Youth, Violence and Cult
This series of workshop will engage in an interdisciplinary and comparative inquiry into one of the most influential narratives of Christian culture, the myth of ritual murder. The accusation that Jews enacted the Crucifixion on the body of Christian youths became a powerful presence within anti-Jewish ideas and practices from its inception in the twelfth-century , through the medieval and early modern centuries, and into modern times. At its heart is the body of a youth, usually a young adolescent boy, out in the world at work, often as an apprentice. Once the accusation against the Jews unfolded and offered a framework for explanation of the youth's death, acts of veneration followed, and punishment too. The youth’s body was ritually buried, the Jews were tried and punished, and the community established routines of commemoration, a cult around what it named as a ‘martyr’ of sorts. The ritual murder narrative and its enactment as social drama is thus a meeting point for the understanding of the suggestive links between youth and collective responses to its violation. The first occasion on which this narrative is known to have been told - mid-twelfth century Norwich - is a unique opportunity to explore the qualities of devotional life in pre-modern Europe.
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