The Judaic Other in Dante, the Gawain Poet, and Chaucer

This book explores the late medieval literary legacy of early Christianity’s relationship to its Judaic origins. Catherine S. Cox demonstrates how the works of three canonical 14th-century authors—Dante, the Gawain-poet, and Chaucer—express conflicting aspects of Jewish and Christian religious identity. In their support of Christianity’s view of history, she argues, their poetry replicates Christianity’s inclination to appropriate and reconstruct Jewish texts.   All three writers shared the challenge of reconciling their Christian agenda with their literary agenda and their desire to excel as artists while perpetuating an evangelical message. Looking at some of their major texts—in particular, the Commedia, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Canterbury Tales—she situates their work in relation to the history of supersessionism and its ideological perspectives. She demonstrates that their representations of the Judaic “Other” and their exclusion of Hebrew scriptural tradition helped establish an instructive frame for late medieval theological, literary, and cultural debate.   By engaging ancient scholarship with contemporary theory, Cox offers provocative readings of both the texts and the cultural conditions from which they emerged and in which they were received. Informed by a broad range of literary, historical and recent critical debates, her study will bring about a new understanding of numerous and sometimes perplexing aspects of work by monumental figures in literary history.