Kathy Lavezzo

Teaches at The Newberry

Kathy Lavezzo is an Associate Professor who joined the English Department in 1999 and who specializes in medieval literary studies with special attention to issues of community and social hierarchy; cultural geography; economy and trade; race and ethnicity; and gender and sexuality. Courses Kathy teaches include Getting Medieval, Arthurian Literatures, Mapping Medieval Jews and Saracens, Mapping Medieval Women, the Canterbury Tales, and the Pearl-poet. She is the editor of Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minnesota, 2003) and the author of Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534 (Cornell, June 2006). Kathy currently is completing a book, A Cultural Geography of Antisemitism: Jews and the Making of English Space, 731-1671, which understands the mapping of Jews in English texts as richly responsive to the appearance of a secular and market-driven urban society in a Christian milieu. This approach reverses our usual thinking of the figure of the Jew in Christian culture.  The classic starting point for understanding early Christian ideas of the Jew is the doctrine of supersession, which claims that Jews and the Jewish books of the bible embody an outmoded carnality that is superseded or supplanted by the new, more spiritual faith of Christianity. Inverting this dynamic, I stress how the Jew served not as a sign of a renounced material past but as a charged harbinger of a material future. The texts I analyze reject the Jew as carnal not only to defend and celebrate Christian otherworldliness but also to manage emerging bourgeois concerns within spheres both private (e.g., inwardness and domesticity) and public (e.g., commerce and trade). Analyzing texts ranging from Bede’s 731 reading of Solomon’s temple to Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), my project demonstrates how English antisemitic writings expose the fraught nature of lived experience in an English society mobilized by not only Christian ideals but also new motives of profit and privacy.