“Swerving from the Sacred” queries the survival of three of the four surviving Marian lyrics in the fifteenth-century Vernon Manuscript (Eng. poet a. 1): “Child Slain by Jews,” “Jewish Boy,” and “Merchant’s Surety.” These three narratives perform a usefulness in two otherwise unrelated—if not downright antagonistic—cultural economies. In the medieval culture in which these narratives were born, the sacred Marian narratives frame Jews as secularized outsiders, concerned with material objects rather than perpetual sanctity. In the Early Modern culture in which they were preserved, these three Marian legends immortalize antisemitism as the perfect refrain in sacred Christian temporality and, perhaps more importantly, as essential narratives in the growth of a nation.

Dr. Miriamne Ara Krummel is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Dayton and is currently serving as a Frankel Fellow at the Frankel Institute of Advanced Judaic Studies during the 2015-2016 academic year. Her first monograph, Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually, was published in 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan in the New Middle Ages Series. Krummel is currently co-editing a book with Tison Pugh, Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the ‘Other.’ The paper you will hear today, “Swerving from the Sacred: Disenchanted Jews in the Vernon Manuscript,” represents her current thinking about images of the Jewish figure in, mostly, late medieval English manuscripts. “Swerving from the Sacred” is part of a chapter in Krummel’s second monograph, currently going under the title, Sacred Matters: The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time. An author of creative and critical nonfiction, Krummel’s scholarship has appeared in edited volumes and such journals as Exemplaria, Shofar, Postmedieval, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language.

Sponsored by: Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies

Photo by permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John's College, Cambridge