The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City
Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century

This book examines the Synagoga-Ecclesia motif in the thirteenth century and argues that the figures conveyed a political message of Christian ascendancy and Jewish submission.

Nina Rowe (Author)

9780521197441, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 April 2011

346 pages, 162 b/w illus.
25.4 x 18 x 2.5 cm, 0.98 kg

'Nina Rowe has succeeded in providing scholars with a provocative foray into the difficult problem of the relationship of artistic evidence to the lived realities of social and political life. Often she is forced to speculate, but she is always forthright about the limitations of her evidence. Not everyone will agree with all her conclusions, but no one working in the general area of her concerns can afford to ignore them. Speculum

In the thirteenth century, sculptures of Synagoga and Ecclesia - paired female personifications of the Synagogue defeated and the Church triumphant - became a favoured motif on cathedral façades in France and Germany. Throughout the preceding centuries, the Jews of northern Europe prospered financially and intellectually, a trend that ran counter to the long-standing Christian conception of Jews as relics of the prehistory of the Church. In this book, Nina Rowe examines the sculptures as defining elements in the urban Jewish-Christian encounter. She locates the roots of the Synagoga-Ecclesia motif in antiquity and explores the theme's public manifestations at the cathedrals of Reims, Bamberg, and Strasbourg, considering each example in relation to local politics and culture. Ultimately, she demonstrates that royal and ecclesiastical policies to restrain the religious, social, and economic lives of Jews in the early thirteenth century found a material analog in lovely renderings of a downtrodden Synagoga, placed in the public arena of the city square.

Introduction: the Jew, the cathedral and the city
Part I. Imagining Jews and Judaism in Life and Art: 1. The Jew in a Christian world: denunciation and restraint in the age of cathedrals
2. Ecclesia and Synagoga: the life of a motif
Part II. Art and Life on the Ecclesiastical Stage - Three Case Studies: Introduction to Part II: nature, antiquity and sculpture in the early thirteenth century
3. Reims: 'our Jews' and the royal sphere
4. Bamberg: the empire, the Jews and earthly order
5. Strasbourg: clerics, burghers and Jews in the medieval city
Epilogue: the afterlife of an image.

Subject Areas: Medieval history [HBLC1], European history [HBJD], The arts [A]