The Fourth Gospel is at the same time a sublime work that has inspired and enriched the faith of countless Christians and a problematic text that has provided potent anti-Jewish imagery exploited in anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic discourse over the course of two millennia. The Fourth Gospel contains approximately 70 references to hoi ioudaioi, a designation most often (and best) translated as "the Jews." Several of these references are neutral or descriptive, referring to Jewish festivals or specific practices, and some depict individual Jews or Jewish groups as interested in Jesus' message. The vast majority, however, express a negative or even hostile stance towards the Jews. These passages express several themes that became central to Christian anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic discourse. These include the charge of deicide - killing God - and the claim that the Jews have the devil as their father (8:44). The essays in this book address both the Gospel's stance towards the Jews and the Gospel's impact on Jewish-Christian relations from antiquity to the present day, in a range of media, including sermons, iconography, art, music, and film. A short volume of collected essays cannot hope to address the full history of the Fourth Gospel's impact on Jewish-Christian relations. Nevertheless, it is hoped that this volume will contribute to the efforts of Christians and Jews alike to find ways to appreciate what is good and life-affirming about the Gospel of John, while also acknowledging the damaging impact of its portrayal of Jews as the children of Satan and the killers of Christ. Only when Christians disavow this portrayal can the Gospel of John continue to be a true source of inspiration and perhaps even a path forward in the relationships between Jews and Christians in the modern world.

First full collection on the seven most significant English mappae mundi from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Mappae mundi (maps of the world), beautiful objects in themselves, offer huge insights into how medieval scholars conceived the world and their place within it. They are a fusion of "real" geographical locations with fantastical, geographic, historical, legendary and theological material. Their production reached its height in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with such well-known examples as the Hereford map, the maps of Matthew Paris, and the Vercelli map. This volume provides a comprehensive Companion to the seven most significant English mappae mundi. It begins with a survey of the maps' materials, types, shapes, sources, contents, conventions,idiosyncrasies, commissioners and users, moving on to locate the maps' creation and use in the realms of medieval rhetoric, Victorine memory theory and clerical pedagogy. It also establishes the shared history of map and book making, and demonstrates how pre-and post-Conquest monastic libraries in Britain fostered and fed their complementary relationship. A chapter is then devoted to each individual map. An annotated bibliography of multilingual resourcescompletes the volume. DAN TERKLA is Emeritus Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University; NICK MILLEA is Map Librarian, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Contributors: Nathalie Bouloux, Michelle Brown. Daniel Connolly, Helen Davies, Gregory Heyworth, Alfred Hiatt, Marcia Kupfer, Nick Millea, Asa Simon Mittman, Dan Terkla, Chet Van Duzer.

A single, monumental mappa mundi (world map), made around 1300 for Hereford Cathedral, survives intact from the Middle Ages. As Marcia Kupfer reveals in her arresting new study, this celebrated testament to medieval learning has long been profoundly misunderstood. Features of the colored and gilded map that baffle modern expectations are typically dismissed as the product of careless execution. Kupfer argues that they should rightly be seen as part of the map's encoded commentary on the nature of vision itself. Optical conceits and perspectival games formed part of the map's language of vision, were central to its commission, and shaped its display, formal design, and allegorical fabric. These discoveries compel a sweeping revision of the artwork's intellectual and art-historical genealogy, as well as its function and aesthetic significance, shedding new light on the impact of scientific discourses in late medieval art. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

No story is more central to Western culture than the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, and none better demonstrates the power of representation in shaping religious faith and practice. The incidence of Passion imagery in diverse media is fundamental to the histories of Christian piety, church politics, and art in European and American societies. At the same time, the visualization and reenactment of Christ's suffering has for centuries been the principal engine generating popular perceptions of Jews and Judaism. The provocative essays collected here, written by eminent scholars with an eye toward the nonspecialist reader, broadly survey the depiction and dramatization of the Passion and consider the significance of this representational focus for both Christians and Jews. This anthology provides a unique, multifaceted overview of a subject of enduring importance in today's religiously pluralistic societies.

Contributors include Robin Blaetz, Stephen Campbell, Jody Enders, Christopher Fuller, James Marrow, Walter Melion, David Morgan, David Nirenberg, Adele Reinhartz, Miri Rubin, Lisa Saltzman, and Marc Saperstein.

Many historians of medieval art now look beyond soaring cathedrals to study the relationship of architecture and image-making to life in medieval society. In The Art of Healing, Marcia Kupfer explores the interplay between church decoration and ritual practice in caring for the sick. Her inquiry bridges cultural anthropology and the social history of medicine even as it also expands our understanding of how clergy employed mural painting to cure body and soul.

Looking closely at paintings from ca. 1200 in the church of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, a castle town in Central France, Kupfer traces their links to burial practices, the veneration of saints, and the care of the sick in nearby hospitals. Through careful analysis of the surrounding agrarian landscape, dotted with cults targeting specific afflictions, especially ergotism (then known as St. Silvan's fire), Kupfer sheds new light on the role of wall painting in an ecclesiastical economy of healing and redemption. Sickness and death, she argues, hold the key to understanding the dynamics of Christian community in the Middle Ages. The Art of Healing will be important reading for cultural anthropologists and historians of both medicine and religion as well as for medievalists and art historians.