Imaging and imagining the Jew in medieval England

This dissertation investigates how images of Jews operated as sources of visual information in three visual communities in medieval England. Examining case studies that date both before and after Edward I expelled all Jews from England in 1290 demonstrates the power of the visualized Jew as an imaginary construct who was always distinct from the actual Jew. The examples I have chosen are formally and contextually diverse: a selection of late 12 th and 13th century rolls from the Exchequer in London, the de Brailes Hours made in Oxford c. 1240, and the Hours of Mary de Bohun made at Pleshey Castle in Essex c. 1380. Despite their inherent differences, a key similarity binds these exceptional works. In each, artists deployed Jews as oppositional foils against whose actions Christian viewers could define themselves.; My focus on the relationship between representations of Jews and the people who made and used these representations fills a significant gap in existing scholarship. My definition of the visual community, as constructed by the complex and nuanced relationship between the choices of an artist, the experience of the viewer, and the structure of an image, draws on work by Stanley Fish and Gabrielle Spiegel that is complemented by recent studies of the Jew as a necessary construct by Gavin Langmuir and Jeremy Cohen. Situating visualized Jews within each community's unique visual culture provides the opportunity to merge traditional art historical methods with pioneering interdisciplinary work, in order to allow for a more complete reading of the Jew in medieval England.