The Wandering Woman in the Jewish Boy: Gender, Antisemitism, and the English City

press release: Friday, November 22, 4:00 p.m. Helen C. White Room 6191.

Public lecture: Professor Kathy Lavezzo (English, University of Iowa).   

The Middle Ages witnessed two monumental spatial phenomena, the rise of the city and the emergence of the doctrine of separate spheres. This talk considers the presence of a crucial way of understanding gender and urban space in a group of highly offensive texts: medieval English antisemitic literature. Focusing on one of the most widely told and influential medieval libels about Jews—the legend of the Jewish Boy—this presentation analyzes what happens when a racial and intolerant culture, oddly, imbues a woman with a public voice and public authority.

Professor Kathy Lavezzo (English, University of Iowa) is a well-established scholar in the field of medieval literary studies. Her wide-ranging work is especially engaged with issues of community, nationhood and social hierarchy; cultural geography and medieval cartography; Christian-Jewish relations; economy and trade; race and ethnicity; and gender and sexuality. Her most recent, groundbreaking book, The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Cornell, 2016) understands the mapping of Jews in English texts as richly responsive to the appearance of a secular and market-driven urban society in a Christian milieu. She is also the author of Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534 (Cornell, 2006), and of multiple articles published in prominent venues (Studies in the Age of Chaucer, New Medieval Literatures, and PMLA, among others); she is the editor of Imagining a Medieval English Nation (2003) and Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson (2011). With Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Professor Lavezzo is also the principal investigator for a digital humanities project, Remappings. Her scholarship has been supported by a Frankel Institute Fellowship at the University of Michigan and a Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities here at UW-Madison.

Professor Lavezzo’s visit is made possible by the Anonymous Fund, the Department of English, the Program in Medieval Studies at UW-Madison and the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at UW-Madison.