Customer Support 1-800-521-3042 ProQuest.com ProQuest logo Dissertations Theses - Gradworks The world s most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn More Virtuous vengeance: Anti-Judaism and Christian piety in medieval England by Birenbaum Maija Ph.D. FORDHAM UNIVERSITY 2010 183 pages 3438476 Abstract: In the later Middle Ages the Crusades the Christian loss of the Holy Land the Great Schism and the perceived menace of the Muslim infidel contributed to rising cultural anxieties about divine judgment and eternal damnation. During this period as the Church sought to strengthen its authority by redefining and promoting orthodoxy an enormous corpus of vernacular devotional literature was produced for the education of the laity. By instructing readers to examine their individual consciences a practice necessary to recognize and repent for sin these works engage with anxieties about salvation while attempting to construct and control them. Many of these texts seek to guide audiences toward spiritual growth by employing the complex and contradictory figure of the Jew an imagined construct against whom to mold both individual and communal Christian identities. Frequently within these works the Christian God is praised for his mercy while in an apparent contradiction he is depicted taking vengeance on the Jews whom medieval Christians believed to be communally and eternally responsible for the murder of Christ. Virtuous Vengeance explores such representations of divine vengeance against Jews in Anglo-Norman and Middle English devotional works composed compiled and circulated in England during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries arguing that these narratives construct the figure of the Jew as a focal point upon which to project diffuse anxieties about divine punishment and eternal damnation. Chapter One examines ways in which the poem Titus and Vespasian uses affective piety to legitimize violence against Jews Chapter Two explores Les Enfaunces Jesu Crist which depicts the Christ child performing miraculous acts of vengeance upon his Jewish playmates Chapter Three re-examines the alliterative poem Cleanness in the context of anti-Judaic discourse and Chapter Four explores a shadow of anti-Judaic violence that appears surprisingly in the Seven Psalms a commentary on the Penitential Psalms translated into Middle English by a laywoman Eleanor Hull. Virtuous Vengeance points to widespread and subtle uses of what has been variously termed the hermeneutical virtual or spectral Jew and suggests that a cultural narrative of anti-Judaic violence was embedded within the penitential culture of medieval England. Adviser Mary Erler School FORDHAM UNIVERSITY Source Type Dissertation Subjects Medieval literature British and Irish literature Judaic studies Publication Number 3438476 Adobe PDF Access the complete dissertation: Find an electronic copy at your library. Use the link below to access a full citation record of this graduate work: ? http: gateway.proquest.com openurl url_ver Z39.88-2004 res_dat xri:pqd iss rft_val_fmt info:ofi fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation rft_dat xri:pqdiss:34 38476 If your library subscribes to the ProQuest Dissertations Theses PQDT database you may be entitled to a free electronic version of this graduate work. If not you will have the option to purchase one and access a 24 page preview for free if available . About ProQuest Dissertations Theses With nearly 4 million records the ProQuest Dissertations Theses PQDT Global database is the most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses in the world. It is the database of record for graduate research. PQDT Global combines content from a range of the world s premier universities - from the Ivy League to the Russell Group. Of the nearly 4 million graduate works included in the database ProQuest offers more than 2.5 million in full text formats. Of those over 1.7 million are available in PDF format. More than 90 000 dissertations and theses are added to the database each year. If you have questions please feel free to visit the ProQuest Web site - http: www.proquest.com - or call ProQuest Hotline Customer Support at 1-800-521-3042. Copyright 2015 ProQuest. All rights reserved. Terms and Conditions