Aural Anti-Judaism in the épître farcie de la Saint-Étienne

This article argues for the importance of sound-making and practices of listening to the construction of religious identity in the French Middle Ages. Building on scholarship that examines the depictions of Christian and Jewish acoustic communities elsewhere in medieval Europe, the article focuses on how one well-attested musico-poetic composition from medieval France — the épître farcie de la Saint-Étienne — advances an anti-Judaism that is most vehemently articulated in the realm of the acoustic. This text, which intersperses French verses into the Vulgate account of St Stephen’s martyrdom, recasts the anti-Jewish sentiment of the scriptural narrative in unusually acoustic terms, insisting on the sonic unruliness and voluntary deafness of the Jews who stop their ears when hearing Stephen’s apostolic message and drown it out with loud noise before stoning him to death. This article homes in on this composition’s importance to the design of one manuscript witness (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS latin 238), a late-twelfth- or early thirteenth-century psalter from Champagne. An examination of the aural anti-Judaism of the épître farcie advances our understanding of the construction of both this psalter and of ideas of Jewish–Christian difference in the Middle Ages