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The Eucharistic host was believed to be Christ’s body, sacrificed for the sins of humankind. Pious sorrow could transform into rage when Christians believed this sacrifice had been desecrated by Jews or witches. Host-desecration trials, blood libels, and some witch-trials are best understood as the flip-side to adoration of the host. Desecrated hosts were imagined to be used in malefice against children, emblems of the innocent Christ-Child. The chapter closely examines one trial in which a young accused witch confessed to host desecration and killing a ‘beautiful baby’ as a way to reflect on her own innocence, lost in a rape or seduction. This and other trials suggest that those accused of the worst anti-Christian crimes might themselves have been the most pious of Christians.

This chapter examines the host-desecration libel staged by the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, with particular emphasis on how Croxton intertwines host desecration with commerce. It considers how the play's economic dimensions would have been all the more resonant when performed in the Great Market of Bury St. Edmunds, due not only to the feel, smell, sound, and sight of market life, but also to the looming presence of Moyse's Hall. The grandest secular building in Bury, Moyse's Hall was associated with Jews but not via ritual-murder, host-desecration, or other antisemitic libels. Instead, folklore claimed that the building contained “hidden treasure” controlled by Jews from afar. By teasing out the interplay of commerce in both the play and the town of Bury, the chapter suggests that Croxton doesn't so much affirm the miraculous Christic properties of the host as use the Eucharist to ponder the slippages, oppressions, and possibilities of life under capital.

This chapter offers a new interpretation of the initial trials of Johannes Reuchlin, arguing that the assault on Reuchlin was undertaken as the first step toward convening a planned inquisition of Jewish books and therefore resumption of the anti-Jewish campaign. Inquisitor Jacob Hoogstraeten rapidly garnered support from a host of universities that condemned any form of toleration of Judaism. The legal and academic charges leveled against Reuchlin represented great peril for European Jews because they included the entire array of late-medieval innuendoes (host desecration, ritual murder, blasphemy, heresy) and all of these charges were published in anti-Jewish pamphlets. The chapter explains how Reuchlin, with support from the Pope Leo X and from many quarters within Germany, turned the tables on the Inquisition and achieved a 1514 ruling from an episcopal court in Speyer that affirmed the orthodoxy of his Recommendation and saddled the Inquisitor General, in a harsh rebuke, with punitive court costs.

This chapter explores the papal angle—the stance taken by medieval popes towards the Jewish communities of western Europe. This chapter shows how the papacy sought to protect but also control the Jews by a number of different methods, in particular by the promulgation of general letters or ‘encyclicals’. Appeals from the Jewish communities encouraged six popes in the twelfth century and ten in the thirteenth to re-issue ‘Sicut Iudaeis’, a letter of protection for Jews originally issued in the sixth century by Gregory the Great which in the High Middle Ages became known as the ‘Constitutio pro Iudaeis’. Sometimes it was re-issued to refute popular charges and increasing accusations against Jews: in particular of ritual murder, host desecration and blood libel.

This chapter explores the false charge leveled against Jews for centuries, the charge that Jews have murdered individuals in order to use human blood in religious ritual. Blood libels were a distinctive form of ritual disruption in which an outside community misrepresented Jewish tradition through allegations against Jewish individuals and communities. The blood libel contributed to a distinctive caricature of Jewish identity situated in a polarized dynamic between Christians and Jews: Jews embodied the “other,” while Christians embodied the preferred “norm.” Christians were human and morally superior, while Jews were nonhuman and morally inferior. Mischaracterizations reinforced an already socially, politically, and economically unequal relationship while simultaneously revealing much of what preoccupied Christians theologically, socially, and historically. Jews were cast as the monstrous “other” as a foil for Christians’ self-representations, illustrating the general point that a dominant group may bolster its own self-presentation through rhetoric that misrepresents another group’s ritual practice.