Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess

Adrienne Williams Boyarin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

"The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess is remarkable, nothing short of paradigm changing. The book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of medieval studies, Jewish studies, and those interested in the formation of proto-racial discourses. The book's careful readings of 'understudied' medieval texts and documents is a significant advantage; too many studies of Jewish representation in medieval texts focus on the same few literary and visual repertoires. Williams Boyarin's voice is original and masterful." (Medieval Encounters) "Through close readings of English texts in French, Latin, and English, and by deploying an impressively rich array of textual and visual evidence combined with a scalpel-like heuristic precision, Boyarin has attempted nothing less than a major paradigm shift to redefine self-other construction in terms of sameness rather than difference. Recalling Lacan's insight that identity is forged in terms of the Other rather than against it, Boyarin skillfully focuses on the frequently overlooked figure of the 'unmarked Jewess' in polemical narratives to show that Jewish women were liminal characters whose ambiguous location between Christian and Jewish identities destabilized the systematic othering of Jews in general." (Journal of English and Germanic Philology) "Any engagement with Boyarin's book must, of necessity, pay tribute to the intellectual brilliance here displayed. It is rare to read a book on such a well-studied subject that nevertheless feels so vitally new, so provocatively urgent. Boyarin's readings are superb, and highly diverse...Boyarin's intellectual creativity offers a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective on how likeness could be as much (or more) of a crisis than difference for medieval Christians living in close proximity to Jews." (Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures) ""The breadth and depth of Boyarin's analysis is stunning. As comfortable with Anglo-Norman and Latin as she is with early English, Boyarin skillfully examines an array of materials, from visual culture, to legal, devotional, literary and historical sources. Importantly, many of those primary materials have not appeared in analyses of the medieval Anglo-Jewry, largely because it is only by training our gaze on similitude and not difference that such texts and images become relevant. By expanding the archive in this manner, Boyarin has laid invaluable groundwork for future studies of the many previously unexamined or underexamined texts covered in The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess." (The Medieval Review) "Adrienne Williams Boyarin has written a remarkable exploration of a strain of Jewish-Christian relations often overlooked in scholarship: the instrumental usefulness of seeing Christians and Jews in English writing and history not as different but as the same. Those familiar with psychoanalytic theory may recall the old Lacanian dictum that identity is forged, not only against the Other, but also in (the) terms of the Other. Exercising this logic, Williams Boyarin teases out the implications of 'polemical sameness' between Self and Other, Christian and Jew, and, in the process, makes an important contribution to the large and expanding field of studies on Jewish-Christian relations in medieval England." (Geraldine Heng, author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages)