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E. M. Rose . The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2015. xii + 394 pp.
Book Reviews: Medieval and Early Modern Eras
On a recent visit to the charming city of Blois, which lies along France's famed Loire River approximately midway between Tours and Orléans, I was confronted with a startling sight. Strolling through the historic center, I found myself standing directly below the cathedral dedicated to St. Louis. To the left was a street bearing the name rue des juifs, and to the right was a street named rue des élus. Splitting the "street of the Jews" from the "street of the elect" at a right angle was the rue St. Louis. It led directly up towards the imposing cathedral, which shares a name with France's famous crusading king of the thirteenth century. What an apt metaphor for the Jews of medieval Europe, I thought: under the watchful eye of ecclesiastical authorities, yet always being led (implicitly or explicitly) towards baptism and the promise of salvation. The fact that Blois was also in 1171 the location of the first accusation of ritual murder on continental Europe and that it resulted in a public burning of over thirty members of the local Jewish population made the scene all the more unsettling.
As medievalists well know, the incident at Blois was not an isolated event, but one of several violent episodes in a century that scholars broadly agree was a turning point for the worse in Jewish-Christian relations. In this important and accessible book, E. M. Rose delivers a detailed reconstruction of the origins of this malicious charge, embedding it within the broader sociopolitical context of twelfth-century Europe. She begins with the first appearance of the charge of ritual murder in Norwich in the mid-twelfth century and concludes with the various "copycat" cults that developed in other cities in...