of a sudden, but one limb at a time. The little boy went to the image of the Blessed Virgin, which was standing on the north side of the same beam, descended, and sat down in her lap [gremio ipsius]. She, however, appeared to extend a hand to the one coming and embraced him, warming him in her arms for three hours. Then, the little boy, in the same way that he had come, went back into the mouth of the crucifix. It was clear that he was not stepping or moving his feet, but rather passing smoothly through the empty space of the air. (101)83 As Monika Otter notes in her discussion of the more elaborate version of this vision that appears in Reginald of Durham’s longer Life of Godric, “the child’s emergence and return signify, in the first place, identity: the child, the Incarnate Word, is the same person as the figure of the crucified Christ. It is the same visual substitution often encountered in Eucharistic visions, where the host changes into a child (or flesh) and then, to clinch the statement of identity, changes back again.”84 The parallel in this passage, signaled by the repetition of the word gremium (lap, bosom), further emphasizes this connection as Godric nestles his psalter in his lap just as the Virgin nestles the Christ Child. It is also reminiscent of the experience of the anchorite Christina of Markyate, when she had

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an embodied vision of holding Christ in her lap “in the guise of a small child [parvuli]” for a full day, “not only being felt but also seen.”85 Indeed, these are among the earliest devotional representations of Christ as a small child. That the crucifix-­centered devotion of the hermit blends seamlessly into the representation of Christ as a child further underlines the devotional proximity of the vitae of Godric and Wulfric to The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, which, for the first time, fully articulates the idea of a child substituting for the adult Christ at the Crucifixion.86 Read in its manuscript context, then, the representation of a crucified boy in the Life and Passion of William of Norwich appears to be at the extreme end of the spectrum of the literal embodiment of the ideal of being crucified with Christ for which these hermits strive. In book 1 Thomas of Monmouth seems to shy away from an explicit representation of William crucified in imitation of Christ: it is a perfect, because unwitnessed, crime. However, by the end of the Life, in the penultimate miracle of Agnes of Crombe’s vision—situated at William’s “hermitage,” the chapel in the woods—images of William as Christ proliferate: William as Christ carrying the cross, William as Christ as embodied in the priest, the corpus on the cross. Agnes’s vision suggests that the representation of the Crucifixion is not only important in terms of its narrative description of how William was ritually murdered, but also in terms of its continued explanatory power for liturgical reenactment of the Crucifixion in the sacrifice of the mass, and also as a devotional prompt or affective script.87 Here we see William acting out the Crucifixion in a way analogous to Goscelin’s suggestion to Eve of Wilton: “sanctify all hours with Christ’s suffering.”88 It is significant that Agnes is healed not by a contact relic of William, but by the corpus of the crucifix, indicating just how fully William stands in for Christ in this vision. While the Life is innovative in its representation of a ritual crucifixion, its innovation participates in and draws strength from a newly invigorated culture of devotion to the cross, importantly shared by hermits and anchorites in twelfth-­century England, as well as by Cistercian communities.

Temporaliter: Jews as Enemies of the Cross If the lively and expanding cross-­centered devotion of the twelfth century is part of the reason why these three saints’ lives were collected together in CUL Add. MS 3037, in the twelfth century devotion to the cross has a sinister side: the focus on cross and Crucifixion has the effect of throwing the spotlight onto the



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Jews who in this period are increasingly thought of as enemies of the cross.89 As Beverly Kienzle has noted: “The expression ‘enemies of the cross’ appears in Philippians 3.18, one of four Pauline passages that undergird sermons on the cross. The verse declares that ‘many . . . live as enemies of the cross of Christ.’ . . . For medieval authors the phrase continued to designate sinners, but also often labelled Jews, heretics, and Muslims.”90 Indeed, the devotion to the cross and to the Crucifixion shared by these texts cannot be fully understood without understanding the concomitant representation of Jews as the enemies of the cross. A contemporary reader of the lives of twelfth-­century recluses would have been aware of this component of their devotional lives, which went hand in glove with devotion to the cross. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich draws upon this preexisting cultural trope as much as it invents a new version of it. Take, for example, the timing of William’s murder to the days surrounding Good Friday, which typologically connects the events to biblical history generally, but more specifically to its liturgical expression in the veneration of the cross, a ritual that reached great elaboration by the twelfth century. The liturgy for this day attracted several elements that were explicitly anti-­Jewish, in particular the use of the Gospel of John’s version of the Passion scene, with its emphasis on “the Jews” as the instigators of Jesus’s betrayal and condemnation 91 As Joanne Pierce describes: one of the major pieces of music sung during the veneration of the cross was also a focus of anti-­Semitism. This complex series of verses and responses, sung as the people approached the cross individually to venerate it with a kiss, is known as the Improperia, or the “Reproaches.” The core of the composition consists of descriptions of the scriptural acts of God (here identified with Christ) for God’s people, coupled with a description of various sufferings endured by Christ during his passion. . . . All of these texts combined to imbue the medieval Good Friday liturgy with a strong anti-­Semitic tone, which was often intensified by the calendrical proximity of the Jewish Passover to Holy Week.92 Understanding the varied articulations of devotion to the cross is important as it connects the new monasticism to the new antisemitism, as well as to cultural movements such as crusading. Crusading culture is perhaps the quintessential expression of medieval Christian obsession with the embodied, historical Jesus, and with the iconography of the cross, as well as with the ways in which Christian ideologies of the

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cross intersected, disastrously, with the embodied, historical Jews of Europe. As Thomas Bestul understates: “eleventh-­and twelfth-­century devotional interest in Christ’s humanity has some relationship to contemporaneous developments such as the crusading movement to recover the physical sites where Christ’s earthly life was acted out.”93 The First Crusade began not with the slaughter of the Muslims who held Jerusalem but with the slaughter of Jews innocently living in the Rhineland.94 Several scholars have traced the emergence of the ritual murder accusation to precisely this moment. Israel Yuval, for example, imagines that for the Christians who witnessed Jewish families sacrifice their own children so as to save them from the marauding Christians it must have been a short connection to suppose that the same Jews would be willing to kill Christian children as well.95 John McCulloh follows Elphège Vacandard in suggesting that knowledge of the death of William of Norwich in Bavaria in the 1140s may have contributed to the anti-­Jewish violence there, particularly if the knowledge was exploited by popular preachers.96 Similarly, Emily Rose has argued for surfacing an implicit crusading narrative in the Life and Passion of William of Norwich. She points to Thomas of Monmouth’s strange suggestion that the murder of William is somehow related to the murder of a Jewish moneylender by a knight who might have been a returned crusader.97 Thus while Christian theology had long framed Jews as “enemies of the cross,” in the context of the crusading movement these more theological, liturgical fantasies increasingly had real-­life implications: implications that surface, obliquely, in this manuscript. For the majority of medieval Christians, after all, crusading culture was a literary, rather than a lived, experience. Godric of Finchale’s interest in Jerusalem as a simultaneously historical and devotional space has been noted above. If he was not technically “crucesignati,” he at least performatively inhabited the devotional space of the crusader. In this he was not at all unusual. Monks, and indeed all Christians, had long conceived of themselves as milites Christi, armored with faith and battling against both demons and temptations: “Defining themselves as spiritual warriors in the tradition of the ancient Israelites and Roman martyrs, monastic writers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries applied military metaphors to every aspect of life in the cloister, and spoke to one another in a distinctive martial language which resonated with the scriptures and patristic hagiography, even as it borrowed imagery and terminology from contemporary military culture.”98 Hermits such as Godric and Wulfric of Haselbury took this ideology to its logical extreme, and, as loricati, adapted the military armor of the knight to the spiritual warfare



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of the monk. Godric and Wulfric both wore the lorica, or chain mail, alongside hair shirts as penitential garments that simultaneously signified the recluse’s status as a soldier of Christ.99 Godric of Finchale was so committed to this practice that he wore out three coats of chain mail during his time as a hermit. John of Ford describes Wulfric’s lorica as “the mail shirt with which he had armed himself to do battle in God’s cause,” and when the lorica spontaneously slips off one day, John reports Wulfric interpreting this accident as an honorable discharge, “heralding the completion of his years of knightly service” (207–8). Recluses thought of themselves as analogous to crusaders: both taking up the cross of Christ in defense of him and of his people. Although the two groups adopted different weapons in this battle, “both crusaders and monastic chroniclers seem to have understood the undertaking to entail a combination of temporal and spiritual warfare.”100 The Life and Passion of William of Norwich participates rhetorically in the same tropes that crusading chronicles deploy to justify their stories. For example, Thomas of Monmouth frames the timing of William’s death thusly: “And so the glorious boy and martyr of Christ, William, dying in this world [temporaliter] the disgrace of the death of the Lord, was crowned with the blood of glorious martyrdom” (18; 22). This word, temporaliter—“at this time” or “in the temporal world”—conflates historical and sacred time in the manner of the liturgy. It simultaneously indexes a trope of crusade historiography, that of the purported synchronicity of the hour of the Crucifixion and the conquest of Jerusalem. As Susanna Throop argues: “The notion that the city of Jerusalem was conquered ‘at the same time’ Christ was crucified is one familiar to crusades scholars. This is largely thanks to William of Tyre’s influential description of the synchronicity later in the twelfth century. . . . Seven sources claim that the conquest of Jerusalem took place at the same time as the Crucifixion.”101 In making this connection, as Throop notes, the chroniclers are “emphasizing synchronicity rather than continuation or completion. The crusaders are not (in these passages) described as sons or heirs; rather, it is implied that they themselves are like Christ.”102 Throop further notes that several of these accounts are inflected by anti-­Jewish sentiment, as in the account of Baldric of Bourgeuil, which describes the crusaders attacking Jerusalem “in the hour in which the Lord suffered because of the will of the Jews.”103 Indeed, in several of the accounts of the pogroms against the Jews that took place at the end of the twelfth century in England, the Jews were frequently characterized as “enemies of the cross,” and those involved in the violence were often crusaders. Thus, for example, the chronicler William of

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Newburgh describes the pogrom at Stamford in 1190: “the movement of a new storm against the Jews arose at Stamford. At that place fairs are held during the solemnities of Lent; to which had come a multitude of young men from different countries, who had received the sign of the Lord, and were about to set out for Jerusalem. They were indignant that the enemies of the cross of Christ, who lived there, should possess so much, while they themselves had so little for the expenses of so great a journey.”104 Perhaps unsurprisingly, these murderous endeavors are presaged and authorized by a vision of a cross in the sky: “as certain persons happened to be looking up at the sky in the afternoon, they saw in the clear atmosphere the form of the banner of the Lord, conspicuous by its milky whiteness, and joined to it the figure of a man crucified [formam hominis crucifixi], such as is painted in the church in remembrance of the passion of the Lord, and for the devotion of the faithful.”105 Richard of Devizes ironically inverts the claim to synchronicity in his account of the violence against Jews at the coronation of Richard the Lionheart: “The very same day of the coronation of the king, at about the hour in which the Son was sacrificed to the Father, they began in London to sacrifice the Jews to their father the demon; and the celebration of this mystery lasted so long that the holocaust could not be completed before the next day.”106 These connections demonstrate The Life and Passion of William of Norwich participating in a larger culture of devotion to the Crucifixion that is making similar claims, and similarly framing Jews specifically as enemies of the cross. Thus, while it should go without saying that the representation of the Crucifixion is central to The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, its engagement moves beyond describing William as crucified like Christ to participate in a range of devotional responses to the cross that are also explored in the lives of Godric and Wulfric, and which have broad and important cultural implications.

Conclusion: The Life and Passion of St. William of Norwich in the Age of the Hermit All told, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich fits more comfortably alongside the lives of Wulfric the anchorite and Godric the hermit than might appear evident at first sight from its reception in the context of studies of medieval antisemitism. Where modern scholars have seen these saint’s lives as very different, a contemporary audience would have been more likely to register their similarities. Particularly, the similarity of socioeconomic milieu, alongside the contemporaneity of the saints, is striking. The tradition of the English hermit



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and the ritual crucifixion accusation are interestingly coterminous as well—both have more or less ended by the thirteenth century. Perhaps we might read this collection as three different examples of holy man: hermit, anchorite, martyr? And there is undoubtedly a connection to be made between the hermit and the child, as figures who are in some way liminal to social existence, more vulnerable and more innocent, but also more imbued with the Cistercian ideal of simplicity. Although the socioeconomic “function” of the recluse in twelfth-­century England has been most consistently highlighted by scholars, I suggest that it is the innovation in thinking about the place of the cross in devotional life that The Life and Passion of William of Norwich offers that suggested its theological compatibility with the lives of Wulfric of Haselbury and Godric of Finchale, which provided its interest to Cistercian audiences and which explains an aspect of its appeal outside, although adjacent to, the putative pleasures of “cultic anti-­ Judaism.” The lives of these two hermits are generally understood to be involved in mainstream, cutting-­edge, theological devotional trends that, on the surface, have little to do with anti-­Judaism. The fact that Wulfric’s and Godric’s lives do not demonize Jewish characters should not distract from the fact that by the late twelfth century it was becoming impossible to think of the cross without imagining it as threatened by Jews. In an essay devoted to political preaching, Beverly Kienzle writes: From the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, Christian preachers rallied their audiences around the cross, the symbol and physical object itself, in their call for conversion, penitence, pilgrimages, peacemaking, and crusades. Practices involving the cross ranged from liturgical veneration and processions to meditations and visions, from gestures for making the sign of the cross to wearing crosses for protection and healing, as well as taking the cross before going on crusade. From Late Antiquity throughout the Middle Ages, Christians used the cross to distinguish themselves from those they considered outsiders: Jews, pagans, heretics, and Muslims.107 What this manuscript compilation ultimately demonstrates is that the lives of “mainstream” saints like Godric of Finchale and Wulfric of Haselbury are more complicit in high medieval cultures of antisemitism than they might at first seem, but also that William of Norwich’s Life is a more mainstream cultural artifact than its reception in medieval studies might imply. Devotion to the cross, I contend, is the connection between the vitae of Wulfric of Haselbury, Godric of

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Finchale, and William of Norwich that the compiler of this manuscript saw, and it thus has much to tell us about the immediate context of reception of the ritual murder accusation. The company William of Norwich keeps in CUL Add. MS 3037 has important stories to tell us about the contemporary reception of William’s life and about the forces that shaped it. If medieval antisemitic texts, like The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, are to be understood as participating in the articulation of Christian identity, this manuscript demonstrates that this is an identity forged as much alongside its neighbors as alongside its others.

Chapter 3

William at the Age of Twelve

Agnes of Crombe is not the only dreamer to whom William of Norwich appears. Suffering a completely disabling illness, a man called Lewin seems on the brink of death when he is “rapt in ecstasy” and experiences a journey through heaven and hell.1 The culmination of this journey is a vision of William: “he saw a boy of about twelve years old [quasi duedennem], perched on a golden stool. His dress was whiter than snow, his face brighter than the sun, and on his head a golden crown shone” (46; 69). This description points to one of the most remarkable aspects of the ritual crucifixion accusation, which is that while the texts are always so clear that the act itself is performed explicitly in imitation and in repetition of the Passion of Christ, the lead actor in the Passion, the adult Jesus, is absent. In his place is a young boy. It is a substitution that begs to be accounted for: why is a child the imagined victim of the ritual crucifixion narrative? The mid-­twelfth century was precisely the moment at which high medieval culture began to compulsively narrate the vulnerability and potentiality of the child’s body across a range of genres and media. These representations are almost too numerous to itemize, and they permeated nearly every aspect of medieval society. As William MacLehose describes: Among the many cultural and intellectual concerns that accompanied the socio-­economic transformations of the central Middle Ages, we encounter, beginning in the late eleventh century, a strong interest in the concept of the child as a unique theological, judicial, physical, emotional, and moral entity in the Latin West. The category of childhood appeared as a source of concern throughout many different aspects of society: the rearing of noble children, theories of the legal age of reason,

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concerns over the baptisms of newborns, high rates of infant mortality, and the theological concepts of the child, etc. In the liturgy, secular literature, hagiography, medical writings, illuminations, and many other forms of written and visual expression of the period, references to the child become a common vehicle for discussion of a wide range of topics and concerns.2 When Godric of Finchale’s practice of singing his psalter in front of the altar sparks a vision of the Christ Child as a little boy (puerulum) emerging from the mouth of the crucifix and crawling into the Virgin’s arms to be cuddled and warmed, he creates one of the earliest devotional representations of Christ as a small child.3 It is a representation that, over the course of the long twelfth century, becomes culturally dominant, particularly in Cistercian circles. The belief that “He who is great became a little child” resonated deeply throughout medieval culture.4 Although miracles of the Christ Child appearing in the eucharistic host had a long history in early medieval art and literature, they developed into an important aspect of incarnational theology. In the course of the twelfth century, Jesus evolves from the triumphant emperor of heaven and becomes the kind of baby the faithful can dandle on their laps, kiss and cuddle. The anchorite Christina of Markyate, for instance, holds Christ in her lap “in the guise of a small child [parvuli]” for a full day, “not only being felt but also seen.”5 At the turn of the thirteenth century Adam of Eynsham describes a vision in which a clerk sees a baby Christ in the consecrated host, “although very tiny, the child was very lovely and of a supernatural brilliance and whiteness beyond man’s imagination.”6 In theological terms, the substitution of the child for the man has significant long-­term implications. As Leah Sinanoglou has influentially noted in her seminal article “The Christ Child as Sacrifice,” by the later Middle Ages this substitution “is more than a minor doctrinal quibble, for it widens out immediately into a much larger issue. . . . Medieval writings, from early Latin tracts to late English popularization, persist in conflating the Incarnation and the Passion, in fusing the Babe of Bethlehem and the sacrificial Victim of the Mass.”7 It might, therefore, seem that the short answer to the question of why the ritual murder accusation always takes a child as its victim is that over the course of the twelfth century the adult and the child Jesus were coming to be imagined as interchangeable, and, indeed, the child Jesus was increasingly imagined as a more compelling representation of the body of God (as in the vision described by Adam of Eynsham) and the word of God (as in Godric of Finchale’s vision).



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However, the way in which these new discourses about the child and about ritual murder were developing simultaneously suggests that they must be read as mutually constitutive rather than as causal narratives. This chapter traces the representation of William of Norwich as a child across The Life and Passion of William of Norwich alongside the emergence of affective piety focused on the humanity of Christ. It shows that if, from the point of view of the ritual murder accusation, the substitution of a young child for the adult Christ is innovative and begs to be accounted for, in the context of twelfth-­ century literary culture there were a plethora of literary models—hagiographical, exegetical, affective—with which the Life could experiment. Similarly, it will suggest that if the growing popularity of affective devotion contributed to William’s cult, antisemitism contributed to the growth of affective devotion. In the first instance, although William’s cult was unique, it did not spring up in a literary vacuum. Child saints, particularly royal child saints, like the widely venerated Saint Kenelm, had a long history in England, and several tropes that Thomas of Monmouth deploys draw on this model. The cults of these child saints, whose lives are often rewritten in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, are themselves inflected with the same assumptions about youthful sanctity that Thomas appropriates for William. More specifically, it is from these hagiographic models that Thomas borrows many of the tropes he uses to write William’s life, such as his unnaturally perfect behavior as a child, the beam of light that leads to the discovery of his body, and the tree on which his body was hung. However, while these literary models, useful as they are, offer the analogy of children menaced by fearsome predators, these predators are not imagined as Jews. Alongside those hagiographic models, therefore, Thomas reminds his audience of the Holy Innocents, those biblical babies murdered by a fearful Herod, who lost their lives in place of Christ. Thomas’s evocation of the Holy Innocents in this context does double duty. It addresses the question of whether a child is genuinely a martyr just because he was murdered by invoking the key exception to the rule of the old adage “the cause not the suffering produces the martyr.” Moreover, increasingly in the twelfth century the literal reading of the Gospel account of the massacre, where the murdered children are killed by Roman soldiers, was being transformed into a more culturally appealing version in which the children, now implicitly Christian, were murdered by a Herod who is increasingly represented as a Jew.8 Thus Thomas is able to suggest that the Massacre of the Innocents in fact offers a very precise analogy to William’s situation: in both, defenseless Christian children are killed by Jews.

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Although the comparison to the Holy Innocents is a crucial strategy in Thomas’s rhetorical arsenal, William is not an infant when he is martyred but a child of twelve, thus nearing the end of boyhood. Thomas of Monmouth presents William as a twelve-­year-­old on several occasions: his death at the age of twelve is prophesied to his mother in a dream; he is chosen by the Jews of Norwich, being “twelve years old [puerum . . . duodennem] at the time and innocent indeed” (13; 16); the former bishop Herbert of Losinga appears to Thomas in a dream vision, holding “with his right hand a boy about twelve years old [puerum quasi duodennem]” (78; 119); Lewin sees him in a heavenly vision as a boy of twelve (quasi duedennem) perched upon a golden stool at the feet of the Lord (46; 69). This insistence draws attention to itself, as one cannot normally tell the age of a child by looking. While there is, of course, every possibility that the one fact that was agreed upon in Norwich Cathedral Priory was that a twelve-­ year-­old boy had been found dead in Thorpe Wood, and that the consensus of opinion on this point accounts for its repetition, the age of twelve also has a larger exegetical context that must be taken into account and may provide one partial explanation for Thomas’s representation of a boy of twelve being the victim of Jewish violence. This context is an innovation in the traditional exegesis on the biblical episode of the Finding in the Temple (or Christ Among the Doctors). This last episode where Jesus is accidentally left behind by his parents, Mary and Joseph, after a trip to Jerusalem was the subject of an important and innovative treatise by the Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx, contemporary to Thomas’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and one of the seminal treatises of affective devotion, titled Jesus at the Age of Twelve. In this treatise, Aelred explores the theological implications of the age of twelve—the last moment in the Gospels when we see Jesus as a child. Like Thomas, moreover, Aelred links affective devotion to the figure of the child with anti-­Judaism. Jesus at the Age of Twelve is a useful companion text to The Life and Passion of William of Norwich because together they begin to suggest why a boy of twelve might have been a plausible victim of the first ritual murder narrative. The frightening vulnerability of the child’s body—delicate, fleshly, innocent, unspoiled, trusting, chaste—always underlies these representations. Isidore of Seville’s etymology of “boy” finds the innocence of childhood to inhabit the very word that signifies it—“A boy (puer) is so called from purity (puritas)”—and Isidore’s formulation is elaborated in the twelfth century by Aelred of Rievaulx, who suggests, “These [children] are called progeny [pueri] because they are pure [puri]. Pure from malice, pure from envy, pure from avarice.”9 When Aelred dies, his biographer describes him as looking childlike on



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his deathbed: “his flesh was clearer than glass, whiter than snow, as though his members were those of a boy of five years old.”10 These representations, however, are not essential but evidence of a historically and culturally specific mentality. While scholars of the Middle Ages disagree in the main with Philippe Ariès’s seminal study Centuries of Childhood, its central point, that childhood is culturally constructed, is well taken. The category of the child is constructed not only as a chronological category but also as an ontological one. Remaining “childlike” was a key aspect of the Cistercian virtue of simplicitas. Indeed, the ideal of innocent vulnerability does not exhaust the ideological work of the figure of the child. In a conclusion I briefly turn to recent theorizations of the child in literary studies, which emphasize the ways in which the figure of the child holds the past and future in productive tension, as the figure of the child is deployed as a key signifier of political potentiality, of the promise of the future.11 Thus while the death of a child demands an ethical response—interpellates us as members of an ethical community—this is precisely because of a cultural investment in the figure of the child as an emblem of the community’s futurity.12 One key implication of this for The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is the appropriation of the figure of the child not simply as the object of devotion but as a posture of devotion. Like Aelred’s Jesus at the Age of Twelve, Thomas’s representation of William at the age of twelve is as much a guide to ritual reenactment in the future as it is a commemoration of the past.

“A Boy of Unusual Innocence”: Constructing William of Norwich’s Boyhood Scholars of the case of William of Norwich have long called attention to the affective opportunities offered by a child saint, or, as Anna Wilson puts it, “the affective power of the child doomed to death.”13 Gavin Langmuir, for example, suggested that William “would also seem a representative of all those who felt defenseless as a child against the little-­understood forces that menaced their existence, and who turned for comfort to their faith that Christ might intervene here and now or at least ensure them a better life hereafter.”14 Similarly, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen elegantly notes that a child’s body is “the most troubling of cadavers.”15 Those scholars who have directly addressed the question of why the child should come to stand in for the man have come to varied conclusions. Diane Auslander, in “Victims or Martyrs: Children, Anti-­Judaism, and the Stress of Change in Medieval England,” rehearses Cohen’s arguments, focusing

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on the affective possibilities of the vulnerable child as a locus of communal identification.16 Magdelene Schultz, in a psychohistorical perspective, reorients her methodology from the history of antisemitism to the history of childhood.17 She argues that the blood libel accusation tracks the social history of childhood, and “emerges when a new sensitivity for, and a new interest in, children is developing; in other words, when a new period is opening in the history of childhood.”18 She further suggests that in the High Middle Ages children were more highly valued in Jewish than in Christian communities (in part following Ariès’s analyses) and that this channeled and aggravated a Christian impulse to project their own failings onto minority communities. William MacLehose, in a discussion that considers the ritual murder accusation alongside anti-­Jewish exempla, focuses on the representation of the family, and particularly of the mother, in these related genres, noting that “the parallels with and references to the Holy Family throughout these tales call attention to one of the most overlooked aspects of ritual murder, its discussion of a close relationship between family and religion.”19 Denise Despres reads Thomas of Monmouth’s representation of William’s age as engaging with cultural tropes about the state of adolescence and the age of consent.20 Most recently, Anna Wilson considers the way in which William’s status as a child can be read as contributing to what she describes as his “queer temporality.”21 Thomas of Monmouth says strikingly little about William as a child, the other ritual murder accusations even less about the children they describe. Thomas’s brief narrative of William’s brief life is thoroughly conventional. Thomas imagines William’s childhood in the context of proving William’s holiness and creates a standard hagiographical narrative. As Despres has likewise noted, Thomas employs “a number of narrative devices in book 1 that garner for him the authority of hagiographic tradition. . . . William is a ‘puer senex.’”22 So while Jeffrey Cohen has rather influentially cast William as “a refreshingly recalcitrant boy in life” and “a rascal” who was “transformed by Thomas’s text into the purest of saints,” there is no solid evidence for this characterization in the Life.23 For Thomas, William’s sole flaw, visible only in retrospect, is having worked with Jews—a decision that was, in any case, not his but his mother’s. The Life gives William the characteristics of both major types of child saints: those who exhibit saintly characteristics from birth and those who experience a kind of conversion at the age of seven, at which point they undertake a penitential lifestyle. It doubles down, in other words, on the literary construction of a boy saint.24 William performs an initial childhood miracle as a babe in arms when, “on the day of his weaning” (11), he shatters the penitential iron armbands of the dinner guest who



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holds him. Subsequently, at the age of seven, he undergoes a sort of conversion to a penitential, monastic lifestyle: The mother, of course, who loved the child greatly, educated him with the greatest of care, and by her attentive education she led him from infancy to the years of understanding. By the time he was seven years old, as I have learned from the mother’s account, he already began to be a lover of abstinence, so that while his older brothers did not fast, he did so three times a week; that is, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He also observed the days of the apostles and other saints, which are official vigils for the people, with pious fasts; and as the ardour of his devotion grew little by little, he passed several days on bread and water alone. Since he was overflowing with inner piety, whatever he was able to take away from his own food or to extract from his mother by his requests, he gave all away to the poor in secret if at any time he did not dare to do so openly. In all this he was not only pious but also kind, so that he conducted himself so wisely that in the same action he both benefited the poor, so far as was in his power, and caused no worry to his parents. He also frequented the church most willingly; he learned letters, psalms and prayers and worshipped with the greatest reverence all that was related to God. (12) Then, as an eight-­year-­old, William is apprenticed to the skinners, where “in a short while he far exceeded his peers in that craft and was equal to quite a few of his instructors” (13). Finally, he is chosen by the Jews as their victim, being “twelve years old at the time and innocent indeed” (13). This holier than thou representation of William is fully conventional—it fulfills the adage that we should speak of “saint” in the singular rather than the plural.

Out of the Mouths of Babes: Child-­Saint Cults and Twelfth-­Century Literary Culture For Thomas of Monmouth, the representation of William as a child operates on several levels and is sustained by other twelfth-­century cults of child saints, who, like William, suffered an unmerited death; these cults, as scholars have noted, undoubtedly supported “the initial plausibility of William’s claims to sanctity.”25 Imported lives of child saints enjoyed popularity: for example, Saint Pancras,

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an early Christian child martyr, had a lively presence in England ever since his relics were imported by Saint Augustine of Canterbury.26 Indeed, Thomas of Monmouth recounts that the visiting prior of the Abbey of St. Pancras offers to take the body of William off of the hands of the monks of Norwich—suggesting that he saw a similarity and the possibility to build a concatenation of cults of child saints as a desirable locus of devotion.27 William of Norwich’s world is subtly populated by the cults of child saints who, even as they may compete with William’s cult, nevertheless support his claims to sanctity against those who would claim that the young boy had little pretense to holiness. In particular, one important cultural matrix for William of Norwich is a group of late eleventh-­ century English lives of child saints, like those of Rumwold, Kenelm, Wistan, and Melor, which remained popular in the twelfth century: of the eight extant lives of the Life of St. Rumwold, for example, half of them are in twelfth-­century manuscripts. These saints perhaps had their origins in the impulse of the royal dynasties of pre-­Conquest England to encourage the veneration of their own kinsmen, although certain common elements of these cults, such as wells and trees, may suggest that “the minster clergy may have used these cults to help convert the countryside.”28 These cults are important to understanding Thomas of Monmouth’s project insofar as he borrows almost all the tropes he uses to narrate William’s Life from them. The now better known Vita et miracula of Saint Kenelm describes the murder of the seven-­year-­old heir to the Mercian throne by his grasping sister Cwenthryth. His twelfth-­century vita describes a boy “little in years, yet eminent in mind and holiness” who “imitating God” (imitator Deus) is “led like a lamb to the slaughter” (agnus ductus ad uictimam).29 Kenelm’s martyrdom is echoed by the eleventh-­century veneration of another murdered Mercian prince, Wistan (or Wigstan), who is murdered by his cousin when his uncle seizes the throne. Wistan is described as a filiolus who has “not yet come of age” when his father dies.30 Patricia Wasyliw notes that “although the events indicate a political assassination, the eleventh-­century legend infused the murder with religious overtones. The murderer, Bithfour, became the boy’s godfather as well as his cousin, and Wistan was slain not because of his claim to the throne, but because he opposed his mother’s marriage to his cousin and godfather on the grounds that such a union was incestuous.”31 Politics also took Saint Melor’s life. Dispossessed by an uncle at the age of seven, Melor had his hand and foot cut off and was exiled to the monastery of St. Corentin. When his prosthetic limbs began to miraculously function as if they were real flesh and bone, Melor’s uncle perceived a threat and had him beheaded at the age of fourteen.32



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These cults were widespread and popular, and it is difficult not to imagine the vita of William of Norwich as profiting from the cultural context that enabled the veneration of these eleventh-­century child saints. William has in common with Kenelm and Wistan in particular (and, as Catherine Cubitt argues, the cults of early English murdered kings more generally) the fact that he merits the name of a saint solely because of his unmerited suffering and unjust death.33 If William is connected through the motif of unwarranted death to the cults of royal martyrs, he is closely connected to the cults of Kenelm, Wistan, Rumwold, and Melor because the motif of unwarranted death is all the more touching if the death is that of a child. These cults also contain common elements, such as vengeance miracles, holy trees and wells, and severed heads. William’s vita and miracles reflect many of the motifs of these child saints: a column of light that identifies the location of the martyrdom, the refusal of the body of the saint to remain hidden, a holy spring or well, the releasing of prisoners bound in fetters, and vengeance miracles, as well as the generic healing miracles, such as curing the deaf, dumb, and blind. Like William’s, Kenelm’s Vita et miracula is at pains to insist that in his martyrdom Kenelm was Christlike, describing him as “imitator Deus” and comparing his death to the sacrifice of the Lamb. Kenelm sings the Te Deum as he is beheaded by his tutor, echoing the liturgical tropes within which Thomas casts William’s Life.34 In this context, the strange detail of the Jews’ hanging William’s corpse from a tree may be a reflex of the motif of the holy tree found in these lives of child saints. While William’s cult shares these types of miracles with the cults of murdered princes, it seems likely that by the second half of the twelfth century they were no longer vernacular elements of a popular cult adopted by official hagiography, but rather, as indeed Rosalind Love suggests about the twelfth-­century Vita et miracula of Kenelm, miracles that were considered essential to the dossier of any self-­respecting saint.35 Many of these motifs are shared, in fact, with the cult of another child saint, much closer to home for William of Norwich, and with much better martyrdom credentials than Kenelm or Wistan. Perhaps the most popular of these high medieval child saints was Saint Faith, a fourth-­century martyr, whose cult was imported from its origin in the south of France in the eleventh century, most likely by pilgrims returning from the shrine of Saint James at Compostela, where her relics at Conques had become an important stop on the pilgrimage routes. Saint Faith was widely venerated in England as well and plays an important role in William’s posthumous miracles. In the eleventh century, her cult captured the imagination of Bernard of Angers, who made several trips to Conques from Chartres, where a chapel dedicated to Faith had piqued his curiosity, and

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produced as a result of these trips two Books of Miracles, to which two more books were subsequently added by the monks of Conques after Bernard’s death, and a variety of later miracles subsequently accrued as the manuscript tradition proliferated. The Book of Miracles circulated widely, and it disseminated Faith’s characteristic miracles: releasing prisoners from fetters and playing “jokes” on her devotees.36 Like William, Faith heals the blind, dumb, and lame, frees prisoners, and makes imperious demands on her devotees. Saint Faith’s feast appears in Bede’s eighth-­century Martyrology, demonstrating that it was of long standing in England, and her popularity only grew in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Her passio and twenty-­one miracles are included in an important legendary from the second half of the twelfth century, British Library, MS Arundel 91. As Delbert Russell notes, “the popularity of Faith’s cult is attested by numerous foundations in her honour. Her feast was celebrated in some fifteen Benedictine abbeys, and was included in the widespread Sarum liturgical use. Twenty-­three medieval churches were dedicated to her, as well as chapels in St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey in London.”37 The cult of Saint Faith was introduced to the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds by Abbot Anselm (abbot, 1121–46).38 In the thirteenth century, this devotion to Saint Faith at Bury St. Edmunds would produce Simon of Walsingham’s Vie seinte Fei, an Anglo-­Norman vita that Russell suggests “was connected with Bury’s renovations to St Faith’s chapel in the abbey church under Abbot Samson.”39 As I will suggest below, there may also have been an altar dedicated to Saint Faith in nearby Norwich Cathedral. The cult of Saint Faith has strong familial links to Norwich. A church in her honor was founded just outside Norwich with a rather dramatic foundation narrative: a local Anglo-­Norman magnate, Robert Fitzwalter, and his wife Sybil de Chesney were taken captive on their return through the south of France from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Imprisoned in fetters, they prayed to Saint Faith and were rewarded with one of her signature miracles, release from their chains. They subsequently traveled to Conques to thank the saint and to donate the fetters (Bernard of Angers had been amazed that the church at Conques was crammed with iron grillwork made from the donated fetters of Faith’s devotees), and they pledged to donate a priory dedicated to Saint Faith to the monastery of Conques. They did so upon their return, founding the Benedictine priory of Horsham St. Faith in 1105.40 As Benedicta Ward has pointed out, “this revival of the cult of St Faith made her known in Norwich at just the time when the cult of St William began.”41 Indeed, William’s very first miracle of releasing a penitent from his fetters seems modeled on Saint Faith. The foundation charter of



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Horsham St. Faith was confirmed in 1163 by Pope Alexander III, and the priory continued to be supported by the founding family, the de Chesneys.42 In addition to being the lords of Horsford in Norfolk, Robert Fitzwalter and his sons John de Chesney and William de Chesney were also, in turn, the High Sheriffs of Norfolk and Suffolk.43 The elder of the two, John de Chesney, was sheriff at the time of William of Norwich’s murder and plays an important role in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich as the royal administrator who protects the Jews of Norwich from the accusation against them and who, Thomas of Monmouth suggests, is rewarded with a deserved death: “And so, may the diligent reader ponder on these issues with care: divine vengeance will fall heavily on him who does not fear to oppose the Holy Church and Christian law in this manner” (73).44 Simon Yarrow suggests that John’s seeming support of the Jews against their accusers might well be attributed to the fact that “the cult of a new child saint at the cathedral cannot have been an attractive prospect for the family whose monastery had its own cult to protect.”45 Put another way, the Life’s antipathy to John may be related to his family’s continued support of a rival cult. Saint Faith herself makes an appearance in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, in a miracle story that suggests a friendly competition. The miracle describes a woman from Belaugh, Norfolk, who put aside three pieces of wax intended for devotional candles—a larger piece to be made into a candle for the Holy Trinity and two smaller pieces each for Saints William and Faith. When Faith’s feast day arrives, the woman fetches the wax in order to make the candles, only to find that when she cuts into the bit of wax intended for Saint Faith, it bleeds. Astonished, she takes up instead the other piece of wax to make the candle for Saint Faith and makes as well the candle for the Holy Trinity out of the larger piece. When the fashioning of these candles is achieved without further portentous bleeding, she takes up the first piece of wax again, and this time produces the candle for William without further incident. Thomas moralizes the strange occurrence by noting: “Astonished by the miracle, she announced to everyone she knew the greatness of the holy martyr William. And we, when we found it out from the account of her neighbours, were informed, as it were, from the outcome, that the holy martyr did not want what had been vowed to him to be offered to another. And so, indeed, the great power of the blessed martyr excelled yet again in very small things.” (178). Norwich Cathedral was dedicated to the Holy Trinity, a dedication that, while somewhat trendy in the twelfth century, was not conducive to acquiring the relics of a patron saint.46 With his championing of William’s cult, Thomas makes no secret of his attempt to position William as a long-­desired relic for the cathedral. He even describes

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a dream in which the former bishop, Herbert of Losinga, promises him that “it would soon happen that they would have so many and such venerable relics that the church of Norwich would be much exalted and become famous in the whole of England and venerated in foreign parts” (77). So the pairing of Faith with William alongside the Holy Trinity is provocative. With the largest candle intended for the Trinity, Thomas seems to honor the dedication of the cathedral. The equal-­sized candles for William and Faith, however, establish a parallel importance of their cults: the woman from Belaugh may have intended to travel to Horsham St. Faith to present her candle there, before continuing on to Norwich Cathedral to present the candles to William and to the Holy Trinity, but it seems more plausible that there was an altar dedicated to Saint Faith already in the cathedral and that all three donations could be made within the cathedral itself. Alternately, the indulgences offered by the bishops of Norwich to those who visited Horsham St. Faith on either the saint’s feast day or on the day of her translation may be the reason that the woman from Belaugh decides to make her offering on Faith’s feast day.47 In either case, the established, local, and competing cult of the child saint Faith may also be the reason for this miracle that asserts William’s right to his equal and proprietary share of local devotion. The bleeding wax is a eucharistic image, certainly, that aligns William with Christ, but the selfish, childish even, demands for a particular piece of wax show William mimicking Faith’s attitude toward her devotees. In another miracle that seems similarly to take aim at the cult of Saint Faith, William mimics Faith’s covetous love of jewelry. Bernard of Angers suggests that “it was as if the saint’s girlish mind took pleasure in the things that young girls usually want to try to get for themselves.”48 Saint Faith’s love of jewelry was such that Bernard even comments about the rich decoration of the church of Conques: “this is the reason that few people are left in this whole region who have a precious ring or brooch or armbands or hairpins, or anything of this kind, because Sainte Foy either with a simple entreaty or with bold threats wrested away these same things for the work of the frontal.”49 Threats are more common than simple entreaties: a series of miracles in book 1 of her Miracles sees Faith acquiring rings from her acolytes by fair means or foul. In one, for example, a noblewoman who is well aware of Faith’s penchant for fine jewelry leaves her ring behind in the care of a chambermaid while she visits Faith, only to have Faith strike her down with a fever until she relinquishes the ring. Another miracle shows Faith extracting a desired ring from a man who attempted to offer her the equivalent value in money instead. When a man called Austrin has the effrontery to marry his second wife, Avigerna, with the very ring that his first



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wife had from her deathbed bequeathed to Faith, Avigerna’s finger swells with pustules until she is reduced to keeping vigil at the saint’s shrine, shrieking in pain. The couple’s confession is to no avail, until, finally, “when the sorrowful woman happened to blow her nose, the ring flew off without hurting her fingers, just as if it had been hurled from the strongest siege engine, and gave a sharp crack on the pavement at a great distance.”50 Perhaps to demonstrate, then, the relative power of William’s cult and the relative devotion of his followers, when William demands a ring, it is simply handed over, no questions asked: There was a certain knight near Lynn by the name of Reginald, son of Philip, whose wife loved Saint William with a remarkable feeling of devotion. One night, as she rested beside her husband in their bed, that same martyr, William, whom she loved, appeared to her in a vision. He thanked her lovingly for her devotion to him and refreshed her with sweet words. After a while he asked her to give him as a token of love a golden ring, smaller than the others—because she wore many—and he removed it up to the top of the finger on which it was. When she awoke the woman was frightened; recalling what had been seen and finding the ring at the top of her finger, she wondered what to do. So she shared what she had seen with her husband. Acting on his advice, she came to Norwich without delay and offered to Saint William the ring that had been requested. (128) Thomas’s appropriation here of one of Faith’s signature miracles to his new saint William suggests a sense of competition with, or at least a healthy awareness of, the neighboring cult of Saint Faith at Horsham St. Faith and at Bury St. Edmunds, supported by the very family of one of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich’s chief villains. These “miracles” seem very much to be negotiating for position against the other local child saint and against the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. At the same time, however, Thomas is appropriating Faith’s authority to buttress his claims about the sanctity of another child saint, because despite the popularity of these child martyrs, there remained a certain difficulty in proving that these murdered children were, in fact, saintly. Faith was an exception to this rule: her passio provided her with the excellent credentials of an early Christian martyr persecuted by a pagan tyrant. Likewise Saint Catherine, another saint martyred by a pagan tyrant, who appears in a vision to Ida, daughter of Stannard

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Wrancberd of Norwich, and informs her that “William has been granted to the men of Norwich by Our Lord to be their sole and special patron” (101). In the former case, Thomas is clearly invoking not only an intensely popular saint in support of William but another child saint, whose youth silently testifies to William’s sanctity. Thomas’s engagement with the cult of Saint Faith might be best read not so much as a question of competition but of connecting with existing networks of authority. The way in which The Life and Passion of William of Norwich shares the motifs of these eleventh-­and twelfth-­century lives of child saints, both specifically in repeated elements like the beam of light that alerts Legarda to William’s burial place and more implicitly in the sanctification of the putative innocence and purity of childhood, demonstrates the extent to which William’s Life participates in a cultural climate that found the veneration of the innocent martyrs of unjust deaths—often children—compelling. Indeed, the particular Englishness of the cults of royal, child martyr-­saints may provide a partial explanation as to why the ritual murder accusation in England took the form of hagiography, in the vitae of William of Norwich and (the lost vita) of Robert of Bury St. Edmunds, as well as the chronicle accounts that are its most common record in England and France. While there are plenty of exegetical reasons for why the ritual crucifixion accusation came into being as it did, the reasons as to why it was initially so compelling in Norwich, England, are inevitably also local in nature, as is seen in the use of Saint Faith as a point of competition with nearby Bury St. Edmunds.51 This literary context, to a certain extent, prescribed the kinds of attributes that Thomas of Monmouth would give to William: his healing miracles, his ability to release prisoners from their fetters, indeed, his youth. It also enabled Thomas of Monmouth to make certain kinds of claims about William of Norwich, in particular that the unjust nature of his death was proof and guarantor of his sanctity.

“The Cause Not the Suffering”: Constructing Holy Innocence Although by the mid-­twelfth century hagiology provided a plethora of examples of child saints more famous for having been unjustly murdered than for any intrinsic holiness, when Thomas of Monmouth most wants to support his claim that William is a saint because he has been martyred, he turns to the timeless example of the very first Christian martyrs, the Holy Innocents. For Thomas, his



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rhetorical deployment of the Massacre of the Innocents is crucial for the way in which it becomes evidence both that William is a saint and that he was killed by Jews. In Book Two, in a highly rhetorical series of special pleadings for his cause, Thomas turns his attention to those who, as he casts the issue, “make light of the miracles of Saint William, and who either deny or doubt that he was slain by the Jews” (85).52 Here, Thomas addresses two categories of doubts—one having to do with the guilt of the Jews, and the other with worthiness of William himself: These people were indeed hard of heart and slow to believe, and they reckoned that the blessed boy William was lacking in any merit after death, he who they heard had been a poor little ragged boy, working for his living as far as he could in the art of tanning. Thus, by no means could they believe that someone like him, of almost no previous merit, could attain excellence of such heights. And there were others too, who, despite seeing with their eyes or hearing from others or reading in the present text that he was cruelly slain, still say: “We are sure of his death, but by whom, why or how he was killed we doubt entirely; hence we would not presume to say he is a saint or martyr. And since suffering does not make the martyr, but rather its cause [does], even if it is shown that he was killed in punishment by the Jews or by others, who would believe beyond doubt that in life he desired to die for Christ or that he suffered death patiently for Christ when it was inflicted?” (56–57) Whether these are genuine doubts emanating from the community or rhetorical strawmen set up so that Thomas can introduce the discussion that follows is an issue I address briefly in the Introduction and at greater length in the fourth chapter of this book. In any case, concerns about William’s poverty are easy enough to explain away, for, after all, Christ himself was poor: “No one should think it absurd that God wanted a boy of such future holiness [puerum tante sanctitatis] and dignity to be born of humble parents, for He himself, it is well known, wished to be born of poor people” (10; 10). Indeed, Thomas may exaggerate William’s poverty to make this point: elsewhere Thomas describes William’s parents as “abundantly supplied with all those things needed for living” (10) and his maternal grandfather as “a famous man at that time” (10). The construction of William as poor is most likely an element of the program to frame him as Christlike. Thomas then goes on to answer the accusation that William was of little visible merit, with reference to several late antique boy martyrs: “If childhood [puericia] were a reason to reject sanctification, we offer them the

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boys Pancras, Pantaleon and Celsus, whom Christ raised to the crown of martyrdom in their childhood years. Moreover, the Lord himself set a child [paruulum)] amid the disciples and asserted that such were particularly suited for the kingdom of heaven” (57–58; 87–88). If concerns about William’s poverty are relatively easy to dismiss, concerns about his meritioriousness are less so. Was William saintly? Even if he was, did he choose martyrdom? Denise Despres has drawn our attention to the ways in which the cultural climate of thinking about intentionality and interiority is contemporary to The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. She situates Thomas of Monmouth’s presentation of his case for William’s sanctity within the changing landscape of twelfth-­century thought, including “new models of sanctity . . . the changing role of boy oblates within the monastery, and the problem of intentionality.”53 Then as now, children are generally perceived to be under the age of reason and therefore unable to give consent. Despres suggests that Thomas emphasizes William’s age of twelve because it puts him squarely on the threshold of adolescence, and thus the age of discretion, implying that his age alone suggests that he might have consented to his martyrdom. It is certainly the case that in the twelfth century thinkers were both increasingly interested in childhood as a stage of life and concerned with discerning the age of discretion at which the formerly irrational child gains reason and intentionality and so becomes responsible for his or her actions ethically and legally. However, there is little evidence that Thomas of Monmouth considered the age of twelve particularly resonant in this context. In the first instance, twelve is not a universal age of consent in the Middle Ages, which had several different models for theorizing the different stages of childhood. One of the most common was to count by sevens, thus paralleling the seven days of creation and the seven hours of the liturgical day with the Seven Ages of the World and the Seven Ages of Man. In this schematic, “every boundary age is hebdomadal,” and thus, as in Isidore of Seville’s influential counting: The first age of man, called infancy, lasts for seven years. The second age, called boyhood, lasts for another seven up to fourteen. The third, extending for two further sevens up to twenty-­eight, is called adolescence. The fourth, consisting of three consecutive seven-­year periods, stretches to forty-­nine, and is called youth or manhood. The fifth, also consisting of three hebdomads, lasts until seventy and is called “elder,” having fallen away from youth towards old age but not yet reached it. The sixth is man’s old age, which is limited to no particular number of years; and this is also called decrepitude.54



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In theoretical discussions, as Isabelle Cochelin summarizes, “it seems safe to affirm that the life cycle was perceived as consisting of one large first phase, routinely called pueritia, often but not always subdivided into the two ages of infantia and pueritia.”55 Nearly all medieval thinkers measured the life cycle in multiples of seven, thus giving pueritia, or boyhood, as between the ages of seven and fourteen. Although under the surviving early Germanic law codes the age of majority is sometimes twelve (or ten or fifteen), this age rose over the course of the Middle Ages.56 Cistercian monasteries, banning child oblation, initially refused entrants under the age of fifteen and subsequently raised the age to eighteen.57 More practically, then as now the age of discretion was measured differently in different places and different cases: monastic orders, marriage, inheritance, legal testimony could each require a different age of reason.58 So while the age of twelve falls within the range of consenting ages, and may well have played into the narrative that Thomas was creating in response to skeptics, the age of twelve specifically is not a particular touchstone in these discussions.59 The question of intention is a concern for the Life. However, when Thomas finally addresses the objection that “the cause not the pain makes the martyr,” he turns not to the concept of adolescence but to that of infancy. He never mentions William’s age in this context; instead he turns to the example of the Holy Innocents: “Once more, if they say this is the reason, that no merits preceded the winning of sanctification, I put in opposition the innocents ‘of two years old or less’ who were not distinguished by the merits of a lifetime, but whom God’s grace alone glorified” (58); and again later, “And, similarly, for the same reason, the glory of martyrdom was not conferred on the Holy Innocents by their suffering, but by the grace of Christ, who was the cause of their death” (63). Thus the example Thomas offers to support William’s sanctity is not of martyrs who were able to consent, but of those who were not. Although the Holy Innocents are younger than William, as Emily Rose has pointed out, in liturgical drama of the twelfth century they are referred to as pueri, “boys,” as is William.60 Moreover, the analogy between William and the Holy Innocents is trenchant—because over the course of the twelfth century the Holy Innocents were increasingly seen not only as martyrs but as martyred by Jews. Thomas’s appeal to the authority of the Holy Innocents at once draws on a long history of exegetical tradition and simultaneously intervenes in a contemporary debate.61 Although they had long been venerated, there was a renewed interest in the Innocents in the twelfth century evident in exegetical and liturgical texts as in the art they inspired. They appear in the illustrations of deluxe English psalters, like the Winchester Psalter and the St. Albans Psalter; in liturgical

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drama, like the Fleury Interfectio puerorum and the Freising Ordo Rachelis; and in sculpture, as in the capitals at Chartres Cathedral and Ford Abbey.62 In their large but indeterminate number, the Innocents also supplied relics to churches and monasteries throughout Europe.63 In the words of Danièle Alexandre-­Bidon and Didier Lett: From the first centuries of the Middle Ages, both in art and in literature, the theme of the Massacre of the Innocents was developed and continued to be enormously successful throughout the entire course of the medieval period. A few days after Christmas (December 28), the day of the Innocents was celebrated. Beginning from the eleventh century, chapels were built to them and some of their relics were even discovered, as at the abbey of Brogne in 1116. With much feeling, artists described the poignant reactions of the mothers from whom the slaughterers, under orders from Herod, seized babies. These widespread images conveyed the strong attachment of parents to their children, the innocence of the very young, and their sympathy with Christ, since not only were these children of Bethlehem, less than two years old—the first martyrs of the Christian religion—massacred unjustly for Christ, but they died in the place of Christ. That is why theologians gradually accepted the dogma according to which these infants were saved by their suffering and the blood they spilled, even though they were not baptized.64 Within this cultural context, Thomas’s appeal to the authority of the Holy Innocents performs several rhetorical operations simultaneously. In the first instance with the invocation of the Holy Innocents, who were the first martyrs, Thomas is able to set aside both the problem of William’s youth and that of his lack of “cause.” The Holy Innocents were universally agreed to be martyrs, and even when their claim was revisited in the twelfth century in the context of debates on intentionality, their status as martyrs was preserved. The Innocents were, moreover, a special kind of martyr. As Theresa Tinkle as described, “exegetes from the eighth century to the thirteenth similarly read the scene as a narrative about Jewish anger and Christian suffering, wherein the Innocents witness to a violent Jewish hatred of Christ that begins with his birth and extends to the contemporary persecution of the saints.”65 Thus Thomas’s appeal to the example of the Holy Innocents in support of William’s sanctity not only addresses the question of whether a child could consent to its martyrdom, but it implicitly



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offers support to his assertion that William was murdered by Jews motivated by hatred of Christ. In the Gospel of Matthew, Herod orders the death of all male children under two years of age in Bethlehem in an attempt to kill the newborn Christ (Matt. 2–18). By at least the fifth century, these murdered children, who came to be known in the Roman Rite as the Holy Innocents, had their own feast day and were honored as the first martyrs.66 Early homilists had questions about the nature of the Innocents’ martyrdom: Did they suffer? Why would Christ allow others to suffer and die in his place? What are the relative roles of grace and free will in their salvation? What about the place of baptism?67 But they universally agreed that the Holy Innocents deserved the name of martyrs. Moreover, these homilists consistently made a virtue out of the necessity of the Innocents’ extreme youth and therefore probable lack of volition. One of the earliest and most widespread commentaries on the Holy Innocents is found in Bede’s Homilies. Bede supports his assertion that the Innocents are justly considered martyrs by reference to scripture: “in this [death] is represented the precious death of all Christ’s martyrs. The fact that little children were killed signifies that through the merit of humility one comes to the glory of martyrdom, and that unless one has turned and become as a little child (Mt 18.3), one will not be able to give one’s life for Christ.”68 And the Innocents’ status as martyrs is enshrined in the Glossa ordinaria: “As soon as Christ appeared to the world persecution began in it, which figured the persecution of the saints: and while the infant was sought, infants were slain, in whom the pattern of martyrdom is born.”69 The representation of the Holy Innocents in the liturgy, which allegorically conflates them with the 144,000 martyrs of the Apocalypse, also serves to reinforce their status as martyrs. Thomas of Monmouth himself, in addition to his explicit comments that the undeniable status of the Holy Innocents as martyrs supports William’s claims to martyrdom, also implicitly subtends this argument by drawing on these liturgical allusions, describing William in the company of the 144,000 martyrs: “In the sacred bands of these we do not doubt that the glorious William has in very truth a place conspicuous in his triple stole, and deserving to be numbered among the illustrious ones” (64).70 The twelfth century, therefore, inherited a certainty that the Holy Innocents were martyrs despite their youth. However, with the new cultural interest in the question of intentionality, the question of whether the Innocents could in all fairness be called martyrs was revisited. The point Thomas’s doubters raise, “the cause not the pain makes the martyr,” once a patristic commonplace, became a pressing cultural concern. Thus with his repeated invocation of the holiness of the Holy Innocents as support

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of William of Norwich’s martyrdom, Thomas of Monmouth is intervening in a current debate. The question of intentionality is one of the great themes of the long twelfth century, and the Massacre of the Innocents provided an interesting test case. However, despite the interest of twelfth-­century thinkers in the role of intention in the process of, for example, sinning, the status of the Holy Innocents as martyrs was ultimately reaffirmed. Indeed, even Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard, who agreed on so little, are in accord that the Innocents are martyrs in their respective homilies on the Massacre of the Innocents.71 Thomas of Monmouth’s appeal to the Holy Innocents is thus compelling because it participates in contemporary debates with which his monastic interlocutors would surely have been familiar. Moreover, the appeal to the exegetical authority of the Holy Innocents enables Thomas simultaneously to vouch for William’s sanctity and to connect his murder to imaginary Jewish antagonists. Increasingly in the exegetical tradition Herod was allegorized as representing the Jews. An eighth-­century commentary on Matthew, for example, allegorizes Herod as “the hatred of the Jews, who were wishing to wipe out the name of Christ and to kill those believing in him.”72 The Glossa ordinaria allegorizes Herod as “the faithlessness of the Jews” in its reading of the Flight into Egypt.73 And in the twelfth century, Aelred of Rievaulx suggests in his Sermon for the Epiphany of the Lord that Herod is in league with the Jews: “For as soon as the kings of which the Gospel speaks learned of the Lord’s birth through the star which they had seen in the East, they came with gifts to adore him; while as soon as Herod heard the report of him he plotted with the Jews how to kill him.”74 Theresa Tinkle has argued that it is in fact the representation of the Holy Innocents as innocent children murdered by Jews in exegesis and liturgical drama that anticipates the ritual murder accusation: “By the late twelfth century,” she suggests, “the Innocents have clearly become the glorified first victims of ritual murder.”75 The connection between the martyrs of ritual crucifixion and the Massacre of the Innocents is similarly drawn in an incident that seems to be roughly contemporary to Thomas of Monmouth’s account of William of Norwich, but for which there is less evidence, that is, the purported ritual crucifixion of Richard of Pontoise (or of Paris) in 1179. Rigord, the twelfth-­century biographer of French king Philip Augustus (Philippe Auguste), writes of the rumors about the Jews that had reached Philip through his playmates: For he had heard many times from the children [a pueris] who had been raised with him in the royal palace—and had carefully committed



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to memory—that the Jews who dwelt in Paris were wont every year on Easter day, or during the sacred week of our Lord’s Passion, to go down secretly into underground vaults and kill a Christian as a sort of sacrifice in contempt of the Christian religion. For a long time they had persisted in this wickedness, inspired by the devil, and in Philip’s father’s time many of them had been seized and burned with fire. St. Richard, whose body rests in the church of the Holy-­Innocents-­in-­the-­Fields in Paris, was thus put to death and crucified by the Jews [sic interfectus a Judeis et cruci affixus], and through martyrdom went in blessedness to God. Wherefore many miracles have been wrought by the hand of God, through the prayers and intercessions of St. Richard, to the glory of God, as we have heard.76 This brief account echoes the Life of William of Norwich in its description of the Jews’ annual crucifixion of a Christian during Holy Week in mockery of the death of Christ. The salient point to be gleaned from Rigord’s account is that the purported martyr Richard was buried in the Church of the Holy Innocents—a church that was expanded by Philip Augustus, reflecting the expansion of the city of Paris into its former banlieues, but also perhaps reflecting the devotional tastes of the young king. Here, as in the Life and Passion of William of Norwich, devotion to martyrs of ritual crucifixion is connected to devotion to the Holy Innocents, a connection that originally served to underwrite the sanctity of these martyrs, but with which over time it became wholly enmeshed. Although Thomas of Monmouth falls short of making the connection between the Holy Innocents and ritual murder explicit, there is no doubt that his appeal to the example of the Holy Innocents performs the double duty of proving that William is a martyr and suggesting that he was indeed killed by Jews.

From Jesus at the Age of Twelve to William at the Age of Twelve Although Thomas of Monmouth uses the comparison to the Holy Innocents to demonstrate that there is a precedent for children under the age of consent being considered martyrs, and although in the twelfth-­century the Innocents are referred to as “boys” rather than infants, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich retains a pressing insistence on William’s eternal age of twelve, not in life, but in death, as in the vision of Lewin who sees William in heaven as “a

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boy of about twelve years old, perched on a golden stool [puerum conspicit quasi duedennem scabello residentem aureo]” (46; 69).77 The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is insistent in its portrayal of William at the age of twelve not because it casts him as an unruly adolescent and potential troublemaker, nor because at the age of twelve William could have willingly consented to his martyrdom. Rather Thomas emphasizes twelve as the age at which William died because it allows him to further map the timeline of William’s life onto Christ’s: from the Massacre of the Innocents to the final episode of Jesus’s childhood narrated in the canonical Gospels, that of the Finding in the Temple (or Christ Among the Doctors), an episode that occurred when Jesus was twelve (in the middle is the Presentation in the Temple, or Candlemas, William’s birthday). The importance of these, the first and last episodes of Jesus’s boyhood, is frequently connected across media in the twelfth century, for example, in a sermon of Honorius of Autun: “Let pleasing infancy raise its voice resounding in praise to Christ. . . . Thousands of infants praised him in their death by Herod for his cause. Let flourishing childhood celebrate in rejoicing in Christ, who as a boy stays sitting in the midst of learned men and provides a model of teaching to the boys.”78 For The Life and Passion of William of Norwich the age of twelve is important because of the exegetical tradition that linked the biblical episode in which Jesus was left behind in the Temple of Jerusalem by his parents when he was a boy of twelve to theological considerations of Jesus’s dual nature as man and God. This is an episode we find explored more fully in a text contemporary to The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, Aelred of Rievaulx’s Jesus at the Age of Twelve, one of the seminal treatises of affective devotion.79 The Cistercian abbot Aelred imagines Christ as a twelve-­year-­old child in this long exegetical letter written between 1153 and 1157 that he addressed to Ivo of Wardon, a daughter house of Rievaulx, and which was, evidently, specifically requested by Ivo. Thus, around the same time that Thomas was beginning to compose The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, Aelred is thinking about childhood as an aspect of spiritual allegory and as a posture of devotion following the example of Jesus: “he who is great became a little child.” While there is an aspect of the child reaching maturity in Aelred’s treatise, the maturity envisioned here is an allegorical one: the spiritual contemplation of God. Moreover, much like the exegetical treatment of the Massacre of the Innocents, and much like The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, Aelred’s exegesis of the episode of the Finding in the Temple in Jesus at the Age of Twelve imagines Jews as the key antagonists of Christian boyhood. Indeed, in the twelfth century the exegesis on both the Massacre of the Innocents and the Finding in the Temple was moving in new



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directions, designed to collapse the distinction between biblical Israelites and medieval Jews and to frame Jews as the paradigmatic threat to a Christ who was increasingly imagined as a child. The juxtaposition of Thomas’s description of William’s ordeal at the age of twelve with Aelred’s description of Jesus’s helps complete the picture of why, when the ritual crucifixion emerges, it imagines a child as its victim. Aelred’s letter expounds the biblical episode, recounted in Luke 2:41–51, in which the twelve-­year-­old Jesus is taken by his family on their annual trip to Jerusalem for the Passover celebration: “When Jesus was twelve years old, after going up to Jerusalem, as the custom was at the time of the feast, and completing the days of its observance, they set about their return home; but the boy Jesus remained in Jerusalem” (Luke 2:42ff ). On the return trip he is accidentally left behind and only discovered after three days, which time he has spent in the ­Temple “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” When his parents remonstrate with him, he replies: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” This episode is the final one of Jesus’s childhood narrated by any of the Gospels. Aelred’s treatise invites his interlocutor to imaginatively follow along in the events of the episode of the Finding in the Temple (or Christ Among the Doctors) for the purposes of spiritual growth in the mode of affective devotion. In the treatise, Aelred offers a threefold allegorical reading of the Finding in the Temple. On the literal level of the allegory is the journey to Jerusalem, the loss and subsequent rediscovery of the child, and Aelred imagines the pleasure that the traveling companions take from spending precious time with Jesus (“The old are amazed, the young are lost in admiration, and boys of his own age are kept from mischief by the seriousness of his behavior”) and ponders some of the questions posed by the episode: What was Jesus doing in those three days? How did Mary feel to be reunited with her son?80 He reads Mary and Joseph’s search for their lost child allegorically to be the Synagogue searching for its messiah who has left to live among the Gentiles.81 And, finally, Aelred interprets the spiritual meaning of the passage as the achievement of the goal of perfect contemplation, as the soul spends three days rapt in the presence of God. The treatise is reminiscent of Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass—discussed at greater length in Chapter 1—in its reliance on a threefold schematic common to Cistercian exegesis: thus Aelred describes the three stages of childhood, the “three days in the history of Israel,” and the three days that Jesus remained in the Temple, which for Aelred represent the soul’s ascent to God through contemplation. As Denise Despres notes, Aelred “delicately fleshes out his historical imagining as a rite of passage in which

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Jesus’s maturation, the liminal stage of which is his pilgrimage from Nazareth to Jerusalem, is spiritually analogous to conversion of heart.”82 Aelred was among the first Cistercian thinkers to embrace Bernard of Clairvaux’s call to meditate upon the life of Jesus as if he were really present, sicut praesens.83 Aelred imagines Ivo in his devotions “reproduc[ing] the features of that most beautiful face” and “rejoic[ing] in the gaze of those most charming and gentle eyes bent upon you.”84 Thus, even as it theorizes the humanity of Christ, this treatise self-­consciously works to make that humanity immanent, visual, and literal, and to conjure forth Christ as a twelve-­year-­old boy. While Aelred’s methodology is traditional, his exegesis on this passage is innovative. Although it had never been a wildly popular pericope, traditionally exegesis on the passage had been primarily concerned with the issue of Jesus’s paternity. The biblical passage suggests that Jesus’s father is Joseph but plays with the question of fatherhood: Mary admonishes, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you”; and Jesus replies, “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house” (Luke 2:48–49). Exegetes clearly worried that this rhetorical play might potentially be misleading, distracting readers from the realization that Jesus is meant to be the son of God. Aelred helpfully clarifies Joseph’s role by referring to him as Jesus’s “nutritius,” or “foster-­father.”85 With the issue of paternity established, this passage was most often elaborated as an example of humility. Thus Bede asserts: “The fact that at twelve years old [ Jesus] sat in the Temple in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions is an indication of his human humility, and moreover it is also an extraordinary example of humility for us to learn.”86 And the Glossa ordinaria follows Bede’s opinion: “He sat in the middle of the doctors as a source, but also as an exemplar of humility.”87 If the twelfth century was the “age of consent,” this pericope is not the place where those issues were played out. Relatively few Cistercian authors devoted sermons to it, and those that do focus primarily on the topoi of humility and paternity discussed above. This relative lack of exegetical writing on the episode of the Finding in the Temple may have been behind Ivo’s request to Aelred. Isaac of Stella, one of the only Cistercians aside from Aelred to devote attention to the episode, wrote two sermons about it. In them, he points to one potential explanation for a new interest in Jesus’s experiences at the age of twelve. Isaac begins his sermon on “when Jesus was twelve years old” by wondering about the lack of information in the Bible about Jesus’s childhood: “The canonical Scriptures, if I remember rightly, tell us little of the Lord Jesus’ doings in youth and prior to his Baptism, or, rather, give us only this incident. Which makes us wonder all the



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more what it means and why we are told this much and no more. It were madness to think that he spent all that time, nearly the whole of his earthly life, idly doing nothing.”88 And he adds: “what the holy Gospels reveal of his infancy deals more with what was done to him or about him than what he did.”89 Isaac here is noticing that this is not a discourse that privileges Christ’s agency or intentionality. Isaac’s sermons are not interested in thinking about Jesus specifically as a child. Indeed, he describes Jesus as mentally mature even while physically young—“He was . . . mentally mature, wise, strong and magnanimous, though his body was that of a tender infant”—a common trope of the child saint.90 However, Isaac’s concerns here might point to another reason that Ivo desired an interpretation of the episode of Jesus in the Temple and why Aelred chose to compose it in the manner that he did. In drawing attention to the question of Jesus’s paternity, the traditional exegetical interpretations of this episode also drew attention to the question of Jesus’s humanity; as the Glossa to the episode emphasizes, “enim Deus et homo est.”91 The dramatic tension in this episode lies not so much in Jesus’s preternatural wisdom in teaching the teachers, or in his humility in being taught by them, but in the moment when he looks his human father in the eye and tells him of a different, “verus Pater.” In this moment the question of the relationship between Jesus’s humanity and his divinity is framed starkly. Thus Isaac suggests that when Mary questions her newly found son, her questions are not intended to indicate that she had genuinely forgotten about him when she left him behind in Jerusalem, which would suggest that she had forgotten about God, but rather they are meant to draw “attention to the mystery” of the incarnation: “What, did you not pray to God during all that dark and gloomy day? Could you not think of God, did you forget him? This is past belief ! How could you, when your Son is God? You prayed, perhaps, to the Father and forgot the Son. But how could this be if to name the Father is to imply the Son?”92 These interpretations emphasize the negotiation between Jesus’s human and divine natures. It is precisely this question of the humanity of Jesus that Aelred will exploit in his emphasis on Jesus’s childhood and his juxtaposition of that childlike state to that of the Jews who, for Aelred, can only comprehend Jesus in his humanity. This emphasis on the humanity of Jesus leads to the slightly odd scene where the devotee is invited to imagine touching and kissing Jesus: “See, I beg, how he is seized upon and led away by each and every one of them. Old men kiss him, young men embrace him.”93 This emphasis on the corporeality, the embodiedness, of Jesus is simultaneously an emphasis on his human presence.94 It is, I believe, the way in which this exegetical attention to the dual nature of Christ in the episode of the Finding in the Temple opens toward a theology

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of Incarnation that leads Aelred to shift his attention away from the tropes of humility traditional in the exegesis toward an imaginary reconstruction of the presence of Jewish characters not present in the Gospel account. Increasingly in the mid-­twelfth century, as the work of Anna Sapir Abulafia and others has shown, Jews were positioned as strawmen in debates on and in treatises about the Incarnation, assigned the role of the unbeliever who is particularly hostile to the idea of God becoming man.95 Aelred’s treatise Jesus at the Age of Twelve rescripts the traditional exegesis on the episode, bringing together the emphasis on Jesus’s dual nature with a sense of that dual nature as always already threatened by Jews. Aelred was not the first or the only twelfth-­century thinker to imagine a connection between a Christ Child and a Jewish threat. One forerunner to Aelred here is Guerric of Igny, another Cistercian abbot who likewise juxtaposes the childlikeness of Jesus to the unbelief of the Jews, but who chooses a series of sermons on the Nativity with which to draw this comparison. In his first sermon for Christmas, Guerric meditates at length on the significance of God having become a child, emphasizing the humility of God in having done so: “Unto us therefore a little Child is born, and ‘emptying out’ his majesty God has taken on himself not merely the earthly body of mortal men but even the weakness and insignificance of children. . . . O sweet and sacred childhood, which brought back man’s true innocence, by which men of every age can return to blessed childhood and be conformed to you, not in physical weakness but in humility of heart and holiness of life.”96 Guerric’s second sermon for Christmas follows from the typological logic inherent in the liturgy and takes as its starting point a verse from Isaiah—“A child is born for us, a son is given to us” (Isa. 9:6)—borrowed from the liturgy for the Christmas vespers mass.97 Here, Guerric contrasts those who accept Jesus as the son of God with those who do not; the Church which gives birth to many children, with the Synagogue, which grows barren.98 In a third sermon on the same verse, “A child is born for us,” Guerric returns to the meaning of God becoming a child (“This birth did not confer being on him . . . he has been born as a child for us”).99 The weakness and humility inherent in becoming a child is compared with the weakness and humility that Christ took on in the Crucifixion, and in both cases Guerric asserts that this weakness and humility are precisely those traits that should have led the Jews to faith but instead repulsed them: “This, I say, is a scandal to you: that God’s strength has been hidden in the weakness of the flesh”100 This, of course, is simply to say that Jesus as a child is a central image of the theology of the Incarnation, and thus Jesus in his childlike form functions as a locus for representing Jewish unbelief.



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Whereas Guerric’s sermons on the Nativity select the moment of Christ’s infancy, with its focus on the extreme humility and helplessness of a child-­God and juxtaposition of the Christ’s birth and death, Aelred chooses instead a Jesus on the cusp of adulthood. Indeed, the age of twelve is conceptually important for Aelred chiefly because he reads the childhood of Jesus as an affective model for spiritual growth, whereby the individual monk begins as innocent and unaware as an infant, but develops through the stages of childhood until he reaches the Temple with Jesus, at the spiritual age of twelve, which signifies the beginning of a mature contemplation of God that nevertheless retains the simplicity of childhood: “So the Lord, without ceasing to be great in his own nature, was born as a little child in the flesh and through a certain interval of time he advanced and grew up according to the flesh, in order that we who in spirit are little children, or rather almost nothing, might be born spiritually and, passing through the successive ages of the spiritual life, grow up and advance.”101 Aelred’s treatise Jesus at the Age of Twelve teases out the implications about the nature of Christ inherent in this traditional exegesis on Luke, which emphasizes Jesus’s paternity, the humility of God in taking on human form, and the relationship between Jesus’s twin human and divine aspects. To these, Aelred of Rievaulx adds an extended contemplation on what Jesus’s childhood might mean allegorically for the spiritual growth of the individual Christian, and in so doing, he also juxtaposes devotion to childhood with anti-­Judaism. When the treatise turns to the allegorical, or typological, interpretation, it inevitably turns to thinking about the place of the Jews in salvation history. Aelred interprets the allegorical meaning of Jesus’s going to Jerusalem: “When Jesus was twelve years old he went up to Jerusalem. It is clear, according to the laws of allegory that Christ went up from Nazareth to Jerusalem when he left the Synagogue and manifested himself in his loving kindness to the Church of the Gentiles. And it is fitting that he was twelve years old then, because, coming not to abolish the Law but to fulfil it, he added to the tenfold Law the two elements of evangelical perfection.”102 For Aelred, this moment is important because it shows Jesus revealing himself for the first time to the world. Thus it becomes a moment for reflection on his reception by that world, specifically, by the Jews in the Temple with whom he interacts. Turning to his allegorical exegesis on the passage, Aelred practically breaks into a jeremiad: “They thought,” we read, “that he was with the company.” What is this? Do you still, you Jews, presume that Christ is in your company when, according to your own Jeremiah, he has left his house and cast away

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his heritage, because it has become like the den of the hyena to him? What signs, what mysteries, what sacraments show him still to be in your company? Where is the temple, where is the continual sacrifice, where is the priesthood, where is the altar, the only one granted to you, in Jerusalem alone? .  .  . Therefore, either you have none of these or, if perhaps you claim to have them, it is not according to God’s commandment that you have them and therefore you do not possess Christ either. For in all these things you did once possess Christ in the mysteries of prophecy, but when he whom they foretold appeared they were taken away and it is in vain that you lay claim to them after his coming. What amazing perversity! What amazing blindness! Paying no regard to all these things the Jews think that he is still in their company and look for him among their kindred and acquaintance. Who is it you are looking for, Jews? Who is it you are looking for?103 The occasion for this lengthy outburst is the interpretation of the line “the boy Jesus stayed on in Jerusalem, without his parents’ knowledge” such that the “parents” are the Jews who refuse to know the truth about Jesus. Jesus’s three days in the T ­ emple are interpreted here eschatologically: “The first day, on which the Lord Jesus, after entering our Jerusalem, hid himself from his mother, the Synagogue, and his brethren, the Jews, was the Apostles’ preaching among the Gentiles” and the persecutions of the Christians. The second day represents the conversion of “the kings of the world” when the “confused night of unbelief was dispelled.”104 And the third day represents the end-­times, when “Jesus will be found by his mother, the Synagogue, as she enters the temple, that is the Church.”105 The jeremiad ends, When will this be, good Jesus? When will you look upon your own flesh, those of your own blood and your own household, for indeed no one hates his own flesh? Distribute a share, Lord, of your bread to the hungry, and bring the needy and the wanderers into your house. How long is the wretched Cain to be a wanderer and a fugitive upon your earth which opened its mouth to drink in your blood, Abel of ours, from his hand? Have you not already payed him back seven times over, since everywhere the elder is serving the younger, everywhere the yoke weighs heavy and the sword terrifies, and there is no one to redeem or to save? I know, yes, I know, that in the end they will be converted and suffer hunger like dogs, but only at evening. For at the end of three days they found him in the temple.106



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This interpretation is followed by a dialogue between Christ and the Jews, framed around the parable of the prodigal son, in which the Jews, in the role of the father, complain at their hard treatment by the son, and Christ, speaking as the prodigal son, defends his action.107 The allegorical interpretation of the Finding in the Temple, which inevitably depends upon a typological supersessionist understanding of the relationship between Christian and Jew, paradoxically appropriates a moment that illustrates Jesus’s wisdom and humility to argue instead for the Jews’ lack thereof. Finally, Mary’s distress at not being able to find Jesus is projected as Israel’s distress, and Aelred reads the third day, on which Mary and Joseph find Jesus, as the day on which “a remnant of Israel will be saved.”108 Aelred’s treatise Jesus at the Age of Twelve suggests that in the second half of the twelfth century the age of twelve was gaining new resonances for those thinkers interested in incarnational theology and the humanity of Christ. In the episode of the Finding in the Temple, being twelve years of age is the last moment of Jesus’s childhood, it is the moment when he, at least temporarily, leaves his family and takes up a public mission, and it is a moment in which the tension between his human and divine aspects is dramatically framed. Jesus at the Age of Twelve takes the implications in the traditional exegesis on this episode to their logical extremes, and in so doing it conflates childhood, especially childhood as a posture of devotion, with Jewish rejection of Jesus. Read alongside Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, it begins to suggest why a child of twelve might have been a plausible and useful victim of the first ritual murder narrative.

“Become Like Little Children”: Affective Scripts and the Performance of Childlikeness Aelred’s treatise is among the first of its kind to connect affective devotion to the human Christ with anti-­Judaism: as Anna Sapir Abulafia has noted, “condemnation of Jews functions here as an integral part of the unfolding of Christian spirituality.”109 In twelfth-­century exegetical treatments of the biblical episodes of the Massacre of the Innocents and the Finding in the Temple we find twin articulations in which the Jews are framed as the enemies of Christian boyhood. These new imaginations of the place of Jews in these episodes are not simply descriptive: they are also affective “scripts,” that is, “scripts for the performance of feeling.”110 This emerging theme of exegesis is crucial to the development of practices

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of affective devotion, where the individual worshipper is invited to imagine him-­ or herself present at the unfolding events of Jesus’s life and (especially) death and to imaginatively inhabit the various characters in these scenes and, indeed, Christ himself. Bernard of Clairvaux famously encouraged worshippers to imagine themselves as present at scenes of Christ’s life, and twelfth-­century writers compulsively produced texts that helped them to do so, creating “richly emotional, script-­like texts that ask their readers to imagine themselves present at scenes of Christ’s suffering and to perform compassion for that suffering victim in a private drama of the heart.”111 In this context, what Aelred’s treatise reveals is childlikeness not just as the object of devotion but also as a key model for Christian devotion. As Despres notes: “Jesus models for the devout reader the process of spiritual maturation from childhood to adulthood.”112 This is the point of the treatise, to imagine Ivo inhabiting the footsteps of Jesus as he lingers in the Temple. As Aelred explains, “what you are looking for, my son, is not theological speculation but devotion; not something to sharpen your tongue but something to arouse your affections.”113 Aelred’s Jesus at the Age of Twelve thus recalls Isaac of Stella’s Letter on the Office of the Mass, which is also an invitation to imaginatively approach the Temple as a mode of devotional practice and a threefold allegorical explanation of how this might be done. In this regard, the figure of the child takes on a special significance. After all, to be “childlike” is not only a stage of life but a state that can extend into senility: indeed, in the High Middle Ages, maintaining the innocence and simplicity of childhood over the course of one’s life was explicitly valued, particularly as a central aspect of an affective piety and particularly in Cistercian textual communities.114 This is reflected, for example, in the tradition of exegesis on Matthew 18:1–5, “unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” As Shulamith Shahar has noted: “Bernard of Clairvaux, in one of his sermons . . . called on believers to give their hearts to this child, to believe in him, and to worship him so that they too could revert to being as innocent and pure as little children.”115 Isaac of Stella conceives of his exegesis in these terms: “Our method is a simple one. We shall examine each part separately, in the light of the grace given us. Like children suckled at the breast we shall eagerly draw all that we can from heaven, since it is from the mouth of babes and sucklings that praise is perfected.”116 Similarly, John of Ford compares the anchorite Wulfric of Haselbury’s simplicity to the simplicity inherent in childhood. In addressing Wulfric’s somewhat less than humble propensity to talk about his own miracles, John writes:



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I say this much because of a general surprise that the man of God did not keep silent about his own works, these being matters about which one should utter nothing or next to nothing, as it is both unseemly and highly dangerous to sing one’s own praises. But such critics have perhaps failed to note either the intimate command of the Holy Spirit, or those qualities which blessed Wulfric had in so singular a degree and which freed him from all trace of pride and boastfulness, namely, simplicity and truthfulness in all their purity. Children in their simplicity [simplicitas parvulorum] are, as we know, left free to speak their minds without restraint, and bodies still immature may display their nakedness unblushingly. And clearly this man too, child that he was, spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child, setting no value on these phenomena, nor on himself in relation to them, quite oblivious as he was of being revered. (113; 17–28) Thus, in Aelred’s Jesus at the Age of Twelve, the representation of childhood is important on both the literal and the allegorical levels, precisely as a devotional model. Aelred dwells on the anxious moments of the parent’s temporary loss of their child in a realistic representation of their worry that focuses on the physicality of the child: “Where were you, good Jesus, during those three days? Who provided you with food and drink? Who made up a bed for you? Who took off your shoes? Who tended your boyish limbs with oil and baths?”117 These questions are prompts that open up the space for affective meditation. And he similarly chastises Mary for having been so careless with her son: “Indeed, my Lady, if you will allow me to say so, why did you lose your dearest son so easily, why did you watch over him with so little care, why were you so late in noticing that he was missing?”118 Aelred participates in a common Cistercian trope of representing the first stage of the soul in its conversion to God as one of childlikeness: “Now this is the beginning of conversion, a spiritual birth as it were, that we should model ourselves upon the Child.”119 The identification of the beginning stage of spiritual growth with childishness is one that Aelred makes elsewhere: in a sermon for Easter, Aelred explains the seeming lack of comprehension on the part of the apostles of what they were witnessing as evidence of their childish spiritual state: “There was every need, brothers, that his disciples, who were still infants, should be nourished with this milk. . . . It was necessary therefore that, like infants, they should see his resurrection even with their physical eyes, and so, as it were, having been nourished with a kind of milk, that they might be capable

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of believing things unseen.”120 In this vulnerable state, the childlikeness that is the first step along the road to spiritual growth, each worshipper must dodge various threats along the way, threats that are often imagined as “Jewish.” The individual Christian as Christ Child is threatened by a Herod forever plotting to massacre innocents: “Herod . . . brandishes his sword and stretches his bow, making ready in it death-­dealing shafts so that he may shoot in the dark at the upright man.”121 Having successfully defeated Herod, however, the Christian devotee is ready to proceed on the next stage of his spiritual journey with Jesus to Nazareth and subsequently to Jerusalem.122 Here, the path of contemplation is imagined to map onto both the experiential and the topographical map of Jesus’s childhood: that is, it is emphatically simultaneously figurative and literal. The three stages of a child’s development—infancy, childhood, and youth—become the three steps in the soul’s development: “For as Bethlehem, where Christ was born little and poor, is the beginning of a good life, and Nazareth, where he was brought up, is the practice of the virtues, so Jerusalem, to which he went up at the age of twelve, is the contemplation of heavenly secrets.”123 The light of contemplation, which is the soul’s goal, is reached at the spiritual age of twelve, and Jesus’s development through his childhood becomes a devotional model. This importance of the cult of the child, and particularly of the representation of Jesus as a child, across literature and the visual arts in the twelfth century is well documented, and its influence only grows into the thirteenth century, with the development of “enfances” narratives that imagine the youthful Jesus’s playtime activities.124 Indeed, in the twelfth century the figure of the child becomes exemplary; it is the screen across which various cultural preoccupations are rehearsed. Not least of this is the conception of the child’s unique innocence and vulnerability to harm, a conception that serves also as a cipher for the vulnerability of all individuals to danger and to injury. Hence its aptness as a point of entry for affective meditation. However, while the figure of the child is a site for the expression of vulnerability, it is not exclusively so. The fetishization of the child, as queer theorist Lee Edelman has so persuasively insisted, is deeply imbricated in a society’s imagination of its own futurity. “The fantasy subtending the image of the child,” he writes, “invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought.”125 In many ways, of course, Edelman’s concerns are quite different from those of the twelfth century: for Edelman, the child becomes a figure of compulsory heteronormativity, insofar as the cultural insistence on “reproductive futurism” fetishizes the child as a figure for a future that must be protected and preserved above all else, and thus as a figure for that which is most threatened by queer sexualities. These concerns play out quite



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differently in a medieval monastic context, where heterosexual reproduction is not valorized, but rather considered a necessary evil of the human condition. Nevertheless, Edelman’s arguments about the ways in which the figure of the child brings together the past and the future, and, indeed, embodies potentiality and futurity, are no less instructive in a medieval context. Indeed, his central figure of Peter Pan, a boy who will never grow up, attacked by men whose intentions are equally murderous and unmotivated, seems in retrospect to be practically a reincarnation of William of Norwich. Edelman’s point that, “charged, after all, with the task of assuring ‘that we being dead yet live,’ the Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural transcendence of the limits of nature itself ), exudes. . . pathos” aptly suggests why the figure of the Christ Child was such a culturally compelling image and such a compelling model for affective devotion.126 As Anna Wilson has argued, “Thomas’ description of the child sacrifice as an annual, global ritual makes the target of Jewish hatred not just this child, but any child, the symbolic Child who represents the continuation of Christian society through heterosexual reproduction.”127 In twelfth-­century monasticism, reproductive futurism was not articulated primarily through sexual reproduction, but rather through the ritual remembering of the body of Christ in the office of the mass and through the embodied devotional practices of affective piety. William of Norwich, dead yet paradoxically still engaging in the world as if he were alive, affirms his own futurity by demonstrating how we should remember him. I am referring here once again to the miracle that Thomas of Monmouth describes as “the miracle of miracles,” the vision of Agnes as narrated by the letter of the monk of Pershore Abbey. Described as a young maiden, as a child, on her sickbed, Agnes has a vision of William carrying a cross to the chapel that marks the spot of his martyrdom. In her vision, William dons priestly garb and, aided by another boy, Robert, and observed by Agnes, celebrates a mass. This remarkable vision shows three children alone in the woods performing— almost playing at—liturgical commemoration. Their identity as children, imitating grown-­ups, highlights the mimetic quality of liturgy as of fiction itself. William is represented here, at the age of twelve, taking up his saintly role as healer and intercessor in a sacramental space created by and for children: this moment is pure potentiality. The body of the child, like the performance of the liturgy, holds past, present, and future in productive tension. Here William’s ghost both figures and suspends temporality and teleology in the endless present of liturgical time. At the same time, this miracle functions as an affective script, inviting the reader to inhabit along with Agnes, and as a child, William’s

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complex performance of his own memory. We do not often consider The Life and Passion of William of Norwich as belonging to the genre of affective devotion, but it nevertheless shares many of that genre’s tropes and techniques: pulling the moment of the Crucifixion into the present, introducing the author as a narrator who leads the reader through the imagined scenes, centering a child as the locus of affect. To this extent, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich participates in the developing affective devotion of the High Middle Ages in which the figure of the child is not simply the object of devotion but also a posture of devotion. The model proposed here, and embodied in William, is reproductive, but it is the ritual reproduction of the body of Christ in the mass, and the spiritual reproduction of childlike innocence and simplicity through the practice of affective contemplation, in which the first step is to “become as a little child.”

Conclusion: The Future of an Illusion This aspect of futurity inherent in the representation of the child, I suggest, underlies the cultural desires projected onto that figure, as much as its vulnerability does. It also underlies The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, which proposes a new kind of narrative in which Jews murder Christian children in ritual repetition of the murder of Christ. The rich layer of exegetical and devotional claims that animates the Life’s representation of William of Norwich’s childhood martyrdom similarly animates the cults of other twelfth-­century child saints. When Thomas of Monmouth sets out to make his case for William’s sainthood, he draws on a variety of available cultural representations of childhood: from the exegetical treatments of the Holy Innocents as genuine martyrs who died in substitution for Christ, to the local example of Saint Faith, a late antique child martyr of impeccable saintly credentials. Indeed, the annals of twelfth-­century hagiology are littered with child saints just like William—saints who could not speak but still managed to consent, children who were tortured, whose bodies were dumped in woods, children whose preternatural sanctity rendered them doubly vulnerable. Often as specifically royal saints, they embody the possibility of political futurity: as with William, the stakes for their communities are high. The only difference is that these children were killed not by Jews but rather, mostly, by pagan tyrants. (One wonders how the difference was registered, or to what extent it registered, to a twelfth-­century audience). Saint Faith’s gentle haunting of William of Norwich’s miracles points to a tension in the narrative between a monkly intellectual culture and a sharp awareness of the



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realpolitik of cathedral cults. The example of these child saints shows that the culting of William does not depend solely on a cultural climate in which Jews were coming to be perceived as the dominant threat—especially to the Christ Child and by extension to all children. So whereas in retrospect William of Norwich stands out as the beginning of the ritual murder accusation, his representation in the Life fits comfortably within a group of contemporary child saints. Nevertheless, the representation of William at the age of twelve belongs to the same intellectual climate of exegesis that produced Aelred of Rievaulx’s Jesus at the Age of Twelve, which, alongside contemporary exegesis on the Holy Innocents, begins to provide a blueprint for how Jews might be imagined as uniquely dangerous to the Christian child. The way in which the figure of the child in the theology of the Incarnation comes to stand as a metonym for Christ and specifically for Christ’s humanity gives the veneration of child saints a new purchase in the twelfth century. This theology is also one node at which the figure of the Jew is summoned forth as uniquely threatening to children, and it constitutes one of the conditions of possibility for the ritual murder accusation. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich’s imbrication in parallel networks of affective devotion, such as Aelred of Rievaulx’s Jesus at the Age of Twelve, shows one of the ways in which the cult of the child as it developed in the twelfth century was not only concerned with the humanity of Jesus; it was also concerned with humanity and innocence in general, and the representation of William as a child has a larger context than that of providing a Christ Child–like foil to the Jew’s imagined cruelty and persecutions. Imagining William of Norwich crucified by Jews in a literal reenactment of the Passion should not be read as an end in and of itself, but rather as a stepping off point for devotional practice. Ultimately, what all these converging narratives of twelfth-­century literary culture—the exegetical treatment of the Massacre of the Innocents and the Finding in the Temple, the popularity of the cults of child saints, and the general increasing cultural devotion to the Christ Child—indicate is not only the importance of the figure of the child as an object of devotion, but the figure of the child as a posture of devotion, particularly in Cistercian spirituality. It is at the intersection of these intellectual and devotional currents that the imagination of a text such as The Life and Passion of William of Norwich became possible.

Chapter 4

William of Norwich Between History and Fiction

The first book of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich encompasses the narrative of William’s life and death. It ends with William’s burial in the interior part of the monks’ cemetery. The joy of the clergy, monks, and laity who participate in the ceremony and the sweet smell that emanates from William’s shrouded and displayed body seem happy proof of the universal acceptance of William’s sanctity. However, the opening paragraphs of book 2 strike a different note, as Thomas of Monmouth rages against those who disbelieve in his new saint. Book 2 begins with an elaborately rhetorical diatribe in which Thomas sets himself up as a new David against the Philistine doubters (“I shall crush by the sling of my lips the offending forehead with the smoothest stone of the word”).1 Book 2 of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich subsequently flashes back to episodes that, if the story were told in strict chronological order, should have been told in book 1. Scholars have mostly taken Thomas at his word and treated this recursive chronology as if Thomas were simply surprised that his story was not immediately believed and annoyed at having to go back and offer more detail—rather than as having made a rhetorical decision to organize his text in this way.2 This chapter will instead treat the structure of book 2, and the series of proofs that Thomas of Monmouth creates there, precisely as a rhetorical choice, arguing that here The Life and Passion of William of Norwich artfully engages with medieval rhetorical theory to explore—and contest—the boundaries between fact and fiction. Scholars have often spoken about the emergence of a new kind of fictionality in the middle of the twelfth century, frequently associating it with the rise of vernacular literature. For example, in a seminal study, Per Nykrog influentially



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identified the invention of fiction in the 1170s, emerging at the interstices of oral and Latinate modes of literary production—that is to say, precisely at the moment of the composition of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich.3 Indeed, the literary culture of mid-­twelfth-­century England is characterized by innovation in literary forms. As Robert M. Stein describes: “It has long been a commonplace of literary history to observe that in the twelfth century, first in the French-­speaking territories controlled by Anglo-­Norman and Capetian ruling families, and especially within the milieu of the English royal court, antique and chivalric romances appear simultaneously with a new form of historical chronicle driven by contemporary affairs. In short order historiography and romance, whether written in Latin or in the vernaculars, become culturally dominant genres of narrative expression throughout the rest of Europe.”4 One need not wholeheartedly accept Nykrog’s assertion about the “invention” of fiction in order to see in the emergence of the new genres of romance and chanson de geste in the mid-­twelfth century a new interest in fictionality. Although these accounts of twelfth-­century fictionality sometimes posit a new need to articulate secular experience as the driving impulse behind the emergence of these genres (as do Nykrog and Stein), a reconsideration of Latin hagiography demonstrates that it, too, is invested in the rhetorical techniques of fictionality and deploys “the full repertoire of fictional narrative techniques.”5 It is the truth claims of hagiography, rather than its rhetorical techniques or formal attributes, which distinguish it from its adjacent genres. In the Middle Ages, hagiography, historiography, and poetry are branches of the ancient art of rhetoric. As the scholar of classical rhetoric A. J. Woodman writes: “Historiography was regarded by the ancients as not essentially different from poetry: each was a branch of rhetoric, and therefore historiography, like poetry, employs the concepts associated with, and relies upon the expectations generated by, a rhetorical genre.”6 Scholars have, of course, recognized that in this regard Thomas of Monmouth is no different from any other twelfth-­century historian. As Anthony Bale aptly notes in this context, “Thomas’s account is a wonderfully lively piece of writing and there can be little doubt that it was written as an exercise in rhetoric and writing rather than ‘fact’ as we might now understand it.”7 And Lynda Coon has made this point about all hagiography: “In short, all saints’ lives are rhetorical, didactic, and constructed. They are sacred fictions, not factual accounts of human achievements.”8 Nevertheless, scholars of the ritual murder accusation have accepted many of Thomas’s contentions as containing a kernel of truth, following a more colloquial understanding of rhetoric that suggests the text is simply elaborated, decorated, rather than purely fictional.9

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This is, however, in spite of the fact that Thomas explicitly indicates that the “proofs” he offers in book 2 of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich are, in fact, fictive. Book 2 consists of several miracles, two visions of otherworld journeys, and an extended imaginative courtroom drama. It also includes a series of seven “arguments”—referred to by their technical term argumentum—in support of the story told in book 1. These arguments include the only eyewitness accounts of William’s abduction, as well as the explicit statement that he was crucified. In this chapter I point out that with his repeated use of the term argumentum, Thomas is explicitly indexing the rhetorical theories of Cicero, Quintilian, and others that composed a central part of a twelfth-­century education.10 Argumentum, according to classical and medieval literary theory, is a middle term between historia and fabula: whereas historia narrates events that actually happened and fabula narrates events that did not happen, argumentum narrates events that did not happen but might have. Argumentum is distinguished from historia by its untruthfulness and from fabula by its plausibility. Both fabula and argumentum are untrue in the sense of nonfactual, although poetry, then as now, may be seen to express a higher truth than that of the third term of this triad, historia. Over the course of the twelfth century, argumentum and fabula will join forces to become fiction. By repeatedly referring to his sample proofs as argumenta, Thomas is signaling to his audience that, although these events are plausible, they did not take place. Although the series of proofs that Thomas offers in book 2 in support of his contention that William of Norwich was ritually murdered by Jews and that this made him a saint are not, by his own admission, factual, they are nevertheless— by twelfth-­century standards—good history. Indeed, in accordance with classical precepts, the very essence of medieval history, for its writers and readers, lay in the persuasive and verisimilar narration of a story about the past. As Nancy Partner describes: “Classical history favored near-­contemporary subjects, eye-­witness evidence, or good testimony, a plausible, coherent narrative full of convincing detail arranged in the narrative-­speech-­narrative rhythm, explanation of events based on the moral character and intelligence of the active agents, and (pace Cicero) as much fictional invention as seemed necessary to create the desired effects.”11 Classical rhetoric also offered suggestions as to where the historian might choose to elaborate—descriptions of cities, perhaps, or of battles, and especially persuasive speeches. In his series of argumenta in book 2, Thomas draws on these models, but he also draws on strategies more common to romance, strategies that explicitly contest the historian’s art. This chapter will begin, therefore, by exploring the significance of the historia-­argumentum-­fabula triad to medieval rhetorical theory



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and to Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. For although classical rhetoric did not, of course, include hagiography as one of its conceptual categories of narrative, in the Middle Ages, hagiography was considered a kind of historical writing.12 This chapter will closely consider several of the argumenta that Thomas imagines in book 2 for their strategies of fictionality and for the ways in which they intersect with other literary genres contemporary to the Life, particularly romance.13 Although hagiography and romance in general are recognized to share a porous border, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in particular has not been considered for the ways in which it shares certain strategies of fictionality with romance. This gap in the scholarship is particularly important to address, since romance as a genre is at the vanguard of the conjoining of argumentum and fabula to create fiction. I use the term “fictionality” here to mean possessing “the qualities and affordances of fictional genres”14—rather than “fictive” in the sense of “made up”—to indicate fictionality as a rhetorical mode, and also to emphasize that Thomas, so far as we can tell, was not trying to deceive. As Jean-­Claude Schmitt quotes in a related context, “it is not a question of deception, but of a logic of writing whose fruits were the results of an implementation of the rhetoric of truth.”15 The implications of these distinctions for contemporary readers, however, are significant; not only because what was considered good historiography in the twelfth century appears, in hindsight, more like good fiction, but also because the choice of scenarios that Thomas makes in adding his rhetorical color (to use Quintilian’s term) offers insight into the emergence of fictionality in the twelfth century. Their shared strategies are indicative of the extent to which historiography and romance are emerging simultaneously in the twelfth century as different responses to similar cultural catalysts. In particular, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich shares with romance an interest in defining itself over and against historia’s dominant tropes, particularly that of eyewitnessing. In antiquity, the historian’s art was dependent on having—or at least claiming—access to eyewitness accounts of events, and this assumption was passed down to the Middle Ages through such authorities as Isidore of Seville. As Isidore explains in his Etymologies: “History is so called from the Greek term ίστορειν (‘inquire,’ ‘observe’), that is, from ‘seeing’ or from ‘knowing.’ Indeed, among the ancients no one would write a history unless he had been present and had seen what was to be written down, for we grasp with our eyes things that occur better than what we gather with our hearing, since what is seen is revealed without falsehood.”16 In the twelfth century, Conrad of Hirsau repeats this claim, stating that the historiographer is “rei visae scriptor” (the recorder of things that have been seen).17

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Twelfth-­century historians typically addressed this issue in their prologues, as did John of Salisbury in the prologue to the Historia Pontificalis: “In what I am going to relate, I shall, by the help of God, write nothing but what I myself have seen and heard and know to be true, or have on good authority from the testimony or writings of reliable men.”18 One key strategy of fictionality deployed by romance is a subversive engagement with this trope of eyewitnessing that characterizes historiography by means of a consistent and almost parodic undermining of the truism that seeing is believing. In the words of D. H. Green, for writers of romance, “any subversion of historia, any suggestion that their work is to be regarded as fiction, must proceed from a denial of eyewitness authentication.”19 Green gives as an example of this the competing treatment of a purportedly magical spring in the forest of Brocéliande by two writers: one claiming to write history and the other romance. In his Roman de Rou, Wace claims embarrassment at having been so foolish as to go personally to the forest to check on the existence of a magical spring that of course does not exist; that is, Green argues, Wace authenticates his narrative as a true history by positioning himself as the historian, as the eyewitness. When, on the other hand, at the beginning of his romance Yvain, le chevalier au lion, Chrétien de Troyes sends the knight Calogrenant to the very same spring, what Calogrenant finds there is indeed a magical spring, and an adventure ensues. As Green points out: The terms in which Calogrenant maintains his eyewitness veracity: “Car ne vuel pas parler de songe,/ Ne de fable ne de mançonge,/ Don maint autre vos ont servi,/ Ainz vos dirai ce, que je vi” (for I shall not speak of a dream, a fable, or a lie, which many others have offered to you, but instead I shall speak of what I saw), are terms with which historians conventionally established their reliability. Behind him, of course, stands Chrétien, whose purpose (as a writer of fiction, not history) it is to question the eyewitness truth claims of historiography. By having Calogrenant (in a work of fiction) contradict Wace’s account of the non-­marvellous nature of Broceliande Chrétien is doing nothing less than appropriating the truth-­claims made of history for his own fable.20 Like romance, book 2 of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich contests fictionality across this very ground, over and against the protocols of historia. This trope is appropriated, for example, in the Life’s description of the maidservant who is the sole “eyewitness” of William’s murder and the protagonist of Thomas’s “second argumentum”:



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At that time and on that very day, indeed at that very hour when the boy William was being tortured so cruelly in retribution, ridiculed and crucified [torquebatur, illudebatur, et crucifigebatur] to the shame of Christ, a little Christian woman, who worked as a servant for them, as she was preparing alone in the kitchen some boiling water, as ordered by them, not knowing what was going on, nonetheless heard clearly the noise of it. When from inside they were calling out “Water! Water!” the woman carried it, boiling fiercely, and served it to those who requested it. But while she handed it over from the outside and they received it from within, she happened to see through the open door—with one eye since she could not with both [quia duobus non potuit, oculo uno uidere contigit]—the boy fixed to a post. Having seen this she was horrified; she closed her eye and they shut the door [clausit oculum, et illi hostium]. (59; 89–90) This representation of a woman spying through a peephole is a quintessentially literary moment. The specificity of the description in time (“at the very hour”), in place (the kitchen), along with the quotidian details of the scene (getting ready some boiling water), even the rather bourgeois setting itself, seem almost to anticipate the representational techniques of the modern realist novel. Indeed, so persuasive are these techniques that the “figure of a peeping Christian maid in the Jewish household was to become a stock character in later blood libel accusations.”21 The maid becomes an avatar for the reader who similarly strains to see the unseeable. This moment simultaneously situates vision as the privileged site of knowledge and at the center of fictional representation. What is asserted here is not so much that William is about to be murdered by Jews, but that seeing is believing. This episode is identified as an argumentum by the text, and in order to be plausible it lays claim to the tropes of verisimilitude that characterize historia, particularly, as here, eyewitnessing. Yet it simultaneously distances itself from them: the eye and the door shut. As I will argue in a final section of this chapter, such frustrated glances and obstructed sightlines are characteristic of the story Thomas of Monmouth concocts about the murder of William of Norwich. They seem to embody the “denial of eyewitness verification” that Green describes as characteristic of romance. The idea, or ideal, of visual proof is a constant touchstone in the stories Thomas tells in book 2 where he seems to be purposefully experimenting with the idea of fictionality. The desired eyewitness verification, however, is always just out of sight, in a strangely implicit acknowledgment of the fictionality of the story Thomas tells.

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This chapter argues that being attentive to Thomas’s explanations of his rhetorical strategies and exploring the way in which The Life and Passion of William of Norwich deploys similar tropes to the nascent genre of vernacular romance might help us to better understand the claims to historical truth made both by Thomas of Monmouth and by contemporary scholars of the ritual murder accusation. It will argue that The Life and Passion of William of Norwich signals its rhetorical strategies throughout, and being attentive to its deployment of classical rhetorical devices can help to elucidate the interplay of the representations of what we would now identify as fact and fiction in this text. This practice is particularly crucial where key representations have been taken to index historical events. For this reason, this discussion has significant implications for our understanding of the historicity of the story The Life and Passion of William of Norwich tells and what it can tell us in turn about Jewish/Christian relations. It also shows the Life in a new light in the experiments with fictionality it shares with its contemporary genres such as romance. Thinking about The Life and Passion of William of Norwich not only in terms of the signifying strategies it deploys to make its case about the purported ritual crucifixion of William of Norwich by some local Jews, but also as sharing these signifying strategies with other contiguous genres, serves to highlight the ways in which The Life and Passion of William of Norwich participates in the literary innovations of the long twelfth century and should not be considered in isolation from them. The Life is situated not just at the birth of antisemitism but at the birth of fictionality as we understand it today.

Making an Argument: Historia–Argumentum–Fabula The scene of the maid peeping through a chink in the doorway at the crucifixion of William of Norwich is one of two eyewitness reports offered by Thomas of Monmouth in book 2. It is remarkable not only for the way in which it lingers on the authenticating possibility of the gaze, but also because it is framed as a story that did not actually happen, but that plausibly might have. That is to say, it is one of the seven argumenta that Thomas composes in book 2 in support of the narrative of the life and death of William that he offered in book 1. The second book of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is a series of rhetorical set pieces. It begins with the classic miracle of a rose blooming in winter at the grave of William (a miracle borrowed from Gregory of Tours and not uncommon in hagiographic writing). There are several healing miracles recounted in book 2—two



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of which involve visions of otherworld journeys, or visio purgatorii—as well as a vengeance miracle (the punishment of Sheriff John with a “bloody flux”). The book ends with this punishment and, just before it, a long imaginative construction of what might have happened had William’s murder been brought to trial. The centerpiece of book 2, however, is the series of seven argumenta. Thomas introduces these by addressing three main classes of objection to William’s sanctity: that he was not very saintly while alive and his miracles are possibly false; that it is undesirable to venerate a boy of such low social standing; and that even if he was killed it is not known by whom. Having addressed these objections, Thomas concludes: “And because we know for sure that they perpetrated this as an insult to the Passion of the Lord and to the shame of Christian law, we will prove the truth of the matter with several argumenta” (58; 88). He then proceeds to lay out seven “arguments,” a rhetorical gambit that elicits a reading practice attuned to these strategies. In Isidore of Seville’s formulation, argumenta “are things that, even if they have not happened, nevertheless could happen.”22 Along with fabula and historia, argumentum was recognized from antiquity as the middle of three basic categories of narrative. The triad is discussed by Cicero in De inventione, by the Rhetorica ad Herennium (“Argumentum is fictional things that nevertheless could have happened” [Argumentum est ficta res quae tamen fieri potuit]) attributed to Cicero in the Middle Ages, by Quintilian in Institutio oratoria—all authors whose works formed the foundation of the medieval schoolroom. The triad is conveyed to the Middle Ages also by Isidore of Seville’s ubiquitous Etymologiae, and it is repeated in the twelfth century by John of Salisbury, Bernard of Utrecht, and Conrad of Hirsau.23 As Green describes in The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: “According to this theory one of these types, historia, was a true record of events that had actually taken place, but at some distance in time from present memory. By contrast, fabula recounted fictitious events that neither had taken place nor could have conceivably done so (as in Aesop’s fables or Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Logically situated between these two extremes was the argumentum, dealing with events that had not happened, but could have.”24 In this schematic, fabula is not just untrue, but unbelievable (Cicero gives the example of stories about dragons), whereas argumentum oscillates between the two ends of the continuum: untrue like fabula, but, like historia, characterized chiefly by verisimilitude: “This middling position of argumentum made it attractive to authors of the twelfth century who sought the freedom to invent their narrative, but were constrained to present it as plausible or even (if by non-­ factual criteria) as truthful.”25 Over the course of the twelfth century “historia

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becomes . . . demarcated from the rest of the trichotomy” and argumentum and fabula, united by their lack of truthfulness, together become “fiction.”26 To be sure, the Latin argumentum can simply mean “argument” in its modern sense—no less an authority on ancient rhetoric than Quintilian points out that the word has many meanings (“Argumentum plura significat”).27 Most commonly, an argumentum denotes a summary of the text that follows, and it follows a prologue, as in the Vulgate Bible.28 However, Thomas of Monmouth’s use of the term here seems clearly to point to the specific rhetorical sense.29 His introduction to the series of “arguments” presented in book 2 makes it clear that these argumenta are not intended in the modern evidentiary sense: “And because we know for sure that they perpetrated this as an insult to the Passion of the Lord and to the shame of Christian law, we will prove [comprobamus] the truth of the matter with several argumenta” (58; 88). Here Thomas is not claiming that evidence-­based arguments lead to belief, but rather that belief enables the construction of plausible arguments, plausible scenarios. The verb he chooses, comprobo, can simply denote “to approve,” “to acknowledge”: that is, Thomas is indicating not so much that he is going to prove a case by revealing new evidence, but that he is going to acknowledge an already proven case by elaborating new scenarios. The rubrication of the manuscript supports this interpretation, with the seven argumenta itemized in the manuscript in the chapter list at the beginning of book 2 (Figure 2), and subsequently with each chapter labeled “primum argumentum” (first argument) (Figure 3) through “septimum argumentum”(seventh argument) rather than with a more descriptive title as for the other tituli, such as “De planctu matris” discussed in Chapter 1. A key difference in approach between books 1 and 2 is that book 1 recounts a narrative of the events that Thomas claims happened, whereas book 2 offers different kinds of rhetorical support for his central claim, that William was murdered by Jews and therefore deserves to be treated as a martyr. This is not to claim that book 1 is in any sense more “truthful” than book 2, simply to note that their strategies of persuasion differ, and the kinds of truth claims that each make for their material are epistemologically different. These argumenta include key aspects of Thomas’s narrative to which attention has been drawn by scholars, and which have often been taken out of context. “Primum argumentum” is short: it elaborates on the description of Thomas’s abduction in book 1 by creating an eyewitness who sees William enter the Jews’ house: “Likewise, a girl who was his relative, following him from a distance and watching him on his way, observed that he entered the Jews’ house and that the door immediately was firmly closed behind him” (58). “Secundum



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Figure 2. “Incipiunt capitula libri secondi,” CUL Add. MS 3037, fol. 16v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

argumentum” is the story of the maidservant discussed above who works in the house, and who sees William being murdered as she passes a cauldron of boiling water through the door. “Tercium argumentum” suggests that the guilty Jews attempted to bribe William’s brother Robert to settle the affair. Thomas claims that Robert himself told him about this. “Quartum argumentum” introduces a story to which Thomas will return at the end of book 2. This claims that the Jews of Norwich had previously accused a knight of murdering a Jew, but that in light of the accusation against them of the murder of William, offered to drop their accusation in return for the action against them likewise being dropped. Like “quartum argumentum,” several of the argumenta include implicit confessions to the crime, such as “quintem argumentum,” in which the converted Jew Theobald describes a worldwide conspiracy, in which every year a Christian is

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Figure 3. “Primum argumentum,” CUL Add. MS 3037, fol. 25v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

sacrificed; and “sextum argumentum,” in which the Jews make an unfunny joke: “You should pay us great thanks, because we have made a saint and martyr for you” (62). In the final argumentum, “septimum argumentum,” in the course of a fight one Jew accuses another of having been the first to lay hands on William. All of these argumenta are characterized by verisimilitude and are deeply plausible, at least within the narrative economy of the Life. They build their verisimilitude through the representation of eyewitness reports of trustworthy men and the words of those close to William himself. Indeed, the verisimilitude of these argumenta depends on their proximity to historia. In the twelfth century, at least in towns with Jewish settlements, Jews and Christians lived as neighbors.



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They worked together and played together.30 Christian women worked in Jewish households and nursed Jewish babies.31 Like Eleazar, some Jews lent money,32 and like John de Chesney, sheriffs were tasked with negotiating royal jurisdiction over Jewish communities.33 Although scholars have rightfully greeted the claims of these argumenta with relative amounts of skepticism, what is at stake in recognizing these as a rhetorical exercise is that by setting them off as argumenta, Thomas is explicitly registering their fictionality, or, at least, he is explicitly distinguishing them from historia. The term argumentum does not propose that something is true, it suggests rather that it might be true, that it is a plausible scenario. The very point of using the term argumentum indexes verisimilitude as opposed to fact. The implications here are different for medieval and for modern historians. From a twelfth-­century perspective, a series of well-­chosen and lively anecdotes— factual or not—would have contributed to the overall purpose of the Life. For modern historians, less so. This last point is important to remember, because at least two of these arguments (argumenta 4 and 5) have been central to scholarly discussions of the genesis of the ritual murder accusation. The fifth argumentum seems to obliquely reference a miracle of the Virgin included in William of Malmesbury’s collection of miracles of the Virgin, or an analogue. This is the popular story of the Jews of Toledo: “The story of the Jews of Toledo captured the Christian imagination throughout western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; it was put into verse and translated into various vernaculars as miracle volumes spread for use in meditative reading, liturgical practice, and performance in courtly contexts.”34 The story is set in Toledo, Spain, in the reign of King Reccared of the Goths. During mass on the Feast of the Assumption, the congregation hears a woman’s voice lamenting: “O the shame, O the pain, that the enemies of my son dwell amid His faithful! How shameful and disgusting it is that they are this day turning on His image with the same fury with which they once attacked him in the flesh.”35 Shocked, when the mass is completed, soldiers are sent to the synagogue of the local Jews in search of confirmation. To their horror, they find “a wax model caricaturing Lord Jesus, crowned with thorns, spat upon, and finally run through with a lance.”36 The Jews are all murdered, and the “moral” of the story is presented as: “This is how the Jews of Toledo came to be wiped out.”37 Kati Ihnat and Katelyn Mesler discuss this story in the context of the use of wax figurines as devotional objects.38 They note how this story about Jews attacking a wax image of Jesus “echoes” the representation in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich of Jews attacking the figura of Jesus in a child, particularly in a context when stories about Jews attacking Christian images

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were in wide circulation.39 Indeed, it is provocative to wonder whether Thomas’s evident familiarity with this story was the genesis of the story he tells about William. William of Malmesbury begins his account of the miracle of Toledo with the claim that there are so many Jews in Spain that they have their own pope: “it has more than once been reported that at Narbonne they have a supreme pope, to whom Jews run from all over the world, piling gifts upon him, or deciding by his arbitration any dispute arising among them that requires someone to resolve it.”40 This tale of a “Jewish pope” is the connection with Thomas of Monmouth’s fifth argumentum, where he describes a certain Theobald, purportedly a converted Jew, who “told us that in the ancient writings of their ancestors it was written that Jews could not achieve their freedom or ever return to the lands of their fathers without the shedding of human blood” (61).41 Theobald further asserts that in order to select their victim, “therefore the leaders and the rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain, at Narbonne, where the seed of kings and their glory flourishes greatly, meet together” (61).42 It is curious that if Thomas knew of this miracle, with its accusation of Jews ritually crucifying a wax figure in the shape of a boy, that he would not report that aspect of it and instead report more generally that the Jews were required every year to sacrifice a Christian: “Hence it was decided by them a long time ago that every year, to the shame and affront of Christ, a Christian somewhere on earth be sacrificed to the highest God” (61).43 It is curious also that Thomas removes the story from its Marian context (if, indeed, it was William of Malmesbury’s miracle or a similar text from which he pulled the story). By removing the Marian frame, Thomas has removed a key aspect of the miracle’s truth claims. Reshaping the story as an argumentum, that is, a plausible scenario, Thomas emphasizes its verisimilitude instead by recourse to ancient authority (“in the ancient writings of their ancestors it was written” [61]) and, again, eyewitness corroboration (“These words, indeed, of a Jewish convert, we believe to be all the truer” [62]). Although Thomas is not claiming that this story is factual, it is still worth noting that the convert Theobald is elsewhere unattested. Indeed, as Emily Rose points out, there are no records of any Jews in Cambridge at this time.44 As D. H. Green notes, “to argue the truth of a fiction by appealing to a ‘witness’ within that fiction, rather than outside it, is to move in a vicious circle.”45 The closed loop of plausibility and verisimilitude is, however, key to Thomas’s strategy of persuasion in book 2. Thomas makes a similar move at the end of the book, when he returns to elaborate at greater length upon the story he initially sketched out in his fourth argumentum, of the knight Simon de Novers, accused of murdering the Jew Eleazar to whom he was in debt. This is the story that has been adduced by Emily



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Rose as the original cause of the accusation of ritual murder. However, in the context of book 2 we should be cautious about mapping these stories onto historical episodes or about interpreting them as historiography. Rose argues that the accusation that the Jews killed William of Norwich is a red herring, a cynical ploy to distract from the accusation that Simon de Novers had ordered the murder of Eleazar. She argues: “The first ritual murder accusation was not the result purely of personal piety from an individual monk or an outburst of violence—popular hatred barely reined in by an exasperated bishop—but the well-­considered judicial strategy created under pressure by a learned and sophisticated cleric and administrator faced with a difficult trial. Bishop Turbe’s attempt to exculpate his vassal by asserting prior blame on the part of the Jews transformed what might have been thought of as the killing of an individual into a communal and religious act.”46 Rose finds a Simon de Novers attesting charters alongside the episcopal household in the early twelfth century, but Thomas of Monmouth’s is the only account of his involvement in a murder trial.47 And although Thomas describes King Stephen’s intervention in the episode, his account also “offers the sole indication that the king was in Norwich between 1140 and 1154.”48 “Eleazar” is nowhere attested despite fairly good records of the Jews living in Norwich at this time.49 This should not be particularly surprising since Thomas explicitly says that he made it all up: “lastly I added a rhetorical version of a disputation [disceptationem supposui peroratoriam] in the presence of King Stephen between Christians and Jews at Norwich” (6; 6–7).50 We should, therefore, proceed with extreme caution before we raise this “trial” to the status of a historical event. In the first instance, it is first raised as one of Thomas’s argumenta, that is, events that did not take place but that plausibly might have. When he returns to his description of the courtroom at the end of book 2, Thomas offers what he explicitly characterizes as “an imaginary account of a trial [in iudiciali genere coniecturalis causa]” (65; 99) in which both the accused and the defendant make long speeches in this literary court of law. Jessopp characterizes the speech as “a mere specimen of the ordinary rhetorical exercise.”51 And Anthony Bale elaborates, “Thomas makes clear that this account is not an eyewitness report but rather a ‘rhetorical version’: the terms Thomas uses are ‘disceptationem supposui’ (a supposed or theoretical discussion), ‘coniecturalis’ (conjectural or speculative) and ‘declamationis’ (suggestive of public, rhetorical context).”52 The imaginative creation of a trial scene does not in and of itself prove that the trial never occurred: inserting dramatic speeches is certainly well within the purview of the historian and should not be taken as falsehoods or fictions. However, its introduction as argumentum (rather than historia) and the larger context of its setting in book 2

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does suggest that this “trial” is intended to be received as entirely fictive. In staging long set-­piece speeches and signaling them as rhetorical exercises, Thomas is casting his text as fiction precisely so that it might be believed. Because what is more compelling than a good story? In repeating the term argumentum Thomas is explicitly reiterating that what he is describing did not necessarily happen, that it should not be read as if it were historia, that is, as if it were “true deeds that have happened” (to recall Isidore of Seville’s definition).53 He uses this rhetorical term to signal his intentions to his audience. Indeed, “complicity with the audience is,” as D. H. Green has explained, “a collusion which is central to fictionality.”54 The argumentum is a rhetorical strategy that depends on verisimilitude; it must seem to be plausible, like historia, even if, like fabula, it is not factual. Paradoxically perhaps, in order to shape a narrative that is verisimilar, Thomas’s argumenta share the strategies of fictionality also common to genres that are more properly fictional in our contemporary sense, like romance. As Robert M. Stein has written: It is clear . . . that medieval historians’ claim to a truth-­telling intention, even when their canons of truth had more to do with probable argument and pedagogical efficacy than with narrating the past “as it actually was,” required the reader’s assent to the mimetic truth value of their narrative. Yet it is equally clear that the effect of mimetic truth value is produced by the historian’s use of the full repertoire of fictional narrative techniques and that fiction and history effectively merge in historiography even while medieval readers recognized some generic and functional distinction between them.55 In particular, as we have seen in the discussion of Thomas’s seven argumenta above, a key “fictional narrative technique” that emerges is a concern with eyewitnessing and visual proof. With the repetition of this trope, borrowed from the historian’s arsenal, we see Thomas of Monmouth experimenting with the techniques of fictionality at the very moment that writers of romance are performing the same experiments in the pursuit of very different truth claims.

De admirabili visione: Dreaming of William While the seven argumenta presented here are central to the strategies of fictionality of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich as a whole, they exist alongside other strategies of fictionality in book 2, including visions—dream



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visions and otherworld journeys—that mark the intrusion of other worlds and other states into the chronological narrative of book 1. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich uses a series of dreams to good literary effect, from Thomas’s own dream of Herbert of Losinga encouraging the cult of William to the dream of William’s aunt prophesying his murder. Medieval dream visions, including otherworld visions, have a long and authoritative genealogy that stretches back to the literature of classical antiquity and to the Bible.56 Although to a modern audience these may seem the stuff of romance, in the twelfth century they were common episodes in historical writing, featuring, for example, in the histories of Geoffrey of Monmouth, William of Malmesbury, William of Newburgh, and Gerald of Wales. Monika Otter has argued that these otherworld episodes in twelfth-­century English historiography express “a latent sense of fictionality.”57 Steven Kruger concurs about the rhetorical work of the dream vision: “Depicting a dream whose status vis-­à-­vis truth is ambiguous, such a dream vision focuses attention on that aspect of literature most problematic for the Middle Ages—its position between truth and falsehood.”58 The dream, or otherworld vision, is a genre that is simultaneously common in classical and medieval historical writing and self-­reflexively literary, heightening and foregrounding its demand to be interpreted. The space opened up by the dream vision is a microcosm of the literary world insofar as it insists on its truthfulness while abrogating any claim to referentiality. In this, the work of the dream vision closely mimics the role of the argumentum in classical literary theory. The two “otherworld” visions that Thomas includes in the series of miracles that open book 2 are among the earliest examples of their kind.59 In the first, a sick man named Lewin “was rapt in ecstasy, as he later attested, and was taken up through various places, some horrible and some pleasant” (46). He sees people he had known before their deaths being tormented before passing on to a more amenable region full of blooming flowers and joyful men where he sees William of Norwich ensconced on a golden stool at the foot of the throne of Christ and the Virgin. Like them, William is crowned and being honored by choirs of saints and angels. His guardian angel identifies William and recommends a curative pilgrimage to his shrine. Lewin’s father undertakes the pilgrimage, but to no avail: no one in Norwich has heard of William. Subsequently, the local priest coincidentally finds himself at the synod at which William’s uncle Godwin denounces the Jews of Norwich for the death of William. Lewin and his father travel to Norwich, seeking William’s grave at first in the woods, then in the cathedral, where he is cured. Thus the story of Godwin’s accusations and William’s translations, narrated in book 1, is affirmed as it is reiterated not in

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the authorial voice of Thomas of Monmouth but through the divine inspiration of otherworld vision. In this vision, as in the one that follows, the angelic guide simply states what book 1 of the Life struggled to demonstrate: “This is the one to whom perpetual honour is due, whom the Jews of Norwich killed in derision and scorn of the Lord’s Passion on these holy days” (47). The second of these purgatorial visions is attributed to a young girl who experiences “a wonderful vision seen at night” (50). Unlike the experience of Lewin, who seems to have an out-­of-­body experience, the girl is transformed into a dove, and she flies through the “places of torment” where she sees “an innumerable multitude of souls subjected to diverse tortures of punishment” (50) and on to the realms of reward, where she too has a vision of Christ and the Virgin crowned in majesty, and William given pride of place beside them. Unlike the story of Lewin, Thomas prefaces this story with anxious protestations to its truthfulness: “These visions I know were seen at different times and by different people, but because of the similarities I have decided to connect one vision to the other. And since I desire to explain them to the ears of the faithful, no one should think I am striking false as true, no one should call me a compiler of trifles or falsehoods. I have presumed to insert nothing at all into the visions about to be told, and have not pretended to know for sure anything apart from the reports of eyewitnesses” (49). With this extraordinary preface, Thomas attempts to tag his story as history by repeating the standard historian’s description of his art (“I . . . have not pretended to know for sure anything apart from the reports of eyewitnesses”), while at the same time attempting to distract attention from the fact that he is very obviously doing what he says he is not—inserting a fictive narrative. Characterized as a dream (noctis visionem), according to Macrobius’s influential Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, this kind of visio is authoritative, the type of dream that prophetically describes the future. In both these stories, the dream vision opens up a landscape that is both familiar and strange, estranging. As Aisling Byrne describes: “From a narratological perspective, it might be more productive to avoid defining the otherworld as the place where the real and the natural give way to the unreal and the supernatural, but instead to think of it as a wholly new horizon of expectations within the text.”60 At the same time they rely on the tropes of the historian, especially the eyewitness report of the visionary, these are manifestly not quotidian occurrences. Although as Nancy Partner has noted, “In an odd way, visions of the Other World fulfilled classical requirements for evidence remarkably well.”61 Although neither passes the test of verisimilitude, like argumentum the dream vision of an otherworld journey stakes a claim to historicity beyond or outside of the factual, a truth that relies on



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fictionality. This is the reason that Macrobius discusses Cicero’s Dream of Scipio in the first place: to insist that the opening up of fictive spaces in philosophical texts is both rhetorically and epistemologically useful.62 Macrobius includes among his two categories of false dreams the “apparition” (visum), which encompasses, as he describes it, the terrifying figure of the incubus: “In this drowsy condition [the dreamer] thinks he is still fully awake and imagines he sees specters rushing at him or wandering vaguely about, differing from natural creatures in size and shape, and hosts of diverse things, either delightful or disturbing. To this class belongs the incubus, which, according to popular belief, rushes upon people in sleep and presses them with a weight which they can feel.”63 This connection may be why Thomas includes alongside the two otherworld visions the miracle of the virgin of Dunwich and her incubus lover, an episode that toggles seamlessly between theological and romance discourses. C. S. Watkins suggests that this story, like the otherworld visions that precede it, is a version of purgation—suffering on earth in hopes of heavenly reward.64 He writes: “This story, in its complex account of divine aid denied, runs against the grain of this particular miracle collection taken as a whole. In order to bolster St William’s reputation, the idea that a search for wonder might fail, even in dire need and pursued in perfect faith, was rhetorically useful.”65 I suggest, rather, that this episode draws on the tropes of romance. This miracula features a young girl who is as beautiful and wealthy as she is chaste and devoted to God. Rather than marry, she chooses to live in a room in her father’s house and engage in private devotions, reading the psalms. It is there that she is visited by an incubus who will not take no for an answer: he first attempts to attract her with flattering words, then with expensive presents, then, finally, with violence. Desperate to escape the situation, the girl tells her parents who tell the local priests, who are nevertheless unable to arrest the visits of the incubus. The situation is resolved only when she has a dream vision in which Herbert of Losinga, the former bishop of Norwich, advises her to seek out the shrine of William of Norwich.66 Although on the one hand the salutary story of a girl devoted to a life of chastity and prayer, on the other hand this is a story that simultaneously engages with all the tropes of courtly love. (The figure of the incubus, indeed, is common to both exempla and romance literature.)67 The girl is beautiful, her parents are wealthy, and she has many suitors although she spurns them all. The incubus is rich and handsome: “He pretended to be of knightly status, of a noble family, endowed with manly virtue and beauty pre-­eminent in wealth and largess” (53). He approaches her with the words of a romance hero: “What is sweeter in this life than love? What more joyful? Both our youthful age and our equal beauty

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invite us to a mutual love” (53). The adoption of these romance tropes within an exemplary tale is reminiscent of the compositional strategies of Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britannie narrates the conception of Merlin in similar language: From my girlhood I began to live chastely in the company of the holy virgins. Meanwhile, when the chambers were closed and the gates bolted, someone used to stand before me in the form of a youth, beautiful of face and comely in all things; he used to give me repeated kisses and playfully wrestle with me; his wrestling gave me pleasure. Beaten, but not unwilling, I submitted and endured ravishment, but enjoyed what I suffered, which was not rape or violation. Then he retreated, melting into the thin breezes. He would return in his usual way, although too tardily for his lover.68 A wise man at the court interprets “Perhaps an incubus of that sort was this boy’s father.”69 Luckily, the virgin of Dunwich avoids this fate thanks to William. Thomas of Monmouth’s approach in book 2 seems similar to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s characteristic interweaving of generic modes in the service of the extended argumentum that is the Historia Regum Britannia.70 Where Geoffrey presents fiction as fact in a polemical and propagandistic work of literature, Thomas presents a series of fictionalized scenarios intended to underwrite the historicity of the story he tells about William of Norwich’s sanctity. Although as an accepted denizen of the dream world in patristic theology the incubus may not have been considered fictional by the original audience of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in the way we would now, the miracle of the virgin of Dunwich and the incubus nevertheless proposes a “new horizon of expectations” in the text, it makes different claims to referentiality, and it provides the occasion for another dream vision authorizing William’s sanctity.71 What A. C. Spearing has intuited about the popularity of late medieval dream-­vision poetry seems equally true of its twelfth-­century progenitors: essentially a dream-­poem, from the fourteenth century on, is a poem which has more fully realized its own existence as a poem. Compared with other poems, it makes us more conscious that it has a beginning and an end (marked by the falling asleep and awakening of the narrator); that it has a narrator, whose experience constitutes the subject-­ matter of the poem; that its status is that of an imaginative fiction



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(whether this is conceived as a matter of inspiration, or of mere fantasy, or somewhere between the two); in short that it is not a work of nature but a work of art. It is a poem which does not take for granted its own existence, but is continuously aware of its own existence and of the need, therefore, to justify that existence (since it is not part of the self-­justifying world of natural objects).72 The dream visions and otherworld journeys embedded in book 2 of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich work alongside the series of seven argumenta in order to signal its literary strategies to its readers. Moreover, they satisfy a desire for eyewitness authentication within a fictive frame. Like the story of the virgin of Dunwich and her demon lover, they highlight the proximity of hagiography to romance.

Peeping Through Keyholes: The Secundum Argumentum With his inclusion of two healing miracles that involve otherworld dream visions, in both cases suitably enough visio purgatorio, Thomas is appropriating a mainstream convention of classical and medieval historiography. If these otherworld visions are characteristic of historiography, some of the other kinds of stories Thomas elects to include among his seven argumenta are more characteristic of romance, like the story of the virgin of Dunwich and the incubus. In particular, the concern of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich with eyewitnessing, and the way in which it thematizes the relationship between seeing and believing, situates it squarely alongside developments in the vernacular literary tradition, particularly the genre of romance, with which hagiography has long been recognized to overlap. In what follows, I concentrate on one small example—yet a paradigmatic literary trope—that The Life and Passion of William of Norwich shares with romance (and, indeed, with hagiography): the classic scene of looking through a peephole. In Thomas’s second argumentum this takes the form of the imagined scene of a Christian maid working in the Jews’ house, who, asked to prepare some boiling water, while passing it through the door glimpses the activities within: “she happened to see through the open door—with one eye since she could not with both—the boy fixed to a post. Having seen this she was horrified; she closed her eye and they shut the door” (59). Setting this moment alongside similar moments of peeping through doors, walls, and keyholes in hagiographies and romances contemporary to The Life and Passion of William of

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Norwich helps to illuminate why Thomas would choose to imagine such a scene as one of his fictions of what might have happened to William. For in all these texts the peephole has a double valence: it is at once the paradigmatic example of literature’s commitment to the scopic regime, to the primacy of vision as a mode of knowing, and at the same time, with its framing of the act of looking as much as the object under surveillance, the peephole draws attention to representation as such.73 Peepholes articulate the liminal spaces of identity, the threshold between public and private, between subject and object. Peepholes “serve to frame desire,”74 which is why the scenes they reveal are so often erotic in content. Peepholes figure the relationship between vision, knowledge, and representation. The peephole is “the threshold that makes representation possible.”75 We see the trope functioning seamlessly in this way in the saint’s life that follows The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in the Cambridge manuscript: John of Ford’s Life of Wulfric of Haselbury. Wulfric is a hermit saint, a wealthy man of the world who turned his back on its pleasures and lived out his life as an anchorite in the parish church at Haselbury. It is there, in his cell, that his devotions are accidentally witnessed by the priest’s son: One Sunday when Master Brihtric went to bless the water in the church the aspersorium was missing. His son Osbern had accidentally taken it home and now the troubled lad didn’t know what to do. Then it flashed on his mind—he believes by divine inspiration—that he might for this once tender the aspersorium belonging to the man of God. On slipping through the door to the cell he saw a light of dazzling brightness over the center of the altar. Intent on this light, the saint was standing quite still in front of the altar step. The boy, filled with wonder, handed the aspersorium to someone else to give to the priest while he himself returned to his vision. Having silently closed the cell door till he could peer in with one eye, he saw the light move slowly away towards the left-­hand corner of the altar and thence, passing over the chest which stood beside it, go out through the north window.76 In this episode, his single eye peering through a crack in the door enables Osbern, the priest’s son, to witness a scene to which he otherwise would have had no access. Peeping simultaneously marks the scene as private and frames it as spectacular. Peeping here enables vision, and it manipulates the reader, positioning him or her alongside Osbern, as an eyewitness to the scene, so that the eyewitness knowledge attained is not just Osbern’s but also the reader’s own.



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Scenes of looking through peepholes are a distinguishing feature of both hagiography and romance—one way in which both genres frame sight as knowledge and knowledge as representation. Thus the late twelfth-­century Middle High German hagiographic romance Der arme Heinrich by Hartmann von Aue, which features a leprous knight who can only be cured by the blood of the heart of a beautiful virgin who voluntarily sacrifices herself for his cure. Having found a willing victim in the eleven-­year-­old child of his last loyal retainer, Heinrich brings her to the celebrated medical center at Salerno and delivers her to the doctor who promises to effect the cure. Taking pity on the young girl and in order to perform the operation as painlessly as possible, the doctor begins to sharpen his blade. Hearing the telltale sounds of the whetstone from the room next door, Heinrich frantically begins searching the wall for a chink: “Now he began searching and looking about until he found a hole going through the wall, and through the crack he caught a glimpse of her naked and bound. Her body was quite lovely. He looked at her and then at himself, and a new way of thinking took hold of him. What he had thought before did not seem good to him, and he suddenly changed his old way of thinking into a new goodness.”77 When Heinrich peeps through the hole in the wall he sees the naked body of a beautiful girl, on the surface a romance trope, and yet what he sees is that body strapped to a table about to be martyred—for the girl is sure that her sacrifice will win her the kingdom of heaven. The vision that Heinrich sees transforms him by turning the gaze back upon itself. When Heinrich peeps through the hole in the wall he sees not only the sight before him, but also himself arrested in the act of looking: the gaze through the peephole, because nonreciprocal, frames, in the first instance, the very act of looking. Hartmann von Aue was a keen reader (and translator) of Chrétien de Troyes, and his rendering of this scene may owe a debt to the more famous scene of Fenice’s martyrdom in Cligès. Here again, doctors from Salerno play the role of the torturers as, in their vain attempt to revive Fenice from her fake death, they beat her, pour molten lead in her palms, and prepare to roast her over a fire. Once again, it is a peephole that reveals the secrets of the scene of martyrdom: “They were already about to place her on the fire to be grilled and roasted when more than a thousand ladies separated from the other people and went their own way. They came to the door and saw through a tiny crack the cruel tortures being inflicted on the lady by those forcing her to suffer martyrdom on the flaming coals.”78 As in Der arme Heinrich, the martyrdom is foiled, as the ladies rush into the room and defenestrate the unlucky doctors. The trope of the peephole here appears almost in the mode of satire, as the scenario of a thousand women

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peeking through a single crack is patently absurd. And yet it serves to highlight the work of the peephole as the purveyor of certain sorts of knowledge. These entangled romance and hagiographic scenarios use the peephole to similar rhetorical ends. The plot function of these moments is clearly probative—intended to provide ocular proof, dependent on the truism that “seeing is believing”—of sanctity. In these moments, the chink in the door introduces a sense of nonreciprocity to the gaze, and it allows the text to insist not on the reality of the object that is to be apprehended but on the process of its apprehension. And we, as readers, register not the object but the subject of the look, a look we become aware of as mediating our own access to the peephole. That is, these moments create narratives that “seem real” by means of thematizing the moment of seeing as the moment of knowing, deploying the visual as the “master relation to the world.”79 Whether the peephole enables or disables visions, it functions as an analogy of literary representation. The romances of Tristan are perhaps the most obsessed with the relationship between seeing and believing of any medieval romance. This problematic haunts the narrative, in which the importance of reading visual signs correctly is crucial throughout the romances, as King Mark is offered, over and over again, visual evidence that his nephew Tristan is having an affair with his wife, Iseult. In a final episode of Béroul’s Tristan, Tristan is followed to Iseult’s room by the scheming Godwin, who plans to trap the lovers in flagrante delicto. Despite the elaborate care he takes not to be discovered while peeping through the window (“Cut a point on the end of a long twig with a sharp knife. Catch the cloth of the curtain with the sharp end of the twig and pull the curtain gently away from the opening, it is not fastened”),80 Iseult catches a glimpse of him and signals his presence to Tristan who kills Godwin with the single shot of an arrow through his eye. This moment emblematizes the romance’s frustration with a visual proof that is always represented as just out of reach. The arrow in Godwin’s eye closely approximates the frustration of vision in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, as the maid’s peeping eye closes on the scene it has been created to witness.

Courtroom Drama: The Quartum Argumentum At the level of plot, looking through a peephole is most often a means to uncover something that is intended to be kept private, or which is otherwise unwitnessable, while enabling the narrating voice to disavow authority over it. This is what the work of the peephole shares conceptually with literary trial scenes, and



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especially with the quintessentially twelfth-­century trial by ordeal—the desire to render the invisible visible at its very source, to gain a knowledge achieved at first hand. Trial scenes in literature bring eyewitness knowledge out from behind closed doors into the public sphere. In this regard, Thomas of Monmouth’s return to his argumentum about Simon de Novers and his murder of the Jew to whom he was indebted at the end of book 2 in order to dramatize a fully elaborated trial scene for his readers is instructive. It recalls the traditionally close relationship between courtroom speech and persuasive speech: in the classical tradition, historiography is closely related to oratory and to judicial oratory in particular.81 Indeed, all of Thomas’s seven argumenta share a concern with the basic tools of the judicial roots of ancient rhetoric, particularly the role of the eyewitness, the confession, the courtroom. What better way to persuade than to return persuasive rhetoric to its roots in the courtroom? As John Ward notes, “Speeches, for the rhetorical historian, were a vital creative tool.”82 Thus it is that trial scenes are ubiquitous in twelfth-­century literature, as literary texts embraced the possibilities of representing proof offered by these discourses as one important strategy of the rhetoric of verisimilitude and fiction. The popularity of trial scenes across literary genres owes a great deal to this connection, and, as R. Howard Bloch notes in Medieval French Literature and the Law: “There are few sustained narrative works belonging to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that do not contain a trial. From the Chanson de Roland to the epics of the feudal cycle, from the romances of Chrétien and Béroul to the prose continuations of the mid-­1200s, from the initial branches of the Roman de Renart to the last, the inclusion of at least one scene of judicial combat, oath, or ordeal appears to have been a sine qua non of poetic production.”83 In romance, trial scenes operate to produce a truth that is both immanent and ocular. This perhaps explains why Thomas returns to the scene of his quartum argumentum in order to extend the story he tells there, of the Jews who hope to have the charges against them dropped in return for dropping their charges against a murderous knight, into a fully elaborated courtroom drama. When first presented, as his “fourth argument,” Thomas declines to name names, s­imply describing “a certain knight was accused by the Jews of killing a certain Jew” (60–61). As Thomas picks up the story at the end of book 2, the knight is now named as Simon de Novers, and the Jew as Eleazar, in whose house William was murdered. Thomas elaborates the bare outline of the story offered as the fourth argument: now Simon owes Eleazar a large amount of money that he is unable to repay. His attempts at delay are matched by Eleazar’s demands until a ­couple of Simon’s retainers decide to rid him of the troublesome Jew by murdering

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him. The Jews report the matter to the king, and the result is the rhetorical set piece of a trial of Simon de Novers, a trial that is explicitly described as “imaginary” (coniecturalis). The trial that is sketched out is full of dramatic language and affective appeals, featuring long speeches from both the prosecution and the defense. In other words, exactly the sort of compositional exercise popular in twelfth-­century schoolrooms. It is complete with obfuscatory legalese: “And so, to make the matter even clearer, the debtor knight either wanted to pay and could, or wanted to and could not, or did not want to and could, or—the possibility of which remains—did not want to and could not” (66). The centerpiece of the trial, the counteraccusation that Eleazar was involved in the death of William, is a gasp-­inducing deus ex machina, cleverly turning the tables so that the accuser becomes the accused. At the end, the matter, in the manner of almost all rhetorical trials, is deferred until another day. As dramatic as this trial is, it is not the first trial in which the Jews are accused of the murder of William. In fact, it is practically double jeopardy. For in book 1, in order to buttress his surprise accusation of murder against the Jews, and in the presence of the bishop’s synod, William’s uncle and the Jews’ chief accuser, Godwin Sturt, offers to undergo trial by ordeal: “Without delay, the oft-­ mentioned priest [Sturt] arose and repeated the charge he had already made, and promised that what he had testified in word he would prove without delay by ordeal” (33). Thomas portrays the Jews as “fear[ing] greatly the proof by ordeal” (34), imagining that they also believe that the truth is likely to be made manifest by God’s intervention. Godwin’s ordeal threatens to produce the staging of a “dramatic public spectacle” that Robert Bartlett identifies as key to not only the production but the acceptance of the proof of a crime in his seminal study Trial by Fire and Water.84 Under the law, trial by ordeal is used to adjudicate disputes by asking God to make the truth of the matter visible for all to see. It is designed to prove something that is otherwise unknowable. Indeed, the premise behind trial by ordeal is so inherently dramatic that it is no wonder that it has a long life as a literary trope. Romance often uses judicial ordeal to dramatize the lovers’ truths, often framed as a tension between legal justice and poetic justice.85 In the narrative economy of Thomas’s courtroom drama, for Godwin to undergo a successful trial by ordeal would produce an incontrovertible moment of visible proof that the Jews did indeed murder William, erasing any shred of reasonable doubt about an unwitnessed crime. This is why trial scenes are important across genres of imaginative literature—historiography, hagiography, and romance. They playfully engage with



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the historiographic tropes of eyewitnessing in order to produce a narrative that seems true, all the while signaling that the protocols of fiction are different. Take, for example, Tristran, an Anglo-­Norman romance composed by Thomas of Britain (d’Angleterre) between 1150 and 1170—which is to say, exactly contemporaneous to Thomas of Monmouth’s Life of William.86 In this famous romance, Isolde is married to the king, Mark, but in love with his nephew, Tristran. Ultimately, facing the ordeal of hot iron in order to silence the (true) allegation that she is committing adultery with her husband’s nephew, Isolde famously rigs the ordeal. Although Thomas’s text is fragmentary, it can be reconstructed through two later versions that use it as a source, Brother Robert’s Old Norse Tristremssaga and Gottfried von Strassburg’s Middle High German Tristan. As Gottfried tells the story, arriving at Carleon by ship, she has Tristan, disguised as a pilgrim, carry her to shore, appearing to accidentally slip and fall on top of her in the process. When it comes time for her to swear the oath and undergo the ordeal, Isolde is then able to swear that no man except her husband—and the pilgrim— have been on top of her. While the actual oath allows Isolde to pretend to veil the truth, in fact it forces her to assert it—that there have been two men. The staged incident functions to give the entire court a clear view of Tristan lying on top of her. While most of the scholarship has focused on Isolde’s “equivocal oath” as being literally but not really true, the element of eyewitnessing is as important thematically as the dramatic irony of her oath.87 The trial that vindicates Isolde’s honor simultaneously authenticates her adultery, a crime that paradoxically has to be made visible in order to continue to remain hidden. In the Tristan romances, Isolde produces a visual proof that is nevertheless a lie, a fiction. In so doing, she upends the protocols of history writing, which insist on the historian’s status as eyewitness and on historical truth as something that can be visually verified. As Adam Miyashiro has noted in his analysis of the parallel scene in Béroul’s Tristan: “In effect, Yseut’s speech declaring her innocence confirms to the fictionality of the argumentum, presenting a notion that the mere possibility of the event is as truthful as any other possibility.”88 Thinking about the way the Tristan romances deploy the theme of trial by ordeal sheds light on why Thomas of Monmouth should raise the specter of one through Godwin Sturt’s threat. The synod at which Godwin declares his desire to undergo the ordeal is itself—like the courtroom—an inherently dramatic scenario. In describing Godwin leaping to his feet and delivering a passionate speech, Thomas portrays him as a figure for the orator of classical rhetorical treatises. In this fictional courtroom, like the imaginary trial of Simon de Novers,

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Thomas returns persuasive speech to its origins in classical rhetoric. In so doing he insists on the verisimilitude of the scenario while simultaneously acknowledging its fictionality.

“As Though It Had Actually Been Seen”: The Limits of Proof The Life and Passion of William of Norwich shares with vernacular romance a central problematic: the desire to persuade an audience of the truth of something that has not been witnessed. Throughout the Life, Thomas simultaneously asserts a model of literary representation in which seeing is believing, and at the same time he asks his audience to believe without having seen. Potential moments of eyewitness verification of the murder of William by the Jews are staged only to be frustrated at the last minute. In each of these episodes there is no need for the potential of visual proof to be teased at all. By raising the possibility of eyewitness confirmation only to question its relevance, Thomas signals that his Life “is subject to criteria other than those of historia.”89 Throughout The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth comes up against the same problem—that the moment of crucifixion is unseeable and therefore unbelievable. Thomas devotes the prologue to the first book of his Life to this problem. The prologue thus becomes an extended meditation of the problem of the relationship between seeing and believing. Thomas begins with a tortured exposition on the problem of the sources of his knowledge: If, however, someone considers that we have included in this little book anything that appears to be untrue, let that person not, indeed, impute the sin of lying to us, because we have taken care to write down nothing but what we have seen or what we have learned as carried by common knowledge. . . . . . . For there are some, led by a corrupt spirit, who, just as they refuse to believe what is written, so also deny what has been witnessed by many. Indeed, they also scorn as falsehoods those things which have been truly seen, not having in faith what the apostle Thomas felt in his heart, “Except I shall see I will not believe.” But in the Lord’s words I say, “blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed.” If you are this sort of person, then listen carefully to this. Because even if not everything can be known by everyone, yet different things



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can be known by different people, and you yourself have been unable to hear or see things known to many. (5) Here Thomas represents himself through the tropes of the historiographer, who writes only what he has seen. At the same time, however, he puns on his own name to remind his readers of the figure of doubting Thomas, one who saw but did not believe. Thomas repeats this methodology at the beginning of book 2, in outraged response to those whom he accuses of doubting his version of events: “Let none turn away the ears of the heart and the striving of faith because such affairs so rarely happen in his time, for nothing but what I have seen or was able to learn for sure from the most credible people through careful investigation have I striven to entrust to these writings. To be sure, if the diligent eye of simplicity runs through the truth of the matter even superficially, what else would it see in beholding or perceive while paying attention, but that the boyhood and innocence of the blessed William saves and that the purity of his virginity commends?” (43–44). Faced with the absent presence of William’s crucifixion and the impossibility of offering his own authenticating eyewitness account, Thomas nevertheless continues to insist that seeing is believing, even as his assertions become more and more tortured. Within the space of a single statement he backpedals from the standard historian’s claim to be an eyewitness to the entirely contradictory statement that “you yourself have been unable to hear or see things known to many” (5). His own narrative, moreover, confounds the possibility of eyewitness verification at every pass. The discovery of William’s body, for example, is circumscribed by the tacit impossibility of knowing what has happened without it having been witnessed. The corpse of William of Norwich lies in Thorpe Wood for a certain period of time before being found, and for even longer before being discovered as the body of a martyr. This body of a dead boy in a wood poses itself a problem of interpretation, again reframing the question of the relationship between seeing and believing.90 Looking at William’s body in Thorpe Wood, people see what they want to see, even though its resting place is pointed out by a beam of light from heaven. The first to follow the beam and thus to arrive at the body is Legarda, the nun. She immediately recognizes it as something holy and, looking, sees a corpse “of many merits” (25). She then “returned home with her associates full of thanks” (25), apparently telling no one. The next person to come across William’s body is a woodcutter; he sees only a dead boy, but he tells the forester about the corpse. The forester, finally, sees a dead child who has been cruelly tortured, probably by Jews: “Seeing also that the boy had been handled with unusual kinds

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of torment, he began already to suspect from the nature of the wounds that no Christian but only a Jew would have taken it upon himself to kill the innocent in this way with such rash daring” (25). In this series of botched discoveries, witnessing itself is no guarantee of knowing. So it is with the proposed trial by ordeal of Godwin Sturt: as with so many other possibilities of ocular proof in this text, it is a moment that remains unstaged. The Jews protest and are protected by the sheriff, John, who treats the issue as one of jurisdiction: “John, acting as if he were aware of the truth of the matter, did not allow the Jews to appear at the synod on the next day, but rather sent his own men to the bishop to say that the Jews belonged to him and that they would not answer such trifling charges by Christians in the king’s absence” (33). In this anticlimactic showdown, the moment of visible truth is frustrated. Following the failure of this trial by ordeal, however, Aimar, prior of St. Pancras, nevertheless comes to the conclusion of the Jew’s guilt: “After seeing, hearing and taking note of what had happened, touched by an inner devotion of the spirit . . . how else could this most holy boy have been killed except by the Jews in an affront to Christ?” (34–35). In Thomas’s narrative in book 1, the crucial moments of eyewitness proof remain defined by what is not, rather than what has been, seen. This preoccupation of the text with the fraught issue of eyewitnessing may well account for the strange behavior of Aelwerd Ded. On the morning of Good Friday, the guilty Jews set out early to dispose of William’s body. Just as they get the body safely out of the city and are entering Thorpe Wood, they have a harrowing encounter with one of the “richest and most prominent” (20) of the citizens of Norwich, Aelwerd Ded. The Jews bump into Aelwerd, who is in the process of visiting all the churches in the city to make his Good Friday devotions, in order, as Thomas asserts, “that a credible witness be present, so that after the body was found the event would not be hidden from the Christians” (21). Aelwerd recognizes the Jews, but not the strange burden they are transporting. The body remains, characteristically, out of sight, tied up “in a sack.” Curious, Aelwerd approaches and, “coming closer and stretching out his hand, he touched with his right hand the object they were carrying and realizes it was a human body” (21). The Jews, taking fright, flee with the body, leaving yet another moment of frustrated recognition in their wake as Aelwerd shrugs his shoulders and continues on his way. For all of Aelwerd’s introduction as an unimpeachable witness to the crime—an eminent and religious man who reached out and touched the evidence with his right hand—Aelwerd proves not to be very forthcoming at all. Immediately (and somewhat inexplicably) sworn to secrecy by the sheriff, Aelwerd keeps the secret until a deathbed vision of the by then saintly William



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inspires him to confess to a priest with his dying breath (30). In any case, for all his qualifications as an eyewitness, Aelwerd has not actually seen anything. Rejecting the desirability of an eyewitness report, Thomas’s strategy instead is to model Jesus’s words to the doubting Thomas that he quoted in his prologue to book 1: “blessed are those who have not seen yet have believed.” Thomas’s narrative works consistently to transform belief into proof, rather than the other way around. Thus the reaction of the forester who sees William’s body lying in the forest and, “seeing also that the boy had been handled with unusual kinds of torment, he began already to suspect from the nature of the wounds that no Christian but only a Jew would have taken it upon himself to kill the innocent in this way with such rash daring” (25). Perhaps most emblematic of the way in which belief becomes truth in this Life is the reaction of William’s mother: Nevertheless, out of many and credible conjectural arguments she was able to conclude that it was not Christians, but in truth Jews, who had dared to commit the crime in that way. She accepted these speculations with a woman’s credulity; and she at once broke out in public with abuse of the Jews in word, noisy clamour and formal accusation. In this way, no doubt, the mother was influenced by the effect of a maternal instinct; here was a woman carried away by feminine and reckless daring. Again, whatever she suspected in her heart she took to be certain, and whatever she imagined she asserted, as if she had seen it with her own eyes; she conducted her roaming through small streets and large, and, compelled by maternal suffering, she accosted everyone with horrible cries and asserted that her son had been seduced by fraud, kidnapped from her by cunning, and killed by the Jews. (30) Even when, in book 2, Thomas explicitly adopts the strategies of classical historiography, with its emphasis on the primacy of an eyewitness report, Thomas simultaneously frames and frustrates the moment of eyewitnessing. Thomas’s first and second argumenta both describe previously unreported eyewitnesses to William’s murder. The first argumentum imagines a little girl following William to the house of the Jews: “In the first place, then, we put forth as the argument of the truth that after the mother had been led astray, the boy—handed over to the traitor—went to the Jews, as has been said, on the day before his death, seen by many, and afterwards was never seen again outdoors. Likewise, a girl who was his relative, following him from a distance and watching him on his way, observed that he entered the Jews’ house and that the door immediately was firmly closed

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behind him” (58). And the second describes the maid who catches a glimpse of William’s murder through a chink in a door. Both of these argumenta multiply eyewitnesses in an implicit submission to the protocols of historia. At the same time, however, they coyly refuse to offer the full access to visual proof that is desired: both of these argumenta feature a door that closes down the lines of sight. This move is characteristic of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, which insistently dramatizes the moment of the unrepresentable, framing and reframing the moment, and inviting the audience to continually strain to visualize the unseeable. Nowhere is this more evident than in Thomas’s treatment of the evidence of the woman who emerges as his prime witness, the only purported eyewitness to the crucifixion, the Christian maidservant who glimpses William’s crucifixion through a crack in the kitchen door. In a rendition of the classic literary moment of peeping through a keyhole, even the pleasure of voyeurism is frustrated, as the peeping eye flashes open and shut in an instant. What the maid sees—“the boy fastened to a post”—is not what she is supposed to have seen—“William being tortured in mockery of Christ’s execution, and . . . being put to shame and crucified”—and, in any case, she instinctively and immediately moves to a double closing down of the lines of vision: first the eye then the door is shut. The anticipated moment of ocular proof breaks down, and the true moment of understanding only comes afterward, after the crime has been committed and the body removed. Left uneasy because of what she has glimpsed, when the maidservant returns to work, her insight supplies what her vision could not: “In consequence, that woman, immediately when she had free access, entered and began to go about her work assiduously. While indeed she went busily about, hither and thither, she found a part of a boy’s belt and, hanging from the belt, a sheath with a knife in it, a needle and a purse. Next she looked around with more care and noted definite clues to what had happened. Later, indeed, she showed us the belt with these objects and pointed out the signs of martyrdom on the doorposts of the house” (60). Juxtaposed to Osbern’s vision in The Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, this scene reads almost as its parodic inversion. In many ways, the two scenes strive to represent the selfsame vision: both center the absent presence of the crucifix. In The Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, this is represented by the light at the center of the saint’s altar. In The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, it ought to be represented by another substitute, the crucifixion of William of Norwich. And yet unlike the presence of the divine light in Wulfric’s cell, here we have only absence. Paradoxically, the maid’s peeping leaves us none the wiser as to what was seen: her closed eye withholds the promised sight. Here, the maid’s imagination fills in for her sight: “looking



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around carefully” after the fact, what the maid sees is not the body of William, but rather his avatars—the belt and penknife that are the tools of his trade and the stand-­in for his absent body. As Peter Brooks has written in another context: “The moment suggests both the ambitions and limitations of sight, the kind of knowledge it would like to gain but the blockages it encounters—blockages that can provoke the compensatory, and error-­prone, play of the imagination.”91 These moments of closed doors and closed eyes in Thomas’s first and second argumenta are invitations to the imagination—to the work of fiction—to pick up where the eye leaves off. Reading book 2 of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich with careful attention to Thomas of Monmouth’s engagement with strategies of fictionality, especially through his deployment of the seven argumenta, sheds new light on book 1. From this vantage point, book 1 very much resembles the Tristan romances, with everyone straining to see what is right in front of their eyes. While Thomas emphasizes the importance of eyewitness testimony like a writer of history, like a writer of romance he does not always provide it. Or, what is seen—like a demon lover, or a boy going into the Jews’ house—is not, by his own admission, factual. Indeed, this need to produce visual proof, the eyewitness record of the historian, animates Thomas’s narrative in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. But if eyewitnessing is the ground on which historia and romance contest their similarities and their differences, it is troubled ground. The Life coyly refuses to offer the eyewitness proof it demands, even as it fetishizes the provision of such proof.

Conclusion: The Life and Passion of William of Norwich Between Historia and Fabula In book 2 of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth offers a series of rhetorical set pieces—argumenta, otherworld visions, imaginary trial scenes—in support of the narrative he tells of the murder of William by Jews and of William’s resulting sanctity. In so doing, he is following the standard protocols of history writing as set out in classical rhetorical treatises and as embraced in the medieval schoolroom. As Roger Ray has noted: “In general rhetorical narrative theory gives broad berth to the imagination. The entirely falsified color aside, the rhetors take for granted that one’s information will hardly ever be complete or fully clear, that one will usually have to augment the facts in one direction or another. This further material need not be true or evident,

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only likely and fitting and evocative.”92 Proposing plausible argumenta and crafting impassioned trial speeches is entirely conventional in twelfth-­century historiography, and it is not remarkable that Thomas uses these techniques. What is remarkable is that he consistently highlights them to his audience when they are so commonplace that he does not need to. As Ruth Morse points out: “It is hardly likely, in the end, that a medieval or renaissance author will call attention to fictional embellishment of an apparently factual account, however aware, even proud, of its existence he might be. Attesting to the truth of the account which is to follow became as much a part of the author’s preface as his apology for his rude, unpolished style.”93 However, this is precisely what Thomas of Monmouth does over and over again: from pointing out that the description he gives of the trial of Simon de Novers is “imaginary” (65) to itemizing his series of argumenta. Instead of crafting his narrative of the murder of William of Norwich so that, for example, the “evidence” of his little kinswoman who followed him to the Jews’ house and watched the door shut behind him is included chronologically after the scene where his mother sells him to the man she is meant to suppose is the archdeacon’s cook for three coins (itself a scene, as I have argued in Chapter 1, that is deeply steeped in biblical allegory), Thomas adds it out of chronological order in book 2 where he explicitly identifies it as an argumentum (58). In these moments, Thomas breaks the proverbial fourth wall and is remarkably self-­ reflexive about his strategies of representation. He stages his “proofs” in book 2 precisely so they will be recognized as rhetorical exercises. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich strives to be convincing: it wants to persuade its audience of the truth of the strange story it tells of William’s martyrdom and saintliness. At the same time, however, it participates in its literary moment, a moment characterized by innovation in themes and forms, a moment that produced works of literature such as Chrétien de Troyes’s romances and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history. In these ways, the Life highlights its own experiments with strategies of fictionality. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich displays a sensitivity to its own fictionality at precisely the moment in which it strives the hardest to be persuasive. Indeed, in many ways, what we might think of as the overdetermined verisimilitude of this text is an implicit concession of the ultimate limits of representation. The text abounds above all in an abundance of detail and description. Consider, for example, Thomas of Monmouth’s description of one moment in the torture of William of Norwich: “Next they took a short rope, about as thick as a little finger, and made three knots in places marked on it, and encircled that innocent head from forehead to back; in the centre of the forehead they pressed



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a knot, as they did at each temple. Both sides of the head were tied to the back, extremely tightly, and there a firm knot was made” (16). Here, Thomas’s account, with its overdetermined verisimilitude (“as thick as a little finger”; “a firm knot”) is dramatically at odds with the possibilities of eyewitness record that he describes with his maidservant with her eye at the keyhole. Its sole function in the narrative is the production of this moment of verisimilitude, where the vividness of the description of the action of tying and knotting the rope around William’s head is self-­authenticating. In these passages, the thick description that we associate with literary realism vies with the even more “real” object of the gaze. This text abounds above all in an abundance of detail and description. Thus, the maid intent on getting her water to boil, a tight knot, Aelred touching the body with his right hand: these elements of everyday life add up to a verisimilitude that Roland Barthes refers to as the “reality effect.”94 Miri Rubin has made a similar point about the narrative logic of the related host desecration accusation, in which what she calls “the clichés of context” “carried over as a guarantee for the more outrageous events these settings were made to contain.”95 Book 2 casts a long shadow over The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and over the history of the ritual murder accusation more generally. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich has recourse to the techniques of fictionality: in order to reconstruct the scene of the crime, to persuade the reader of the veracity, or, at least, the verisimilitude, of the reconstruction, and finally to valorize the very act of literary representation itself. On this note, it is apposite to return briefly to the miraculous healing of Agnes of Crombe, a moment that has been a touchstone in this study, to note the extent to which this miracle also relies on eyewitness authenticating techniques common to fiction and history: the author reporting a letter, the letter itself reporting a dream vision. The truth claims that Thomas makes for his Life are, of course, very different from the truth claims of romance, of fiction. As a writer of hagiography, when he turns away from the eyewitness verification of respected men, Thomas might be expected to turn instead to divine authentication—although he never really does, choosing instead to pile up episodes of blocked sightlines and frustrated visual proof. In juxtaposing Thomas’s strategies of fictionality to those of romance, therefore, we gain a greater sense of the ways in which Thomas is engaging with the new modes of fictionality being developed across genres in the twelfth century in order to persuasively narrate the new kind of story that he tells. In book 2, plausibility is ultimately both a strategy and an end in itself. As Derek Attridge observes, “inventive subject matter usually requires formal inventiveness, and it is impossible to say whether the formal breakthrough makes possible the

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incorporation of new subject matter, or the demands of the new subject matter produce formal inventiveness.”96 Indeed, rather than being viewed as a riposte to those skeptics of William’s sanctity, book 2 of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich might better be viewed as a response to the literary innovations of the long twelfth century. The central claim of this chapter, as of this book, has been that we must take the Life’s fictionality as seriously as we do its antisemitism in order to fully understand either.

Afterword

Afterward

Throughout this book I have highlighted the simultaneous emergence of antisemitism and fictionality in the second half of the twelfth century. Therefore, it seems only appropriate to end by considering what happens afterward and by considering some of the long-­term implications of that contemporaneity for the study of the ritual murder accusation beyond The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. The approach here, of reading The Life and Passion of William of Norwich alongside other texts that do not explicitly demonize Jews, rather than alongside the other ritual murder accusations and antisemitic exempla with which it is usually read, has been unusual. Therefore, by way of considering what comes after, I want to briefly recall those other intertexts, the other twelfth-­century narratives of ritual crucifixion accusations.1 These accusations are remarkable for their generic diversity, underlining the importance of keeping literary approaches to these texts at the forefront of their discussion. Doing so offers us a way to think about these texts without assuming that they are all making the same truth claims and without implicitly acquiescing to those claims. In the second half of the twelfth century in northern Europe a series of stories is composed accusing Jews of ritually murdering Christian boys. It was the French chronicler and abbot of Mont-­Saint-­Michel, Robert of Torigni, who, toward the end of the twelfth century, first made a connection between the death of William of Norwich and the purported murders of three other boys. It was also he who first explicitly asserted that the connection between these boys is that they were all ritually crucified by Jews: Theobald, count of Chartres, burnt many Jews who resided at Blois, because, in order to mark their contempt to the Christians, they had

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crucified a child at Easter [in solempnitate Paschali crucifixissent ad opprobrium christianorum], and afterwards had put him in a sack and thrown him into the Loire. When the body was discovered, they were found guilty of the crime; whereupon (as we have stated) the count gave them up to the flames, excepting such of them as embraced the Christian faith. During the reign of king Stephen, they did the same thing at Norwich, in England to St. William: he was buried in the cathedral church there, and many miracles are performed at his tomb. The like thing occurred at Gloucester, in the time of king Henry the second. And again; these wicked Jews perpetuated the same crime at a castle in France, called Pontisare, upon St. Richard: he was conveyed to Paris, and buried in the church there, where he shines by his many miracles. These martyred persons are reported to be most liberal with their miracles about Easter-­tide, if they have the opportunity.2 Robert here distills the significance of this accusation into a stark contrast between the wicked Jews and the miracles of the murdered children. This distillation of the story of William of Norwich’s murder to its barest outline—“they crucified a child at Easter”—is emblematic of Hayden White’s identification of chronicle’s resistance to narrativizing. At the same time, however, as White notes, “the shape of the relationships which will appear to be inherent in the objects inhabiting the field will in reality have been imposed on the field by the investigator in the very act of identifying and describing the objects that he finds there.”3 Robert of Torigni’s account stands at the beginning of the shaping of the ritual murder accusation into a genre of its own, but despite his conflation of these four stories, the extant literary record of these accusations offers as many differences as it does similarities, differences that are in part determined by their differing genres. The Blois incident, for example, is unique in that it is the only ritual murder accusation in the twelfth century that resulted in recorded violence against the accused Jews. It is also unique in that it is attested by a variety of sources, and by Hebrew as well as Latin sources: in addition to the chronicle entry of Robert of Torigni, there are chronicle accounts, letters, and liturgical poems in Hebrew.4 Together, these sources tell the following story: In Blois in 1171, a Christian servant happened upon a Jewish man by the river. According to subsequent Jewish accounts, this man, R. Isaac, accidentally dropped the fur hides he was carrying into the river. What the servant saw, however, and reported to his master, was a Jewish man disposing of the corpse of a Christian child. According to the

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account of a letter composed by the Jewish community of Orléans, the Count Theobald of Blois quickly arrested the Jewish community of Blois, including a certain Jewish woman called Pucellina. An Augustinian monk appeared on the scene and suggested that the servant be submitted to trial by ordeal, in this case by water, in order to prove the truth of his story. A bribe offered by the Jews was rejected as insultingly low and this sealed their fate. Although thirty-­one or thirty-­three Jews were burned to death in Blois, the body of the “murdered” boy was never produced, and no cult ever developed. Indeed, both Susan Einbinder and Emily Rose, following the contemporary Jewish accounts of the incident, strongly suggest that the motivation for accusing the Jews of murder was in this case financial rather than religious.5 When the matter was brought before King Louis VII by the leaders of the Jewish community of Paris, the king repudiated the violence of Count Theobald of Blois and reasserted his protection of the Jews. As Rose notes: “The attention generated by the murder accusation in Blois far surpassed the modest enthusiasm recorded for William of Norwich or Harold of Gloucester. It is one of the few actions by this count of Blois that merits mention in French reports by Christians; it obviously made a great impression in Paris as well as in the Loire Valley. For Jews, the poetry composed in the wake of the burnings became an influential model for much later writing about martyrs.”6 In this case, the existence of multiple and varied sources leaves our understanding of the incident less dependent on the protocols of genre than it has been, for example, in the case of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. The case of Richard of Pontoise (or Paris), is described more fully by the royal chronicler Rigord, who, like Robert of Torigni, also connects the Pontoise and Blois accusations. In his Gesta Philippi, a history of the reign of Philip Augustus, Rigord describes the relationships between Philip and the Jews thusly: For he had heard many times from the children who had been raised with him in the royal palace—and had carefully committed to memory— that the Jews who dwelt in Paris were wont every year on Easter day, or during the sacred week of our Lord’s Passion, to go down secretly into underground vaults and kill [jugulabant] a Christian as a sort of sacrifice [quasi pro sacrificio] in contempt of the Christian religion. For a long time they had persisted in this wickedness, inspired by the devil, and in Philip’s father’s time many of them had been seized and burned with fire. St. Richard, whose body rests in the church of the Holy Innocents-­ in-­the-­Fields in Paris, was thus put to death and crucified by the Jews [sic interfectus a Judeis et cruci affixus], and through martyrdom went

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in blessedness to God. Wherefore many miracles have been wrought by the hand of God, through the prayers and intercessions of St. Richard, to the glory of God, as we have heard.7 The version of the story given by Rigord interestingly fails to suggest that the victim was a child, although this detail is added when the story is repeated by the annals of Cambrai, where the purported victim is referred to as “a certain Christian child” (quemdam adolescentem christianum).8 The continuator of Rigord’s chronicle, Guillaume le Breton, adds the detail that as a child himself, Philip’s playmates had frightened him with stories that the Jews sacrificed children, and took communion by eating their hearts (immobalant et eius corde communicabant).9 Despite these gruesome details, Richard’s cult seems not to have achieved much popularity in the twelfth century.10 Unlike the chronicle of Robert of Torigni, Rigord’s Gesta Philippi, as its title suggests, is a narrativized, and initially quite laudatory, history of Philip’s reign (it was Rigord who dubbed Philip “Augustus”). Instead of emphasizing the youth of a boy crucified by Jews, Rigord instead emphasizes the youth of Philip, framing the ritual murder accusation as a bogeyman story, used by children to scare one another. It is less concerned to draw retrospective connections among diverse events and more interested in deploying the ritual murder accusation as an element in a psychodrama that will provide a partial explanation of royal policy toward Jewish subjects. The fourth ritual murder itemized by Robert of Torigni is the case of Harold of Gloucester, memoralized by the Chronicle of St. Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester. According to the chronicle entry for 1168, Jews from throughout England came to Gloucester under the pretense of celebrating a circumcision, but really with the intention of ritually murdering a Christian child. They kidnap Harold, and “they tortured the boy with immense tortures” (puerum immensis suppliciis excruciaverunt).11 The tortures described are bizarre, including roasting him between two fires and covering him with hot wax (“just like with roast meat” [veluti assatura carnis]).12 They finish the deed by tying his feet and throwing him in the River Severn. Although Robert of Torigni describes them as similar, there are some key differences between the literary versions of the “martyrdoms” of William of Norwich and Harold of Gloucester as they are extant: Harold’s story is not set at Easter, he is not referred to by the chronicle as a saint, neither miracles nor a cult are described, although he is buried in the abbey church.13 The chronicle does not clearly state that Harold was crucified, although Robert of Torigni’s description seems to suggest that was the version of the story he had heard.14 The connection is further complicated by the fact that the Chronicle

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of St. Peter’s Abbey was compiled in the fifteenth century. The compiler most likely depended on a twelfth-­century source that is no longer extant, although this cannot be verified.15 Although different in some details, the Chronicle of St. Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester’s representation of Harold’s death shares significant tropes with The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. Like The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, the Chronicle of St. Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester paradoxically relies on the trope of eyewitnessing even in the absence of visual proof. As the chronicler succinctly notes: “It is true that no Christian was present, or saw or heard the deed, nor have we found anything that was betrayed by any Jew.”16 Instead, although the crucifixion (if, indeed, that is what the chronicler intended) itself has not been witnessed, the moment of discovery has, by “innumerable” persons: “But a ­little while after when the whole convent of monks of Gloucester and almost all the citizens of that city, and innumerable persons running to the spectacle, saw the wounds of the dead body, scars of fire, the thorns fixed on his head, and liquid wax poured into the eyes and face, and with a diligent examination of the clenched hands, in this way those tortures were believed or guessed to have been inflicted on him.”17 As in the Life of William of Norwich, lacking visual proof of the moment of crucifixion itself, the narrative falls back upon examination of the body—on it, the marks of crucifixion are clearly apprehended, both seen and touched. The lack of eyewitnesses to the crime is more than made up for by the overwhelming number of eyewitnesses to the discovery, which itself becomes a moment that must be viewed—a “spectacle”—laid out not only for the monks and the townspeople to view, but for the reader of the text itself, who is led through the spectacle to agreement with the judgment of the chronicler that Harold was “a glorious martyr to Christ.”18 This trope of the eyewitness, and, indeed, the ritual crucifixion accusation itself, is satirized in the Cronicon of the Benedictine monk Richard of Devizes. Richard of Devizes’s narrative of a purported ritual murder accusation in Winchester is interesting because of the way it differs in tone from its companion texts. Richard’s text is marked by a sarcasm that subtly mocks the genre of ritual murder accusation. Despite its title, the Cronicon is not a straightforward chronicle, but rather a sensationalistic and satirical account of the political scene in England in the absence of its crusading king, Richard the Lionheart. Richard sets his take on the ritual murder accusation in the context of a satire on the stereotypes of England’s towns and cities (York is full of Scotsmen, Ely stinks, and so on). He begins his narrative in a markedly sardonic tone: “Because Winchester should not be deprived of its just praise for having kept peace with the

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Jews, as is told at the beginning of this book, the Jews of Winchester, zealous, after the Jewish fashion, for the honour of their city (although what was done greatly lessened it), brought upon themselves, according to the testimony of many people, the widely known reputation of having made a martyr of a boy in Winchester.”19 Richard then proceeds to tell the tale of a young French boy who, advised by the French Jew to whom he was apprenticed as a cobbler, to seek his fortune in England, “a land flowing with milk and honey.”20 Bringing a friend with him, the boy travels to Winchester and finds employment with a Jew of that city thanks to a letter of recommendation from his French benefactor. On Good Friday, however, the Jewish Passover, Richard reminds us, the boy never comes home from work and his friend becomes worried: When he did not find him after having looked for several days in every corner of the town, in his simplicity he went to the Jew [to ask him] if he had sent his friend anywhere. He was greeted with extraordinary harshness in place of yesterday’s kindness. Noticing the change in the Jew’s words and looks, he became inflamed against him. Since he was of sharp voice and wonderful eloquence, he burst into a quarrel, accusing him with loud cries of having done away with his companion. “You son of a dirty whore,” he said, “you thief, you traitor, you devil, you have crucified my friend [tu crucifixisti socium meum]!”21 Attracted by the boy’s shouts, a crowd gathers to whom the boy repeats this accusation, adding “this man has cut the throat of my only friend, and I presume he has eaten him too.”22 Strangely, the boy’s accusations find some support from the family’s Christian nurse who claims to have seen the missing boy disappear into the Jew’s storeroom. Nevertheless: “The Jew denied the story, and the matter was referred to the judges. The accusers failed: the boy because he was under age; the woman because her being employed by Jews made her infamous. The Jew offered to clear his conscience by oath concerning the infamy. Gold won the judges’ favour.”23 Moreover, the men of Winchester, Richard informs his readers, are all liars, “indeed nowhere else under heaven are so many false rumours made up so easily as there.”24 Nevertheless, the story struck historian Cecil Roth as so plausible that he searched the archives for evidence that the accusation had made it to the ears of the royal court, thus rescripting Richard of Devizes’s satire as history.25 The story struck the Cronicon’s nineteenth-­century editor as “satire disguised as fact,”26 on the other hand, as it did the historian Nancy Partner, and she suggests that Richard of Devizes is knowingly satirizing Thomas of Monmouth’s The Life

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and Passion of William of Norwich.27 This may indeed be the case, although the limited circulation of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and the way in which several of the story elements, including the accusation that the Jew has slit his victim’s throat and eaten his body, recall the treatment of the murder of Richard of Pontoise in Rigord’s history, suggest a broader target of this satire. Most recent scholarship has tended to side with the view that Richard is writing satire here (while nevertheless being tentative in asserting that a ritual crucifixion accusation did not occur in Winchester).28 As Michael Jones has described, Richard of Devizes “shows that such tales constitute a literature which is replete with its own rhetorical codes and generic expectations, and which is designed to call forth particular social responses.”29 Another ritual murder narrative that is not mentioned by Robert of Torigni, because it postdates his chronicle, is nevertheless often discussed by scholars as an intertext to the Life and Passion of William of Norwich. In contrast to the prolixity of Thomas of Monmouth’s Life of William is the brevity of the description of the purported ritual murder of the boy Robert of Bury St. Edmunds, The chronicler Jocelin of Brakelond simply notes: “It was at this time that the saintly boy Robert was martyred [sanctus puer Robertus martirizatus] and was buried in our church: many signs and wonders were performed among the people, as I have recorded elsewhere.”30 A slightly later chronicler, Gervase of Canterbury, adds that Robert was martyred at Easter time by Jews.31 This comment has been taken to suggest that Jocelin wrote a vita for Robert. If so, the vita of Robert of Bury St. Edmunds that Jocelin refers to has been lost. Had it survived it would no doubt have offered an interesting response to Thomas of Monmouth’s Life of William: the relative proximity of Bury St. Edmunds to Norwich has long suggested to scholars that Robert’s cult was invented in direct response that of William. Moreover, a vita of Robert of Bury St. Edmunds would be the only other narrative of the ritual murder accusation cast in the mode of hagiography. As it stands, as in the case of Harold of Gloucester, most surviving evidence of the cult of Robert of Bury St. Edmunds comes from the fifteenth century, including John Lydgate’s “Prayer to St. Robert” and an image of scenes from his death in Los Angeles, Getty MS 101, fol. 44 (olim Dyson Perrins MS 1).32 Rather than accepting Robert of Torgini’s assertion that they are all the same, these examples demand that we be attentive to the variety in genre and tone of these texts—that is to say, be attentive to their literariness. The Cronicon in particular, with its satirical take on the accusation, underlines the importance of literary approaches to these texts, as does The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, with its adherence to the generic norms of hagiography. Even as the

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ritual murder accusation is coalescing into its own genre, organized around a set of shared story elements, it nevertheless participates simultaneously in the generic norms of the texts that encode it. This suggests that the ritual murder accusation might fruitfully be approached in the first instance through the conceptual category of the literary analogue. Thinking with the term “analogue” is useful because the relationship articulated between literary analogues is lateral and rhizomatic rather than filial, and so it avoids having to account for texts that may no longer be extant when attempting to reconstruct direct lines of affiliation. That is to say, it reorients our perspective, putting the texts into dialogue with each other rather than with a putative historical event. To think of these texts as analogues is to be attentive to the ways in which they share a set of overlapping and interlocking themes and motifs, and it helps us to see active engagement with tropes and story elements rather than simple reportage. Thus, for example, if Richard of Torigni drew a connection between boys who had been ritually crucified by Jews, the Chronicle of Melrose Abbey makes a different connection entirely, linking the murder of Robert of Bury St. Edmunds by Jews to the murder of a boy called Herbert by his own father: “Similarly in Huntingdon they tell the story about a certain boy named Herbert, whose own father wickedly tied him to a stake and threw him in the water which runs through the town and miserably killed him in the water that runs through that town.”33 A similar situation exists among modern scholars, who have sometimes disagreed on which story elements are central to the ritual murder accusation. An accusation in Würzburg in 1147, that Jews had simply murdered a local man, with no ritual connotations, is sometimes included in the conversation and sometimes not.34 Similarly, the thirteenth-­century exemplum featuring as its central character a Christian boy called Adam of Bristol who is crucified by local Jews is sometimes included in the discussion, sometimes excluded.35 The ritual murder accusation as a trope encompassed varied rhetorical expressions, such as Peter of Blois’s comment in a letter to the bishop of Ely: “I am going to Canterbury . . . in order to be crucified by the perfidious Jews, who torture me by their debts and afflict me with their usury. I expect to bear the same cross through the London Jews, unless you liberate me out of your piety.”36 Comments like these are rarely discussed in the context of the boy-­martyr cults, but they must have been an aspect of their horizon of expectation for a medieval audience. Literary methodologies enable us to draw the distinctions between texts like Peter of Blois’s letter, Richard of Devizes’s satire, and Ephraim of Bonn’s descriptions of the judicial murder of the Jews of Blois more carefully and to read the epistemological stakes of each more clearly. They highlight the way in which,

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although different, these texts often rely on the same strategies of persuasion— strategies that have, in fact, been persuasive—and which are deeply entangled in twelfth-­century literary culture. Thinking of these intertexts as literary analogues and tracing their shared tropes can offer insight into how this strange accusation tapped into the cultural zeitgeist, how it became compelling even to those who did not necessarily initially believe that Jews killed Christian children, and how it was able to mutate into other forms and other centuries.

Notes

Introduction 1. Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and M. R. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896). There is a transcription by Miri Rubin at http://​yvc​.history​.qmul​.ac​.uk​/WN​-­joined​-­17​-­08​-­09​.pdf. The translation is Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Miri Rubin (London: Penguin Books, 2014), and all further references are provided in text to this translation unless otherwise specified (Rubin’s editorial comments are cited in notes as Rubin, Life and Passion). Where I have provided the Latin for clarity’s sake, the reference is to Jessopp and James’s edition for ease of reference. The Victorian editors of the Life titled it The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, a title that is descriptive of the work, which follows the standard twelfth-­ century hagiograpical form of a short description of a saint’s life followed by a collection of his or her miracles. The manuscript’s incipit, however, gives the title as “vita et passione Sancti Willelmi Martyris Norwicensis.” Rubin has restored this title in her translation, and I follow her lead also in silently eliding “saint and martyr.” Although not formally descriptive, the manuscript’s title is thematically descriptive in reflecting the importance of the “Passion” narrative to the text. Rubin notes of Agnes’s home that “Croome and Crombe are used interchangeably” (Life and Passion, 245 n. 30). 2. Gavin Langmuir thought it possible that the initial historical accusation was one of “cruel murder” rather than “ritual crucifixion” and that both the “ritual” and the “crucifixion” aspects of the libel were the embellishments of historiography (Gavin Langmuir, “Historiographic Crucifixion,” in Toward a Definition of Antisemitism [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996], 282–98). Since this book focuses on The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, it will use the terms “ritual murder” and “ritual crucifixion” to refer to the libel, since these ideas are both articulated in the Life. In an afterword, however, I return to the significance of Langmuir’s argument. 3. Ian Short, “Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-­Century England,” Anglo-­ Norman Studies 14 (1992): 230. 4. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); see also Dominique Iogna-­Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). On Jewish-­Christian relations in twelfth-­century Europe, see Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-­Century Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1995); Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christian-­Jewish Relations, 1000–1300: Jews in the Service of Medieval Christendom (New York: Pearson Longman, 2011); Geraldine Heng, England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); David Nirenberg, Anti-­Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen, eds., Jews and Christians in

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Twelfth-­Century Europe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001); Gilbert Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au Moyen Âge (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990); Robert Stacey, “Anti-­Semitism and the Medieval English State,” in The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell, ed. J. R. Maddicott and D. M. Palliser (London: Hambledon, 2000), 163–77. 5. For discussions of the use of “antisemitism” in a medieval context, see Robert C. Stacey, “From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration: Jews and the Body of Christ,” Jewish History 12, no.  1 (1998): 14; Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3; and François Soyer, Medieval Antisemitism? (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019), 5–22. 6. Rubin similarly points to the usefulness of this term (Rubin, “Introduction,” in Life and Passion, xx). 7. Historian Miri Rubin offers a fascinating apologia for literary approaches in the introduction to Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 2–4; literary approaches to the Life include Jeffrey J. Cohen, “The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich,” Speculum 79, no.1 (2004): 26–65; Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book; Hannah R. Johnson, “Rhetoric’s Work: Thomas of Monmouth and the History of Forgetting,” New Medieval Literatures 9 (2007): 63–91; Anthony P. Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2010); Kathy Lavezzo, The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); Anna Wilson, “Similia similibus: Queer Time in Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich,” Exemplaria 28, no. 1 (2016): 44–69; Anne E. Bailey, “Gendered Discourses of Time and Memory in the Cult and Hagiography of William of Norwich,” in Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture, ed. Elizabeth Cox and Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015), 111–26. 8. Anthony P. Bale, “Fictions of Judaism in England Before 1290,” in The Jews in Medieval Britain, ed. Patricia Skinner (New York: Boydell, 2003), 131. 9. Gavin Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder,” Speculum 59, no. 4 (1984): 820–46; Emily Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13–92; Israel Jacob Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations” [in Hebrew], Zion 58 (1993): 33–90; Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 163–70; Jeffrey J. Cohen, “The Flow of Blood.” The Victorian editors of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich suggested that the accusation was invented by William’s uncle but that it may have been influenced by two classical accusations of Jewish violence ( Jessopp and James, “Introduction,” xiii, lxii–lxiv). Cecil Roth proposed that the ritual murder accusation is the result of Christian misunderstanding of Jewish celebrations of Purim (Cecil Roth, “The Feast of Purim and the Origin of the Blood Accusation,” Speculum 8, no. 4 [1933]: 521); V. D. Lipman suggested the accusation was in fact the cover-­up of a sex crime (V. D. Lipman, The Jews of Medieval Norwich [London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1967], 55–56); other studies frame projected fears about child abuse and abandonment at the root of the accusation (Diane Auslander, “Victims or Martyrs: Children, Anti-­Judaism, and the Stress of Change in Medieval England,” in Childhood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, ed. Albrecht Classen, [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005], 105–34). For a full analysis of the historiography of the ritual murder accusation, see Hannah R. Johnson’s Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Libel at the Limit of Jewish History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).



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10. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich, 11. 11. It is worth adding a note here to address the “intentional fallacy.” Although the perils of assuming authorial intention have been thoroughly theorized in literary study for some time now, the relationship of medieval studies to this body of work has been somewhat tentative. Medieval studies as a discipline tends to place more emphasis on authorship, as named authors about whom something is known are at a premium. As is the case with Thomas of Monmouth, many if not most medieval authors are little more than a name. In the scholarship on The Life and Passion of William of Norwich this tendency has been exaggerated due to the prominence of Gavin Langmuir’s identification of Thomas of Monmouth as the creative originator of the ritual murder libel, an identification that has served to orient scholarship around the question of Thomas’s intentionality (Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth”). 12. Rubin suggests that “grammatical errors” in the letter of the monk of Pershore support the Life’s assertion of the letter’s authenticity (Life and Passion, 245 n. 29). 13. Despite the literary representation of antagonism between the Virgin Mary and the Jews in the many miracle tales and exempla that began to be collected in the twelfth century, and despite the importance of Marian affective devotion to twelfth-­century (and particularly Cistercian) piety, Mary does not play a particularly prominent role in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. She appears only three times, in visions. And, indeed, she plays no role at all in the other extant twelfth-­ century ritual crucifixion accusations (Stacey, “From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration,” 15). 14. Jessopp and James, “Preface,” in Life and Miracles, v. 15. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1997), 146, 160. 16. Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Manuscripts and Their Readers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 10. For different versions of this approach, see also George Edmondson, The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011); Stephen Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990): 1–10; Pamela Gehrke, Saints and Scribes: Medieval Hagiography in Its Manuscript Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 17. Jessopp and James, “Introduction,” l. Rubin traces the manuscript’s modern history (“A Note on the Text,” in Life and Passion, li–lvii). 18. Rubin, “Introduction,” in Life and Passion, xix, xxxi. East Anglia is, however, remarkable for its lack of Cistercian foundations in the twelfth century: Sibton Abbey is the exception to this rule (Tim Pestell, Landscapes of Monastic Foundation: The Establishment of Religious Houses in East Anglia, c. 650–1200 [Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004], 158). It was founded by William de Chesney, the brother of John of Chesney, the sheriff who features in the Life as a protector of the Jews of Norwich (Rubin, “Introduction,” in Life and Passion, lxi). 19. See Jessopp and James, “Introduction,” l–liii. James characterizes the two sections of the manuscript as “two volumes bound in one” (li). The term libellus describes the small pamphlets or booklets in which saints’ lives often circulated and which may lie behind this collection. 20. Rubin concurs with James’s assessment (Rubin, “Introduction,” liii). 21. On the life of Isaac of Stella, see Gaetano Raciti, “Isaac de l’Étoile” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité: Ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, vol. 7 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1970), 2011–38; Elias Dietz, “When Exile Is Home: The Biography of Isaac of Stella,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 41, no. 2 (2006): 141–65; and Travis D. Stolz, “Isaac of Stella, the Cistercians, and the Thomas Becket Controversy: A Bibliographical and Contextual Study” (PhD diss., Marquette University, 2010). 22. Bernard McGinn, The Golden Chain: A Study in the Theological Anthropology of Isaac of Stella (Washington, DC: Cistercian Publications, 1972), 30 n. 129. Isaac’s letter also exists in three

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different recensions; the one printed in the Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-­P. Migne (Paris 1841–61) (hereafter, PL), is most likely the original (Raciti, “Isaac de l’Étoile,” 2020). 23. Many of the works traditionally attributed to Haimo of Halberstadt have been reassigned to Haimo of Auxerre, but they are printed in the Patrologia Latina under the name “Haimo of Halberstadt.” For a fuller discussion of the issue of the authorship of this text, see Chapter 1. 24. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 274. 25. The Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, trans. G. N. Garmonsway (London: Dent, 1965), 265–66; The Peterborough Chronicle, 1070–1154, ed. Cecily Clark, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 57. See John M. McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Dissemination of the Myth,” Speculum 72, no. 3 (1997): 718, for the Mortemer Abbey chronicle; 713 n. 60, for a list of the chronicles that mention William of Norwich. 26. Indeed, in an unsolved mystery of literary history, the only other extant text to reprise the names of the Life’s cast of supporting characters is a thirteenth-­century Middle English version of the romance of Havelock the Dane (Havelok, ed. G. V. Smithers [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987], lx–lxx). 27. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 5. 28. Barthes quoted in White, Content of the Form, 2. 29. The Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, 265. 30. Johnson, “Rhetoric’s Work,” 64–65. See also Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 62. 31. It has also been used as evidence for dating the composition of the Life: Langmuir argues that Thomas wrote books 2 through 6 some five years after completing book 1 circa 1150, in part in response to the skeptics in his community: see the discussion in Chapter 4. In using the slash for “Jewish/Christian,” I follow the example of Dorothy Kim, who notes: “this move from a dash ( Jewish-­Christian) to a slash ( Jewish/Christian) shifts our focus away from thinking about Jewish/ Christian relations in one-­directional and fixed ways. Rather, it indicates a different kind of framework centered on separate entities still in the progress of formation with unstable, ever-­shifting ideas of the medieval categories of ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian’” (Dorothy Kim, “Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours,” in Medieval Anchorites and Their Communities, ed. Cate Gunn and Liz McAvoy [Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2017], 200. 32. Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-­Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 39. 33. Rosalind C. Love, ed. and trans., Three Eleventh-­Century Anglo-­Latin Saints’ Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), clxi; Love offers more examples (clxi n. 119). 34. The Book of Sainte Foy, ed. and trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 256. 35. Eadmer of Canterbury, Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan and Oswald, ed. and trans. Andrew J. Turner and Bernard J. Muir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 45. 36. It is worth remembering that we only have the Life’s word on this. Dedications to the Holy Trinity were common and fashionable in the period. As John Crook describes, even those cathedrals that did have a patron saint were translating and renewing the cult beginning in the mid-­ twelfth century ( John Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints in the Early Christian West, c. 300–1200 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000]). 37. John of Forde, Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite, trans. Pauline Matarasso, Cistercian Fathers 79 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011), 152. See also Christopher J. Holdsworth,



Notes to Pages 14–17

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“John of Ford and English Cistercian Writing, 1167–1214,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 11 (1961): 117–36. John of Ford is sometimes given as John of Forde, his abbey is now known as Forde Abbey. 38. Dominique Iogna-­Prat, “L’oeuvre d’Haymon d’Auxerre: État de la question,” in L’École Carolingienne d’Auxerre de Murethach à Remi, 830–908, ed. Dominique Iogna-­Prat, Collette Jeudy, and Guy Lobrichon (Paris: Beauchesne, 1991), 173. 39. See Richard Sharpe, A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland Before 1540 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 707, although the manuscript date given is incorrect. See Margaret Coombe, “Reginald of Durham’s Latin Life of St. Godric of Finchale: A Study” (PhD diss., Oxford, 2011), 68–69. 40. Reginald, in addressing the vita to Thomas and Aelric, notes: “I was not so much asked as compelled” (non tam rogatus quam compulsus) to write (Reginald of Durham, Libellus de Vita et Miraculis S. Godrici, Heremitae de Finchale, ed. Joseph Stevenson, Surtees Society 20 [London, 1847], 19). The fact that the general chapter of the Cistercian order forbade unauthorized writing/ composition has been traditionally interpreted to indicate that the Cistercians were “anti-­ intellectual.” See Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, vol. 1, C. 550–c. 1307 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 263, 287, for an articulation of this argument. Elizabeth Freeman argues against this understanding of the Cistercian attitude toward composition, arguing instead that “it is worth pointing out that the legislation against composition does not in fact ban writing, it simply bans unauthorized writing” (Elizabeth Freeman, Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150–1220 [Turnhout: Brepols, 2002], 94). 41. Tom Licence, “The Benedictines, the Cistercians, and the Acquisition of a Hermitage in Twelfth-­Century Durham,” Journal of Medieval History 29 (2003): 326. 42. Victoria M. Tudor, “Reginald of Durham and St Godric of Finchale: A Study of a Twelfth-­ Century Hagiographer and His Major Subject” (PhD diss., University of Reading, 1979), 305–6. 43. It is not clear that Godric ever officially took monastic orders. See Heather Blurton, “The Songs of Godric of Finchale: Vernacular Liturgy and Literary History,” in New Medieval Literatures 18, ed. Laura Ashe et al. (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), 81 n. 15. 44. McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder,” 730. 45. Here I offer a complementary argument to that of Hannah R. Johnson who discusses Thomas of Monmouth’s use of the term simplicitas as a monastic-­based rebuke to the mode of argumentation in the schools ( Johnson, “Rhetoric’s Work”). See also Simon Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-­Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 131–2. The literature on Cistercian simplicity is vast. For a classic exposition, see Jean Leclercq, “Holy Simplicity,” in The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 204–7; and Chrysogonus Waddell, “Simplicity and Ordinariness: The Climate of Early Cistercian Hagiography,” in Simplicity and Ordinariness: Studies in Medieval Cistercian History IV, ed. John Sommerfeldt (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1980), 1–47. 46. H. Mayr-­Harting, “Functions of a Twelfth-­Century Recluse,” History 60 (1975): 339. 47. William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle, vol. 4 of The Works of William of St. Thierry, trans. Theodore Berkeley (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 28. For simplicitas as a leitmotif of William’s thought, see Monique Simon, “Sancta simplicitas: La simplicité selon Guillaume de Saint-­Thierry,” Collectanea Cisterciensia 41 (1979): 52–72. 48. John of Forde, Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite, 101; John of Ford, Wulfric of Haselbury, by John, Abbot of Ford, ed. Maurice Bell, Somerset Record Society 47 (London: Butler and Tanner, 1933), 16.

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49. John of Forde, Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite, 166; see also the examples of Wulfric’s trademark simplicity at 103, 111–12, 116, 132–33, 181, 199. 50. John of Forde, Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite, 113; John of Ford, Wulfric of Haselbury, by John, Abbot of Ford, 27–28. 51. Aelred of Rievaulx, The Liturgical Sermons: The First Clairvaux Collection; Advent–All Saints, trans. Theodore Berkeley and M. Basil Pennington (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2001), 193 (sermon 11, “For the Feast of Easter”). 52. Emilia Jamroziak, The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe, 1090–1500 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 16. See also Louis J. Lekai, “The Early Cistercians and the Rule of Benedict,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 17 (1982): 96–107; Bede Lackner, The Eleventh-­Century Background of Cîteaux (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1972). 53. Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 37. See also Martha C. Newman, The Boundaries of Charity: Cistercian Culture and Ecclesiastical Reform, 1098–1180 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 54. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 55. Steven Kruger, “Medieval Jewish/Christian Debate and the Question of Gender: Gilbert Crispin’s Disputatio Iudei et Christiani,” in Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cordelia Beattie and Kirsten A. Fenton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 85. See also the seminal Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) in this regard. 56. Kruger, “Medieval Jewish/Christian Debate,” 86. 57. William F. MacLehose, A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 107–74. 58. Elizabeth Rutledge, “The Medieval Jews of Norwich and Their Legacy,” in Art, Faith and Place in East Anglia: From Prehistory to the Present, ed. T. A. Heslop and Elizabeth Mellings (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), 117. 59. Lipman, Jews of Medieval Norwich; James Campbell, “Norwich Before 1300,” in Medieval Norwich, ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), 29–48; Rutledge, “Medieval Jews of Norwich,” 117–29. 60. Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-­Semitic Iconography (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 178–82. 61. Bale, Feeling Persecuted, 55. 62. Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 2–3. Cohen’s concept of the “hermeneutical Jew” is closely related to Gilbert Dahan’s concept of the “theological Jew” (Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens, 585). For a discussion of these and other similar terms, see Heather Blurton and Hannah R. Johnson, The Prioress and the Critics: Antisemitism, Criticism and Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 48–54. 63. Steven Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xx. 64. Abulafia, Christian-­Jewish Relations, 167–68. 65. There is very little marginalia in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich; the only passages that are consistently marked out are those containing dream visions. 66. For the poetry of Meir of Norwich, see Into the Light: The Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Meir of Norwich, trans. Ellman Crasnow and Bente Elsworth (Norwich: East Publishing, 2013); Susan Einbinder, “Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: Persecution and Poetry Among Medieval English



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Jews,” Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000): 145–62. Miriamne Ara Krummel, Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 49–68, discusses Meir’s poetry as a way of bringing Jewish voices into discussion; Miri Rubin offers an “Interjection: What Did Jews Think of the Eucharist? According to Jews and According to Christians,” in Gentile Tales, 93–103. See Sheila Delany, “Turn It Again: Medieval Jewish Studies and Literary Theory,” Exemplaria 12, no.1 (2000): 1–5, for a critique of the “christiancentrism” of medieval studies in this regard. Ruth Nisse’s Jacob’s Shipwreck is exemplary in its consideration of the interconnectedness of Jewish and Christian literary cultures in England in this period (Ruth Nisse, Jacob’s Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-­Christian Relations in Medieval England [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017]). 67. Christopher Prendergast, The Triangle of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 15. 68. Bale, Feeling Persecuted, 50, 54. Alternately, to borrow Robert Chazan’s words: “Methodologically, we must be a bit cautious in dealing with Thomas’s account. Even a casual reading suggests a high level of embellishment and a low level of reliability” (Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism, 63). 69. Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-­Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 33. 70. Abulafia, Christian-­Jewish Relations, xii. 71. Christopher Ocker counts fifty-­seven accusations of some version of ritual murder and/ or host desecration against Jewish people by the fourteenth century (Christopher Ocker, “Ritual Murder and the Subjectivity of Christ: A Choice in Medieval Christianity,” Harvard Theological Review 91, no. 2 [1998]: 155). 72. Friedrich Lotter, “Innocens Virgo et Martyr: Thomas von Monmouth und die Verbreitung der Ritualmordlegende im Hochmittelalter,” in Die Legende vom Ritualmord: Zur Geschichte der Blutbeschuldigung gegen Juden, ed. R. Erb (Berlin: Metropol, 1993), 70. 73. Recent archaeological discoveries may change our understanding of violence against Jews in twelfth-­century England; see “Jewish Bodies Found in Medieval Well in Norwich,” BBC News, June 23, 2011, https://​www​.bbc​.com​/news​/uk​-­13855238. See also the essays collected in Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson, eds., Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013). 74. Robert M. Stein, Reality Fictions: Romance, History and Governmental Authority, 1025– 1180 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 2–3.

Chapter 1 1. Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Miri Rubin (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 189; Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and M. R. James (Cambridge, 1896), 285– 86. All further references are provided in text to Rubin’s translation and to Jessopp and James’s edition where the Latin is supplied. 2. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 10. 3. Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 5. 4. Roland Recht, Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 197–98.

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5. Michal Kobialka, This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 155, 148, 152; Kobialka here discusses Guibert of Nogent, De sanctis et eorum pignoribus, PL 156:629D–630B. 6. Denise Despres, “Immaculate Flesh and the Social Body: Mary and the Jews,” Jewish History 12, no. 1 (1998): 52. 7. For a study that traces a genealogy for allegory as an interpretive practice, on the one hand, and allegory as a genre of literature, on the other, see Deborah Madsen, Rereading Allegory: A Narrative Approach to Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 8. Rosamund Tuve discusses the origin of this phrase in Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 45–47. 9. The overlap here between the terms “allegory” and “typology” as designations for the level of meaning of allegory that interprets the life of Christ with reference to the Old Testament has been the source of some terminological confusion. For discussions of the debate, see Madsen, Rereading Allegory; Jon Whitman, ed., Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (Boston: Brill, 2003); and Henri de Lubac, “‘Typologie’ et ‘allégorisme,’ ” Recherches de science religieuse 34 (1947): 180–226. For the purposes of this chapter, I will follow contemporary practice and use the term “typology” to refer to the practice of interpreting the Old Testament in the light of the New, and “allegory” to refer both to the practice of reading that identifies many levels of spiritual meaning in a text as well as to the genre of literary texts that are intended to be read in this way. 10. Augustine, City of God 16.26, quoted in Elizabeth C. Teviotdale, The Stammheim Missal, Getty Museum Studies on Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2001), 38, as is the example of John 3:14; there is a useful discussion of the efflorescence of typological representations in the art of the twelfth century at 36–52. 11. All Bible quotations are to the Douay-­Rheims translation, http://​www​.biblegateway​.com​ /versions​/Douay​-­Rheims​-­1899​-­American​-­Edition​-­DRA​-­Bible; the numbering of the psalms also follows this edition. 12. Madsen, Rereading Allegory, 43. See also Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 179–82, on ancient discussions of Paul’s use of “allegory” in Galatians. 13. Michael Signer, “The Glossa Ordinaria and the Transmission of Medieval Anti-­Judaism,” in A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., ed. Jacqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 591–605. 14. Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 4. 15. Elizabeth C. Parker and Charles T. Little, The Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 112. 16. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 53. 17. See also Praefatio Hieronymi in Librum Josue Ben Nun, PL 28:461–64. Thomas earlier signals this quotation by citing Jerome: “as if, to quote the blessed Jerome: ‘I was not removing errors, but sowing fictions” (quemadmodum ait beatus, Ieronimus errores non auferam sed fictitia seram) (4–5). 18. Praefatio Hieronymi in Librum Josue Ben Nun, PL 28:461–64. 19. Haimo of Auxerre’s works are printed in the Patrologia Latina under the name “Haimo of Halberstadt.” For a synopsis of the scholarship on Haimo’s identity and oeuvre, see Iogna-­Prat, “L’oeuvre d’Haymon d’Auxerre,” 157–79.



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20. Johannes Heil, “‘Labourers in the Lord’s Quarry’: Carolingian Exegesis, Patristic Authority, and Theological Innovation, a Case Study in the Representation of the Jews in Commentaries on Paul,” in The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era, ed. Celia Chazelle and Burton Van Name Edwards (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 85. 21. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), 40. 22. On Haimo of Auxerre’s importance as an exegete, see John Contreni, “‘By Lions, Bishops Are Meant; by Wolves, Priests’: History, Exegesis, and the Carolingian Church in Haimo of Auxerre’s Commentary on Ezechiel,” Francia: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte 29, no. 1 (2002): 29–56; Frans van Liere, “Biblical Exegesis Through the Twelfth Century,” in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 157–78; and E. Ann Matter, “Haimo’s Commentary on the Song of Songs and the Traditions of the Carolingian Schools,” in Études d’exégèse carolingienne: Autour d’Haymon d’Auxerre, ed. Sumi Shimahara (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 89–102. 23. Paul Studer and Joan Evans, Anglo-­Norman Lapidaries (Paris: Édouard Champion, 1924), xvi–xvii; the most useful account of those lapidaries which deal specifically with allegorizing the biblical stones is Léon Baisier, The Lapidaire Chrétien (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1936), esp. 8–13. 24. Haimo [of Auxerre], Expositio in Apocalypsin, PL 117:1206A–C; CUL Add. MS 3037, fol. 80v. My translation. 25. I am grateful to Jayne Ringrose of Cambridge University Library for alerting me to the existence of the Salzburg manuscript, and to Beatrix Koll of Salzburg University Library for affirming that the text in MS II 341 is indeed the same as that in CUL Add. MS 3037. The provenance of this manuscript is unknown; at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was in the library of the bishops of Chiemsee. 26. Bede, Commentary on the Apocalypse, PL 93:198C. Bede’s commentary is translated by Faith Wallis as Bede: Commentary on the Apocalypse, trans. Faith Wallis, Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). For a discussion of the sources of Bede’s commentary, see Peter Kitson, “Lapidary Traditions in Anglo-­Saxon England: Part I, the Background; the Old English Lapidary,” Anglo-­Saxon England 7 (1978): 9–60; and Peter Kitson, “Lapidary Traditions in Anglo-­Saxon England: Part II, Bede’s Explanatio Apocalypsis and Related Works,” Anglo-­Saxon England 12 (1983): 73–123. Ambrosius Autpertus’s commentary is printed as Ambrosii Autperti Expositio in Apocalypsin, ed. R. Weber, CCSL Continuatio Medievalis 27–27A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975). For Haimo’s place in the tradition of Apocalypse commentaries and his relationship to Ambrosius Autpertus, see Guy Lobrichon, “Stalking the Signs: The Apocalyptic Commentaries” in The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious Expectation and Social Change, 950–1050, ed. Richard Landes, Andrew Gow, and David C. Van Meter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 67–79; Guy Lobrichon, “L’ordre de ce temps et les désordres de la fin: Apocalypse et société, du IXe à la fin du XIe siècle,” in The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. Werner Verbeke, Daniel Verhelst, and Andries Welkenhuysen (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988), 221–41; and E. Ann Matter, “Exegesis of the Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages,” in The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the Millennium, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 29–40. 27. The struggle between the griffins and the Arimaspasians originates with Herodotus, most likely as cited in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. It is Herodotus who offers the useful

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explanation that the word “Arimaspasian” means “one-­eyed” in the language of the Scythians. Pliny, however, has the griffins mine gold, and it is left to Solinus to suggest the griffins as the hoarders of emeralds through his juxtaposition of Scythian griffins and Scythian emeralds. The authority of Pliny’s Natural History was unchallenged in the early Middle Ages, and it was mined by the polymath medieval encyclopedist Isidore of Seville when he created the entry for smaragdus in the section of his Etymologies dealing with gems and minerals. In turn, when he came to formulate his Commentary on the Apocalypse, Bede draws on this tradition of natural history: the opening line of his description, “Smaragdus nimiae viriditatis est,” quotes Isidore, who in turn quotes Pliny. Bede relies mainly, however, on the Psalms for his allegorical interpretations of the Christian symbolic meaning of the emerald. While Haimo follows the general outline of Bede’s approach to the Apocalypse, there are few lexical borrowings, barring the quotation of Psalm 54. 28. For a discussion of the different genealogies, yet complementary hermeneutics, of the threefold versus the fourfold allegory, see Calvin B. Kendall, The Allegory of the Church: Romanesque Portals and Their Verse Inscriptions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 7–8. 29. Bede, Commentary on the Apocalypse, PL 93:198 C–D; Bede, The Explanation of the Apocalypse by the Venerable Bede, trans. Edward Marshall (Oxford: James Parker, 1878), 151–52. 30. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 56. 31. Kobialka, This Is My Body, 151. 32. Mary M. Schaefer, “Twelfth Century Latin Commentaries on the Mass: Christological and Ecclesiological Dimensions” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1983), 308. Schaefer places Isaac alongside Ivo of Chartres, Hildebert of LeMans, and Pseudo-­Alger of Liège as commentators who focus on the mass as a representation of the Crucifixion. 33. Traditionally, Isaac of Stella was identified as a partisan of Thomas Becket during his exile at Stella’s motherhouse of Pontigny, who subsequently lost his position when Becket was forced to leave Pontigny and ended up in exile as the abbot of the obscure Notre Dame des Châteliers on the Atlantic island of Ré. More recent criticism has convincingly called this interpretation of his biography into question, pointing to the probability that the tropes of island exile in Isaac’s work are conventionally literary rather than biographical. On the life of Isaac of Stella, see Raciti, “Isaac de l’Étoile”; Dietz, “When Exile Is Home”; and Stolz, “Isaac of Stella.” On the letter as a monastic literary form, see Leclercq, Love of Learning, 176–79. 34. Isaac of Stella, “A Letter on the Mass,” trans. Michele Daviau, in The Selected Works of Isaac of Stella: A Cistercian Voice from the Twelfth Century, ed. Daniel Deme (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 158. 35. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 159. For Isaac’s rhetorical use of triads elsewhere, see Elias Dietz, “Conversion in the Sermons of Isaac of Stella,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2002): 254–55, who suggests that “it indicates the influence of Pseudo-­Dionysus” (255); and, more generally, Elizabeth Connor, “Saint Bernard’s Three Steps of Truth and Saint Aelred of Rievaulx’s Three Loves,” Cîteaux 42 (1991): 225–37. 36. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 160. 37. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 161. 38. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 162. 39. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 163. 40. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 163. 41. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 159. 42. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 161. 43. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 159. 44. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 161.



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45. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 162. 46. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 163. 47. Quoted in Leclercq, Love of Learning, 238. 48. On the genre of allegorical commentaries on the mass, see Mary M. Schaefer, “Twelfth Century Latin Commentaries on the Mass: The Relationship of the Priest to Christ and to the ­People,” Studia Liturgica 15 (1982–83): 76–86 (which is an epitome of her PhD dissertation, “Twelfth Century Latin Commentaries on the Mass: Christological and Ecclesiological Dimensions”); Joseph A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, trans. Francis A. Brunner, vol. 1 (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1951), 109–11; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 52–54. For the circulation of these texts in England, see David Dumville, Liturgy and the Ecclesiastical History of Late Anglo-­Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992), 96–145. 49. Amalarius of Metz, Liber officialis, vol. 2 of Amalarii Episcopi Opera liturgica omnia, ed. Jean-­Michel Hanssens (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1948). 50. Jungmann, Mass of the Roman Rite, 88, 109. 51. Donnalee Dox, “Roman Theater and Roman Rite: Twelfth-­Century Transformations in Allegory, Ritual, and the Idea of Theater,” in The Appearances of Medieval Rituals: The Play of Construction and Modification, ed. Nils Holger Petersen et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 37. 52. Jungmann, Mass of the Roman Rite, vol 1, 117 n. 81. 53. Quoted in Kobialka, This Is My Body, 149. Dox points out that this comparison between priest and tragic actor remained problematic and was not mainstream (“Roman Theater and Roman Rite,” 38). See also O. B. Hardison Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965, chap. 2 “The Mass as Sacred Drama,” for a discussion of Amalarius’s allegories of the mass and their relationship to medieval drama. 54. Dox, “Roman Theater and Roman Rite,” 37. 55. Schaefer, “Twelfth Century Latin Commentaries on the Mass: The Relationship of the Priest to Christ and to the People,” 80. 56. Lisa Lampert-­Weissig, “‘Why Is This Knight Different from All Other Knights?’ Jews, Anti-­Semitism, and the Old French Grail Narratives,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106, no. 2 (2007): 229. 57. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 158. 58. Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth,” 834–37; McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder,” 703. See Chapter 4 for further discussion of these “proofs.” 59. The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-­Century Recluse, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 34–35. 60. Anthony Bale makes this last connection in Feeling Persecuted, 53. 61. The Stammheim Missal is now Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum MS 64, the Crucifixion image is on folio 86. For a reproduction of the image and discussion of the iconography, see Teviotdale, The Stammheim Missal, 63 and 65. 62. Parker and Little, The Cloisters Cross; see page 44 where there is a figure of the cross with its inscriptions translated. 63. Anthony Bale suggests that “the twelve fins call to mind a range of valorized duodecimal ideas: the twelve sides of the Temple and the twelve gates of the New Jerusalem, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve Disciples, and the combination of the sacred and the secular (3 × 4), all of which represent aspects of William’s life and death” (Bale, Feeling Persecuted, 53). 64. Sarum Use, quoted in Paul Edward Kretzmann, The Liturgical Element in the Earliest Forms of Medieval Drama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1916), 91. My translation.

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Notes to Pages 43–47

65. Quoted in Kretzmann, The Liturgical Element, 91. 66. Bede, Homilies on the Gospels: Book One, Advent to Lent, trans. Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 97. 67. MacLehose, A Tender Age, 132. This trope appears elsewhere in twelfth-­century hagiography—thus Ralph Flambard’s attempt to seduce Christina of Markyate is described thusly: “When it was getting dark, the bishop gave a secret sign to his servants and they left the room, leaving their master and Christina, . . . the wolf and the lamb, together in the same room” (Life of Christina of Markyate, 42–43). 68. MacLehose, A Tender Age, 133. 69. Jeremy Cohen discusses the shared trope of Rachel as a prototypical mourning mother between medieval Jews and Christians in Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 106–29. 70. Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 16, 20. See Otter, Inventiones, 39, for a discussion of Thomas of Monmouth’s use of the Easter narrative. 71. This timeline is troubled by a marginal note in the manuscript that William died “in the year of our Lord’s Incarnation, 1144, on Wednesday, 22nd day of March” (Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 23 n. 1) and by the editors’ note that “in a.d. 1144 Easter fell on the 26th March, and the Jews’ Passover on the 25th” (20 n. 1). Thomas will later give Good Friday as the day of William’s death. 72. See, for example, Isidore of Seville, Etymologies: “an immolation (immolatio) is so called by the ancients because a victim would be slain when it was placed ‘on the mass’ (in mole) of the altar. Whence also the slaughtering is after the immolation. But now an ‘immolation’ of the bread and chalice is proper usage” (The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 148). 73. The Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, trans. Garmonsway, 265; The Peterborough Chronicle, ed. Clark, 57. The Gospels are quite vague on the nature of these tortures. 74. The twelfth-­century romance Boeve de Haumptone seems to support the suggestion that the “right leg” is the high medieval equivalent of the metaphorical “right arm”: Saboath, Boeve’s trusty tutor, has a dream in which “Boeve was wounded and the main bone in his thigh was broken”; his wife interprets the dream to mean that Boeve has lost what is most dear to him, which might be either his wife or his horse (“Boeve de Haumtone” and “Gui de Warewic”: Two Anglo-­ Norman Romances, trans. Judith Weiss [Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008], 88). 75. Jeffrey J. Cohen, “Flow of Blood,” 57. 76. MacLehose, A Tender Age, 135. 77. The manuscript is not an autograph, so it cannot be certain that the chapter titles were conceived by Thomas and not by a subsequent copyist. If the latter were the case, it would nevertheless suggest something about the context of reception. 78. The planctus Mariae used to be considered as the origin of medieval drama, its lyric expressions initially amplifying the emotion of the moment of the Crucifixion, and subsequently being expanded through the amplification of dialogue and action into what would become medieval drama (in the Anglophone tradition, see Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933]). Sandro Sticca has argued against this interpretation of the evidence, noting that the Montecassino Passion provides evidence that the planctus Mariae does not precede the Passion play chronologically (Sandro Sticca, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, trans. Joseph R. Berrigan [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988], 5–6). Peter Dronke briefly discusses late antique models of Mary’s lament (Peter Dronke, Nine



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Medieval Latin Plays [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 190–91). For the fullest study of the genre of the planctus Mariae, see Sticca, Planctus Mariae. Despite the fact that there remains no extant evidence from England of dramatic reenactment of Mary’s lament beneath the cross, we do know that England was early in expanding liturgical commemoration of Mary’s life (see, for example, Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin in Anglo-­Saxon England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]). 79. Sticca, Planctus Mariae, xv–xvi. 80. On the place of the Planctus ante nescia in the planctus tradition, see Sticca, Planctus Mariae, 71, 175–76. See also Susan Boynton, “From the Lament of Rachel to the Lament of Mary: A Transformation in the History of Drama and Spirituality,” in Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and Their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000, ed. Nils Holger Petersen, Claus Clüver, and Nicolas Bell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 319–40, esp. 331–33. 81. Dronke, Nine Medieval Latin Plays, 230–31. 82. Dronke, Nine Medieval Latin Plays, 232–33. 83. Planctus et lamentation beatae Mariae, stanzas 6 and 7. Sticca, Planctus Mariae, cites this twelfth-­century planctus (from a fifteenth-­century manuscript) at 72–77 and discusses it at 71–72; the stanzas quoted here are on 73. 84. Rubin, Gentile Tales, 7. 85. The phrasing here, “per vicos et plateas discursu,” is reminiscent of Cant. 3:2: “surgam et circuibo per vicos et plateas quaerum quem diligit anima mea quae sivi illum et non inveni” (I will rise and go about the city: in the streets and in the [squares] I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him and I found him not). This passage, often interpreted in medieval exegesis as the church seeking Christ, further suggests a liturgical resonance of William as a cipher for Christ. It also composes one of the responsa for the liturgy of the Feast of the Assumption (R.-­J. Hesbert, ed., Corpus antiphonalium officii (Rome: Herder, 1963–79), 4:7390). 86. This passage also recalls Apoc. 14:1, discussed below. 87. Augustine, “Exposition on Psalm 96 [95],” trans. J. E. Tweed, in Nicene and Post-­Nicene Fathers, ser. 1, vol. 8, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing, 1888); rev. and ed. Kevin Knight, for New Advent, accessed October 8, 2019, http://​www​.newadvent​.org​/fathers​ /1801096​.htm. 88. Peter Lombard, Commentary on the Psalms, PL 191:880C; my translation. 89. Peter Lombard, Commentary on the Psalms, PL 191:880D; my translation. 90. Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 44. 91. The Feasts of the Holy Innocents is represented in the earliest sources for the medieval liturgy, and it appears in mass books of both the Gelasian and the Gregorian tradition (Richard W. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 5–6, 59–61). For the relationship of the veneration of the Holy Innocents in the twelfth century to the ritual crucifixion accusation, see Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich, 210–19. 92. There are four surviving twelfth-­century dramatizations of the Massacre (Grace Frank, The Medieval French Drama [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954], 36–39). See also Karl Young, Ordo Rachelis, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature 4 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1919). 93. See the discussion of the use of Apocalypse in the liturgy for the Feast of the Holy Innocents in C. Clifford Flanigan, “The Apocalypse and Medieval Liturgy,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 335–36. Susan Boynton draws attention to a late antique sermon that “employs [the] metaphor of

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the mothers as sheep mourning the Innocents, who are the lambs symbolizing the sacrificed Christ,” imagery evocative of the Life’s earlier depiction of William’s mother as a sheep (Susan Boynton, “Performative Exegesis in the Fleury Interfectio Puerorum,” Viator 29 [1998]: 45–46). 94. Flanigan, “Apocalypse and Medieval Liturgy,” 336; Flanigan notes, “in this way . . . the gospel reading was given an eschatological perspective” (336). 95. Kathleen Nolan, “‘Ploratus et ululatus’: The Mothers in the Massacre of the Innocents at Chartres Cathedral,” Studies in Iconography 17 (1996): 101–2. Nolan also discusses the rich tradition of representation of the Massacre of the Innocents in manuscript illustration and sculptural programs. 96. Theresa Tinkle, “Exegesis Reconsidered: The Fleury Slaughter of the Innocents and the Myth of Ritual Murder,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 102, no. 2 (2003): 212–13. 97. Denise Despres briefly discusses Thomas’s use of the Holy Innocents as a persuasive strategy in “Adolescence and Sanctity: The Life and Passion of William of Norwich,” Journal of Religion 90, no. 1 (2010): 54–55. 98. Jessopp and James note: “Can this be Robert the boy martyr of Bury? His reputed date is 1181, later, it seems, than this document” (Life and Miracles, 286 n. 1). Although it is tempting to read this Robert as Robert of Bury St. Edmunds, another purported victim of ritual crucifixion, another possibility is that this is the brother of William of Norwich, also a Robert, who entered Norwich Cathedral Priory as a monk. A boy by the name of Robert is cured by William in miracle 7.10. Anthony Bale has suggested that Robert of Bury St. Edmund’s name may derive from this anecdote about a “Robert” attending William (Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, 109). 99. Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities, 157. 100. Dox, “Roman Theater and Roman Rite,” 37. 101. Dumville, Liturgy and the Ecclesiastical History, 108. See also Love, Three Eleventh-­ Century Anglo-­Latin Saints’ Lives, xxix–xxxiii, for the liturgical function of hagiography. 102. Kobialka, This Is My Body, 160. 103. Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth,” 822.

Chapter 2 1. Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, trans. Miri Rubin (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 117; Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and M.  R. James (Cambridge, 1896), 179. All further references are provided in text to Rubin’s translation and to Jessopp and James’s edition where the Latin is supplied. 2. Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 60–66. The terminology surrounding recluses is slightly tricky. This study will follow the usage of Isidore of Seville, who defined hermits and anchorites as two different categories: “According to Isidore, heremitae fled into lonely places far from humanity, whereas anachoretae, after attaining perfection in monasteries, enclosed themselves in cells” (Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 13). This matches the modern convention of referring to Godric as a hermit and Wulfric as an anchorite. See the discussion in Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 14–15. 3. Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 1. Henrietta Leyser identifies peak hermit popularity between ca. 1040 and 1140; the anchoritic lifestyle, more adaptable to urban contexts, was popular between the tenth and thirteenth centuries (Henrietta Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism: A Study of Religious Communities in Western Europe [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984]). See



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also Anneke B. Mulder-­Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Roberta Gilchrist, Contemplation and Action: The Other Monasticism (London: Leicester University Press, 1996); Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London: Methuen, 1914); Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). According to John McCulloh, this reference to a “hermitage” suggests that “William was coming to be remembered . . . as a boy who had acquired a kind of semi-­monastic status” ( John M. McCulloh, “Unofficial Elements in the Cult of St. William of Norwich,” Hagiographica 13 [2006]: 193). 4. For the profusion of hermits in romance, see Angus Kennedy, “The Portrayal of the Hermit-­Saint in French Arthurian Romance: The Remoulding of a Stock Character,” in An Arthurian Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Lewis Thorpe, ed. Kenneth Varty (Glasgow: French Department, University of Glasgow, 1981), 69–82; Paul Bretel, Les ermites et les moines dans la littérature française du Moyen Age (1150–1250) (Paris: Champion, 1995), esp. 607–33. 5. Maurice Bell, “Introduction,” in Wulfric of Haselbury, by John, Abbot of Ford, lxxvi–lxxx. 6. Benedicta Ward discusses William of Norwich and Godric of Finchale together alongside Saint Frideswide, with a brief mention of Wulfric of Haselbury, in a chapter about the new saints of the twelfth century, without mentioning this manuscript connection (Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987], 67–88). The lives of these three saints do not follow one another calendrically, which might have been a rationale for collecting them together. 7. John of Ford’s Life of Wulfric of Haselbury is printed as Wulfric of Haselbury, by John, Abbot of Ford, ed. Maurice Bell (Somerset Record Society 47, 1933); and translated as John of Forde, Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite, with introduction and notes by Pauline Matarasso (Cistercian Fathers Series, no. 79, 2011). All further references will be given in text to Matarasso’s translation, and to Bell’s edition where the Latin is supplied. Bell collates three twelfth-­century manuscripts and an early thirteenth-­century manuscript of the text for his edition. They are: Eton MS 109; CUL Add. MS 3037; British Library (BL), Cotton MS Faustina B IV; and BL Harley MS 322. Eton MS 109 is his base text. On John of Ford, see Holdsworth, “John of Ford and English Cistercian Writing,” 117–36. Keith Day believes that the Life was written with a view to Wulfric’s eventual canonization (Keith Day, “John of Forde’s Life of Wulfric of Haselbury and the Identity of ‘The Lord Abbot Pie Memorie,” Cîteaux 49, nos. 3–4 [1998]: 221–33). 8. Coombe, “Reginald of Durham’s Latin Life,” 113; Coombe points out that “we can estimate a date for Walter’s work: the earliest extant copy of Walter’s text is found in [CUL Add. MS 3037] which dates from the late twelfth century and the latest of the miracles he includes is internally dateable to at least 1181” (95). Three separate but related twelfth-­century vitae of Godric of Finchale are extant. The vita in CUL Add. MS 3037, attributed in this manuscript to “Walter,” is a shorter, adapted version of the long vita by Reginald of Durham. Walter’s vita of Godric is also extant in British Library, Harley MS 322, which Joseph Stevenson printed in the footnotes to his edition of Reginald’s vita (Stevenson seems not to have known about the version in CUL Add. MS 3037 and thus of the attribution of the text to Walter). All further references are given in the text to this edition (Reginald of Durham, Libellus de Vita et Miraculis S. Godrici, Heremitae de Finchale, ed. Joseph Stevenson, Surtees Society 20 [London, 1847]). Walter’s vita is also copied twice in a seventeenth-­century manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque national de France, MS lat. 11784. Translations are my own. A new edition and translation of Reginald’s Life of Godric of Finchale is being prepared for the Oxford Medieval Texts series by Margaret Coombe.

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9. For the new interest in contemporary saints that emerged in the twelfth century, see Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 10. See Introduction, 14–19; and Rubin’s “Note on the Text,” in Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Passion, liii–lv. 11. The Revelation to the Monk of Evesham Abbey, trans. Valerian Paget (London: Alston Rivers, 1909), 45. “Evesham” is an misreading of “Eynsham.” See Adam of Eynsham, The Revelation of the Monk of Eynsham, ed. Robert Easting, EETS os 318 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xxx–xxxi. 12. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998– 99), 2:573. See the discussion of this incident in Heather Blurton, Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 59–80. 13. The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans. David Staines (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 30. 14. See the discussion in John Munns, Cross and Culture in Anglo-­Norman England: Theology, Imagery, Devotion (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016), 42. 15. I have substituted “of the Jews” for Matarasso’s “of the Old Covenant” as the translation of Judeorum. Anna Sapir Abulafia quotes John of Ford’s Sermon 31 as exemplary of Cistercian anti-­ Jewish language: “But how tragic is your lot, house of Israel! You have set up in your heart, like twin doorposts, a complete refusal to feel fear or sorrow at the shedding of such great blood, and for a lintel, you have laid down a defiant rejection of the sense of shame. . . . Yet even to this day, the blood of his only Son cries out to the Father from the gateway of this house. There is nowhere for the sons of Israel to turn aside, they cannot go in or out, without this blood forcing itself on their attention, their accuser and their judge, but also their deceiver” (Christian-­Jewish Relations, 218). It was John of Ford who completed Bernard of Clairvaux’s Commentary on the Song of Songs. A fairly major figure in his day, there is work to be done on John of Ford’s anti-­Judaism. 16. Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 22. 17. Dom Hubert Dauphin, “L’érémitisme en Angleterre aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” in L’eremitismo in Occidente nei secoli XI e XII, Miscellanea del Centro di Studi Medioevali 4 (Milan: Pubblicazioni della Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 1965), 271–303; Gilchrist, Contemplation and Action, 159. 18. Mayr-­Harting, “Functions of a Twelfth-­Century Recluse,” 337–52; Susan Ridyard, “Functions of a Twelfth-­Century Recluse Revisited: The Case of Godric of Finchale,” in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-­Harting, ed. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 236–50; Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–101. 19. Mayr-­Harting, “Functions of a Twelfth-­Century Recluse,” 344–45. 20. Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, 1066–c. 1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 223. See also Christopher Holdsworth, “Hermits and the Powers of the Frontier,” Reading Medieval Studies 16 (1990): 70–72; Gilchrist, Contemplation and Action, 159. 21. For the ideal of “white martyrdom,” see Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 69. 22. Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 697. 23. This is a common function of hagiography, and the point has been argued many times in the cases of William and Godric (for Godric, see the case laid out in Licence, “The Benedictines,



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the Cistercians, and the Acquisition of a Hermitage,” 315–29). It is also true for Wulfric of Haselbury: Henry Mayr-­Harting’s suggestion that John of Ford’s motives in writing about Wulfric were purely academic and spiritual does not tell the whole story (Mayr-­Harting, “Functions of a Twelfth-­Century Recluse,” 338). Wulfric’s Life had official sponsorship, and even though the church at Haselbury Plunkett that contained Wulfric’s cell never became a dependent priory of Ford Abbey does not mean that the Life was not written with such considerations in mind. Indeed, several aspects of the text do seem designed to assert the claims of Ford Abbey over Montacute Priory, which had supported Wulfric during his lifetime. The desire of the Life to underline the strength of Wulfric’s ties to Ford Abbey suggests that at least John of Ford saw the potential for a relationship between Wulfric and Ford that would be similar to the ties that ultimately emerged between Godric and Durham. 24. Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 194. This practice is discussed by Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Theft of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 56–86. 25. Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 97; Koopmans gives the example of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich in support of her argument (120). 26. See Tudor, “Reginald of Durham and Godric of Finchale,” 217–19, for a conjectural discussion of the socioeconomic context of Godric of Finchale’s parents. Simon Yarrow discusses the shared socioeconomic milieu of Godric and William of Norwich (Saints and Their Communities, 147). Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell discuss the importance of the trope of the family in saints’ lives in Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 27. Mayr-­Harting, “Functions of a Twelfth-­Century Recluse,” 337–38. See also Gilchrist, Contemplation and Action, 159–60; and Holdsworth, “Hermits and the Powers of the Frontier,” 58. The slightly earlier Eve of Wilton had a Danish father and a Lotharingian mother. 28. The prose Latin life of Robert of Knaresborough is printed as an appendix to The Metrical Life of St. Robert of Knaresborough: Together with the Other Middle English Pieces in British Museum Ms. Egerton 3143, ed. Joyce Bazire, Early English Text Society, o.s., 228 (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 113; MS Egerton 3143 is a late fifteenth-­century manuscript, composed entirely of material related to the cult of Robert of Knaresborough in both Latin and Middle English. See also the discussion of Robert in Brian Golding, “The Hermit and the Hunter,” in The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in Honor of Barbara Harvey, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 98–99. 29. Geoffrey of Durham, Vita Bartholomaei Farnensis, appendix 2, in Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia, ed. Thomas Arnold, Rolls Series 75 (London, 1882), 1:295–325. 30. Tom Licence, “The Life and Miracles of Godric of Throckenholt,” Analecta Bollandiana 124 (2006): 27, 37. 31. Mayr-­Harting, “Functions of a Twelfth-­Century Recluse,” 344–45. Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 70–83, has argued for the connections between the growth of the profit economy and the growth of the appeal of the eremitic lifestyle. 32. Ann Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest (Rochester, NY: Boydell, 1995), 131. 33. Indeed, some of the earliest post-­Conquest vernacular literary production emerges around eremitical contexts, such as Ancrene Wisse and Ancren Riwle, or the Anglo-­Norman Vie St. Alexis in the St. Albans Psalter, connected with the circle of Christina of Markyate, or the early Middle English songs of Godric of Finchale. For the multilingualism of this milieu, see, among others, Ian Short, “On

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Bilingualism in Anglo-­Norman England,” Romance Philology 33 (1979–80): 467–79; and Pauline Matarasso, “Introduction,” in John of Forde, Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite, 32–37. 34. For a fuller description and discussion of this anecdote, see Bruce Holsinger, “Liturgy,” in Twenty-­First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 304–5. 35. See Short, “On Bilingualism in Anglo-­Norman England,” 474–78, for a discussion of this genre of language miracle. 36. The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. and trans. Talbot, 106–7. 37. The translation here draws on Monika Otter, “Godric of Finchale’s Canora Modulatio: The Auditory and Visionary Worlds of a Twelfth-­Century Hermit,” Haskins Society Journal 24 (2013): 138. I have indicated where the original is in early Middle English with italics. Reginald, Libellus, 118–19. 38. Blurton, “The Songs of Godric of Finchale,” 76. 39. This is not unusual in the manuscript tradition of the songs. See the useful chart provided by Helen Deeming, “The Songs of St Godric: A Neglected Context,” Music and Letters 86, no. 2 (2005): 171. 40. Christopher Harper-­Bill, “Searching for Salvation in Anglo-­Norman East Anglia,” in East Anglia’s History: Studies in Honor of Norman Scarfe, ed. Christopher Harper-­Bill, Carole Rawcliffe, and Richard Wilson (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2002), 34. 41. Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, 131. 42. On cold water immersion as a trope in twelfth-­century saints’ lives, see Ruth Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 155. 43. These miracles are perfectly conventional, following the model set forth by the New Testament: “Go and tell John the things which you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Matt. 11:4–5). 44. Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London: Hambledon, 2000), 47. 45. Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England, 141. This practice, like so many others, took inspiration from that of pilgrims to the shrine of Saint Martin of Tours, although “the synodal statutes of the bishop of Bath and Wells in 1258 repeated the Lateran prohibition and added that ‘stones, wood, trees or springs are not to be venerated as holy” (Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England, 141). See also John Crook, English Medieval Shrines (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), esp. 17; Munns, Cross and Culture, 233, on Becket water; Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind. 46. Life of Christina of Markyate, 120–21. 47. Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, 80; Reginald, Libellus, 368–70. 48. John of Ford, Wulfric of Haselbury, 109. 49. Harper-­Bill, “Searching for Salvation,” 34. 50. Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, 125. 51. Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, 125. See also Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England, 47. 52. See, for example, the miracles recounted in Reginald, Libellus, 376, 397–98, 409, 432–33, 441–42, and 459–60. 53. C. Matthew Phillips, “Crucified with Christ: The Imitation of the Crucified Christ and Crusading Spirituality,” in Crusades: Medieval Worlds in Conflict, ed. Thomas F. Madden, James Naus, and Vincent Ryan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 25–26. 54. Brian Golding, “Gilbert of Sempringham,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 22:160–63; Munns, Cross and Culture, 86. For Cistercians



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as reformers, see Newman, The Boundaries of Charity, esp. 191–218. See also Wolfgang Riehle, The Secret Within: Hermits, Recluses, and Spiritual Outsiders in Medieval England, trans. Charity Scott-­ Stokes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 55. Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism, 2–3. 56. Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 42. 57. Conrad of Eberbach, Exordium magnum cisterciense; sive, Narratio de initio cisterciensis, ed. Bruno Griesser, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (CCCM) 138 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997); see also Janet Burton and Julie Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 4; and Giles Constable, “‘Eremetical’ Forms of Monastic Life,” in Istituzione monastiche e istituzioni canonicali in occidente (1123–1215) (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1980): 241–42. Although there was a literal aspect to the Cistercian “wasteland” also: many of the English Cistercian monasteries had to be resited after their initial donations of land proved to be too inhospitable to support the monks, such as Sawley, Haverholme, and Vaudey abbeys (Bennett D. Hill, English Cistercian Monasteries and Their Patrons in the Twelfth Century [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968], 47–48). See Elizabeth Freeman’s critique of the trope in Narratives of a New Order, 143–45. 58. Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism, 35. 59. R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 161; quoted in Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism, 17. On the Cistercian self-­ understanding of the symbolism of the “desert,” see Benedicta Ward, “The Desert Myth: Reflections on the Desert Ideal in Early Cistercian Monasticism,” Signs and Wonders: Saints, Miracles and Prayers from the Fourth Century to the Fourteenth (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992), 183–99; Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050–1250, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 237–38; Jamroziak, Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe, 18–19; Thomas Renna, “The Wilderness and the Cistercians,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 30 (1995): 179–89. 60. Licence notes that “no fewer than ten anchorites alive during the twelfth century became the protagonists of Lives before the middle of the thirteenth” (Hermits and Recluses, 20). 61. Munns, Cross and Culture, 14. See also Giles Constable, “The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ,” in Three Studies in Medieval Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 143–248; Barbara C. Raw, Anglo-­Saxon Crucifixion Iconography and the Art of the Monastic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and especially Munns, Cross and Culture, to which the argument that follows in indebted. 62. Aelredi Rievallensis Sermones I –XLVI, ed. G. Raciti, CCCM 2A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1989), 87–88. 63. Phillips, “Crucified with Christ,” 25; Exordium magnum cisterciense 2.7, ed. Griesser, 78–79. See also Jamroziak, Cistercian Order, 173. 64. Munns, Cross and Culture, 74. 65. Munns, Cross and Culture, 83; Aelred of Rievaulx, A Rule for a Recluse, trans. M. MacPherson, in Treatises and Pastoral Prayer, ed. M. B. Pennington (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 73. 66. Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 78; Goscelin of St. Bertin, The Book of Encouragement and Consolation, trans. Monika Otter (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 77–79. 67. Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 79. 68. Geoffrey of Durham, Vita Bartholomei Farnensis, 300. 69. Munns, Cross and Culture, 85. 70. Life of Christina of Markyate, 106–7. 71. Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 56–57.

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Notes to Pages 76–81

72. Munns, Cross and Culture, 83. The life of Henry of Coquet Island (d. 1127) is now extant only in John of Tynemouth’s Nova legenda Anglie of the fourteenth century. 73. Goscelin of St. Bertin, The Book of Encouragement and Consolation, 99–100. See also the discussion in Monika Otter, “Entrances and Exits: Performing the Psalms in Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius,” Speculum 83 (2008): 286–88. 74. Munns, Cross and Culture, 84–85. 75. Goscelin of St. Bertin, The Book of Encouragement and Consolation, 93. 76. On the “rhetoric of death” in liturgical rites for the enclosure of anchorites, see E. A. Jones, “Ceremonies of Enclosure: Rite, Rhetoric and Reality,” in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body Within the Discourses of Enclosure, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), 34–49. Also Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons, 97–100. 77. Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012), 238. 78. Munns, Cross and Culture, 257. See Lee Manion, Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 67–106, for the overlap in conception of “pilgrim” and “crusader” in imaginative literature. 79. The song is a version of Psalm 121; see Heather Blurton, “Godric of Finchale’s ‘Jerusalem Song’ in Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 1716,” Notes and Queries 66, no. 2 (2019): 183–92. 80. Munns, Cross and Culture, 83. 81. Aelred of Rievaulx, “Rule of Life for a Recluse,” quoted in Munns, Cross and Culture, 86. Although, as Stevenson notes, some passages seem to suggest that a crucifix was on the altar rather than on the rood screen (Reginald, Libellus, 100 n. 1). 82. Monika Otter has discussed the nuptial imagery in this passage, signaled by the phrase “tamquam sponsus de thalamo” in the version by Reginald. Walter cuts this language from his version, although Otter’s point about the parallels in medieval exegesis between the wound and the womb still holds (Otter, “Entrances and Exits,” 290–91). 83. This description is a shorter version of the more elaborate treatment of this vision in Reginald of Durham’s Life of Godric. For a discussion of the latter, see Otter, “Godric of Finchale’s Canora Modulatio,” 133. 84. Otter, “Entrances and Exits,” 290–91. 85. Life of Christina of Markyate, 118–19. 86. I discuss this phenomenon in more detail in Chapter 3. 87. The latter term is Sarah McNamer’s in Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 88. Goscelin of St. Bertin, The Book of Encouragement and Consolation, 99. 89. See, among others, Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-­Century Renaissance; Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism; Jeremy Cohen, “The Jews as the Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition, from Augustine to the Friars,” Traditio 39 (1983): 1–27; Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society; Munns, Cross and Culture; Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 90. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, “Preaching the Cross: Liturgy and Crusade Propaganda,” Medieval Sermon Studies 53, no. (2009): 13. 91. Joanne M. Pierce, “Holy Week and Easter in the Middle Ages,” in Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times, ed. Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 170. For what we know about the history of the ritual



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of venerating the cross on Good Friday, see Robin M. Jensen, The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 114–16; and Sarah Larratt Keefer, “The Veneration of the Cross in Anglo-­Saxon England,” in The Liturgy of the Late Anglo-­Saxon Church, ed. Helen Gittos and M. Bradford Bedingfield (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), 143–84. 92. Pierce, “Holy Week and Easter,” 170–71. 93. Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 72. Katherine Smith notes the close relationship between monasticism and the art of war in general: “For monastic thinkers in the Central Middle Ages (c. 950–1200), war was not simply a worldly evil but a path to self-­knowledge and even a way of imitating Christ; encountered at every turn in the texts and rituals that shaped life in the monastery, war was among the most useful tools in the monk’s meditative arsenal, and its language and symbolism were intimately woven into his identity” (Katherine Allen Smith, War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture [Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011], 2–3). See also Munns, Cross and Culture, 176–85. 94. See, for example, Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Jonathan Riley-­Smith, “The First Crusade and the Persecution of the Jews,” Studies in Church History 21 (1984): 51–72. 95. Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, 163–70. 96. McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder,” 730; Elphège Vacandard, Vie de Saint Bernard, abbé de Clairvaux, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1897), 2:286–87. 97. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich, 13–93. 98. Smith, War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture, 198. 99. See Dominic Alexander, “Hermits and Hairshirts: The Social Meanings of Saintly Clothing in the Vitae of Godric of Finchale and Wulfric of Haselbury,” Journal of Medieval History 28, no. 3 (2002): 205–26; and Katherine Allen Smith, “Saints in Shining Armor: Martial Asceticism and Masculine Models of Sanctity, ca. 1050–1250,” Speculum 83, no. 3 (2008): 572–602. 100. Smith, War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture, 103. 101. Susanna A. Throop, “Narratives of Crucifixion, Narratives of Crusade: The Construction of Christian Violence in First Crusade Accounts,” Paper presented at the “Violence + Art: Reflections of the Premodern” workshop, Caltech, April 28, 2017, 3. The seven sources are the Gesta Francorum, Historia vie, Gesta Dei per Francos, Peter Tudebode, Fulcher of Chartres, Baldric of Bourgeuil, and Orderic Vitalis. Many of these ideas came out of an invited response to Susanna Throop’s paper at Caltech. I would like to thank Dr. Throop for sharing her work, as well as the organizers of the colloquium, Dr. Jennifer Jahner and Dr. Benjamin Saltzman. 102. Throop, “Narratives of Crucifixion, Narratives of Crusade,” 5. 103. Susanna A. Throop, Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 1095–1216 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 61. 104. William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, trans. Joseph Stevenson, in The Church Historians of England, vol. 4, part 2 (London, 1856), 564; and with Latin from Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett, vol. 1 (London, 1884), 310. 105. William of Newburgh, Historia, 563; Chronicles of the Reigns, 307. I have argued elsewhere that this incident may have been related to a ritual murder accusation: Heather Blurton, “Egyptian Days: From Passion to Exodus in the Representation of Twelfth-­Century Jewish-­Christian Relations,” in Jones and Watson, Christians and Jews in Angevin England, 225–27. 106. Richard of Devizes, Cronicon Richardi Divisensis de Tempore Regis Richardi Primi/The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of King Richard the First, ed. and trans. John T. Appleby (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963), 3. 107. Kienzle, “Preaching the Cross,” 12.

188

Notes to Pages 87–92

Chapter 3 1. Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Miri Rubin (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 46; Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and M. R. James (Cambridge, 1896). All further references are provided in text to Rubin’s translation and to Jessopp and James’s edition where the Latin is supplied. 2. William MacLehose, “The Holy Tooth: Dentition, Childhood Development, and the Cult of the Christ Child,” in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, ed. Mary Dzon and Theresa M. Kenney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 201. On medieval childhood, see the controversial Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962); in addition, see Danièle Alexandre-­Bidon and Didier Lett, Children in the Middle Ages: Fifth–Fifteenth Centuries, trans. Jody Gladding (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Barbara Hanawalt, “Medievalists and the Study of Childhood,” Speculum 77, no. 2 (2002): 440–60; MacLehose, A Tender Age; Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); James A. Schultz, The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100–1350 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1990). 3. Reginald of Durham, Libellus, 101; Otter, “Godric of Finchale’s Canora Modulatio,” 133. 4. Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia, I: Opera Ascetica, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971); Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, trans. Theodore Berkeley, in The Works of Aelred of Rievaulx, vol. 1 (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 16. All further citations will be to this translation. 5. The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. and trans. Talbot, 119. 6. Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, ed. and trans. Decima L. Douie and Hugh Farmer (London: Nelson, 1961–62), 2:86. 7. Leah Sinanoglou, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays,” Speculum 48, no. 3 (1973): 491. 8. Theresa Tinkle, “Exegesis Reconsidered,” 212; see discussion below. 9. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 241; Aelred of Rievaulx, The Liturgical Sermons, 174 (sermon 10, “For Palm Sunday”). 10. Walter Daniel, The Life of Aelred of Rievaulx, ed. and trans. F. M. Powicke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), 61–62. 11. I am inspired here by the work of Anna Wilson in “Similia similibus.” 12. Here I am influenced by the work of Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), among others, which I turn to at the end of the chapter. 13. Wilson, “Similia similibus,” 57. 14. Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth,” 845. 15. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Flow of Blood,” 41. 16. Auslander, “Victims or Martyrs,” 105–34. 17. Magdelene Schultz, “The Blood Libel: A Motif in the History of Childhood,” Journal of Psychohistory 14, no. 1 (1986): 1–24. 18. Magdelene Schultz, “The Blood Libel,” 5. 19. MacLehose, A Tender Age, 109.



Notes to Pages 92–96

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20. Denise Despres, “Adolescence and Sanctity: The Life and Passion of Saint William of Norwich,” Journal of Religion 90, no. 1 (2010): 33–62. 21. Wilson, “Similia similibus,” 48. 22. Despres, “Adolescence and Sanctity,” 50–51. 23. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Flow of Blood,” 46; this comment about William is not related to Cohen’s main argument. 24. Weinstein and Bell discuss these tropes in Saints and Society, 25, 29. For the former kind, see also Istvàn Bejczy, “The Sacra Infantia in Medieval Hagiography,” in The Church and Childhood, Studies in Church History 31, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 143–51. 25. Stacey, “Anti-­Semitism and the Medieval English State,” 169. 26. Patricia Healy Wasyliw, Martyrdom, Murder, and Magic: Child Saints and Their Cults in Medieval Europe, Studies in Church History 2 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 41. 27. Joe Hillaby notes that prior Almar was engaged in a building project at St. Pancras (Hillaby, “The Ritual-­Child-­Murder Accusation: Its Dissemination and Harold of Gloucester,” Jewish Historical Research 34 [1996]: 72–73). 28.  Paul Hayward, “The Idea of Innocent Martyrdom in Late Tenth-­and Eleventh-­Century English Hagiology,” Studies in Church History 30 (1993): 86; see also Alan Thacker, “Kings, Saints, and Monasteries in Pre-­Viking Mercia,” Midland History 10 (1985): 1–25; Catherine Cubitt, “Sites and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cult of Murdered and Martyred Anglo-­Saxon Royal Saints,” Early Medieval Europe 9, no. 1 (2000): 53–83. 29. Love, Three Eleventh-­Century Anglo-­Latin Saints’ Lives, 59, 61. 30. Hayward, “The Idea of Innocent Martyrdom,” 83. Wistan’s life is described by William of Malmesbury in the Gesta regum Anglorum and subsequently embroidered by Thomas of Marlborough for his twelfth-­century Chronicon Abbatiae Evesham (Thomas of Marlborough, Chronicon Abbatiae Evesham, ed. W. D. Macray, Rolls Series 29 [London 1863], 325–37). 31. Wasyliw, Martyrdom, Murder, and Magic, 76. 32. Nicholas Orme, The Saints of Cornwall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 185–87; an eleventh-­century and a twelfth-­century Life of Melor are lost but represented in later manuscripts (185). Printed in André-­Yves Bourgès, Le dossier hagiographique de saint Melar, prince et martyr en Bretagne armoricaine: Textes, traductions, commentaires, Britannia monastica 5 (Landévennec: CIRDoMoC, 1997). 33. Cubitt, “Sites and Sanctity,” 59. 34. Love, Three Eleventh-­Century Anglo-­Latin Saints’ Lives, 59, 61. 35. Love, Three Eleventh-­Century Anglo-­Latin Saints’ Lives, xciii. 36. For the cult of Saint Faith, see Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis, ed. Luca Robertini, Biblioteca di Medioevo Latino 10 (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medieovo, 1994); The Book of Sainte Foy, ed. and trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, Writing Faith: Text, Sign, and History in the ­Miracles of Sainte Foy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). A.  G. Remensnyder, “Une problème de cultures ou de culture? La statue-­reliquaire et les joca de sainte Foy de Conques dans le Liber miraculorum de Bernard d’Angers,” Cahiers de la Civilisation Médiévale 33 (1990): 351–79, connects Faith’s “jokes” to her gender, but also to lay piety. 37. Delbert Russell, “Introduction: Saint Faith of Agen, Virgin Martyr,” in Verse Saints’ Lives Written in the French of England, trans. Delbert Russell, FRETS 5 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012), 45. I am grateful to Professor Russell for sharing a pre-­ print version of this Introduction with me. Alison Binns identifies two monastic houses dedicated to Faith before 1216: Horsham St. Faith in East Anglia and Newton Longville in Buckinghamshire

190

Notes to Pages 96–103

(Binns, Dedications of Monastic Houses in England and Wales, 1066–1216 [Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989], 99, 115; Russell, “Introduction,” 45 n. 15). See also Auguste Bouillet and L. Servières, Sainte Foy, vierge et martyre (Rodez, France: E. Carrère, 1900), 348–55, for churches dedicated to Saint Faith in England. 38. Antonia Gransden, A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, 1182–1256 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), 134; see Gransden’s discussion of the cult of Saint Faith at Bury St. Edmunds, 133–35. 39. Russell, “Introduction,” 51. 40. This dramatic story is reported by William Dugdale, Monasticon anglicanum, cited in J. C. Cox, “The Priory of St. Faith, Horsham,” in The Victoria History of the County of Norfolk, vol. 2, ed. William Page (London: Constable, 1906), 346–49. It also survives in a series of thirteenth-­ century wall paintings in what was the refectory of Horsham St. Faith Priory. See also Russell, “Introduction,” 45–46; and Pestell, Landscapes of Monastic Foundation, 155–56. 41. Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, 75–76. 42. Cox, “Priory of St. Faith, Horsham,” 346. As Sybil’s family was more illustrious than her husband’s, their children adopted her name. 43. On the de Chesney family, see Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities, 145–46; Judith A. Green, English Sheriffs to 1154, Public Records Office Handbook 24 (London: HMSO, 1990), 61. Emily Rose traces John de Chesney witnessing charters (see Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 276 n. 8, 277 n. 20). 44. Thomas accuses John specifically of having been bribed by the Jews to protect them and of opposing the election of William Turbe as bishop of Norwich. The manner of John’s death—excessive anal bleeding—has suggested comparison with the description of the death of Judas in Acts 1:18 (Bale, Feeling Persecuted, 57). 45. Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities, 146. 46. The cathedral’s founder, Herbert of Losinga, was most likely trained at the Abbey of Fécamp in Normandy, which was likewise dedicated to the Trinity. 47. Bouillet and Servières, Sainte Foy, 352. 48. Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, 136. 49. Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, 83. 50. Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy, 87–88. 51. Although the “local” is relative: Thomas points out that to “the people of Greece and Palestine” even a saint like Thomas Becket is local (60). 52. See Chapter 4 below, where I discuss the artifice of book 2 at greater length. 53. Despres, “Adolescence and Sanctity,” 36. See also her related discussion in Denise Despres, “Adolescence and Interiority in Aelred’s Lives of Christ,” in Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life, ed. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 107–25. 54. J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 76, 85, quoting Papias, ed., Elementarium Doctrinae Rudimentum (Milan, 1476), s.v. “aetas.” See also Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 24–31, 264 n. 3; all the examples she gives also go up to fourteen for pueritia. Isabelle Cochelin tabulates eighty pre-­thirteenth-­century descriptions of the ages of man; all those that give an age for the ending of boyhood and the beginning of adolescence in males give the age of fourteen (“Introduction: Pre-­Thirteenth-­Century Definitions of the Life Cycle” in Medieval Life Cycles: Continuity and Change, ed. Isabelle Cochelin and Karen Smyth [Turnhout: Brepols, 2013], 3–5). 55. Cochelin, “Introduction,” 9.



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56. For the law codes, see Fiona Harris Stoertz, “Adolescence and Authority in Medieval Monasticism,” in The Growth of Authority in the Medieval West, ed. Martin Gosman, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Jan Veenstra, Selected Proceedings of the International Conference Groningen, November 6–9, 1997 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1999), 126 n. 25, 140. 57.  J. H. Lynch, “The Cistercians and Underage Novices,” Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses 24 (1973): 285, 287. It is tempting to speculate but impossible to know whether Thomas’s own experiences of child oblates influenced his description of William. Despres suggests that Thomas may represent William offering himself as an oblate in a vision where he asks to be moved to the chapterhouse so that he can be “a boy among boys” (Despres, “Adolescence and Sanctity,” 58). For studies on how shifting ideals of consent, inter alia, impacted the practice of oblation, see Mayke de Jong, In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); and Patricia A. Quinn, Better Than the Sons of Kings: Boys and Monks in the Early Middle Ages (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); Greg Peters, “Offering Sons to God in the Monastery: Child Oblation, Monastic Benevolence, and the Cistercian Order in the Middle Ages,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2003): 285–95; and Orme, Medieval Children, 216. 58. Indeed, as Ariès has noted, individuals may not have been fully certain of their precise age at all (Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 18). 59. Ivan Marcus describes how, influenced by changing cultural conceptions of the age of consent, medieval Jews developed the ritual of the bar mitzvah, which celebrates thirteen as the age of consent for boys, in the later Middle Ages (Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996], 17). Jean-­Claude Schmitt, The Conversion of Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century, trans. Alex J. Novikoff (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 70, also discusses the age of consent for Jewish boys in the context of conversion. Indeed, it is interesting that the later ritual murder accusations tend to give their victims ages as seven or eight, on the cusp of boyhood rather than adulthood. For example, William’s age is given as seven in The Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande, ed. M. Görlach (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1994), 174. 60. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich, 218. 61. The question of baptism and consent is related and similarly took shape under pressure from heretical groups. See MacLehose, A Tender Age, 53–106. 62. Nolan, “‘Ploratus et ululatus,’ ” 101–3. 63. Wasyliw, Martyrdom, Murder, and Magic, 40; Rosalind B. Brooke and Christopher Brooke, Popular Religion in the Middle Ages: Western Europe, 1000–1300 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 19. 64. Alexandre-­Bidon and Lett, Children in the Middle Ages, 22. 65. Tinkle, “Exegesis Reconsidered,” 212–13. 66. Susan Boynton, “Performative Exegesis,” 40. See Shulamith Shahar, “The Boy Bishop’s Feast: A Case-­Study in Church Attitudes Towards Children in the High and Late Middle Ages,” in Wood, The Church and Childhood, 243–61, for a discussion of children’s participation in liturgical celebrations of the massacre. 67. See the discussion in Paul A. Hayward, “Suffering and Innocence in Latin Sermons for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, c. 400–800,” in Wood, The Church and Childhood, 67–80; and Boynton, “Performative Exegesis,” 45–46. 68. Bede the Venerable, Homilies on the Gospels, Book One: Advent to Lent, trans. Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 96. 69. Tinkle, “Exegesis Reconsidered,” 218. 70. See the discussion in Chapter 1.

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Notes to Pages 106–111

71. Wasyliw, Martyrdom, Murder, and Magic, 48, makes this point. 72. Tinkle, “Exegesis Reconsidered,” 221. 73. Tinkle, “Exegesis Reconsidered,” 221. 74. Aelred of Rievaulx, The Liturgical Sermons, 107. 75. Tinkle, “Exegesis Reconsidered,” 231. See also the discussion in Chapter 1. 76. Quoted in Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 49. ; Rigord, Histoire de Philippe Auguste [Gesta Philippi Augusti, Francorum Regis], in Oeuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, ed. ­H.-­François Delaborde (Paris: Librarie Renouard, 1882), 1:15. See a parallel discussion of the way in which the Holy Innocents form a connection between the ritual murder accusations of William of Norwich and Richard of Pontoise in Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich, 209–20. 77. A similar vision, this time of a young girl, refers to William as “puer” and “puerulum.” 78. Cited in Kati Ihnat, Mother of Mercy, Bane of the Jews: Devotion to the Virgin Mary in Anglo-­Norman England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 133. 79. See the discussions of this text in Despres, “Adolescence and Sanctity,” 47–48; Anna Sapir Abulafia, “The Intellectual and Spiritual Quest for Christ and Central Medieval Persecution of Jews,” in Religious Violence Between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. Anna Sapir Abulafia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 67–69; Damien Boquet, “De l’enfant-­ dieu à l’homme-­enfant: Regards sur l’enfance et la psychologie de l’adulte chez Aelred de Rievaulx (1110–1167),” Médiévales 36 (1999): 129–43; Pamela Sheingorn, “Constructing the Patriarchal Parent: Fragments of the Biography of Joseph,” in Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. Rosalynn Voaden and Diane Wolfthal (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 164–71. 80. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 9. 81. This interpretation, that Jesus’s passing from Nazareth to Jerusalem prefigures the movement from Synagoga to Ecclesia, stems originally from Origen (G. Aerden, “Le moment favorable dans Quand Jésus eut douze ans d’Aelred de Rievaulx,” Collectanea Cisterciensia 76, no. 1 [2014]: 37). 82. Despres, “Adolescence and Sanctity,” 47. 83. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 4 n. 5. 84. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 4. 85. Sheingorn, “Constructing the Patriarchal Parent,” 169. 86. Bede, Homilies on the Gospels, 189. This is the version that appears in the homilary of Paul the Deacon (Réginald Grégoire, Homéliaires liturgiques médiévaux [Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi Sull’Alto Medioevo, 1980], 441). 87. Glossa ordinaria, in PL 114:251, my translation. Bede’s commentary In Lucam is one of the two main sources for the Glossa ordinaria to the Gospel of Luke, along with Ambrose’s Expositio Exangelii secundum Lucam (E. Ann Matter, “The Church Fathers and the Glossa Ordinaria,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus, [Leiden: Brill, 1996], 1:106). See also the discussion of this pericope as an example of Christ’s humility in Burrow, Ages of Man, 140–42. 88. Isaac of Stella, “Sermon Seven,” in Sermons on the Christian Year, vol. 1, trans. Hugh McCaffery (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1979), 57. 89. Isaac of Stella, “Sermon Seven,” 57. 90. Isaac of Stella, “Sermon Seven,” 65. 91. Glossa ordinaria, cols. 114, 251. 92. Isaac of Stella, “Sermon Seven,” 67.



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93. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 9. The affective devotion in this treatise has most often been discussed in the context of Aelred’s sexuality: for which see Marsha Dutton, “The Invented Sexual History of Aelred of Rievaulx: A Review Article,” American Benedictine Review 47, no. 4 (1996): 414–32; Brian McGuire, “Sexual Awareness and Identity in Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167),” American Benedictine Review 45, no. 2 (1994): 213–14. 94. Aerden, “Le moment favorable,” 33. 95. Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-­Century Renaissance. For a different but sympathetic reading on this issue, see Uri Z. Shachar, “Inspecting the Pious Body: Christological Morphology and the Ritual Crucifixion Allegation,” Journal of Medieval History 41, no. 1 (2015): 21–40. The favor was returned by Jewish texts that focused on the illogical and unappealing aspects of incarnational theology. 96. Guerric of Igny (d. 1157) had (most likely) been a monk at Clairvaux when Bernard was abbot and subsequently became the second abbot of its daughter house at Igny in 1138. Guerric of Igny, Liturgical Sermons, vol. 1, trans. monks of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 38. 97. Guerric of Igny, Liturgical Sermons, 42 n. 1. 98. Guerric of Igny, Liturgical Sermons, 42–46. 99. Guerric of Igny, Liturgical Sermons, 47. 100. Guerric of Igny, Liturgical Sermons, 51. 101. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 15. 102. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 17. 103. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 18. 104. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 20–21. 105. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 21. 106. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 20. 107. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 22–24 108. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 44–46. 109. Abulafia, “Intellectual and Spiritual Quest,” 69. 110. I am borrowing here the terminology from Sarah McNamer’s study of Middle English devotional literature: McNamer describes the texts of affective meditation as “intimate scripts” (Affective Devotion, 246). 111. McNamer, Affective Devotion, 1. 112. Despres, “Adolescence and Sanctity,” 48. 113. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 13–14. 114. See Tim Gorringe, “Parvulus: The Idea of the Little Child in Medieval Preaching and Commentary,” in Generations in the Cloister: Youth and Age in Medieval Religious Life, ed. Sabine von Heusinger and Annette Kehnel (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008), 65–73. The literature on affective devotion in the High Middle Ages is vast. Some seminal studies that are most relevant to the discussion here are Bale, Feeling Persecuted; Bestul, Texts of the Passion; Bynum, Jesus as Mother; Southern, Making of the Middle Ages. 115. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 18. See also Bynum, Jesus as Mother; and the collection in Dzon and Kenney, The Christ Child in Medieval Culture. 116. Isaac of Stella, “Letter on the Mass,” 159. 117. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 10. 118. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 5. 119. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 7.

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Notes to Pages 118–124

120. Aelred of Rievaulx, The Liturgical Sermons, 192 (sermon 11, “For the Feast of Easter”). 121. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 16. Aelred also speaks of Herod plotting with the Jews in a sermon on the Epiphany (Aelred of Rievaulx, The Liturgical Sermons, 107). 122. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 17. 123. Aelred of Rievaulx, Jesus at the Age of Twelve, 25. 124. Maureen Boulton, ed., Les enfaunces de Jesu Crist (London: Anglo-­Norman Text Society, Birkbeck College, 1985). This trend began at the end of the twelfth century, with texts such as Ava’s Leben Jesu and Konrad von Fussesbrunnen’s Kindheit Jesu (Eva Frojmovic, “Taking Little Jesus to School in Two Thirteenth-­Century Latin Psalters from South Germany,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-­Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. Mitchell B. Merback [Leiden: Brill, 2007], 97–98). 125. Edelman, No Future, 2. 126. Edelman, No Future, 12. Wan-­Chuan Kao offers a compelling reading of Saint Faith through the category of the “tomboy” that makes parallel points about the liminal possibilities of the child saint (“The Tomboyism of Faith: Spiritual Tomboyism in the Cult of Sainte Foy,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 15, no. 4 [2011]: 412–49). 127. Wilson, “Similia similibus,” 55.

Chapter 4 1. Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Miri Rubin (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 40; Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and M. R. James (Cambridge, 1896), 58–59. All further references are provided in text to Rubin’s translation and to Jessopp and James’s edition where the Latin is supplied. 2. Indeed, the recursive structure of book 2 is often brought to bear on discussions of the dating of the text. See, for example, the discussion in Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth,” 820; Langmuir believes that Thomas of Monmouth wrote the Life in three stages, with book 1 as the first stage, versus the opinion of John McCulloh, who believes books 1–6 were composed at the same time (McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder,” 706–7). 3. Per Nykrog, “The Rise of Literary Fiction,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 593–612. On literature in the 1170s, see also Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 4. Stein, Reality Fictions, 1. 5. Stein, Reality Fictions, 8. 6. A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies (London: Croom Helm, 1988), x. 7. Bale, Feeling Persecuted, 56. 8. Lynda L. Coon, Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), xxi. 9. For example, Robert Chazan’s comment that “if, however, we strip away the excesses of Thomas’s account . . . we are left with additional firm testimony” (Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes, 67). 10. For a general account of Thomas’s likely education and intellectual milieu, see Rubin, “Introduction,” in Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Passion, xiii. Also Nicholas Orme, English Schools



Notes to Pages 124–130

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in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1973), 167–74; Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33–41. 11. Nancy Partner, “The New Cornificius: Medieval History and the Artifice of Words,” in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1985), 11. See also Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages; and the other essays collected in Breisach, Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography. 12. Felice Lifshitz, “Beyond Positivism and Genre: ‘Hagiographical’ Texts as Historical Narrative,” Viator 25 (1994): 95–115. See also the discussion in the Introduction. 13. The definition of romance in this period is also a moving target. See, among others, Simon Gaunt, “Romance and Other Genres,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45–59. On the influence of the history of rhetoric on vernacular romance, see Douglas Kelly, The Art of Medieval French Romance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 32–67. 14. Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, “Fictionality” (2016), in The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. (Hamburg: Hamburg University), accessed October 10, 2018, http://​ www​.lhn​.uni​-­hamburg​.de​/article​/fictionality. 15. Schmitt, Conversion of Herman the Jew, 35–36. 16. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 67. 17. D.  H. Green, The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 84. 18. John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, prologue, quoted in Matthew Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400–1500 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 417. For this trope, see also Panagiotis A. Agapitos and Lars Boje Mortensen, eds., Medieval Narratives Between History and Fiction: From the Centre to the Periphery of Europe, c. 1100–1400 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 18. 19. D. H. Green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance, 85. 20. D. H. Green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance, 180. 21. Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 84. 22. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 67. McCulloh notes that “in his second book Thomas switches from narrative to argument,” but he says nothing about argumentum as a rhetorical technique (McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder,” 703). 23. A. J. Minnis, and A. B. Scott, with David Wallace, eds. Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 37–64. See also the discussion in D. H. Green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance, 1–17; and Päivi Mehtonen, Old Concepts and New Poetics: Historia, Argumentum, and Fabula in the Twelfth-­and Early Thirteenth-­Century Latin Poetics of Fiction (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1996); and more generally, Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography. 24. D. H. Green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance, 3–4. 25. D.  H. Green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance, 8; Green notes that “the dividing line between argumentum and fabula on the one hand and historia on the other was no sharp one. Rhetorical embellishments, criticized by rigorists as untrue, could be found a place in history as in fiction; history could make use of poetic devices, just as fiction could incorporate historical details” (91). 26. Mehtonen, Old Concepts and New Poetics, 53. 27. See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), s.v. “argumentum”; also Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, chap. 3, “Invention

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Notes to Pages 130–133

and Narrative,” esp. p. 316. Although in this rhetorical context historia means a recounting of factual events, in the Middle Ages it also had the liturgical sense of a series of lessons (lectiones) from the vita of a saint (or a bible story) usually set to music. Historia is not a word that appears anywhere in the Life. 28. Similarly, the Life of Godric of Finchale in Cambridge University Library Add. MS 3037 begins with a prologue and an argumentum (fols. 119v–120r), a brief summary of the Life. 29. Miri Rubin translates argumentum as “proof,” although she acknowledges the rhetorical valences of the term (Life and Passion, 225 n. 50). Hannah R. Johnson has previously drawn attention to the importance of the term “argumentum” to the Life, although her conclusions differ from those presented here: Hannah R. Johnson, “The Medieval Limit: Historiography, Ethics, Culture” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2006). 30. In the thirteenth century the bishop of Hereford excommunicated a number of his flock for participating in a Jewish wedding (Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 3rd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964], 77; 120). 31. Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 128–33. See John Tolan, “Of Milk and Blood: Innocent III and the Jews, Revisited,” in Jews and Christians in Thirteenth-­Century France, ed. Elisheva Baumgarten and Judah D. Galinsky (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), esp. 142–43, for evidence of Jewish/Christian household interaction as well as growing ecclesiastical concern about it. Lateran III (1179) had already tried to put an end to these practices. For these practices in the thirteenth century, see Hannah Meyer, “Female Moneylending and Wet-­Nursing in Jewish-­Christian Relations” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2009). 32. For a general overview, see Robin R. Mundill, The King’s Jews: Money, Massacre and Exodus in Medieval England (London: Continuum, 2010). The contours of our assumptions about Jewish moneylending are challenged by Julie L. Mell, The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, 2 vols. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 33. See, for example, Mundill, The King’s Jews, 45, 47–49; and the entry for “sheriff ” in Joe Hillaby and Caroline Hillaby, The Palgrave Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-­Jewish History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 333–37. 34. Kati Ihnat and Katelyn Mesler, “From Christian Devotion to Jewish Sorcery: The Curious History of Wax Figurines in Medieval Europe,” in Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century, ed. Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 149. 35. William of Malmesbury, The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, ed. and trans. R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2015), 27; on the fairly limited influence of this collection, see Thomson and Winterbottom’s introduction, lvi. 36. Ihnat and Mesler translate “ad Domini Iesu ludibrium” as “for the mockery of our lord Jesus,” a translation that brings the scene closer in line with Thomas’s representation of the Jews’ motives in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich (Ihnat and Mesler, “From Christian Devotion to Jewish Sorcery,” 149). 37. William of Malmesbury, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 27. 38. Ihnat and Mesler, “From Christian Devotion to Jewish Sorcery,” 146; they cite Megan Holmes, “Ex-­votos: Materiality, Memory and Cult,” in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World, ed. M. W. Cole and R. Zorach (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 165–88. “The growing popularity of wax votives coincided with the emergence of two types of legend that Jews misused such objects. One type of abuse appeared in stories that depicted Jews fashioning wax figurines and crucifying them in scorn and mockery of Christ’s Passion. The other type of abuse



Notes to Pages 133–136

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was a form of sympathetic magic, in which harm done to the figurine was believed to cause physical injury or to induce states such as love or madness in the person depicted; this activity was also associated with Jews in chronicles and in the evidence from legal trials” (Ihnat and Mesler, “From Christian Devotion to Jewish Sorcery,” 135). See also the brief discussion in Abulafia, Christian-­ Jewish Relations, 173. 39. Ihnat and Mesler, “From Christian Devotion to Jewish Sorcery,” 150. The idea that Jews crucify wax effigies of Christ is seen elsewhere: see Schmitt, Conversion of Herman the Jew, 157. 40. William of Malmesbury, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 26. 41. On alleged international Jewish conspiracy, see Irven M. Resnick, Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 135–36. 42. Thomas may have heard of the rumor of a “Jewish pope” from a different source. On the idea of a “Jewish king” in Narbonne, see Resnick, Marks of Distinction, 196 n. 85. 43. Chazan notes that the introduction of a ritual element to this story recalls the allegations in Rigord’s chronicle (Medieval Stereotypes, 71). 44. Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 83. 45. D. H. Green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance, 85. 46. Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 90. 47. See Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 62–63; Rubin, Life and Passion, 225 n. 59. Eamon Duffy argues against Rose’s conclusions in a short essay on William of Norwich, pointing out that there is no evidence for Rose’s claim that Simon de Novers was a returning crusader, and he also questions Rose’s timeline for the murder and trial (Eamon Duffy, Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity [London: Bloomsbury, 2018], 131). Duffy cites Harper-­Bill, who accepts that the speech is “imaginary,” but maintains the historicity of the trial: “there is no reason to doubt the statement that Bishop William put his case most eloquently” (Christopher Harper-­ Bill, “Bishop William Turbe and the Diocese of Norwich, 1146 – 1174,” Anglo-­Norman Studies 7 [1984]: 143). 48. Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 277 n. 19. 49. Rose has called this translation of the name into question. See Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 75. 50. “Demum christianorum ac succedentium Norwici iudeorum indecorum coram rege Stephano disceptationem supposui peroratoriam” (6–7); “rhetorical version” is the translation of Jessopp and James, in Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, 7; Rubin translates as “in direct speech” (Life and Passion, 6). I have preferred “a disputation” as the translation of disceptionem where Rubin has “the legal dispute.” In my translation I have also emended the articles: substituting “a” for “the.” The lack of articles in Latin leaves the translator with a choice—here the choice between the definite and indefinite article makes a significant difference, as the selection of the definite article in English gives a greater sense of the historicity of the episode. 51. Jessopp and James, “Preface,” xi. 52. Bale, Feeling Persecuted, 56. On the larger context of this episode in relation to the tradition of disputations between Christians and Jews, see the essays collected in Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature and the Rise of Anti-­Judaism in the West (c. 1100–1150) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); and Alex J. Novikoff, The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), for the ways in which scholastic habits of disputation permeated other aspects of literary production. 53. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 67.

198

Notes to Pages 136–139

54. D. H. Green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance, 10. 55. Stein, Reality Fictions, 8. 56. On the medieval dream vision, see the classic A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-­Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); also Kathryn Lynch, The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 57. Otter, Inventiones, 1; Otter suggests that “the ‘other world’ episodes .  .  . create playful spaces that permit writers to articulate the hypothetical, the ironic, the uncertain, and at the same time to reflect on and play with such intrusive voices in their texts. They are designed to shake the firm construct of referentiality, of both sorts, and to allow for doubt, whether serious or playful” (93). C. S. Watkins, on the other hand, has warned against literary readings that, in his estimation, go too far in evacuating these texts of their historical intent (History and the Supernatural in Medieval England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 16). 58. Steven Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 135. 59. These two visions are examples of a genre that became popular in the last quarter of the twelfth century. As Jacques LeGoff describes it: “In these tales the souls of the dead undergoing punishment in Purgatory appeared to the living and asked for suffrages or warned them to mend their ways before it was too late” (The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], 177). LeGoff has discussed this genre from the point of view of the “birth of purgatory,” in (mainly) theological texts. Aisling Byrne has discussed it from the point of view of “otherworld” journeys in (mainly) romance texts (Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016]). Jonas Wellendorf explores the intersection of purgatorial visions and fictionality in “True Records of Events That Could Have Taken Place: Fictionality in Vision Literature,” in Agapitos and Mortensen, Medieval Narratives Between History and Fiction, 141–66. None of these scholars discuss these two episodes from Thomas of Monmouth. See also Watkins, History and the Supernatural; Otter, Inventiones; D. D. R. Owen, The Vision of Hell: Infernal Journeys in Medieval Literature (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1970). Thomas does not use the noun purgatorium, referring instead to “loca diversa” (68) and “loca . . . penalia” (75). On the emergence of this genre in Cistercian contexts, see LeGoff, Birth of Purgatory, 180–81. John McCulloh notes that the chronicle of Helinand of Froidmont, seemingly written independently of Thomas of Monmouth’s life of William, also describes an otherworld vision that witnesses William in heaven (McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder,” 719–23; and McCulloh, “Unofficial Elements,” 180–81). 60. Byrne, Otherworlds, 21. 61. Partner, “The New Cornificius,” 12. 62. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 84–85: “Philosophy does not discountenance all stories nor does it accept all.” It accepts stories that “draw the reader’s attention to certain kinds of virtue.” The Dream of Scipio is itself an otherworld vision. 63. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, 89. 64. Watkins, History and the Supernatural, 119. 65. Watkins, History and the Supernatural, 118. 66. This is the miracle that says that memory of William had almost died out. It seems almost as much about Herbert as about William: “By this miracle, indeed, the memory of the blessed martyr William was revived, for it had been gradually declining and in the hearts of all was almost completely dead. Again, I wish the diligent reader to evaluate and assess carefully from this account what virtuous power Bishop HERBERT, of pious memory, has with God” (55–56).



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67. The incubus is common in miracle and exempla collections as well as romance; see Nicholas Kiessling, The Incubus in English Literature: Provenance and Progeny (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1977); Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); William MacLehose, “Fear, Fantasy and Sleep in Medieval Medicine,” in Emotions and Health, 1200–1700, ed. Elena Carrera (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 67–94; Maaike van der Lugt, “The Incubus in Scholastic Debate: Medicine, Theology and Popular Belief,” in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), 175–200. 68. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britannia, vol. 5. ed. and trans. Neil Wright (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), 140–43. 69. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britannia, 142–43. 70. Indeed, it is tempting to identify a “Monmouth school” of historiography. Several scholars have noticed the shared cognomen: see Jessopp and James, “Introduction,” ix; and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Flow of Blood,” 39–40. Rubin comments: If Thomas was indeed born and educated in South Wales, he may have been familiar with the traditions of creative forgery and fiction which several Welsh writers developed so effectively in the twelfth century, in particular Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1155). Geoffrey was the foremost British historian of the twelfth century in terms of popularity and fame, though he was not without detractors. . . . Geoffrey’s colleague, Caradoc of Llancarfan specialized in writing fictitious hagiography, as did the anonymous author of the Book of Llandaff. In fact, the monks of South Wales in the decades just before and during Thomas’s life were accomplished in the art of forgery and invention. (Rubin, “Introduction,” xii) 71. On the use of the dream vision in authorizing saints’ miracles, see Michael E. Goodich, “Vision, Dream and Canonization Policy Under Innocent III,” in Pope Innocent and His World, ed. John C. Moore (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 151–63. 72. Spearing, Medieval Dream-­Poetry, 4–5. 73. In this context it is unsurprising that the eighteenth century, also often discussed in the context of the development of fictionality and realism in the development of the novel (see Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006]: 1:336–63), is also the great age of the peephole in literature: Fanny Hill, for example, is the peephole novel par excellence. But peepholes also feature prominently in the plots of Tristram Shandy, Pamela, and Shamela. 74. Greta Olson, “Keyholes in Eighteenth-­Century Novels as Liminal Spaces Between the Public and Private Spheres,” in Sites of Discourse–Public and Private Spheres–Legal Culture: Papers from a Conference Held at the Technical University of Dresden, December 2001, ed. Uwe Böker and Julie A. Hibbard (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 161. 75. Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Woman’s Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 9. 76. John of Forde, Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite, trans. Matarasso, 139. 77. Hartmann von Aue, Der arme Heinrich, trans. Frank Tobin, as Poor Heinrich, in Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry: The Complete Works of Hartman von Aue, ed. and trans. Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard H. Lawson (University Park: Pennsylvania University State Press, 2001), 230–31. 78. Chrétien de Troyes, Complete Romances, trans. Staines, 160.

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Notes to Pages 144–154

79. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 88. 80. Béroul, The Romance of Tristan, trans. Alan S. Fedrick (New York: Penguin, 1970), 145. 81. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography, 83–88. 82. John Ward, “Some Principles of Rhetorical Historiography in the Twelfth Century,” in Breisach, Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, 146. 83. R. Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature and the Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 4. See also Paul Hyams, “Law, Literature, and the Discourse of Dispute,” in Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture, ed. Andrew Galloway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 43. For an interesting parallel discussion, see Johnson, Blood Libel, 30–58, on the pervasiveness of the juridical imagination in the historiography of the ritual murder accusation. 84. Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 14. On trial by ordeal in the twelfth century, especially as a literary motif, see Stephen D. White, “Imaginary Justice: The End of the Ordeal and the Survival of the Duel,” Medieval Perspectives 13 (1998): 32–55; Colin Morris, “Judicium Dei: The Social and Political Significance of the Ordeal in the Eleventh Century,” Studies in Church History 12 (1975): 95–111; Paul R. Hyams, “Trial by Ordeal: The Key to Proof in the Early Common Law,” in On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne, ed. Morris S. Arnold et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 90–126; Margaret H. Kerr, Richard D. Forsyth, and Michael J. Plyley, “Cold Water and Hot Iron: Trial by Ordeal in England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 4 (1992): 573–95. 85. I borrow this neat formulation from R. Howard Bloch, “New Philology and Old French,” Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990): 48. 86. Thomas of Britain, Tristran, ed. and trans. Stewart Gregory, in Early French Tristan Poems, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1998), 2:4–5; Thomas’s Tristan survives in nine different fragments—interestingly, one of these appears in a manuscript (the thirteenth-­century Oxford Bodleian Library MS Douce d. 6) alongside two commentaries on the “True Cross,” suggesting that a medieval audience would have been used to reading it across genres (Early French Tristan Poems, 2:3). 87. The term “equivocal oath” belongs to Ralph Hexter, Equivocal Oaths and Ordeals in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 88. Adam Miyashiro, “Disease and Deceit in Béroul’s Roman de Tristan,” Neophilologus 89, no. 4 (2005): 510. 89. D. H. Green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance, 87. 90. M.  D. Anderson suggests that one reason no one wants to claim the body might have to do with the legal category of “murdrum”: “Desire to evade the fine would also incline anyone who might accidentally discover such a burial to say nothing about it. This point is relevant to Thomas’ account of the Jews’ attempt to dispose of the body of St William. . . . If the body of an unidentified boy had been found in some Hundred at a little distance from Norwich, he would have been assumed to be a Frenchman, unless his Englishry could be proved, owing to a curious provision of the law, derived from its original purpose. The murder fine would have been extorted from the wholly guiltless inhabitants of that Hundred” (M. D. Anderson, A Saint at Stake: The Strange Death of William of Norwich, 1144 [London: Faber, 1964], 30–31). 91. Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 56. Brooks’s example is about windows rather than peepholes. 92. Roger Ray, “Rhetorical Skepticism and Verisimilar Narrative in John of Salisbury’s Historia Pontificalis,” in Breisach, Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, 84. 93. Morse, Truth and Convention, 155.



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94. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141–48. See Partner’s similar reading of a scene from the Life of Christina of Markyate, “Medieval Histories and Modern Realism: Yet Another History of the Novel,” Modern Language Notes 114, no. 4 (1999): 867–68. Historians have often used these details as sources for material history. See, for example, Bell, “Introduction,” in Wulfric of Haselbury, by John, Abbot of Ford, xxviii–xxix. 95. Rubin, Gentile Tales, 70. 96. Derek Attridge, “Context, Idioculture, Invention,” New Literary History 42 (2011): 686.

Afterword 1. For a critical historiography of how these texts were developed into a sustained antisemitic genre, see Langmuir, “Historiographic Crucifixion,” 282–98. 2. The Chronicles of Robert de Monte, trans. Joseph Stevenson (1856; repr., [Lampeter, Wales]: Llanerch, 1991), 114–15; Chronique de Robert de Torigni, ed. Léopold Delisle, vol. 1 (Rouen: A. Le Brument, 1872), 27–28. Although this is the chronicle entry for 1171, as Stevenson notes, since the death of Richard of Pontoise was alleged to have occurred in 1179, “this passage must have been written, or interpolated, after that date” (114 n. 9). On the debated date of the Richard of Pontoise incident, see Kenneth Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters; Continuity in the Catholic-­ Jewish Encounter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 245–46 n. 4. 3. Hayden White, “Historical Text as Literary Artefact,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 95. 4. For the documents of the Blois accusation, see Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791 (1938; repr., Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2002), 127– 46. For a full accounting of the sources for this incident, see Robert Chazan, “The Blois Incident of 1171: A Study in Jewish Intercommunal Organization,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 36 (1968): 13–31; and Susan L. Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois: Romantic Myths and Narrative Conventions,” Jewish History 12, no. 1 (1998): 29–46. For analysis, see Robert Chazan, ed., Church, State and Jew in the Middle Ages (New York: Behrman House, 1980), 114–16; Susan L. Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Kirsten Anne Fudeman, Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 60–88; William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 18–22; Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 151–86. 5. Einbinder, “Pucellina of Blois,” 29–46; and Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 165–67. 6. Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 183. Rose notes that the accusation at Blois seems to have kicked off a series of other accusations in the north of France, but there are so few details available that we cannot be sure (Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 151–52). Indeed, with the exception of the case of Pontoise, discussed below, it is not entirely clear that these are in fact accusations of ritual murder: see Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 157–58; Langmuir, “Historiographic Crucifixion,” 284. 7. Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France, 49; Rigord, Histoire de Philippe Auguste, 15. I discuss this chronicle briefly in Chapter 3. There is also a later, fifteenth-­century, description of the purported martyrdom of Richard of Pontoise that is printed in the Acta Sanctorum 3. 591–94. On Rigord’s treatment of Philip Augustus’s relationship to his Jewish subjects, see Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes, 52–53. Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 18–19.

202

Notes to Pages 160–163

8. Lambert of Waterloo, Annales Cameracenses, ed. I. M. Lappenberg, in Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores, vol. 16 (repr., New York, 1963), 536. 9. Delaborde, Oeuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, 1:180. 10. Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 226. See also Emily Rose, “Royal Power and Ritual Murder: Some Notes on the Expulsion of the Jews from the Royal Domain of France,” in Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan, ed. Katherine L. Jansen, Guy Geltner, and Anne E. Lester (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 51–63. 11. Historia Monasterii S. Petri Gloucestriæ, ed. W. H. Hart, Rolls Series 33 (London, 1863–65), 20. The translations are based on Joseph Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England: Documents and Records (London: David Nutt, 1893), 45–46, where the entry is excerpted. There is a full translation of the chronicle by David Welander, The History, Art and Architecture of Gloucester Cathedral (Stroud: Sutton, 1991), 610–11. 12. Historia Monasterii S. Petri Gloucestriæ, 20. 13. Hillaby, “The Ritual-­Child-­Murder Accusation,” 83. 14. The Peterborough Chronicle contains an entry about Harold of Gloucester that describes him as having been crucified. Hillaby has suggested that it was through the Gloucester connection that the ritual crucifixion accusation was exported to the Continent; Roger Dahood, to the contrary, argues that there is no explicit association of crucifixion with Harold’s death until the late thirteenth century (Hillaby, “The Ritual-­Child-­Murder Accusation,” 101; Dahood, “English Historical Narratives of Jewish Child-­Murder, Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, and the Date of Chaucer’s Unknown Source,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 [2009]: 131–32). For Langmuir and Dahood, this has suggested that Harold’s martyrdom was not originally constructed as a “boy-­crucifixion,” and only later took on that aspect through association with William of Norwich (Langmuir, “Historiographic Crucifixion,” 284–85). In a later article Dahood argues that the roasting of the Paschal Lamb in Exodus underlies the roasting of Harold of Gloucester and offers a typological connection to the crucifixion (Roger Dahood, “Boy Crucifixion, Sainthood, and the Puzzling Case of Harold of Gloucester,” in Saints and Cults in Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2015 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Susan Powell [Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2017], 140–55). 15. Hillaby, “The Ritual-­Child-­Murder Accusation,” 74. 16. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 46; Historia Monasterii S. Petri Gloucestriæ, 20. 17. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 46. 18. Historia Monasterii S. Petri Gloucestriæ, 20. 19. Richard of Devizes, Cronicon, ed. and trans. Appleby, 64. 20. Richard of Devizes, Cronicon, 64. 21. Richard of Devizes, Cronicon, 68. 22. Richard of Devizes, Cronicon, 69. 23. Richard of Devizes, Cronicon, 69. 24. Richard of Devizes, Cronicon, 67. 25. He found the record of a legal action against some Jews from Winchester, without mention of the purported offense (Roth, History of the Jews in England, 21–22 n. 1). 26. Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. Howlett, lxxii. 27. Nancy Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-­Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 176–78. 28. See, for example, Anthony P. Bale, “Richard of Devizes and Fictions of Judaism,” Jewish Culture and History 3, no. 2 (2000): 55–72; Heather Blurton, “Richard of Devizes’ Cronicon, Menippean Satire, and the Jews of Winchester,” Exemplaria 22, no. 4 (2010): 265–84; Robert



Notes to Pages 163–164

203

Levine, “Why Praise Jews: Satire and History in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 12 (1986): 291–96. 29. Michael Jones, “‘The Place of the Jews’: Anti-­Judaism and Theatricality in Medieval Culture,” Exemplaria 12, no. 2 (2000): 347. See also, in a similar vein, Bale, “Fictions of Judaism,” 133. 30. Jocelin of Brakelond, Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, trans. Diana Greenway and Jane Sayers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 15. 31. Gervase of Canterbury, The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs (London, 1879), 1:296. 32. See Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, chap. 4 (“Cult: The Resurrections of Robert of Bury”); Anthony P. Bale, “‘House Devil, Town Saint’: Anti-­Semitism and Hagiography in Medieval Suffolk,” in Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. Sheila Delany (New York: Routledge, 2002), 185–210. 33. Jessopp and James, “Introduction,” in Life and Miracles, lxxv–lxxvi. 34. The Würzburg incident is included by Richard Utz, “Remembering Ritual Murder: The Anti-­Semitic Blood Accusation Narrative in Medieval and Contemporary Cultural Memory,” in Genre and Ritual: The Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, ed. Eyolf Østrem et al. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2005), 145–62; Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation” ; and Langmuir, “Historiographic Crucifixion”; but not by most other scholars of the accusation. 35. On Adam of Bristol, see Christoph Cluse, “‘Fabula ineptissima’: Die Ritualmordelegende um Adam von Bristol nach der Handscrift London, British Library, Harley 957,” Aschkenas 5 (1995): 293–330; Stacey, “From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration.” 36. Peter of Blois to Bishop of Ely, ca. 1174, in Michael Adler, Jews of Medieval England (London: Jewish Historical Society, 1939), 60.

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Index

Abelard, Peter, 106 Abulafia, Anna Sapir, 20, 22, 112, 115, 197n52 Adam of Eynsham, 88 Aelred of Rievaulx: affective devotion and, 116–117, 193n93; crucifixes and, 186n81; exegesis and, 121; Godric of Finchale and, 15; Herod and, 106; Jesus at the Age of Twelve and, 90–91, 108–115; recluses and, 76–78; simplicity and, 17 Aelwerd Ded, 150–151 affective devotion: child saints and, 89–92; childlikeness and, 117–121; Jesus at the Age of Twelve and, 9, 108–110, 113, 193n93; as scripts for performance of feeling, 115–116, 193n110 Agnes of Crombe: as cipher, 19; imitatio Christi and, 80; literary culture and, 4; vernacular language and, 69–70; vision of William of Norwich and, 1, 24, 54–55, 119, 155 Agnus Dei, 43–45, 50 Alexandre-Bidon, Danièle, 104 allegory: Arimaspasians and griffins and, 32–33, 175–176n27; childhood and, 117; CUL Add. MS 3037 and, 55–56; Herod as Jew and, 106; as interpretive framework, 8–9; as literary genre, 174n7; typology and, 174n9. See also typology altars, 34–36, 55–56, 96, 98 Amalarius of Mertz, 37–38, 55 Ambrosius Autpertus, 33, 175n26 anchorholds, 74–77. See also hermitages anchorites. See hermits Ancrene Wisse, 76 anti-Judaism. See antisemitism antisemitism: affective devotion and, 9, 89–90, 115–116, 118; children and, 91–92; in exegesis of Finding in the Temple, 113–114; fictionality and, 128, 156, 157; gender and, 18–19; Jewish fictional characters and, 20;

Jewish poets and, 21; Jews as enemies of the cross and, 63–64, 80–84; John of Ford and, 182n15; The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and, 21, 84–86; literary culture and, 22–23; literary history and, 6; medieval history of, 1–5; ritual murder accusations and, 173n71, 201n1. See also Jews; Judaism Apocalypse, 33–34, 49–53, 175n26, 179–180n93 argumentum: in CUL Add. MS 3037, 131–132fig; dream visions and, 137–141; eyewitness accounts and, 151–153; in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, 129–136, 196n29; as rhetorical tool, 124–128, 195n22, 195n25; trial scenes and, 145–147 Ariès, Philippe, 91–92 Arimaspasians, 32–33, 175–176n27 arme Heinrich, Der (Hartmann von Aue), 143 Attridge, Derek, 155 Auerbach, Erich, 29 Augustine of Hippo, 28, 51 Auslander, Diane, 91–92 Baldric of Bourgeuil, 83 Bale, Anthony, 3, 20, 22, 123, 135, 177n61 Barthes, Roland, 6, 11, 155 Bartholomew of Farne, 67, 76 Bartlett, Robert, 146 Becket, Thomas, 4–5, 7, 68–69, 72–73, 176n33 Bede, 33–34, 44, 96, 105, 110, 175n26, 175–176n27 Beginnings of Medieval Romance, The (Green), 129 belief, 12–13, 126–127, 130, 136, 141–144, 148–151 Bellesmains, John, 7 Benedictine monasticism, 14–16, 25. See also monasticism Bernard of Angers, 13, 95–96, 98 Bernard of Clairvaux, 17, 75, 106, 110, 116

228 Index Béroul, 144, 147 Bestul, Thomas, 82 Biddick, Kathleen, 29 Bloch, R. Howard, 145 Blois incident, 157–159, 201n4, 201n6 blood libel. See ritual murder accusations Boeve de Haumptone, 178n74 Books of Miracles (Bernard of Angers), 95–96, 98 Botilda (devotee of William of Norwich), 58, 71 boys, 19, 90–91 Brithric, 68, 76 British Library, Harley MS 322, 68 British Library, MS Arundel 91, 96 Brooks, Peter, 153 Brother Robert, 147 Brown, Peter, 65 Bury Cross, 42 Bury St. Edmunds, 96, 99–100 Byrne, Aisling, 138 Cambridge University Library Additional MS 3037 (CUL Add. MS 3037): allegorical exegesis of, 30–35; Cistercian spirituality and, 17–18; composition of, 61; de planctu matris and, 47fig; devotion to Crucifixion and, 63–64, 85–86; hermits and, 59; Life of Godric of Finchale and, 181n8; liturgical language and, 55–56; manuscript context and, 6, 24–27 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 3 Catherine, Saint, 99–100 Celestial Jerusalem, 7–8, 26, 30–34 Centuries of Childhood (Ariès), 91 chastity. See virginity Chaucer, Geoffrey, 3, 21 child saints, 89, 91–100, 111, 120–121 childlikeness, 17, 112, 115–120 children: boys and, 19; childlikeness as model of devotion, 116–117; consent and, 102–106, 191n57; fetishization of, 118–120; innocence of, 90–92; Jews and, 121; hermits and, 85; ritual murder and, 9; simplicity and, 17; in twelfth-century England, 87–88. See also child saints Chrétien de Troyes, 62, 126, 143 Christ: allegorical readings of Eucharist and, 38; bodily representations of, 26–27, 35–37, 63; childlikeness of, 116–119, 194n124;

devotion to Crucifixion and, 73–75, 76–78; as emerald, 32–34; Eucharist and, 56; humanity of, 18; Massacre of the Innocents and, 53, 103–105; Old Testament prophecies and, 28–30; hermits and, 61; sacrifice of priests and, 54–55; as twelve-year-old boy, 108–115; William of Norwich and, 24–25, 40–45, 101–102, 179n85 Christ Among the Doctors. See Finding in the Temple Christ Child, 9, 79–80, 87–90, 117–119 Christianity: in allegory of Finding in the Temple, 113–115; antisemitism and, 3–4; childlikeness in spiritual growth and, 117–118; children and, 91–92; Christian/ Jewish relations and, 22–23, 132–133, 170n31, 196nn30–31; gender and, 18–19; hermeneutical Jew and, 20; liturgical Mass and, 25–26; supersession and, 28–30 Christina of Markyate, 41, 67–70, 76, 79–80, 88, 178n67 Chronicle of Melrose Abbey, 164 Chronicle of St. Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester, 160–161 chronicles, 10–15, 123, 157–163 Cicero, 124, 129, 139 Cistercian spirituality: Aelred of Rievaulx and, 109–110; antisemitism and, 182n15; childlikeness and, 117–118; children and, 103, 191n57; composition and, 171n40; devotion to Crucifixion and, 85; eremitic lifestyle and, 74–75, 185n57; Isaac of Stella and, 37; The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and, 14–18; hermithermits and, 61 Cîteaux Abbey, 74 Clanchy, Michael, 78 Cochelin, Isabelle, 103 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 4, 46, 91–92 Cohen, Jeremy, 20 Colman, Edward, 7 Commentary of the Dream of Scipio (Macrobius), 138–139 Commentary on the Apocalypse of John (Haimo of Auxerre), 7–8, 25–26, 30–35, 55, 63 Commentary on the Psalms (Lombard), 51 Conques, France, 95–96 Conrad of Eberbach, 75 Conrad of Hirsau, 125 consent, 102–106, 110, 191n57, 191n59 Coon, Lynda, 123

Index 229 Cronicon (Richard of Devizes), 161–163 cross. See crucifixion crucifixion: conquest of Jerusalem and, 83; devotion to, 62, 73–80, 85–86; eyewitness accounts and, 152; Massacre of the Innocents and, 106–107; representation and, 27; ritual murder accusations and, 9, 157–165 Crucifixion (of Christ): allegory and, 35–39, 41–42, 45–46; Christ’s humility and, 112; Jews as enemies of the cross and, 80–84; Massacre of the Innocents and, 53 Crusades, 64, 81–84 Cubitt, Catherine, 95 de Certeau, Michel, 10 de Chesney, John, 97, 190n43 de Chesney, Sybil, 96–97, 190n42 de Chesney, William, 97 De inventione (Cicero), 129 Derby Psalter, 51 Despres, Denise, 27, 92, 102, 109, 116, 180n97, 190n53 devotional texts, 5–6, 18, 22 Dickens, Charles, 3 Divine Office, 25 Dox, Donnalee, 37–38 Dream of Scipio (Cicero), 139 dream visions, 24, 54–55, 87, 90, 119, 136–141, 199n71. See also otherworld visions; purgatorial visions Dumville, David, 55–56 Durham Cathedral, 66 Eadmer of Canterbury, 13 Edelman, Lee, 118–119, 188n12, 194n126 Edmund, Saint, 73 Einbinder, Susan, 159 Eleazar (murdered Jew), 134–135, 145–146 Eliot, T. S., 22 Elviva (William of Norwich’s mother), 40–44, 46, 151 emerald, 7–8, 26, 30–35, 175–176n27. See also smaragdus excerpt enfances, 118, 194n124 Erec et Enide (Chrétien de Troyes), 62 eremitic lifestyle, 8–9, 58–61, 64–65, 68, 73–75, 183n31. See also recluses; hermits Etymologies (Isidore of Seville), 125, 129, 175–176n27, 178n72 Eucharist, 27, 34–38, 44–45, 54–56

Eve of Wilton, 76–77, 80, 183n27 exegesis, 30–31, 53, 108–116, 121 Exordium magnum cisterciense (Conrad of Eberbach), 75 eyewitness accounts: argumentum and, 130–136; belief and, 148–153; historiography and, 138; peepholes and, 141–144; as rhetorical tool, 124–128; ritual murder accusations and, 161–162; trial scenes and, 145–147 fabula, 124–125, 129–130, 136, 195n25 Faith, Saint (Sainte Foy), 95–99, 120, 189–190nn36–37, 194n126 familial life, 19 fictionality: antisemitism and, 157; argumentum and, 128–133, 135–136, 153–156; dream visions and, 136–141; Jews and, 19–20; in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, 124–125; romance and, 125–127; trial scenes and, 147; in twelfth-century England, 6; in twelfth-century literature, 9–10, 122–123 Finding in the Temple, 90, 108–115 First Crusade, 82 Fitzwalter, Robert, 96–97 fitzWalter, William, 59 Flanigan, C. Clifford, 52–53 Ford Abbey, 66, 182–183n23 futurity, 118–120 Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia, 25 gender, 18–19 genre. See literary genres Geoffrey of Canterbury, 72–73 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 140, 199n70 Gesta Philippi (Rigord), 159–160 Glossa ordinaria, 29–31, 53, 105–106, 110–111, 192n87 Godric of Finchale: antisemitism and, 64; Christ Child and, 88; concerns for posterity and, 182–183n23; devotion to Crucifixion and, 73, 76–80; hagiography of, 7–9, 15; healing miracles and, 70–71; popularity of, 21; as hermit, 58–61, 65–68, 181n6; as soldier of Christ, 82–83; Thomas Becket and, 72; vernacular language and, 69 Godric of Throckenholt, 67 Golding, Brian, 74 Good Friday, 81 Goscelin of St. Bertin, 76–77, 80

230 Index Gospel of John, 81 Gospel of Luke, 109–110, 113 Gospel of Matthew, 105–106, 116 Gospels, 90, 108 Green, D. H., 126–127, 129, 134, 136 griffins, 32–33, 175–176n27 Guerric of Igny, 112–113, 193n96 Guibert of Nogent, 27 Guillaume le Breton, 160 hagiography: allegory and, 39–45; child saint tropes in, 89; Christ model of, 25; concerns for posterity and, 66–67, 182–183n23; fictionality and, 123–124, 155–156; The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and, 5, 21; literary culture and, 22; as literary genre, 10–11; peepholes and, 143–144; hermits and, 58–61; rhetoric and, 125; ritual murder accusations and, 163; romance and, 141; saints’ lives and, 8–9; skeptics and, 12–14; Thomas Becket and, 71–72; trial scenes and, 145–147 Haimo of Auxerre, 7–8, 15, 25–27, 30–35, 170n23, 175n26 Haimo of Halberstadt (see Haimo of Auxerre) Harold of Gloucester, 5, 10, 160–161, 163, 202n14 Harper-Bill, Christopher, 70, 72 Hartmann van Aue, 143 Heil, Johannes, 31 Henry de Sprowston, 45 Henry of Coquet Island, 76 Henry of Huntingdon, 66 Herbert of Losinga, 14, 98, 137, 139, 190n46, 198n66 hermeneutical Jew (Cohen), 20, 172n62 hermitages, 58, 60–61, 71, 78, 180–181n3. See also anchorholds hermits: antisemitism and, 64; Cistercian monasticism and, 74–75; cult of Thomas Becket and, 72–73; hagiography and, 15; healing miracles and, 70–71; imitatio Christi and, 76–80; Letter on the Office of the Mass and, 8–9; recluses and, 180–181nn2–4; in twelfth-century England, 64–65, 85; vernacular language and, 68–70; William of Norwich and, 58–61, 65–67. See also eremitic lifestyle; recluses Hermits and the New Monasticism (Leyser), 74 Herod, 51–53, 105–106, 118 Herodotus, 175–176n27

High Middle Ages: affective devotion and, 120; age of consent in, 102–103; allegory in, 29; children and, 87–88, 91–92, 116; fictionality and, 9; literary forms and, 2–5 historia, 124–127, 129–130, 132–133, 135–136, 152, 195n25, 195–196n27 Historia Pontificalis ( John of Salisbury), 126 Historia Regum Britannie (Geoffrey of Monmouth), 140 historiography: antisemitism and, 5; argumentum and, 133, 136, 153–154; dream visions and, 137, 141; eyewitness accounts and, 148–153; fictionality and, 9–10, 122–128; Geoffrey of Monmouth and, 199n70; ritual murder accusations and, 167n2, 168n9; trial scenes and, 145–147 Holy Innocents. See Massacre of the Innocents Holy Trinity, 14, 97–98 holy water, 70–71 Holy Week, 42–45 Homilies (Bede), 105 Honorius Augustodenensis, 37–38 Honorius Autun, 108 Horsham St. Faith, 96–98, 190n40, 190n42 Hugh of Lincoln, 3, 5 humility, 110–113 Ida (daughter of Stannard Wrancberd of Norwich), 99–100 Ihnat, Kati, 133 imaginative literature, 9 imitatio Christi, 61, 76–80 Incarnation, 88, 111–115, 121, 193n95 incubus, 139–141, 199n67 innocence, 50, 70, 90–93, 101–105, 116–118, 121. See also simplicitas (simplicity) Innocent III, Pope, 37 intentionality, 102–106, 110–111, 169n11 intertextuality, 5–8, 17–18, 21, 157–165 Iogna-Prat, Dominique, 14–15 Isaac of Norwich, 20 Isaac of Stella, 7–8, 14, 24–27, 30, 34–37, 109–111, 116, 176nn32–33 Isaiah 63:2-3, 41–42 Isidore of Seville, 90, 102, 125, 129, 175–176n27, 178n72, 180n2 Ivo of Chartres, 37 Ivo of Wardon, 108–111, 116 James, M. R., 5, 7, 180n98 Jerome, Saint, 29–30, 44, 174n17

Index 231 Jerusalem, 78, 82–84, 109–110 Jessopp, Augustus, 5, 135, 180n98 Jesus. See Christ Jesus at the Age of Twelve (De Jesu puero duodenni) (Aelred of Rievaulx), 9, 90–91, 108–115, 117, 121, 193n93 Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 3 Jews: allegory and, 27, 35, 42–46; antisemitism in affective devotion and, 115, 118–121; argumenta against and, 131–133; as characters in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, 19–20; children and, 92–93, 108–109, 191n59; Christian martyrs and, 50–51; Christian/Jewish relations and, 170n31, 196nn30–31; disbelief in Incarnation and, 111–115; as enemies of the cross, 63–64, 80–84; eyewitness accounts and, 149–150; Hebrew poetry in England and, 21, 172–173n66; John de Chesney and, 97; Massacre of the Innocents and, 89, 101–107; as opponents of Mary, 47–49; Passion of Christ and, 26; ritual murder accusations and, 1–3, 9–11, 157–165, 196n36, 203n34; Simon de Novers and, 134–135; trial scenes and, 145–146; violence in exegetical tradition and, 53; Virgin Mary and, 169n13; wax figures and, 133–134, 196–197n38; William of Norwich and, 24. See also antisemitism; Judaism Jews of Toledo, 133–134 Jocelin of Brakelond, 163 John of Ford: antisemitism and, 182n15; childlikeness and, 116–117; concerns for posterity and, 67; imitatio Christi and, 77; Life of Wulfric of Haselbury and, 7, 61; simplicity and, 17; vernacular language and, 68; Wulfric of Haselbury and, 14; Wulfric of Haselbury as soldier of Christ and, 83 John of Salisbury, 126 Johnson, Hannah, 12, 171n45, 196n29 Jones, Michael, 163 Joseph (father of Jesus), 90, 109–110, 115 Judaism, 18–19, 22–23, 28–30. See also antisemitism; Jews Judas Iscariot, 42–43 Julius, Anthony, 22 Jurnet of Norwich, 20 Kenelm, Saint, 89, 94–95 keyholes. See peepholes Kienzle, Beverly, 81, 85

Kobialka, Michal, 27 Koopmans, Rachel, 66–67, 72 Kruger, Steven, 18–20, 137 Krummel, Miriamne Ara, 21 lamb imagery, 31, 43–45, 50–53, 95 Lamb of the Apocalypse, 31, 43–44, 50 Lampert-Weissig, Lisa, 39 Langmuir, Gavin, 4, 56, 91, 167n2, 169n11 Last Supper, 37–38 Leclercq, Jean, 39 Legarda (devout widow), 45, 149 Lett, Didier, 104 Letter on the Office of the Mass (Isaac of Stella), 7–8, 24–26, 30, 34–39, 55–56, 63, 109, 116 Lewin, 87, 90, 107–108, 137–138 Leyser, Henrietta, 74 libellus, 7–8, 24–27, 30–31, 55–56, 63, 169n19 Liber confortatus (Goscelin of St. Bertin), 76–77 Liber officialis (Amalarius of Mertz), 37–38 Licence, Tom, 15, 59, 64–65, 74, 180nn2–3 Life and Passion of William of Norwich, The (Thomas of Monmouth): affective devotion and, 119–120; allegory and, 28–30, 34, 38–39; antisemitism and, 157; argumentum and, 153–155; Christ Child and, 80; Chronicle of St. Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester and, 161; Cistercian spirituality and, 15–18; cult of Thomas Becket and, 72–73; devotion to Crucifixion and, 62–63, 73, 84–86; dream visions and, 136–141; eyewitness accounts and, 148–153; fictionality and, 122–128, 194n9; futurity of childhood and, 120; gender and, 19; historical background of, 1–5, 167n1; innocence of children in, 90–93; intertextuality and, 6–10, 21; Jesus at the Age of Twelve and, 115; Jews as enemies of the cross and, 81–84; literary culture and, 22–23; liturgical language and, 24–26, 40, 46–50, 54–57; Massacre of the Innocents and, 51–53; peepholes and, 141–144; Saint Faith and, 97–100; skeptics and, 12–14; structure of, 194n2; William as twelve-yearold boy and, 108–112 Life of Godric of Finchale (Walter): Cistercian spirituality and, 15; in CUL Add. MS 3037, 68; devotion to Crucifixion and, 63, 85–86; imitatio Christi and, 76–80; intertextuality of, 7–9, 59–61; other versions of, 181n8; popularity of, 21

232 Index Life of St. Dunstan (Eadmer of Canterbury), 13 Life of St. Rumwold, 94 Life of Wulfric of Haselbury ( John of Ford): Cistercian spirituality and, 14; devotion to Crucifixion and, 63, 85–86; historical background of, 181n7; intertextuality of, 7–9, 21, 59–61; The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and, 17–18; multilingualism and, 68; Osbern’s vision and, 142, 152 literary analogues, 10, 164–165 literary culture: antisemitism and, 21–23; cults of child saints and, 94–100; The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and, 4–5, 122–128, 154; Massacre of the Innocents and, 103–104; persecuting societies and, 2; of twelfth century, 9–10 literary genres: affective devotion and, 119–120; allegory and, 174n7; argumentum and, 129; childhood narratives and, 118; dream visions and, 137; fictionality and, 155–156; hagiography and, 8–11; The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and, 2–5; rhetorical theory and, 123–125, 128; ritual murder accusations and, 157–165; romance and, 141–142; skeptics and, 12–14 literary history: antisemitism and, 23; Jewish characters and, 19–20; The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and, 2–6, 21; William of Norwich and, 12 literary theory: argumentum and, 124–125; intertextuality and, 6–10; rhetoric and, 122–123 liturgical drama, 40, 47–49, 52, 103–104, 106, 178–179n78 liturgy: Agnes of Crombe’s vision and, 119; allegorical exegesis of, 37–39; allegorical tropes in hagiography and, 39–45; allegory and, 8–9, 26–27; CUL Add. MS 3037 and, 55–57; Good Friday and, 81; language of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and, 24–25, 46–54; literary culture and, 22; Massacre of the Innocents and, 103–106, 179n91; Nativity and, 112. See also Mass Liviva (William of Norwich’s aunt), 45–46 Lombard, Peter, 51 lorica (chain mail), 83 Love, Rosalind, 13, 95 MacLehose, William, 19, 44, 46–47, 87–88, 92 Macrobius, 138–139, 198n62 Marcus, Leah Sinanoglou, 88

Marlowe, Christopher, 3 martyrdom: allegory and, 24, 35–37, 41–46; Blois incident and, 159; of child saints, 94–95; children and, 89; consent and, 102–106; discourse of, 22; in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, 50–53, 83; narrative of William of Norwich and, 10–13; Thomas Becket and, 71–72 Martyrology (Bede), 96 Mary. See Virgin Mary masculinity, 19 Mass, 25–27, 36–39, 56. See also liturgy Massacre of the Innocents, 51–53, 89–90, 100–107, 115, 120–121, 179n91, 180n95 Mayr-Harting, Henry, 16, 65–67 McCulloh, John, 82 Medieval French Literature and the Law (Bloch), 145 medieval period. See High Middle Ages Meir ben Elijah of Norwich, 21, 172–173n66 Melor, Saint, 94–95, 189n32 Merlin, 140 Mesler, Katelyn, 133 Middle Ages. See High Middle Ages Middle English, 12 miracle working, 1–2, 4, 70, 95–99, 119–120, 128–129, 184n43 Miyashiro, Adam, 147 monasticism, 74–75, 187n93. See also Benedictine monasticism Monk of Eynsham, 62 Moore, R. I., 2 Morse, Ruth, 154 multilingualism, 68, 183–184n33 Munns, John, 63, 75–78 Nativity, 112–113 Natural History (Pliny the Elder), 175–176n27 New Testament, 8, 25, 28–30, 37, 51. See also Old Testament; supersession Norman Conquest, 65–67 Norwich, England, 19–21, 96 Norwich Cathedral, 1, 14, 66, 96–98 Nykrog, Per, 122–123 Old English, 12 Old Testament, 8, 25, 28–30, 37, 51, 174n9. See also New Testament; supersession Oliver Twist (Dickens), 3 On the Interpretation of Hebrew Names (St. Jerome), 44

Index 233 oratory, 145–147 otherworld visions, 124, 128–129, 137–141, 198n57, 198n59. See also dream visions; purgatorial visions Otter, Monika, 13, 79, 137, 186n82, 198n57 Pancras, Saint, 93–94 Partner, Nancy, 124, 138, 162 Paschal Lamb, 43–44 Passion of Christ, 1, 26–27, 38–39, 42–49, 81, 87 Passion plays, 48, 178–179n78 Passover, 81 paternity, 110–113 Paul the Apostle, 28, 31 peepholes, 141–144, 152–153, 199n73 persecuting society, 2–3 Peter, Saint, 50 Peter of Blois, 164 Peterborough Chronicle, 10–12, 45, 202n14 Philip Augustus (Philippe Auguste), 106–107, 159–160 Pierce, Joanne, 81 pilgrimage, 58–60, 78, 184n45 Planctus ante nescia, 48 planctus Mariae (mourning of Mary), 47, 178–179n78. See also Virgin Mary plausibility, 124, 128–130, 133–136, 154–155 Pliny the Elder, 175–176n27 poetry, 21, 123–124, 140–141, 159 pogroms, 83–84 posterity, 66–67 Prendergast, Christopher, 21 priesthood, 54–55 Prioress’s Tale (Chaucer), 21 Prodigal Son parable, 115 prophecy, 28–29, 41–46, 138 Psalms, 51 purgatorial visions, 129, 138–139, 141, 198n59. See also dream visions; otherworld visions queer theory, 118–119 Quintilian, 129–130 Rachel, 44, 52, 178n69 Ray, Roger, 153 realism, 154–155 Recht, Roland, 27 recluses, 75–80, 83, 180n2. See also eremitic lifestyle; hermits

Reginald of Durham, 15, 61, 79, 171n40, 181n8, 186n82 rhetoric: argumentum and, 129–130, 135–136, 153–154, 195n25; discursiveness and, 22; fictionality and, 9; in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, 122–128; ritual murder accusations and, 164–165; skeptics and, 12–13; trial scenes and, 145–147 Richard of Devizes, 10, 84, 161–163 Richard of Paris (or Pontoise), 10, 106–107, 159–160, 163, 192n76, 201n2, 201n7 Richard the Lionheart, 23, 84 Ridyard, Susan, 65 Rigord (chronicler), 106–107, 159–160 ritual murder accusations: allegory and, 38–39; antisemitism and, 173n71, 201n1; argumenta and, 133–135, 155; children and, 120–121; Christ Child and, 87–89; Cistercian textual community and, 18; Crucifixion and, 9; cults of child saints and, 100; discursiveness of, 21–23; family and, 92; fictionality and, 123–124, 128; First Crusade and, 82; Harold of Gloucester and, 202n14; hermeneutical Jew and, 20; historiography and, 167n2, 168n9; The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and, 1–7; as literary genre, 10–12, 157–165; liturgy and, 56–57; Massacre of the Innocents and, 53, 106–107; origins of, 168n9; skeptics and, 13–14; Thomas of Monmouth and, 169n11; in twelfth-century England, 85–86 Robert of Bury St. Edmunds, 5, 10, 100, 163–164, 180n98 Robert of Knaresborough, 66–67, 76, 183n28 Robert of Torigni, 157–160, 163–164 Roman de Rou (Wace), 126 romance: argumentum and, 136, 141; eremitic lifestyle and, 59; eyewitness accounts and, 153; fictionality and, 6, 125–128, 155; in High Middle Ages, 2, 123–124, 195n13; incubus and, 139–141; literary culture and, 22; peepholes and, 143–144; trial scenes and, 145–147 Rose, Emily, 4, 82, 103, 134–135, 159, 197n47 Roth, Cecil, 162, 168n9 royal martyrs, 94–95, 120 Rubin, Miri, 7, 14, 21, 48, 155, 167n1, 196n29 Rule for a Recluse (Aelred of Rievaulx), 76 Rumwold, Saint, 94–95 Rupert of Deutz, 37 Russell, Delbert, 96 Rutledge, Elizabeth, 20

234 Index sacraments, 54–55 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 125 Schultz, Magdelene, 92 Selby Abbey, 76 Sermo de conversione (Bernard of Clairvaux), 75 Sermon for the Epiphany of the Lord (Aelred of Rievaulx), 106 Seven Ages of Man, 102, 190n54 sexuality, 18–19 Shahar, Shulamith, 116 Short, Ian, 2 Sibton Abbey, 7 Signer, Michael, 29 Simon de Novers, 134–135, 145–147, 154, 197n47 Simon of Trent, 3, 5 Simon of Walsingham, 96 simplicitas (simplicity), 15–18, 91, 116–117, 171n45. See also innocence skeptics, 12–14, 49, 101–103, 122, 129, 148–149, 170n31 Smalley, Beryl, 31 smaragdus excerpt, 7, 31–33, 175–176n27. See also emerald socioeconomic milieu, 3–4, 65–68, 87–88, 183n26 Spearing, A. C., 140 St. William in the Wood, 54–55 Stammheim Missal, 41, 177n61 Stein, Robert M., 23, 123, 136 Stephen (Christian martyr), 50 Stephen, King, 12, 135 Sticca, Sandro, 47 Stock, Brian, 18 Strassburg, Gottfried von, 147 Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Smalley), 31 Sturt, Godwin, 45, 71, 137, 146–147, 150 supersession, 28–30, 35–37, 41–46, 49–53, 115. See also New Testament; Old Testament tabernacle, 34–36 Taylor, Andrew, 6 textual community, 18 Theobald (the convert), 39, 134 Theobald of Blois, 157–159 Thomas of Britain, 147, 200n86 Thomas of Durham, Prior, 15 Thomas of Monmouth: allegory and, 29–30, 35, 38–39; argumentum and, 129–136, 154–155; child saint tropes and, 89–90, 120; Christian

martyrs and, 49–50; Cistercian spirituality and, 15–16; concerns for posterity and, 67; construction of William’s innocence and, 100–107; cult of Thomas Becket and, 73; cults of child saints and, 94; dream visions and, 137–141; eyewitness accounts and, 148–153; The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and, 7–8, 61; literary culture and, 22; liturgical language and, 24–27, 56–57; Massacre of the Innocents and, 51–53; rhetoric and, 122–128, 194–195n10; ritual murder accusations and, 169n11; romance and, 142; Saint Faith and, 97–100; trial scenes and, 145–147; William of Norwich and, 1–4, 11–14; William of Norwich’s as child and, 92–93 Thorpe Wood, 1, 45, 58 Throop, Susanna, 83 Tinkle, Theresa, 53, 104, 106 Trial by Fire and Water (Bartlett), 146 trial by ordeal, 146–147, 150, 159, 200n84 trial scenes, 144–147 Tristan (Béroul), 144, 147 Tristran (Thomas of Britain), 147, 200n86 typology: allegory and, 174n9; Christian martyrs and, 49–53; Commentary on the Apocalypse of John and, 30–35; of Finding in the Temple episode, 108–115; Letter on the Office of the Mass and, 36–37; in The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, 40–46; liturgy and, 25–27, 38–39; supersession and, 28–30. See also allegory Universitätsbibliothek Salzburg MS II 341, fol. 1r, 33, 175n25 Vacandard, Elphège, 82 verisimilitude, 127–129, 132–134, 136, 145, 154–155 vernacular language, 68–70, 122–123, 141 Vie seinte Fei (Simon of Walsingham), 96 Virgin Mary: Crucifixion and, 78–79; Finding in the Temple episode and, 109–111, 115, 117; Godric of Finchale and, 69; Jews and, 169n13; miracles of, 133–134; planctus Mariae and, 47–49. See also planctus Mariae (mourning of Mary) virgin of Dunwich, 139–141 virginity, 19, 52–53, 70 visions. See dream visions; otherworld visions; purgatorial visions Vita et miracula (of Saint Kenelm), 94–95

Index 235 Wace, 126 Walter (author of Life of Godric of Finchale), 7, 15, 61, 181n8, 186n82 Ward, Benedicta, 96, 181n6 Ward, John, 145 Watkins, C. S., 139 wax figures, 133–134, 196–197n38 Waysliw, Patricia, 94 Webb, Diana, 70 Wenstan (William of Norwich’s father), 40–41 Werner of Oberwesel, 3 White, Hayden, 11, 158 William of Malmesbury, 133–134, 189n30, 196n35 William of Newburgh, 83–84 William of Norwich: affective devotion and, 119–121; Agnes of Crombe’s vision and, 54–55; as allegorical representation of Christ, 24–26, 30–31, 35, 40–46, 179n85; Christian martyrs and, 50–53; chronicle versions of murder and, 10–12; construction of innocence and, 91–93, 100–107; cult of, 14; cult of Thomas Becket and, 72–73; cults of child saints and, 94–100; devotion to Crucifixion and, 73; discovery of, 149–150, 200n90; eyewitness accounts and, 161; healing miracles and, 71; imitatio Christi and, 77, 80; Jews and, 20; The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and,

1–5; Massacre of the Innocents and, 51–53; murder as liturgical allegory and, 38–39; Passion of Christ and, 47–49; hermits and, 58–61, 65–67, 181n6; as twelve-yearold boy, 19, 89–90, 108; virginity and, 70; visions of, 87, 137 William of St. Thierry, 16, 37 William of Tyre, 83 Wilson, Anna, 91–92, 119 Winchester, England, 161–163 Wistan, Saint, 94–95, 189n30 women, 19 Woodman, A. J., 123 Wulfric of Haselbury: as anchorite, 58–61, 65–68, 181n6; antisemitism and, 64; childlikeness and, 116–117; concerns for posterity and, 182–183n23; devotion to Crucifixion and, 73; hagiography of, 7–9; healing miracles and, 70–71; imitatio Christi and, 77; simplicity and, 17; as soldier of Christ, 82–83; Thomas Becket and, 72 Wulward (William of Norwich’s grandfather), 40–42 Yarrow, Simon, 54, 97, 183n26 Yuval, Israel, 4, 82 Yvain, le chevalier au lion (de Troyes), 126 Zieman, Kathryn, 51