The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time

Description

The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time studies violent temporal clashes that are written into the medieval vision of annus domini [the year of our Lord]. Christian temporality represents Jewish time as queerly oddly outmoded and advocating uncivil and socially disruptive behavior. Jewish temporality, in turn, records a marginalized people who work to rescue their embattled temporality from becoming a time forgotten and colonized. Through a select group of literature in Middle English, Latin, and Hebrew, as well as sixteen manuscript pictorials, author Miriamne Ara Krummel confronts the notion that annus domini time (whether disguised as CE or AD) figures as the universal standard. Krummel’s argument details how Other temporalities—ones outside and not like annus domini time—are cast as nonstandard and imagined as wholly devised out of stories that promote fear and terror, and are positioned as putative threats to the fabric of the temporal empire of Latin Christendom. Ultimately, the book reflects on the ways in which “common” time both marks and silences marginal identities and cultures and shows to what extent the dynamics of the medieval environment materialize in our modern world. Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Calculating Time: Eosturmonath, Nisan, and the Paschal Table Chapter 1. Just in Time: Sacrificial Gifts, Rotting Corpses, and Annus Domini Chapter 2. An (Un)Common Era: Passionate Narratives, Temporal Clashes—Jewish and Christian Chapter 3. Taking Jews Out and Putting Them Back In: Christian Chronometry, the York Massacre, and a Cycle of Mystery Plays Chapter 4. A Time of Many Layers: Feasting on the Temporalities of The Siege of Jerusalem Chapter 5. Repressing a Perpetually Resurfacing Temporality: Four Authorial Orphans and the Fifteenth-Century “The Legend of the Litel Clergeon and the Jews” Epilogue: The Empire of Common Time Bibliography Index