Anthony Bale - Feeling Persecuted : Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages.

Feeling Persecuted : Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages. — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Feeling Persecuted : Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages." online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...57

FEELING PERSECUTED

For Tim and Percy, with love

Published by
REAKTION BOOKS LTD
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2010

Copyright Anthony Bale 2010

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI/Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bale, Anthony Paul, 1975
Feeling persecuted: christians, jews and
images of violence in the middle ages
1. Christianity and other religions Judaism History To 1500.
2. Judaism Relations Christianity History To 1500.
3. Jews Persecutions Europe History To 1500.
4. Violence Religious aspects Judaism History To 1500.
5. Violence Religious aspects Christianity History To 1500.
I. Title
261.260940902-DC22

eISBN: 9781780230016

Contents

2 The Violence of Memory: Seven Kinds of
Jewish Torture

4 The Jews Hand and the Virgins Bier:
Tangible Interruption

5 Visiting Calvary: Contrition, Intimacy
and Virtual Persecution

CHAPTER 1

He Who is in Pain is Alive

How can we remember pain? What would an image of it be like? Augustine thought it absurd to assume that when we think about sadness or fear, we experience grief or terror. The problem is that if the image of pain is not painful, how can it resemble pain? It seems that Augustine did not have a good answer. He says that we remember the affections of the soul by having notions of them.

Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy

An Art of Intimate Terror

A study of the Christian representation of Jews might fittingly open with a fairy-tale, a seemingly domestic but emphatically grisly fiction. The Grimm brothers The Boy Who Had to Learn Fear, written down in the early nineteenth century but based on medieval folktales, describes two sons. The elder son, though smart and sensible, is afraid: of dark places, of the graveyard, of night-time, of any dismal place, which make him shudder. The younger son, who is stupid, knows no fear and cannot shudder: That, too, must be an art of which I understand nothing. The younger son perceives his lack of shuddering fear to be a kind of knowledge he has not yet acquired. His brothers maturity is marked by his performance of fear: once fear is known and understood, it is no longer terrifying, but recreational and useful.

The boys father is concerned at his younger sons lack of fear, convinced that he will never get on in life, so he commissions a sexton to teach the boy how to shudder in fear. The sexton pretends to be a ghost, and meets the boy by night at the top of a belfry: the boy is unafraid and merely pushes the ghost down the stairs. Disgraced, the boy is given fifty talers by his father and told to leave town: he goes on his way, exclaiming to himself If I could but shudder! If I could but shudder! A passing man hears him saying this to himself and tells the boy to spend the night sitting by the gallows where seven corpses are hanging. But the hanged men cannot scare the boy; he merely feels cold, stokes his fire, and takes down the bodies because he pities them.

A passing waggoner tells the boy that whoever can free a haunted castle from evil spirits will marry the kings daughter, the most beautiful maiden the sun shone on. So the boy goes to the haunted castle, where strange things happen: terrifying animals prowl about, a bed moves of its own accord, a hideous old man appears with bones and skulls (which the boy simply turns on his lathe and makes into skittles).

For the next few nights similar things happen, but the boy remains unafraid. When six men appear with a coffin containing the cold body of the boys dead cousin, the boy tries to revive the corpse, thinking to himself, When two people lie in bed together, they warm each other: he takes his dead cousin to bed, lies with him, soon the cousin revives, only to say Now I will strangle you!

After the third night, the king sees that the boy has survived and driven away the evil spirits, and gives him his daughters hand in marriage; thus the boy becomes king. The boy says That is all very well... but still I do not know what it is to shudder!

The wedding between the princess and the boy is celebrated, but the boy is still muttering to himself If I could but shudder! The princess grows angry, and tells her waiting-maid to gather a bucket of fish:

At night when the young King was sleeping, his wife was to draw the clothes off him and empty the bucketful of cold water with the gudgeons in it over him, so that the little fishes would sprawl about him. Then he woke up and cried: Oh what makes me shudder so? what makes me shudder so, dear wife? Ah! now I know what it is to shudder!

The boy has been taught how to shudder, in pleasurable fear, the art of fear: hes not really afraid, but he can perform fearful shuddering correctly.

The Grimms story seems ripe for Freudian analysis, the setting in the haunted house the epitome of the unheimlich, the uncanny. The story gathers images of obviously psychosexual neuroses and desires: the rejection by the father, the homoerotic, incestuous and morbid encounter with the dead cousin, the crazy bed with a life of its own, the boys masturbatory nocturnal turning of his lathe, the fishy conjunction of sex and terror in the final scene of the wriggling gudgeons in the marital bed. Freudian horror is inherently sexual; Freud described emotions, like fear and terror, as a chain of repressions, displacements and negations, interrelating pleasure and pain. The Grimms story is exactly about what Freud called that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.

Such a Freudian reading, though illuminating, has its limits, and would certainly fail to do justice to the storys complicated notion of edifying fear. This fear is socially and culturally determined; it is a key part of becoming a civilized adult; fear has its own pleasures, fear itself being precious and wished for; acquiring fear is what makes the protagonist of the story heroic; and fear is itself a learned art, a performance of shuddering, to use the boys own terms, not the eruption of a thing repressed. Between learned fear and learned pleasure is an intimate and personally involved place, but it is also culturally constructed and socially contingent; the boy cannot perceive fear or terror, because these things do not inhere in, for instance, a black cat or an old castle he must learn how to read with fear, to imagine terror, and to enjoy this painful kind of interpretation.

The thing that finally makes the boy shudder turns out to be a thinly veiled metaphor for sex, feminine intelligence and masculine vulnerability: the fishy slithering concocted by his wife and her maid, in bed, when he is naked. As he becomes king and becomes a man, the boy finally learns what it is to shudder. This is also a metaphor for pleasure, maturity and, finally, the intimately gratifying, sensual and aesthetic preciousness of being afraid. It is incorrect to see in this story a kind of subjection to fear and terror, of the subjects disabling passionate attachment to his own subordination to fear: through affect by successfully linking ideas and cues to emotions and physical sensations the boy performs recreational terror, and so fear can take its correct place in building character. The boys reaction to the fish in his bed is itself childish and playful, but in being taught how to shudder he learns how to master his performance of fear, pain rethought as its aesthetic assumption.

Next page

1234567...57

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Feeling Persecuted : Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages.»

Look at similar books to Feeling Persecuted : Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages.. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Tyndale

The One Year Pray for the Persecuted Bible NLT

Max I. Dimont

The Indestructible Jews

Rose Publishing

Strong in the Storm: Lessons From the Persecuted Church

Mindy Belz

They Say We Are Infidels: On the Run from ISIS with Persecuted Christians in the Middle East

Eleanor Janega

The Middle Ages: A Graphic History (Introducing)

Christine Caldwell Ames

Medieval Heresies: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

Bill Warner

Islamic Doctrine of Christians and Jews

Michael Frassetto

Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages : From Muhammad to Dante

Karsten

Straw Bale Solutions

Iris Idelson-Shein

Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History: From the Middle Ages to Modernity

David Nirenberg

Communities of Violence : Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages

Paul Marshall

Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians

Discussion, reviews of the book Feeling Persecuted : Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages. and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.