ABSTRACT
The European festive year is based on the feasts and fasts of the Christian faith. Christianity’s profound roots in Judaism had complex early modern cultural and social repercussions. Jews, the most significant religious group represented within Christian festivals, were also their largest non-participating group. This chapter focuses on the Platter brothers’ accounts of the reception, impact and diffusion of Jewish culture in western Mediterranean France in the 1550s and 1590s, when they lived with and were taught medicine and pharmacy by conversos: baptized Iberian Jews and their ‘New Christian’ descendants. It concludes by considering some Jewish representations and misrepresentations in the writings of Hippolytus Guarinonius. For over a decade until 1594, while studying at Prague’s Jesuit College, he came into unhappy daily contact with the Jews of the Prague ghetto, and one of his hagiographies initiated a persistent anti-Jewish legend commemorated in drama and other literature.
