Adrienne Williams Boyarin (University of Victoria), Jewish Women in Medieval England: New Tools for New Biographies. Co-sponsored by the Committee on Medieval Studies and the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies.

Medieval England’s Jewish communities survived for almost two and a half centuries before their expulsion in 1290 CE. Scholarship on these communities has generated relatively little information about women, however, even though national records provide thousands of mentions of hundreds of Anglo-Jewish women’s activities and family networks. In this lecture, Adrienne Williams Boyarin will introduce (for the first time) a new open website for exploring the lives and records of these women. In the process, she will address methodological problems that arise when seeking Jewish stories from (mainly) Latin, Christian sources, as well as the difficulties inherent in tracing premodern women’s names, marriages, and affiliations. Still, she argues, a women-first approach reveals new and valuable cultural information about the medieval English diaspora, a paradigm shift that highlights our duty to remember, even when evidence must be gleaned from biased and complex records.