Feeling Persecuted

The central argument of Anthony Bale’s book is rather elusive. There is no real introduction setting out the main theme of the book. The prose is often elliptical and filled with the kind of unnecessary and opaque rhetorical flourishes that make so much academic literary criticism off-putting. Despite these flaws, he has brought together case-studies of how medieval Christian culture used images of Jews, in books of hours, psalters, and other texts, to enhance Christian spirituality. Specifically, Bale identifies a variety of texts and images in which, he argues, imagined violence by Jewish figures against Christ allowed medieval Christians to feel, in personal ways, Christ’s passion. In this context, Bale is open to the idea that these images of Jews acting violently against Jesus, the Virgin, Christian boys, or other martyrs were not simple expressions of a contemporary anti-Judaism. Much of the English evidence, at least, comes from the period

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