The Insight of Unbelievers. Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages by Deeana Copeland Klepper

2014 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-139
Author(s):  
Anna Sapir Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Jewish Text ◽  
Nicholas Of Lyra

Pleasures and Dangers of Conversion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Nisse
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Jewish Text ◽  
Joseph And Aseneth ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter examines Joseph and Aseneth, a Greek Jewish text that was translated into Latin in late twelfth-century England, and how it reemerges as significant within a crisis over Jewish conversion. Joseph and Aseneth, an account of the marriage of Joseph, then second in command to Pharaoh, to the Egyptian beauty Aseneth, was probably composed in the mid-first century in Egypt. The Jewish story is a text of the Diaspora in Egypt that imagines the circumstances of the marriage. Two of its major themes, conversion and female agency, offer a glimpse into the relations between Christians and Jews. The chapter shows how, in the Middle Ages, Joseph and Aseneth becomes a narrative of its heroine's conversion to Christianity and considers Jewish conversion as a deadly topic in the era following the Crusades.

William Tyndale's Response to the Hebraic Tradition

1967 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 110-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dahlia M. Karpman
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Nicholas Of Lyra ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Language Type ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Printing Presses

Christians of the Middle Ages did not respond favorably to Jewish thought; what they did learn with the assistance of prominent Jews, they used to develop a Christian typology. Apart from Nicholas of Lyra and Andrew of St. Victor, by and large commentators ignored the rabbinical discussions of the Bible. Intensive Hebraic scholarship had to await Renaissance philological techniques, printing presses, and the Reformation, before it came to full flower. The philological study of Hebrew by a grammarian such as Politian and the study of the Christian Cabala undertaken by men like Pico gave interest to this little-known language. Type faces were set up for Hebrew grammars, lexicons, and Bibles during the early development of printing. But it was the Reformation, with its emphasis on the two founts of religion—sola fidei, sola scriptura—which brought about the great dissemination of Hebrew learning.

scholarly journals Jewish polemics against Christianity and the Christians in Northern and Southern France from 1100 to 1300

1986 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-83
Author(s):  
Hanne Trautner-Kromann
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Southern France ◽  
Text Type ◽  
First Crusade ◽  
Comprehensive Picture ◽  
Jewish Text ◽  
Striking Change ◽  
The One

Jewish polemics against Christianity in the Middle Ages show a striking change in contents and in the linguistic form of the texts after the First Crusade. While the texts up to about 1100 are reports on religious discussions between Jews and Christians, often held in a friendly tone, the texts after 1100 contain aggressive or bitter attacks on the Christians. An example of how this was put into words appears in a Jewish text from the 1250s. In seven points the author gives voice to this protest against the introduction by the French king of a number of harsh edicts against the Jews. There is a marked dividing line between the predominantly aggressive texts from Northern France and the more sober ones from Southern France. On the one hand every single Jewish polemical passage should be analyzed as to form and content, including the context and text type in which the passage occurs, on the other hand the passages should be related to each other including their historical background. By this procedure of comparison every single passage can contribute towards creating a more differentiated and comprehensive picture of the conditions of the Jewish minorities in Christian Europe.

The ‘Pictures’ of Jerusalem in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 156

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Carruthers
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Jerusalem Temple ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Illuminated Manuscript ◽  
Nicholas Of Lyra ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Temple Mount

Imagining structures from the ekphrastic descriptions of the Jerusalem Temple and Temple Mount in I Kings and Ezekiel is an ancient meditation discipline, which was adopted from Jewish practices into early Christian monasticism. Though it could take various forms, ‘imagining/remembering Jerusalem’ was often practised as a devotional exercise throughout the European Middle Ages. Drawings of such an imagined character are significant to late medieval exegesis of these and related scriptural materials, particularly those associated with the commentaries of Nicholas of Lyra and the collection of visual meditations known as the Speculum theologie. This chapter queries a late medieval illuminated manuscript (Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 156) that, in the fifteenth century, formed part of the library of St John's Hospital in Exeter, to suggest that its materials were acquired and used for scriptural study and sermon composition by scholars of the hospital and its associated school.

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