Re Evitt, Professor of English and Department Chair, has published a new essay, “Supersession and Conversion: The Adversus Judaeos Liturgical Dramas of Saint-Martial de Limoges,” in the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures. The essay builds on Professor Evitt’s previous research exploring Jewish-Christian relations during the Middle Ages and Christian representations of Jewish communities in drama. In this new essay, Evitt traces antisemitic tropes embedded in the Saint-Martial de Limoges liturgical dramas to reveal radical ways such texts rethought the organizing concepts that inform some of the era’s devotional performances.

As Evitt’s research shows, early eleventh-century liturgical records from Saint-Martial de Limoges demonstrate profound tensions grounded in anxieties about an impending Apocalypse.  End-of-days anxieties combined with news of the 1009 CE Muslim destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to inspire heightened levels of antagonism toward contemporary Jewish communities throughout Europe. In Limoges, influential Christian clerics Rodulfus Glaber and Ademar of Chabannes crafted retrospective historical narratives of forced conversions, exile, and death as tools used to disperse Limoges's Jewish community after purported Jewish-Christian debates in 1010 CE. The Limoges liturgical dramas, with their shared focus on anti-Jewish tropes, collectively reflect systemic cultural commitment during the era to exclusionary representations of Jews and Judaism. The evidence of culturally systemic anti-semitism in these devotional plays serves as a powerful reminder of the deeply ingrained cultural biases that have contributed during recent violent altercations in America to ethno-nationalist claims.