In the introduction to his 2006 monograph The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500, Anthony Bale cites a variety of scholars, theorists, and popular sources outlining the long history of anti-Semitism in the West, central among them Jean-Paul Sartre's wry observation that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” In that book, Bale compellingly synthesizes disciplinary approaches from literature, art history, and manuscript studies in order to uncover this process of invention in late medieval England and to demonstrate its centrality to the larger project of medieval literary culture. Feeling Persecuted is in some ways a continuation of that work, reading at times almost like an extended coda pushing at the boundaries of the first book's semantic field. Yes, this is a second project about medieval anti-Jewish sentiment, but less straightforwardly so than Bale's first treatment of the subject. As in The Jew...

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