On a recent visit to the charming city of Blois, which lies along France's famed Loire River approximately midway between Tours and Orléans, I was confronted with a startling sight. Strolling through the historic center, I found myself standing directly below the cathedral dedicated to St. Louis. To the left was a street bearing the name rue des juifs, and to the right was a street named rue des élus. Splitting the “street of the Jews” from the “street of the elect” at a right angle was the rue St. Louis. It led directly up towards the imposing cathedral, which shares a name with France's famous crusading king of the thirteenth century. What an apt metaphor for the Jews of medieval Europe, I thought: under the watchful eye of ecclesiastical authorities, yet always being led (implicitly or explicitly) towards baptism and the promise of salvation. The fact that Blois was also in 1171 the location of the first accusation of ritual murder on continental Europe and that it resulted in a public burning of over thirty members of the local Jewish population made the scene all the more unsettling.

As medievalists well know, the incident at Blois was not an isolated event, but one of several violent episodes in a century that scholars broadly agree was a turning point for the worse in Jewish-Christian relations. In this important and accessible book, E. M. Rose delivers a detailed reconstruction of the origins of this malicious charge, embedding it within the broader sociopolitical context of twelfth-century Europe. She begins with the first appearance of the charge of ritual murder in Norwich in the mid-twelfth century and concludes with the various “copycat” cults that developed in other cities in England and in Europe later in the century. To be sure, much has been said already about the English monk Thomas of Monmouth and his fanciful but damning Life and Passion of William of Norwich, a hagiography of the young apprentice leatherworker allegedly killed and mutilated by the local Jewish community. The Life is now available as a Penguin Classic thanks to a recent translation by Miri Rubin (2014), but strangely there had never been a scholarly monograph devoted to the full range of events surrounding William's infamous martyrdom. That desideratum has now been more than filled.

Rose's book is especially commendable for its synthesis of a wide body of relevant scholarship, its judicious questioning of previous assumptions, and its lucid and jargon-free prose. But Rose is not simply retelling an old story in greater detail, one that is admittedly well known to scholars of medieval anti-Judaism. She is also, and quite rightly, placing the origins of the ritual murder charge at the very heart of medieval society, leaving no doubt about its centrality to medieval life more generally. The chapters are helpfully organized so as to allow the story to unfold from the center, rather than from the margins, of twelfth-century urban life.

Part 1 of the book includes four chapters under a broad heading, “The Monk, the Knight, the Bishop, and the Banker.” These refer to characters that are central to the events in Norwich. Chapter 1 concerns the initial discovery around Easter in 1144 of a dead child. As Rose points out, initially there was little commotion following his murder and it was not until a monk named Thomas arrived on the scene and began investigating his death that much attention was paid to the child's unusual death. It was Thomas who shifted the focus onto the alleged Jewish perpetrators of the crime. Rose especially emphasizes the various parties who stood to benefit from the death of this otherwise undistinguished boy. Central to her focus in chapter 2 is the failure of the second crusade and the spiritual devotion that it engendered. Rose argues that the military, devotional, and financial disaster of the crusade contributed to a backdrop that combined “spur-of-the-moment miracle cults,” burdensome loans, and “animosity directed towards Jews vigorously preached” (61). Chapter 3 fleshes out a feature of the ritual murder accusation that has been often understated: the murder trial of a Jewish banker referred to by Thomas of Monmouth as “Deus-adiuvet” (possibly a corruption of the Anglo-Norman name Deulesalt). The Christian prosecutor of the trial, Bishop William Turbe, is seen here to play an instrumental role in supplying damning details of Jewish communal activities. Since Deulesalt was by this point already dead, it was important that the trial focus instead on the community writ large. “It is this, above all,” Rose writes, “that raises the entire incident from a ‘simple homicide’ to a ‘ritual murder’. It was the educated bishop and his legal team, not Brother Thomas alone, who put together the story of William that was memorialized in the Life” (90). Chapter 4, “The Making of a Saint,” brings the story back to Thomas of Monmouth and the establishment of a cult surrounding the boy-martyr. Stressing the social, rather than individual, factors at play, Rose urges us to see the saint and his hagiographer as ordinary characters in an ordinary English setting operating under ordinary circumstances, even if the end product of those events was something quite unprecedented.

Part 2 of the book is titled “The Earl, the Count, the Abbot, and the King.” This both echoes the character division in the first half while also underscoring those figures of authority who stood to benefit from the ritual murder accusation in the four “copycat” cases under examination: Gloucester (1168), Blois (1171), Bury St. Edmunds (1181), and Paris (1181). Once again, Rose stresses the particular social and political circumstances of the events that led to the promotion of child martyrs, examining which aspects of the Norwich case were adapted or reworked as necessary. The most intriguing of the four cases must surely be Blois. It is the first example of ritual murder accusations outside of England, and unlike Norwich or the other three cities, no identification of a victim was ever made and no body or corroborating evidence was ever produced. In this sense, Blois is least like the other four cases. The uniqueness of Blois is amplified by the fact that Count Thibaut V ordered over thirty Jews to burn in the flames as a collective punishment for the crime, a far greater casualty than in any of the other cities. For this reason I am not entirely persuaded that Blois deserves to be categorized as a “copycat” case like the others. As Rose herself points out, here it is the punishment rather than the alleged crime that was remembered by both Jews and Christians alike (185). Nor is it entirely clear how Count Thibaut V's decision to persecute the Jews in the way that he did “constituted a claim to share in royal power” (168). More convincing is Rose's astute comparison between the public and pedagogic aspects of the burnings of an additional three Jewish scholars in Blois and the twelfth-century theatrical performances of the Ordo Prophetarum and other liturgical plays, where the lessons learned from the Jewish characters is of the ultimate damnability of rejecting or mocking Christ. Thinking about these connections brought my image of the medieval streets in Blois into vivid relief.

The Murder of William of Norwich is a truly excellent book. It deserves to be read and studied by scholars in many if not all fields of medieval studies. The provocative lessons not just about Jewish-Christian relations, but also about the interlaced nature of the medieval urban landscape help to raise this book to that rarest of categories: a scholarly monograph that can be assigned with profit to both undergraduate and graduate students.