The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time

The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time studies violent temporal clashes that are written into the medieval vision of annus domini [the year of our Lord]. Christian temporality represents Jewish time as queerly oddly outmoded and advocating uncivil and socially disruptive behavior. Jewish temporality, in turn, records a marginalized people who work to rescue their embattled temporality from becoming a time forgotten and colonized. Through a select group of literature in Middle English, Latin, and Hebrew, as well as sixteen manuscript pictorials, author Miriamne Ara Krummel confronts the notion that annus domini time (whether disguised as CE or AD) figures as the universal standard. Krummel’s argument details how Other temporalities—ones outside and not like annus domini time—are cast as nonstandard and imagined as wholly devised out of stories that promote fear and terror, and are positioned as putative threats to the fabric of the temporal empire of Latin Christendom. Ultimately, the book reflects on the ways in which “common” time both marks and silences marginal identities and cultures and shows to what extent the dynamics of the medieval environment materialize in our modern world.

Praise / Awards

• “This thoughtful and thought-provoking book shows how much effort and violent exclusions were necessary to establish and uphold the Christian calendar and the linear sense of time that we now take for granted.”
  —Bettina Bildhauer, University of St Andrews

• “An original, edifying, and insightful contribution to our understanding of medieval literary and religious textual traditions and the cultural conditions of their production, dissemination, and reception.”
  —Catherine Cox, University of Pittsburgh