Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews
Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews

Author: Peter the Venerable

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0813221293

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"Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews represents a turning point in medieval anti-Jewish polemics. On the one hand, the polemic's intention--to bring about the conversion of the Jews--is predicated on an assumption that Jews are rational agents who may be persuaded of Christian truths by philosophical argument, empirical evidence, and proper biblical exegesis. On the other hand, Peter also introduced the notion that the Jews' enduring "blindness" stems from a persistent strain of bestial irrationality, for which they themselves are responsible. Peter traces this irrationality to the medieval Jews' commitment to the Talmud. Peter is the first medieval Christian author to name the Talmud explicitly. The Jewish convert to Christianity, Petrus Alfonsi, had ridiculed Talmudic folklore in his Dialogue Against the Jews. Peter the Venerable borrowed from but also surpassed Alfonsi's critique, as even his use of the name Talmud indicates. By emphasizing the irrationality of the Jews, Peter cast doubt upon their essential humanity and paved the way toward an increasingly violent treatment of the Jewish minority in medieval Christendom. Perhaps for this reason, Peter's Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews has been popular among modern anti-Semites as well."--Publisher description.

Writings Against the Saracens
Writings Against the Saracens

Author: Peter (the Venerable)

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 2016-06-03

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 081322859X

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Peter the Venerable's extensive literary legacy includes poems, a large epistolary collection, and polemical treatises. The first of his four major polemics targeted a Christian heresy, the Petrobrussians (Against the Petrobrusians); the rest took aim at Jews and Saracens. Catholic University of America Press has published his Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews. This present volume will make available in their entirety Peter the Venerable's twin polemics against Islam - A Summary of the entire heresy of the Saracens and Against the sect of the Saracens - as well as related correspondence. These works resulted from a sustained engagement with Islam begun during Peter's journey to Spain in 1142-43. There the abbot commissioned a translation of sources from the Arabic, the so-called Toledan Collection, that include the Letter of a Saracen with a Christian Response (from the Apology of [Ps.] Al-Kindi ); Fables of the Saracens (a potpourri of Islamic hadith traditions); and Robert of Ketton's first Latin translation of the whole of the Qur'an. Thanks to Peter's efforts, from the second half of the twelfth century Christians could acquire a far better understanding of the teachings of Islam, and Peter may rightly be viewed as the initiator of Islamic studies in the West.

The Life and Passion of William of Norwich
The Life and Passion of William of Norwich

Author: Thomas of Monmouth

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0141970537

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A fascinating surviving chronicle from 12th-century England which holds a unique and terrible place in the history of anti-Semitism The Life and Passion of William of Norwich gives a remarkable insight into life in a medieval cathedral city, brilliantly capturing the everyday concerns of ordinary people and focussing on the miraculous cures carried out at a shrine. But this was no ordinary shrine; fervent worshippers gathered around the burial-place where they believed that a boy was buried, a boy murdered by the Jews of Norwich. A chilling, highly significant document, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is, as far as we know, the earliest version of what was to become the 'blood libel' which has haunted Europe ever since. Miri Rubin both superbly translates the book and in her introduction interprets the sequence of events that led to the monk Thomas of Monmouth's appalling narrative. The consequences of his fantasies have been incalculable.

Feeling Exclusion
Feeling Exclusion

Author: Giovanni Tarantino

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-10

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 100070842X

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Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe investigates the emotional experience of exclusion at the heart of the religious life of persecuted and exiled individuals and communities in early modern Europe. Between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries an unprecedented number of people in Europe were forced to flee their native lands and live in a state of physical or internal exile as a result of religious conflict and upheaval. Drawing on new insights from history of emotions methodologies, Feeling Exclusion explores the complex relationships between communities in exile, the homelands from which they fled or were exiled, and those from whom they sought physical or psychological assistance. It examines the various coping strategies religious refugees developed to deal with their marginalization and exclusion, and investigates the strategies deployed in various media to generate feelings of exclusion through models of social difference, that questioned the loyalty, values, and trust of "others". Accessibly written, divided into three thematic parts, and enhanced by a variety of illustrations, Feeling Exclusion is perfect for students and researchers of early modern emotions and religion.

Marks of Distinctions
Marks of Distinctions

Author: Irven M. Resnick

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 2012-06

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 0813219698

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Through the use of several illustrations from illuminated manuscripts and other media, Resnick engages readers in a discussion of the later medieval notion of Jewish difference.

Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World
Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World

Author: Francois Soyer

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-03-27

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 9004395601

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In Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred, François Soyer offers the first detailed historical analysis of antisemitic conspiracy theories in Spain, Portugal and their overseas colonies between 1450 and 1750. These conspiracy theories accused Jews and conversos, the descendants of medieval Jewish converts to Christianity, of deadly plots and blamed them for a range of social, religious, military and economic problems. Ultimately, many Iberian antisemitic conspiracy theorists aimed to create a ‘moral panic’ about the converso presence in Iberian society, thereby justifying the legitimacy of ethnic discrimination within the Church and society. Moreover, they were also exploited by some churchmen seeking to impose an idealized sense of communal identity upon the lay faithful.

Making Monsters
Making Monsters

Author: David Livingstone Smith

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0674545567

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A leading scholar explores what it means to dehumanize othersÑand how and why we do it. ÒI wouldnÕt have accepted that they were human beings. You would see an infant whoÕs just learning to smile, and it smiles at you, but you still kill it.Ó So a Hutu man explained to an incredulous researcher, when asked to recall how he felt slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Such statements are shocking, yet we recognize them; we hear their echoes in accounts of genocides, massacres, and pogroms throughout history. How do some people come to believe that their enemies are monsters, and therefore easy to kill? In Making Monsters David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isnÕt. When we dehumanize our enemy, we hold two incongruous beliefs at the same time: we believe our enemy is at once subhuman and fully human. To call someone a monster, then, is not merely a resort to metaphorÑdehumanization really does happen in our minds. Turning to an abundance of historical examples, Smith explores the relationship between dehumanization and racism, the psychology of hierarchy, what it means to regard others as human beings, and why dehumanizing others transforms them into something so terrifying that they must be destroyed. Meticulous but highly readable, Making Monsters suggests that the process of dehumanization is deeply seated in our psychology. It is precisely because we are all human that we are vulnerable to the manipulations of those trading in the politics of demonization and violence.

Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World
Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World

Author: Yosi Yisraeli

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-08

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 1317160266

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The Mediterranean and its hinterlands were the scene of intensive and transformative contact between cultures in the Middle Ages. From the seventh to the seventeenth century, the three civilizations into which the region came to be divided geographically – the Islamic Khalifate, the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin West – were busily redefining themselves vis-à-vis one another. Interspersed throughout the region were communities of minorities, such as Christians in Muslim lands, Muslims in Christian lands, heterodoxical sects, pagans, and, of course, Jews. One of the most potent vectors of interaction and influence between these communities in the medieval world was inter-religious conversion: the process whereby groups or individuals formally embraced a new religion. The chapters of this book explore this dynamic: what did it mean to convert to Christianity in seventh-century Ireland? What did it mean to embrace Islam in tenth-century Egypt? Are the two phenomena comparable on a social, cultural, and legal level? The chapters of the book also ask what we are able to learn from our sources, which, at times, provide a very culturally-charged and specific conversion rhetoric. Taken as a whole, the compositions in this volume set out to argue that inter-religious conversion was a process that was recognizable and comparable throughout its geographical and chronological purview.

On the Body of the Lord
On the Body of the Lord

Author: Saint Albertus (Magnus)

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0813229588

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Chapter 4: That this sacrament causes communion in the sufferings of the mystical body -- Chapter 5: That this sacrament causes material assistance in works of mercy -- Chapter 6: That this sacrament makes common all that is ours of both spiritual and material things -- Chapter 7: That this sacrament causes the truest communion of the divine and the human -- Distinction Five: Sacrifice -- Chapter 1: About the authority and antiquity of this sacrifice -- Chapter 2: About the holiness of this sacrifice -- Chapter 3: About the acceptableness of this sacrifice -- Chapter 4: About the truth of this sacrifice -- Distinction Six: Sacrament -- Tractate 1: About the institution of this sacrament -- Chapter 1: About the reason for the institution of this sacrament -- Chapter 2: About the necessity for the institution of this sacrament -- Chapter 3: About the time of the institution of this sacrament -- Chapter 4: About the mode of the institution of this sacrament -- Tractate 2: About the matter and form of this sacrament -- Chapter 1: About the matter of this sacrament -- Chapter 2: About the form of the sacrament over the bread -- Chapter 3: About the form that is spoken over the wine -- Chapter 4: About things following both forms -- Tractate 3: What in this sacrament is the sacrament alone, and what are the reality and the sacrament, and what is the reality without the sacrament? -- Chapter 1 -- Tractate 4: In which the rite of this sacrament is treated -- Chapter 1: About the rite of this sacrament on Christ's part -- Chapter 2: About the rite of this sacrament on the minister's part -- Chapter 3: About the rite of this sacrament on the recipient's part -- III. Indices -- General Index -- Index of Holy Scripture

Cartographies of Exclusion
Cartographies of Exclusion

Author: Asa Simon Mittman

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2024-06-18

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 0271097868

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From the battles over Jerusalem to the emergence of the “Holy Land,” from legally mandated ghettos to the Edict of Expulsion, geography has long been a component of Christian-Jewish relations. Attending to world maps drawn by medieval Christian mapmakers, Cartographies of Exclusion brings us to the literal drawing board of “Christendom” and shows the creation, in real time, of a mythic state intended to dehumanize the non-Christian people it ultimately sought to displace. In his close analyses of English maps from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Asa Mittman makes a valuable contribution to conversations about medieval Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Grounding his arguments in the history of anti-Jewish sentiment and actions rampant in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, Mittman shows how English world maps of the period successfully Othered Jewish people by means of four primary strategies: conflating Jews with other groups; spreading libels about Jewish bodies, beliefs, and practices; associating Jews with Satan; and, most importantly, cartographically “mislocating” Jews in time and space. On maps, Jews were banished to locations and historical moments with no actual connection to Jewish populations or histories. Medieval Christian anti-Semitism is the foundation upon which modern anti-Semitism rests, and the medieval mapping of Jews was crucial to that foundation. Mittman’s thinking offers essential insights for any scholar interested in the interface of cartography, politics, and religion in premodern Europe.