ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the development of the ritual murder tale as it moves from Thomas of Monmouth’s narrative about William of Norwich’s alleged martyrdom to Matthew Paris’s account of the Jews’ supposed sacrifice of Hugh of Lincoln and closes with Chaucer’s fictional Prioress and her fantasy about the Jews’ murder of a young boy (a “litel clergeon”). The essay interrogates the gestures of both temporal inclusion and temporal exclusion made by Thomas, Matthew, and the Prioress. “The Ritual Murder Accusation as Medieval Invention” illustrates how the Jew is dangerously situated inside of sacred Christian temporality (forever cast in a fantasy of Jewish violence) and outside of secular Christian temporality (the eternal Other destined to be written about rather than allowed to be living in the civil Christian world).
