From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration: Jews and the Body of Christ

Author(s): Robert C. Stacey

Source: Jewish History , Spring, 1998, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 11-28
Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20101321

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Jewish History Volume 12, No. 1 * Spring 1998

From Ritual Crucifixion

to Host Desecration:
Jews and the Body of Christ

Robert C. Stacey

That Jews constitute a threat to the body of Christ is the oldest, and arguably the
most unchanging, of all Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. It was, after
all, to make precisely this point that the redactors of the New Testament
reassigned responsibility for Jesus's crucifixion from the Roman governor who
ordered it, to an implausibly well-organized crowd of "Ioudaioi" who were
alleged to have approved of it.1 In the historical context of first-century CE
Roman Judea, it is by no means clear who the New Testament authors meant to
comprehend by this term Ioudaioi. To the people of the Middle Ages, however,
there was no ambiguity. ludaei were Jews; and the contemporary Jews who lived
among them were thus regarded as the direct descendants of the Ioudaioi who
had willingly taken upon themselves and their children the blood of Jesus that
Pilate had washed from his own hands.2
In the Middle Ages, then, Christians were in no doubt that Jews were the
enemies of the body of Christ.3 There was considerably more uncertainty,
however, as to the nature and identity of the body of Christ itself. The doctrine
of the resurrection imparted a real and continuing life to the historical, material
body of Christ; but it also raised important questions about the nature of that
risen body, and about the relationship between that risen body and the body of
Christian believers who were comprehended within it.4 So far as we know, it was
Paul who first declared the risen Christ to be the head of the Christian body
which was the church.5 By the end of the fourth century this notion of the Church
as the corpus verum Christi, the true body of Christ, had become a commonplace
in Christian discourse.6
Alongside this identification of the Church with the body of Christ another

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 12 Robert C. Stacey

idea was also developing, the full consequences of which would be worked out
during the Middle Ages. This idea had to do with the bodily presence of Christ
in the Mass.7 The Church embodied Christ in the world; as the true body of
Christ, the Church was thus the repository of the same salvific power that Christ
himself had introduced into the world in and through his historical body. Through
its sacraments, the Church, the body of Christ, administered to the world the
salvific power of the crucified and resurrected body of Christ in a regular,
continuing, and predictable way. Nowhere was this sense of bodily identification
between Church and Christ felt with more immediacy, however, than in the
sacrament of the Mass, when the body of Christ, i.e., the Church, relived the
historical sacrifice of Christ's own body through the bread and wine that Christ
himself had declared to be his body and blood. In the Patristic era, then, to declare
that Christ's body was present in the Mass was almost a tautology. Through the
Mass, the body of Christ relived the sacrifice Christ had made in and through
his own body. How then could Christ's true body not be fully and physically
present in such a sacrifice?
In the early Middle Ages, however, as the Mass came to be viewed less as a
corporate reliving by the Church, and more as a sacrifice offered by a priest on
behalf of the church, the real presence of Christ's body in the eucharistie elements
came to take on a very different meaning and signficance.8 Here too, Paul laid
the foundations for these developments when he asked of the Corinthians: "The
cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion in the blood of Christ?
And the bread which we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because
there is one bread, we many are one body, all of us who share in one bread."9
By the Carolingian period, the doctrine of the real presence of Christ's body in
the eucharist had developed so far as to pose inescapable questions not only
about the nature of this presence, but also about "the relation of the eucharistie
body of Christ to the historical body of Christ" on the cross.10
By the early twelfth century, general agreement had been reached in Latin
Christendom that the eucharistie body and the historical body of Christ were
identical, although the precise nature ofthat identity would continue to be debated
and refined for at least another century.11 There was also general agreement that
the body of Christ could therefore be understood in three distinguishable, but
interdependent, ways. In the words of Alger of Liege, these were "the body of
Christ in human form, the body of Christ in the Sacrament [of the eucharist],
and the body of Christ in the church. Those who are unable to distinguish among
these ways in the Holy Scriptures fall into great confusion, so that what is said
about one 'body of Christ' is taken to refer to another."12
These distinctions, however, were far from clear, Alger of Liege
notwithstanding; and they became even more confused as eucharistie debate

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 From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration 13

increased during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.13 Carolingian theologians,

attempting to distinguish between the various senses of the body of Christ, had
introduced the term corpus mysticum Christi to refer to the mystical presence of
Christ's body in the Mass. This new term was necessary because, in keeping
with Patristic precedent, they reserved the term corpus verum Christi for the
Church. "From the mid-twelfth century onward, however, something of a reversal
took place."14 Concern to emphasize the real presence of Christ in the Mass led
theologians increasingly to insist that the eucharist was the "true body of Christ,"
the corpus verum Christi, and to speak therefore of the Church as the mystical
body of Christ, an aggregatio fidelium that soon took on the juristic overtones
of a Roman law corporation.15 By the end of the thirteenth century, this reversal
was substantially complete. The true body of Christ was now the eucharist; the
mystical body of Christ was the Church; and both were embodiments of the
historical body of Christ on the cross. The late medieval Corpus Christi feast, so
well studied by Miri Rubin, could thus simultaneously celebrate the body of
Christ in the Mass and the resulting unity of Christian believers in their
multiplicity of social bodies.16 It was not by accident, then, that the feast of
Corpus Christi also became a principal occasion on which to celebrate the
triumph of the body of Christ, ecclesiastical and eucharistie, over those perpetual
and inveterate threats to Christ's bodily integrity, the Jews.17
As actors in a drama of Christian devising, this was by no means a new role
for Jews to be assigned to play. The New Testament redactors had long ago
appointed Jews to be the enemies of Christ's historical body, while St. John
Chrysostom and many other Patristic authors had presented Jews (and the
Judaizing Christians whom they inspired) as primary threats to the integrity and
unity of the body of Christ which was the Church.18 Agobard of Lyons followed
firmly in this patristic tradition, as did Rather of Verona and Rupert of Deutz.
With Rupert, however, who wrote in the early decades of the twelfth century,
we begin to see Jews taking on a new role, as enemies not only of the body of
Christ on the cross and of the body of Christ in the Church, but also as the
enemies of the body of Christ in the eucharist.19 This is, quite obviously, the
notion that lies behind the host desecration charge - that Jews would torture and
seek to destroy consecrated eucharistie hosts if only they could get their hands
on them.20 The theological foundations for the host desecration charge were thus
already in place by the middle of the twelfth century. Historians, however, have
generally agreed that the charge itself does not appear until the end of the
thirteenth century.21 No explanations for this apparent "delay" have as yet been
offered.
The "delay" is all the more puzzling insofar as the period between 1100 and
1300 witnessed the very rapid development of a number of dangerous and

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 14 Robert C. Stacey

long-lived anti-Jewish prejudices on the part of Christians. To the traditional

calumnies of Christian anti-Judaism, twelfth- and thirteenth-century theologians
added a new insistence that Jews were knowing and deliberate d?icides; a
renewed concern that the unity, integrity, and holiness of the Church was
threatened by Jewish attacks; and a newly salient identification of the body of
Christ, in all its aspects, with the miraculously transformed eucharistie elements
in the Mass.22 These theological developments helped in turn to give rise to new
mythical structures into which traditional Christian anti-Judaism could be
channeled: ritual crucifixion (the notion that contemporary Jews crucified and
killed innocent Christian boys, just as their ancestors had killed the innocent
Christ); ritual cannibalism (the notion that Jews murdered Christians and
consumed their blood for magical or ritual purposes); and host desecration (see
above). Together, these three myths lie at the core of what Gavin Langmuir has
categorized as medieval anti-Semitism, a new creation of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, distinct both etiologically and phenomenologically from
traditional Christian anti-Judaism.23
Despite the obvious links between these anti-Semitic myths - and especially
between the two most popular and widespread of these myths, the ritual
crucifixion and the host desecration charge - historians for the most part have
tended to analyze them as representing quite separate literary and devotional
genres of story. And there are indeed some important thematic and contextual
differences between them. Ritual crucifixion tales arise first. Most date from the
period between 1144 and 1270, and the majority come from England, where the
myth itself began and where it remained most popular. Host desecration tales,
by contrast, arose on the Continent, although they were preached in fourteenth
and fifteenth-century England too. They are also considerably later to emerge.
Despite some earlier anticipations, the first fully developed host desecration
narrative dates from Paris in 1290, one hundred and fifty years after the first
ritual crucifixion story.24
Ritual crucifixion tales tell the story of a Christian boy who is crucified and
murdered by an organized community of Jews, who act together to perpetrate
this act and conceal their crime from their Christian neighbors.25 The murder
itself is essentially motiveless; it is simply an expression of malice toward all
things Christian. Sometimes, as in The Life and Passion of St William of
Norwich, the Jewish perpetrators escape punishment for their deeds altogether;
in other examples, such as the various accounts of the martyrdom of little St.
Hugh of Lincoln or in Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale," Christian authorities punish
the Jewish murderers after the concealed body of the martyr reveals itself to the
Christian community in miraculous ways.26 Either way, however, a triumphant
closure to the story is achieved when the body of the martyred child is interred

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 From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration 15

in an appropriately public shrine, either a monastery or a cathedral, and the new

saint begins to manifest his thaumaturgie powers by restoring the bodily
wholeness of his petitioners.27 Ritual crucifixion tales are thus not, fundamentally,
dramas of vengeance. Christ, through his Church, overcomes the Jews' attack
upon the Christian community, but the threat itself is not removed. At the end
of these tales, the Jews remain, unconverted and malevolent, within the Christian
body politic. Finally, neither Marian nor eucharistie themes feature at all
prominently in twelfth- and thirteenth-century ritual crucifixion stories, although
they can be traced in some fourteenth-century stories, most notably in Chaucer's
"Prioress's Tale."28
Host desecration tales, by contrast, generally feature a single Jewish
perpetrator, almost always male, who abuses the consecrated eucharistie host
because he identifies the host with Christ himself.29 The Jewish perpetrator thus
acts as a very conscious and deliberate deicide. The host thereupon manifests
itself as the body of Christ in miraculous ways, and the Jew is consequently
discovered and executed by an enraged crowd of Christian neighbors. The
miraculous host may subsequently be preserved and honored in the local parish
church, but the climax of the story is typically reached when the injured host is
avenged through the death of the Jewish perpetrator and the conversion of his
widow and children to Christianity. Host desecration stories often borrow both
motifs and themes from eucharistie and Marian miracle stories, and in the
fourteenth century were commonly preached in connection with Marian feasts
as well as with the feast of Corpus Christi.30
Without denying that these contrasts do exist, I want to suggest that there is,
nevertheless, an evolutionary link between ritual crucifixion and host desecration
charges; and that by tracing the process by which Marian and eucharistie themes
began to be incorporated into ritual crucifixion stories, we may learn something
not only about the origins of the host desecration charge, but also about the
developing devotional significance of the body of Christ to thirteenth-century
Christians.

To make this case I want to begin with a story, about the ritual crucifixion and
martyrdom of Adam of Bristol.31 The events of the story itself are alleged to
have taken place in Bristol "in the days of King Henry, father of the other King
Henry,"32 but for reasons that will quickly become apparent, the story as we have
it is unlikely to have been composed before the second quarter of the thirteenth
century. The story survives in a unique copy in a miscellaneous volume of
Harleian manuscripts in the British Library. It is written in Latin, by a practiced
hand of the latter half of the thirteenth century. Although by no means a de-luxe
manuscript, the text is clearly a professional production. It is partially rubricated

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 16 Robert C. Stacey

with red initial letters, and accompanied by two small illuminations. These
illuminations were laid out in advance of the text and were carefully placed so
as to correspond with the accompanying storyline, a requirement that forced the
scribe to squeeze several lines of text at the bottom of folio 21 v so that text and
illustrations would coincide properly on folio 22r.33 Behind the story may lie a
tradition of dramatic performance associated with the parish church of St. Mary
Redcliff, a suburb of Bristol.34 If so, this parish drama would probably have been
performed on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (15 August), the
date on which the action of the tale takes place. But the text as we have it was
clearly conceived as a book, and is described as such by the scribe who produced
it.35
The story itself begins with an address by God to the audience, commanding
our attention to "what the idolatrous and garrulous Jews in England have done
to me."36 Throughout the text, God will occasionally interject commentary,
sometimes to interpret the action, but more often to declare to the audience that
all the action being portrayed took place with his full knowledge and consent.
All narrative description in the story is thus presented as coming straight from
the mouth of God. This matters, because God alone knows this story: first because
the story itself is retrospective, retelling twelfth-century events from the
perspective of the thirteenth century; and second, because the very fact of Adam's
martyrdom has been hitherto unknown to the Christian citizens of Bristol by
God's own deliberate design, as the story now proceeds to explain.
The action begins with a Jewish man, Samuel, telling his sister (who is never
named, although she is the principal character in the story) of a remarkable event
that has just occurred. The first part of the story thus has a kind of double
narrative frame, being told first by God the omniscient narrator, but also by
Samuel, retrospectively, in an account to his sister. This rather clumsy device is
not sustained, however, so that the point at which Samuel's report to his sister
ends and the direct action of the drama begins, can only be inferred by the reader.
It is nowhere marked in the text.
Samuel tells his sister that he and his young son had gone into the city of
Bristol the day before, where they encountered a Christian boy whom Samuel's
son invited back to their house to play and eat apples. The son tells the boy that
he and his family are Christians too, but that the boy must nonetheless follow at
a distance behind them when walking back to their house, and cover his face
with his hood when he enters their door. Samuel's son has been taught by his
father to do all this. He knows clearly what the fate of his Christian playmate
will be, his father having crucified three other Christian boys within the past
year. When the boys arrive, Samuel's wife lays out a luxurious meal for them
in a rear chamber of the house, while Samuel goes outside to make sure that

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 From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration 17

none of his Christian neighbors have seen the boy enter. Samuel's wife,
meanwhile, asks the boy his name, where he lives, and who his relatives are,
providing Adam the opportunity to tell her (and the audience) not only his name,
but also that his father is William of Wales, that he lives in the parish of St.
Mary Redcliff, and that his mother has just given birth to her second child and
is still on her sickbed. Samuel and his wife then compare notes, and after
determining that Adam is from a sufficiently remote part of the city and that no
one has seen the boy enter their house, they conclude that it is safe to crucify
him. Samuel's wife then re-enters the chamber and plies the boy with beer.
But when Adam insists upon going home, even after Samuel's wife has assured
him she is his father's niece and that she will take him home in the morning
with gifts for his mother, Samuel closes all the doors, gags the boy, ties him up,
and covers him with a sheet. The Jews then depart the chamber to wait for
nightfall.37
A lengthy and lurid account of Adam's crucifixion then begins, in which
Samuel repeatedly identifies Adam as "the god of the Christians" or as "the body
of the Christians' god," thus identifying the crucified Adam directly with the
eucharist, the consecrated and broken body of Christ in the Mass.38 Adam cries
out for help to the Virgin Mary, and specifically to St. Mary of Redcliff, giving
Samuel opportunity to demonstrate his particular odium for "that whore."39 All
three Jews then mock Adam. Samuel addresses him as God, and calls upon him
to descend from his cross, declaring that then they will believe that he is God.
Samuel's wife cuts off Adam's nose and upper lip, remarking as she does so,
"Behold how beautifully the God of the Christians smiles!"40 The son stabs Adam
with a knife, and the three Jews then take him down from the cross and stomp
on him.
Thus far Adam's tortures have taken place in the Jews' privy, located at the
back of the house beyond the chamber where the boys had dined. Now, however,
the Jews drag Adam's body to the front room of the house, where they proceed
to bind him to a spit and roast him, "like a fat chicken," over a great fire. At
this point, a loud voice booms out from the unconscious Adam's throat, declaring
in Hebrew that "I am the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob ... whom you
persecute." The Jews are astonished, and removing Adam from the spit, they
attempt to revive him with beer. Samuel, however, insists on nailing him again
to the cross, "and we will see if his Christ comes to liberate him from our
hands."41
Adam now awakes, and questioned by the Jews tells them that while he was
in the fire he was comforted by a beautiful lady and by a boy who kissed the
wounds on Adam's hands and feet and called him his beloved brother. The Jews
ask where this boy is now, and Adam replies that he is still with him on the

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 18 Robert C. Stacey

cross. They then ask who the boy is, and once again a voice booms out from
Adam's throat, declaring "Jesus Christ the Nazarene is my name." Samuel again
wonders why, if Jesus is God, He does not rescue Adam, and declares that if he
can get his hands on the boy whom Adam has seen in the fire he will crucify
him too. Samuel then stabs Adam to the heart, and Adam dies, whereupon the
voices of thousands of angels are heard exclaiming, "Blessed are all the works
of the lord God."42
This is too much for Samuel's wife and son, who now declare their intention
to convert to Christianity and are promptly murdered by Samuel. Samuel then
buries Adam's body beneath the floor of the latrine, and hides the bodies of his
wife and son in his house, covering them with a woolen sheet.43 The next
morning, however, when he goes out to use the latrine, Samuel is confronted by
an angel with a fiery sword who bars his entrance to the privy and knocks him
backward out the door declaring, memorably, "Wretch! You shall not empty your
bowels here!"44 Thoroughly discommoded, Samuel thereupon flees his house to
consult his widowed sister.
Samuel's sister laments the murder of her brother's wife and son, and is clearly
puzzled by Samuel's penchant for crucifying Christians. But she accompanies
him back to his house, helps him to bury the bodies of his wife and son, and
proposes that they tell their Jewish neighbors that the wife and son have departed
for places unknown. This does not, however, solve the problem of the angel in
the privy. Samuel therefore decides to live with his sister at her house until they
can figure out a way to get Adam's body (and hence the angel) transported out
of the latrine.
Samuel and his sister decide that they must find a Christian priest who will,
for a fee, remove Adam's body to a cemetery without revealing his actions to
anyone; for, as they note, if it became known that Samuel had crucified a
Christian boy, they and all the Jewish people would be destroyed by the avenging
Christians.45 The sister finds such a man in the person of an Irish priest, newly
arrived with several companions on the first stage of a pilgrimage to Rome, and
so unknown to anyone in the city. Samuel's sister brings the priest and his
companions home, feeds and lodges them, pretending all the while that she and
Samuel are Christians. The ruse is entirely successful; the Christians all get drunk
and the priest propositions the sister's serving maid. The next morning, Samuel
and his sister explain to the priest that the boy who is buried in Samuel's latrine
is in fact their son, who has been crucified by Jews, but whose death they wish
to conceal because otherwise the king's officials will extort money from them
by falsely charging them with the murder. The priest is utterly taken in by this
story and goes off with his two male companions to exhume Adam's body and
remove it to a Christian cemetery.46

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 From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration 19

When the priest enters Samuel's house, however, he and his two companions
are met by the odor of sanctity and the sound of an angelic choir, whose singing
is described in considerable detail. But when the priest tries to enter the latrine
where Adam is buried, he is barred entrance by an angel who orders him to go
first to a local parish priest to confess his sins and be cleansed of them. He does
so, making his confession to a married priest of the city. Returning to Samuel's
house, the angel pronounces the priest's confession efficacious, and admits him
into the presence of the angelic host gathered around Adam's grave in the latrine.
With the angels' assistance, the priest wraps the boy's body in linen cloth. The
angels then tell him to take the martyr's body back with him to Ireland to his
own church and bury it there, at a place the angels will show him. The angels
then instruct the priest to return to the house of Samuel's sister, to convert her
and her brother to Christianity and also to prepare a coffin in which to transport
Adam's body to Ireland. Interestingly, it is only now that the priest learns that
Samuel and his sister are Jews.47
The priest's efforts to convert the two Jews are unavailing, but Samuel does
procure some wood, out of which the priest constructs a coffin for Adam's body.
Refusing to remain any longer in what he now knows to be a Jewish house, the
priest returns with the coffin, collects Adam's body, and he and his companions
take ship with it to Ireland.48
This is the last we see or hear of Samuel and his sister, whose crimes thus go
completely undetected by any Bristol citizen. The priest, on returning to Ireland,
buries Adam's body in a spot revealed to him by the angels, along with all the
instruments of his martyrdom, including the cross and the nails. Every bit of the
physical evidence around which a martyr's cult might form is thus concealed
below ground in Ireland. The angels then order the priest to resume his
interrupted pilgrimage to Rome and tell him that when he returns from Rome he
will have forgotten the location of Adam's grave. This, they explain to him, is
by divine decree, God the Father wishing the spot to remain hidden until the day
He has predetermined to reveal the martyr's body to the world. When the priest
returns from Rome, he has indeed forgotten the spot where Adam was buried;
he has also forgotten the angels' words and so spends many days fruitlessly
searching for Adam's grave. But as the angel has told him, "This place shall be
unknown to you and to all human creatures until the day predestined by God the
Father."49 The text of the story ends here, followed by an envoi, written in red
letters by the scribe.50

The eucharistie associations of this text will need little urging. Samuel addresses
the crucified Adam directly as "the God of the Christians" and as "the body of
the Christians' God"; Jesus himself, in the form of a young boy, declares himself

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20 Robert C. Stacey

to be with Adam on the cross; and God the Father declares that it is He whom
the Jews are torturing on their Cross. The Jews' roasting of Adam over a fire
also has eucharistie overtones, establishing links with both the well-known "Jew
of Bourges" tale, in which a Jewish father throws his own son into an oven when
the son reports having seen the Christ child present in a Eucharistie host (the son
is preserved, unharmed, by the Virgin Mary), and with the baking of the
eucharistie host itself, prior to its consecration as the body of Christ.51 The
tortures inflicted upon Adam - stomping, burning, stabbing - are also typical of
the abuse Jews were accused of perpetrating upon the eucharistie bread in host
desecration stories. The interest shown by the text in the confessional also carries
eucharistie significance. The Irish priest, no paragon of personal holiness, must
first confess his sins and be absolved of them before he can approach Adam's
broken and martyred body, just as Christian believers were required to confess
their sins before presenting themselves to receive the eucharist. Nor should we
ignore the significance of the boy's name as another way of identifying Christ,
the second Adam, with the crucified child martyr.
As these eucharistie associations may suggest, the text also shows a notable
and consistent concern with the proprieties of lay piety. When Adam is brought
before the cross on which he is to be crucified, he immediately kneels, much to
the disgust of his Jewish captor, who promises him even more dire punishment
in consequence. When the Irish priest's servants arrive at the place of Adam's
martyrdom, the priest instructs them to kneel and recite the prayers which lay
people in the middle ages were taught to recite during Mass, the Pater Noster
and the Ave Maria, identified in the text not only by their Latin opening lines,
but also by their common designations as "the Lord's prayer" and "the angel's
greeting."52 The necessity and efficacy of confession, even when offered to a
sinful priest, is another aspect of lay piety emphasized in the text.53 So too are
the value of special masses sung by priests on behalf of lay people.54 But there
is also a persistent undertone of criticism in the text, directed toward the low
moral standards of the parish clergy. The lechery and drunkenness of parish
priests are repeatedly emphasized, not only in the character of the Irish priest,
but also in Samuel's descriptions of the Christian clergy of Bristol, many of
whom he declares to be living with women and regularly drunken.55 In the Irish
priest's willingness to accept five marks from Samuel and his sister to bury their
supposed son, there may also be an implied criticism of the clergy's greed to
collect burial fees from lay people, even in highly suspicious circumstances.56
Neither the tale's eucharistie associations, nor its concentration on the proprieties
of lay piety, is characteristic of most ritual crucifixion stories. The classic ritual
crucifixion tale was a product of the monastic house which guarded the martyr's
relics and mediated his thaumaturgie power. To these purposes, the identification

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 From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration 21

our text establishes between the crucified child martyr and the eucharist was
irrelevant, perhaps even counter-productive insofar as eucharistie associations
might tend to break down the exclusivity of the martyr's association with a
specific site and shrine. As we have seen, the point of ritual crucifixion stories
was to emphasize that by their actions in crucifying the child victim, Jews as a
group had launched an attack upon the body of Christ which was the Church.
The child's passion was identified with the passion of Christ: this was, indeed,
what constituted the child as a saint, as Thomas of Monmouth insisted in his
account. But nowhere does Thomas of Monmouth, or any other monastic author
of a ritual crucifixion story, identify the suffering body of the child/Christ directly
with the eucharist. The attack in ritual crucifixion stories is a corporate one, by
a group of Jews against the entire body of Christians which is the Church. The
apppropriate resolution of such an attack is, therefore, that the crucified body of
the martyred child/Christ be reincorporated into the body of Christ through the
construction of a shrine for the new saint inside the monastic or cathedral church.

The shrine then in turn becomes a center for the restoration of the bodily integrity
of the Christian people through the manifestation of thaumaturgie miracles by
the saint.
Adam of Bristol's tale is quite different. It has no associations with either a
monastery or a cathedral. It is associated instead with a parish church - a church,
moreover, which, for reasons the story explains, held not a single relic of Adam
and promoted no cult devoted to him. Indeed, the figure who stands at the
devotional center of the tale is not really Adam at all, but rather the Virgin Mary,
to whom the parish church at Redcliff was dedicated, and toward whom Samuel
displayed a very particular contempt. Adam himself was from the parish of St.
Mary's, Redcliff, while one of Samuel's earlier Christian victims hailed from the
linked parish of St. Mary's, Bedminster.57 When Samuel tortures Adam, it is to
St. Mary of Redcliff that Adam cries out for protection, and it is Mary who
subsequently protects Adam from being burned in the fire. It is Mary, dressed
in purple, who leads the angelic procession to Adam's grave, accompanied by
Jesus as a young boy; and it is upon the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin
that Adam's martyrdom occurs. If our text did indeed begin life as a parish drama,
it was almost certainly a drama intended to celebrate the power of St. Mary of
Redcliff; and I venture to guess that it would have been performed by the
parishioners of Redcliff on the fifteenth day of August, to celebrate the bodily
Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven.
Another element which tends to connect this story with host desecration tales
rather than with traditional ritual crucifixion stories is the interest shown in
Samuel's motives for crucifying Adam. These are examined in quite interesting
detail, largely through the character of Samuel's sister, who is very much the

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22 Robert C. Stacey

heroine of the story. It is she who directs the burial of Samuel's wife and son
with all their clothing and personal effects, and who invents a story to explain
their disappearance. It is she who calms her brother's panic, and who designs
and executes the plan that eventually removes Adam's body and conceals her
brother's crimes. At the same time, however, she is strongly critical of Samuel's
murders. "Why do you hate Jesus and His mother?" she asks Samuel. "What is
it to us if he has said, 'I am Christ the son of the living God?' Let us hold to
our law, which God gave us by the hand of Moses and Aaron, and that is enough
for us."58 Indeed, God Himself interrupts the action to commend her fidelity to
Jewish law; and at the end of the play, she flatly rejects the Irish priest's efforts
to convert her, remarking simply: "I do not believe in the mortal man Jesus."59
By her strategems, she emerges by the end of the story as a kind of Esther or
Deborah figure, saving her people from destruction by her own quick-wittedness.
As a result, she, her brother, and all the Jews of England remain safe, secure,
and unconverted to Christianity when the story ends.
As a Christian morality tale, this seems a highly unsatisfactory ending. It offers
neither the solace of a martyr's shrine, with which a ritual crucifixion tale would
ordinarily conclude, nor the satisfaction of Christian vengeance and Jewish
conversion characteristic of the host desecration genre. Awkwardly but
interestingly, Adam of Bristol's tale stands somewhere between these two genres.
It suggests, therefore, some of the ways in which ritual crucifixion narratives
were being transformed as these stories moved out of their original monastic
milieu and into the new devotional world of thirteenth-century lay piety.

The associations our text establishes between eucharistie devotion, Marian

miracles, and what Denise Despres has called "cultic anti-Judaism" will be
familiar enough to those who have studied fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
Corpus Christi sermons and dramas. "Adam of Bristol," however, is the earliest
evidence so far discovered for the coalescence of these ideas around a ritual
crucifixion tale. As we have seen, the text shows clearly how the new theological
and devotional developments characteristic of thirteenth-century lay piety were
being integrated into traditional narratives of ritual crucifixion. In that process
of integration, as the ritual crucifixion story took on more explicitly eucharistie
and Marian elements, we see one of the ways in which the host desecration tales
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries could have emerged out of the earlier
narratives of ritual crucifixion.
This transformation of ritual crucifixion tales into host desecration tales may
also offer some explanation for what has hitherto been a rather puzzling pattern
of waxing and waning popularity for the ritual crucifixion charge itself. The
charge took shape first in Norwich, between 1144 and 1150. It spread quickly,

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 From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration 23

being reported in both English and German sources by the mid to late 1150s.60
In 1163, the charge crops up in France, when a shrine was erected in Paris to
St. Richard of Pontoise. In 1168, a boy named Harold was reported to have been
crucified by Jews in Gloucester. In 1171, the death of a Christian youth at Blois
was quickly ascribed to ritual crucixion by at least one of its Norman chroniclers.
A decade or so later, a new shrine to a victim of ritual crucifixion was erected
at Bury St. Edmunds, whose monastic community was evidently feeling the
thaumaturgie competition from the nearby shrine of St. William of Norwich.61
Then, between ca. 1181 and 1244 no new cults surrounding victims of ritual
crucifixion arose in England or on the Continent62 while, in England, even
existing ritual crucifixion cults struggled to survive the enormous competition
from the greatest of all healing saints, Thomas Becket.63 In 1235, however, at
Fulda, a new charge, ritual cannibalism, makes its first appearance. And soon
thereafter, a new round of ritual crucifixion charges emerges: in London in 1244,
in the 1260s, and again in 1276; in Lincoln in 1255; in Bristol around 1260; and
in Northampton in 1279.
In the monastically composed accounts of post-1244 crucifixions that have
come down to us, there is little or nothing to distinguish them from the traditional
ritual crucifixion charges that we see during the twelfth century. As "Adam of
Bristol" must suggest, however, the appearance of quiescence between 1181 and
1244 is misleading. Despite the absence of new cults, ritual crucifixion charges
were clearly not losing their persuasive power during these years. Indeed,
precisely the opposite seems to have been the case - by the mid-thirteenth
century, Jews in England were coming under suspicion whenever a Christian
child went missing in a town. What appears to have been happening, rather, is
that between the 1180s and the mid-thirteenth century, ritual crucifixion tales
were moving out of the monastic environs in which they originated, and into the
world of lay and parish piety; and in this process, ritual crucifixion tales were
being transformed by the addition of new devotional elements. A central role in
such tales was beginning to be assumed by the Virgin Mary, whose own Miracles
were themselves acquiring new, specifically anti-Jewish elements during these
years;64 and a new identification was also emerging between the crucified child
martyr and the body of Christ in the Mass.

The process by which these new Marian and eucharistie themes came to be
incorporated into ritual crucifixion tales needs more careful investigation than is
possible here. "Adam of Bristol" shows us the results, but it only hints at the
processes. The hints, however, are worth following up, if only briefly. Sermons,
perhaps particularly the sermons preached by mendicant friars, must have played
an important role in this transformation of the discourse of ritual murder. So too,

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24 Robert C. Stacey

I would suggest, did parish dramas, of the sort that may lie behind the text of
"Adam of Bristol." The Marian miracle stories themselves must also have played
a role in bringing these themes together: if the Jew of Bourges would so willingly
toss his own Jewish son into an oven, what more would such a man do to a
Christian child? Interestingly, however, the Marian and eucharistie themes we
see in "Adam of Bristol," and in the later host desecration charge, do not appear
in the new ritual crucifixion stories that were being composed in English
monasteries in the half-century after 1244. In the surprising absence of such
themes from the surviving contemporary accounts of the martyrdom of little St.
Hugh of Lincoln, we may have some measure of the gulf that was now opening
up between the localized, monastically centered piety of the traditional ritual
crucifixion tale, and the emerging devotional world of the later medieval laity.
In emphasizing the importance of sermon, drama, and devotional story to the
renewed popularity of ritual crucifixion tales during the thirteenth century, we
should not, however, overlook the influence of written texts like "Adam of
Bristol" itself as both shapers and transmitters of anti-Semitic "knowledge." By
the last half of the thirteenth century, a sizeable audience of literate laypeople
existed in England who could and did read books for pleasure. A very significant
percentage of those literate laypeople were female.65 Tales like "Adam of Bristol"
were among the books these literate laypeople read. And their reading, in turn,
helped to shape the social, political, and religious world within which real Jews
and real Christians in thirteenth century England lived and died. We see this
shaping, I would suggest, in the new rash of ritual crucifixion charges which
arose in England after 1244. We see it also in the story of Adam of Bristol. But
we see its consequences most clearly in 1255, when the king's steward, John of
Lexington, arrived in Lincoln to interrogate a Jew named Copin concerning the
death of a little Christian boy named Hugh.66 John must already have had a
detailed knowledge of ritual crucifixions by Jews before he ever sat down with
Copin. He had to have had. The entire charge was, after all, a Christian invention.
Like any good inquisitor, John already knew what Copin and the Jews of Lincoln
had done to Hugh, before he even began his interrogation. All he needed was
for Copin to confess to what John of Lexington already knew to be true. And
this Copin did, with fatal consequences for himself and the Jewish community
of Lincoln.
John of Lexington was a learned man. His brothers were all clerics, and he
himself had probably attended a university before becoming a knight and a royal
steward.67 He could have derived his knowledge of ritual crucifixions from a
highly learned source. Certainly I do not suggest that he had read the story of
Adam of Bristol. Our text does, however, offer us for the first time a concrete
example of the kind of text from which a man like John of Lexington might have

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 From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration 25

derived the information he put to such disastrous use at Lincoln. Books played
a critical role in shaping the piety of the late medieval laity from the thirteenth
century on.68 So too did Jews. Their historical absence from England after 1290
notwithstanding, Jews remained in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries what
they had already become in the thirteenth century: a ubiquitous presence in the
English imagination established largely (and after 1290, entirely) through words,
texts, and images. Those of us who live constantly around books may be tempted
on occasion to underestimate their power. We should know, or learn, better.

NOTES
Author's note: A first version of this paper was delivered at Rice University as part of the Neil J.
O'Brien Triennial Symposium in Medieval Studies, 10 and 11 November 1995. I want to express
my thanks to Mr. O'Brien, the conference organizers, and especially to Professor David Nirenberg,
for this invitation; and to the conference participants for their stimulating contributions concerning
"The Body of Christ in the Late Middle Ages." I am grateful also to William Jordan for helpful
comments on an intermediate draft of this essay.
1. E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (Harmondsworth, 1993), 273-4, and Krister
Stendahl, "Anti-Semitism," in Bruce Metzger and Michael Coogan (eds.), The Oxford
Companion to the Bible (Oxford, 1993), 33, represent a wide (although not universal)
consensus amongst New Testament scholars on this issue. For the New Testament references,
see Matthew 27:11-26 and John 18:28-19:16; and, less explicitly, Mark 15:1-15, Luke
23:1-24.
2. Matthew 27:24-25.
3. On the development of the notion of deicide, see Jeremy Cohen, "The Jews as Killers of
Christ in the Latin Tradition, from Augustine to the Friars," Traditio 39 (1983), 1-27.
4. See now Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity,
200-1336 (New York, 1995).
5. For this common Pauline metaphor, see I Corinthians 6:15, 12:12; 12:27; Colossians 1:18.
6. Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1979), 82-3, following
Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, 2nd ed. (London, 1960), 240-50.
7. Joseph A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origin and Development, trans. F. A.
Brunner, 2 vols. (New York, 1950), remains the standard account of the mass.
8. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition. A History of the Development of Doctrine. Volume
III: The Growth of Medieval Theology, 600-1300 (Chicago, 1978), 74-80, 184-204; Oakley,
Western Church, 83-6; and see also Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The
Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), 48-69.
9. I Corinthia?s 10:16-17, my translation from the Vulgate.
10. Pelikan, Growth, 75; and see also the classic work by Henri de Lubac, Corpus mysticum:
L'eucharistie et V?glise au Moyen Age, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1949).
11. G. Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period (Oxford, 1984).
12. Pelikan's translation (Growth, 191) of Alger of Liege, On the Sacraments: Patrolog?a Latina,
ed. J. P. Migne, vol. 180: 790-1.

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26 Robert C. Stacey_

13. For what follows, see Oakley, Western Church, 161-3; Lubac, Corpus mysticum, 116-35; and
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology
(Princeton, 1957), 194-206.
14. Oakley, Western Church, 162.
15. Ibid., 162-3; Brien Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the
Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1955), 132-53;
Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies, 196-202.
16. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi (Cambridge, 1991); and see also John Bossy's classic article, "The
Mass as a Social Institution, 1200-1700," Past and Present 100 (1983), 29-61.
17. Bynum, Holy Feast, 63-4; and see also two important articles by Denise Despres: "Cultic
Anti-Judaism and Chaucer's Little Clergeon," Modern Philology (1994), 413-27; and "Mary
of the Eucharist: Cultic Anti-Judaism in Fourteenth-Century English Devotional Manuscripts,"
in Jeremy Cohen (ed.), From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian
Thought (Wiesbaden, 1996), 375-401.
18. Wayne A. Meeks and Robert L. Wilken, Jews and Christians in Antioch (Missoula, 1978);
Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews (Berkeley, 1983).
19. Anna Sapir Abulafia, "Bodies in the Jewish-Christian Debate," in Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin
(eds.), Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester, 1994), 131-2. The standard work on Rupert of
Deutz is John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983).
20. Miri Rubin is engaged in a comprehensive study of host desecration stories. See "Desecration
of the Host: The Birth of an Accusation," in Diana Wood (ed.), Christianity and Judaism
(Studies in Church History 29, Oxford, 1992), 169-85; and her article in R. Po-chia Hsia and
Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval
and Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1995).
21. Rubin, "Desecration of the Host," 169-72.
22. Cohen, "Jews as Killers of Christ," 1-27; Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of
Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 231-51; Rubin, Corpus Christi.
23. I am adopting Langmuir's terminology for these accusations, which too often are lumped
together under the analytically unsatisfactory heading of "blood libel." For Langmuir's
understanding of medieval antisemitism, see his synthetic treatment, History, Religion and
Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1990), and his collected essays, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism
(Berkeley, 1990). I have offered my own evaluation of Langmuir's arguments in "History,
Religion, and Medieval Antisemitism: A Response to Gavin Langmuir," Religious Studies
Review 20:2 (1994), 95-101.
24. Rubin, "Desecration of the Host," 169-72.
25. Although she is not responsible for my conclusions, I must acknowledge the help of Deborah
Jo Miller, Cornell University, in formulating these observations on ritual crucifixion stories.
Her most important work is as yet unpublished; but in the meantime, see her Cambridge
University M. Phil, thesis, "The Development of the 'Ritual Murder' Accusation in the Twelfth
and Thirteenth Centuries and its Relationship to the Changing Attitudes of Christians Toward
Jews" (1991).
26. The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, ed. Augustus Jessopp and M. R. James
(Cambridge, 1896); Gavin Langmuir, "The Knight's Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln," in
Toward a Definition, 237-62; Despres, "Cultic Anti-Judaism."
27. The lengthy collection of miracle stories which follows the account of William of Norwich's
life and crucifixion is thus an essential part of the Vita et Passio Willelmi, as Jo Miller has
pointed out to me.

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 From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration 27

28. As William Jordan has noted, the saint's days for many of these child martyrs frequently
coincide with Marian feast days: see his The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip
Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), 19. The stories themselves, however, do
not generally accord a significant role to Mary in their narratives. She is neither a principal
target for the hostility of the Jewish perpetrators toward Christianity, nor does she intervene
to lessen the suffering of the child martyr. Nor is it always easy to determine the date at which
a formal saint's day was assigned to these child martyrs. In some cases, for example that of
Hugh of Lincoln, the official saint's day of 27 July seems to have been assigned quite late,
perhaps not until the eighteenth century: see Langmuir, "Knight's Tale," 238.
29. For the analysis that follows, I am indebted to Rubin, "Desecration of the Host."
30. Despres, "Cultic Anti-Judaism," and idem, "Mary of the Eucharist."
31. The story appears in British Library Harleian MS. 957, fols. 19r-27r. A Latin transcript of the
tale has now been published by Christoph Cluse, "Fabula Ineptissima: Die Ritualmordlegende
um Adam von Bristol nach der Handschrift London, British Library, Harley 957," Aschkenas:
Zeitschrift f?r Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 5:2 (1995), 293-330. I am grateful to Dr.
Cluse for his generosity in sharing his work with me, after discovering that we were both
simultaneously at work on this fascinating text. I hope to complete my own edition, translation
and study of the text shortly.
32. Cluse, "Fabula," 305; fol. 19r. Scholars have presumed that this must refer to Henry II, whose
son Henry, "the young king," died in 1183 - hence the dating of a Bristol ritual crucifixion
accusation to 1183 in Michael Adler, Jews of Medieval England (London, 1939), 185-6,
followed by Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 3rd. ed. (Oxford, 1964), 13, and
Langmuir, "Knight's Tale," 241. As Dr. Paul Brand has pointed out to me, however, the
reference could conceivably be to the reign of King Henry I, who was sometimes thought in
the thirteenth century to have been the father (rather than the grandfather) of King Henry II.
33. Cluse, "Fabula," 304, reproduces folio 22r with the two illuminations.
34. I have argued the case for this in "From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration: The
Excruciating Drama of Adam of Redcliff," an unpublished paper delivered to the annual
meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, Boston, 1993. A revised version of this paper
will become part of my book in progress on this tale.
35. The text ends with the following comment, set off in red ink from the dark brown ink of the
text: "Amen, the book is finished. Praise and glory to Christ. May the tongue of the reader
bless the body of the writer." ("Amen. Finito libro sit laus et gloria Christo. Corpus scribentis
benedicat lingua legentis." Cluse, "Fabula," 327; fol. 27r, but reading "benedicat" for Cluse's
"benedick". I am grateful to Dr. Adam Kosto for help with this passage.)
36. "quid fecerint michi judei in Anglia ydolatra et garula" (Cluse, "Fabula," 305; fol. 19r).
37. Cluse, "Fabula," 305-7; fols. 19r-v.
38. "Hic est deus christianorum"; (ibid., 308; fol. 20r); "corpus dei christianorum"; (ibid., 309;
fol. 20v). Examples could be multiplied.
39. Cluse, ibid., 309, 311; fols. 20v, 21 v.
40. "Ecce quam pulcre ridet deus christianorum!"; (ibid., 309; fol. 20v).
41. Ibid., 310-11; fol. 21r.
42. Ibid., 311-12; fol. 21 v.
43. I'm grateful to Professor Laura Hodges, formerly of Rice University, for advice on stamen.
44. "Miser, hic non purgabis ventrem!" Cluse, "Fabula," 314; fol. 22v.
45. Ibid., 317; fol. 23v.
46. Ibid., 317-22; fols. 23v-25r.

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28 Robert C. Stacey_

47. Ibid., 322-5; fols. 25v-26v.

48. Ibid., 325-6; fols. 26v-27r.
49. Ibids., 326-7; fol. 27r. "Locus iste ignotus erit tibi et omni humane creature usque in diem
prefinitam a deo patre."
50. For the text of this envoi, see note 36 above.
51. On the "Jew of Bourges" tale, see Rubin, "Desecration of the Host," 173 and references cited
there.
52. Cluse, "Fabula," 322; fol. 25v: "Ad quern sacerdos: 'Tace ne loquare unum solum verbum.
S?dete hic donee veniam ad vos et dicite Pater Noster, dominicain scilicet orationem, et Ave
Maria, salutacionem videlicet angelicam, et nolite egredi a loco isto." On the centrality of
these prayers to later medieval English devotion, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the
Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven, 1992), 53-5, 80, 219.
53. Cluse, "Fabula, 323; fols. 25v-25r.
54. When Samuel's sister sends the Irish priest and his companions off to church in the morning,
she gives the priest 3 pennies, telling him to have three priests each say one Mass of the Holy
Spirit, "ut omnia nobis prospera sint," with the priest himself saying a fourth Mass. The church
of St. Mary, Redcliff, had a Chapel of the Holy Spirit on its grounds, for which I have not
yet determined the foundation date.
55. Cluse, "Fabula," 317; fol. 23v.
56. Ibid., 319, 321; fols. 24r-24v, 24v-25r.
57. On the links between Redcliff and Bedminster, both held in the twelfth century by the Fitz
Harding family, see the article on Bristol in M. D. Lobel (ed.), Historic Towns Atlas, Volume
II (Oxford, 1975).
58. Cluse, "Fabula," 316; fol. 23r.
59. "Erat enim mulier ceca fidelis in lege sua, dicit dominus deus"; Cluse, "Fabula," 315; fol.
22v. "Non credam in hominem mortalem Ihesum" ibid., 325; fol. 26v.
60. John McCulloh, "Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the
Early Dissemination of the Myth," Speculum 72:3 (July, 1997).
61. Langmuir, "Knight's Tale," 240-1, collects the references.
62. A point noted also by Langmuir, "Knight's Tale," 241.
63. Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims (London, 1997).
64. R. W. Southern, "The English Origins of the Miracles of the Virgin," Mediaeval and
Renaissance Studies 4 (1958): 176-216; Jordan, French Monarchy.
65. Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1993), is an excellent
introduction to the burgeoning literature on women and the reading of books.
66. Langmuir, "Knight's Tale," passim.
67. Robert C. Stacey, "John of Lexinton," The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford
University Press, forthcoming).
68. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 209-98.

University of Washington

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