The Thompson Room, Barker Center 110, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Annual Center for Jewish Studies-Medieval Studies Lecture in Medieval Jewish Culture and Society
ABSTRACT: Medieval England’s Jewish communities survived for almost two and a half centuries before their expulsion in 1290 CE. Scholarship on these communities has generated relatively little information about women, however, even though national records provide thousands of mentions of hundreds of Anglo-Jewish women’s activities and family networks. In this lecture, Adrienne Williams Boyarin will introduce (for the first time) a new open website for exploring the lives and records of these women. In the process, she will address methodological problems that arise when seeking Jewish stories from (mainly) Latin, Christian sources, as well as the difficulties inherent in tracing premodern women’s names, marriages, and affiliations. Still, she argues, a women-first approach reveals new and valuable cultural information about the medieval English diaspora, a paradigm shift that highlights our duty to remember, even when evidence must be gleaned from biased and complex records.
Adrienne Williams Boyarin is Professor of English at the University of Victoria. She is the author of The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism (Penn, 2021) and Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends (D.S. Brewer, 2010). She is also founder of the journal Early Middle English (Arc Humanities) and editor and translator of two Broadview editions for teaching: Miracles of the Virgin in Middle English (2015) and the alliterative Siege of Jerusalem (2014). She writes and teaches at the intersection of literary-historical studies, Jewish studies, gender studies, and manuscript studies.
Cosponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies and Medieval Studies
