Adrienne Williams Boyarin (University of Victoria) discusses her new project which seeks to make the lives of medieval England’s Jews accessible.
Cultural and biographical study of Anglo-Jewish women is difficult. Scarcity of women’s voices, gendered divides in literacy and religious practice, marriages, name changes — all can make medieval women difficult to find let alone assess, and this is of course true across religious lines. As Charlotte Newman Goldy has put it, “Even Christian women’s lives most often need to be examined in aggregate, and that can obscure both the humanity of their stories and their variations.”[i] Further, all scholarship on medieval Anglo-Jewish women must cope with a primary methodological problem that scholarship on Anglo-Jewish men does not necessitate: the vast majority of the evidence for Jewish women in England comes from Latin legal and financial records. There are many thousands of Latin records of many hundreds of Jewish women in medieval England—dispersed through the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, Close Rolls, Patent Rolls, Liberate Rolls, Fine Rolls, Tower of London receipts, endless writs, and more—but all are filtered through an oppressive (Christian) bureaucracy. At the same time, these records provide historically verifiable information; they allow us to see English Jewish women whom we could not otherwise see, and they allow us to reconstruct some (fragmentary) part of their lives. But can we tell Jewish stories with this material?
My recent work on a website that aims to spread knowledge about, and allow new research on, Jewish women from medieval England has brought this question into relief. The Medieval Anglo-Jewish Women (MAJW) project (https://majw.uvic.ca) currently documents 1,904 references to 720 Anglo-Jewish women (including unnamed women and converts to Christianity). Of these, however, only 68 women and 94 references come from Hebrew or Hebrew-Latin materials produced by or with Jews. The imbalance is stark: already more than 90% of the references come from Latin, Christian sources, and the divide will grow. So, we can know quite a lot about quite a lot of Jewish women from medieval England, but most of what we can know, and even our knowledge of the existence of over 650 Jewish women so far documented on MAJW, depends on the output of an anti-Jewish governmental system. Still, I have always wished for a systematic cataloguing of all Anglo-Jewish women who appear in extant records, partly to establish broader (Jewish) cultural data—family networks, social networks, conversion rates, language networks and literacy, books owned, household objects, domestic life, etc. MAJW aims, over time, to do this work, and to give other researchers the tools to find, assess, and query the sources. (Read the About page for more on the structure and constraints of the current site, and my hopes for its future.)
18 women are currently featured on MAJW. A “featured” designation means that I have analyzed their records and written brief biographies from those records as well as select existing scholarship. Let us take, for example, the best known of all medieval Anglo-Jewish women, Licoricia of Winchester,about whom much has been written. She provides a full, featured profile. My own short biography of her reiterates and compresses the good work already done, though I emphasize litigation over her library (part of my personal interest in books known to have been in Anglo-Jewish women’s hands, whether through family inheritance or trade/pledge). A “further reading” list provides a small bibliography for Licoricia, and you can scroll to find basic information about her family, the locations where she worked and lived, and each record that names her. This profile, that is, can function as a starter pack for research or teaching purposes, all set in a woman-focused context sensitive to the bias and shortcomings of the available records.[ii] As I continue to work, I hope to provide full profile pages for as many as possible — and I will be very happy to have guest biography writers too.
What will we find of Anglo-Jewish women viewed in aggregate, particularly if we are not obedient to the Christian gaze? [iii] MAJW begins to give at least a fragmented glimpse of the Jewish stories behind the records. In Latin records, yes, the Anglo-Jewish woman appears mainly at the most difficult times of her life — deaths of husbands or children, conversions, disputes over property, fines, imprisonment — and we must be clear-eyed about the fact that our evidence has been curated by Christian officials often hostile to Jews.[iv] Further, as Judith Olszowy-Schlanger has noted, even the Hebrew documents that survive can present similar problems: many were produced to match the demands of the Jewish Exchequer, and “all … have passed through the hands of non-Jewish authorities.”[v] But we might, nonetheless, allow these records to reveal other experiences. We might focus on clues that provide cultural (rather than only financial or Christian legal) information. We might, as Goldy has urged, “use our critical imaginations to understand what we cannot document.”[vi] The future of studies of medieval Anglo-Jewish women is wide open, and I look forward to what the next decades will bring.
[i] Charlotte Newman Goldy, “A Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Woman Crossing Boundaries: Visible and Invisible,” Journal of Medieval History 34, no. 2 (2008): 130–45, at 131.
[ii] For a useful critique of what happens without sensitivity to bias and scholarship on Jewish life, see Ahuva Liberles, “New Perspective on Religious Conversion in Medieval England: A Review Essay on Lauren Fogle, The King’s Converts: Jewish Conversion in Medieval London,” Jewish Culture and History 23.1(2022), 103–114.
[iii] For a good introduction to medieval Jewish women’s lives (from a Jewish perspective and without assuming previous knowledge), see Sarah Ifft Decker, Jewish Women in the Medieval World, 500–1500 CE, Seminar Studies Series (New York: Routledge, 2022).
[iv] See Adrienne Williams Boyarin, The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 114–15:
[v] Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, Hebrew and Hebrew-Latin Documents from Medieval England,vol. 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 26–27.
[vi] Goldy, “A Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Woman Crossing Boundaries,” 132.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Dean A. Irwin (June 4, 2023). The Medieval Anglo-Jewish Women (MAJW) Project. medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved March 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ri3i