Siege of Jerusalem (Teams Middle English Texts)

Michael Livingston (Editor)

The fourteenth-century Siege of Jerusalem has been called by Ralph Hanna "the chocolate-covered tarantula of the alliterative movement" for its apparent anti-Semitism and is, as Livingston notes in his introduction, "simply difficult for twenty-first-century readers to like." The poem, which describes the destruction of the Second Temple by Roman forces in AD 70, is graphic in detail and unpleasant in its relish of the suffering of the Jews. But as Livingston points out, "Like the gritty violence of Alliterative Morte Arthure, the gore in Siege is perhaps best read as a grim awareness of the terrible realities of war, not as a bloodthirsty and berserk cry for further bloodshed. The poem chronicles a historical war, and it is this historical quality that must stand out: the poem not only has resonances of the bloodshed that battle inevitably brings, but it also is, in a very literal sense, history. This is to say, the war is over. The vengeance of Jesus has been accomplished. The Siege-poet's answer to the social-political-religious question of whether there is such a thing as a just war is that there was one: Titus and Vespasian's vengeance for the death of Christ. . . . Further efforts to avenge Christ were unnecessary. . . . That the poem is a call to action and to crusade, then, seems to be a claim that is far less sustainable than its opposite: a call to peace and to remembrance."

• ISBN10: 1580440908
• ISBN13: 9781580440905
• Publish Date: 1 March 2005
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Medieval Institute Publications
• Edition: New edition
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 154
• Language: English

Reviews

[Briana @ Pages Unbound]

Siege of Jerusalem is an interesting mix of the romantic, the religious, and the historical. The main theme is the criteria of a just war—which necessitates the author’s choice to present Titus’s and Vespasian’s conversion to Christianity before they head off to fight the Jews. They then have both religion and the empire on their side. Once there, they must negotiate the brutal violence, deciding whether they should offer or accept peace treaties and how many people they can let walk from the city alive.

The war itself is depicted in full gory detail, such as one might have encountered in The Song of Roland. Bones break, brains fly, blood is everywhere, and a woman eats her own child because everyone in Jerusalem is starving. Not the usual descriptions one expects to find in a text so heavily focused on the religious, but very much with precedent and quite in the tradition of epic poems. Readers who are particularly queasy will probably not enjoy this book.

Another obvious concern for modern readers is the apparent anti-Semitism. According to the text, the Christians are right, and the Jews are wrong, and they willingly murdered God. The introduction notes the correlation between the violence of the crucifixion scene that begins the poem and the later violence enacted against Jerusalem in retribution. Obviously, a bit of historical perspective can help dampen any discomfort, as well as the knowledge that author probably had never met a Jew in England at the time. The Jews are in a way the unknown, faceless other, and another group could function just as well as the enemy. Also, both the author and the Romans offer the Jews a bit of mercy. Titus at one point calls them “fierce men and noble,” (871) and they are granted a lot of credit for inventing ingenious ways to defend their city. Does all this make the text fair? No. But its unfairness is part of what gives it historical value.