ABSTRACT
After years of critical neglect, The Siege of Jerusalem 1 recently has been the focus of two fine studies—studies that invoke earlier assessments of the poem and then propose new contexts for understanding either the composition or the reception of this work. Notorious for its violence and virulent anti-Judaism, this late-fourteenth-century alliterative narrative was dismissed years ago by Derek Pearsall as a “model of decadent poetic.” 2 Ten years later, A. C. Spearing recoiled from its “horrible delight in the suffering of the Jews,” and concluded that the poem “leaves no unresolved ambiguities in the reader's mind.” 3 Unlike Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, which has been for years the subject of a lively debate about the nature and significance of its anti-Judaism, the graphically violent and seemingly unambiguous bigotry of The Siege of Jerusalem convinced critics that the work was a repellently conventional, if somewhat overwrought, model of late-medieval sentiment about the Jews. Invoking and then echoing these earlier assessments, Ralph Hanna decries the poem's “gratuitous” and “cheerfully sanctioned violence.” 4 He goes on to suggest the suitability of its composition in Yorkshire, where two hundred years earlier the Jews of York had been massacred in one of the most infamous episodes in the history of medieval English Jewry. 5 Nonetheless, Hanna then proposes a fifteenth-century reception and Lancastrian reading of the poem in which flayed Jewish flesh is transformed into flayed Lollard flesh. In a methodologically similar reading, Mary Hamel argues that the poem was composed in response to the briefly resurgent crusade fervor of the late fourteenth century. In her cogent discussion, the object of the poem's “repugnant brand of anti-Semitism” is not the Jews, but the Saracens. 6
