| In this dissertation I take up the vexed issue of the complex and shifting relationships between antisemitism and misogyny in early literature. I argue that medieval representations of women and Jews parallel and complement each other in a relationship developing from the Pauline exegetical tradition that links the spiritual, masculine and Christian and defines them in opposition to the carnal, feminine and Jewish. But women and Jews are not simply the "Other" for Christian patriarchy; they are also its origins. One cannot conceive (of) men without women, or (of) Christianity without Judaism. To accommodate these paradoxes, Pauline paradigms shift and splinter. These tensions within Christian self-definition are crucial to antisemitism on the one hand, and misogyny, on the other, and to the entangled and conflicted relationships between them.;Focusing on the functions of these paradigms of self-definition within specific communities, I discuss how authors use strategies of differentiation from and identification with figures of Jews and women to create individual and collective Christian identities. I begin with Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, whose Pauline-influenced exegesis creates polarized representations of women and Jews that simultaneously acknowledge and undermine their originary roles in Christian ideology. In my next section, I trace the influence of these Pauline hermeneutics in Chaucer's Prioress' Tale, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the Digby Mary Magdalene. All of these works literalize, in graphic and gruesome ways, the oppositional dynamic of Christian identity formation. In the sixteenth century, these strategies for creating Christian identity are further complicated by the added tensions of Tudor and Reformation politics and the impact of nascent English imperialism, which I discuss in relation to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. To explore the impact of these medieval and early modern paradigms on modernity, I turn, in a coda, to Shylock: The History of a Character, written by German-Jewish theater critic Hermann Sinsheimer on the eve of the Shoah. |
