ABSTRACT
In 1475, the Jewish community of Trent was accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child named Simon. Through the new medium of the printing press, a narrative deliberately constructed by local authorities in order to justify the trial was circulated widely and quickly, promoting a popular pilgrimage site centred on Simon’s body while codifying and amplifying existing beliefs about the alleged activities of Jews. This chapter conceptualises this paradigmatic instance of the early modern blood libel as a form of political magic designed to help forge a Christian civic identity across linguistic, economic, and social lines. It demonstrates how this political magic was mediated by print technology, blood symbolism, and a theological conception of economics in order to produce an affective network united by cultic devotion and a shared stereotype of Jews as murderous usurers. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’, Sara Ahmed’s ‘Affective Economies’, and Egil Asprem’s ‘Magical theory of Politics’, this chapter examines the role that the mimetic virality of Latin texts, vernacular literatures, and printed images of Simon played in the cultivation of a Christian social body, as well as the ways these mechanisms continue to inform contemporary conspiracy theories.
