In this comprehensive and authoritative study, Magda Teter explores the narrative contours, juridical career, visual imagery, and long-term consequences of the ritual murder accusation against Jews from its medieval European origins to the second half of the eighteenth century. The book's main concerns, however, lie with the early modern period—roughly a three-century span of time stretching from the famous case of Simon of Trent in 1475 to the judicial reforms in the Polish Commonwealth around 1775, which largely ended the use of torture and severely limited capital punishment.

The early modern period, Teter laments, “has been unappreciated” in the history of the ritual murder accusation against Jews, for it was precisely during this time that the blood libel “became truly rooted in the European Christian imagination” (377). It was then that it consolidated its central narrative and iconographic features, finding—thanks to the technology of printing—a permanent place in authoritative accounts of world history, weakening the papacy's earlier condemnation of the accusation, and producing both precedent and argumentation for a string of prosecutions that would darken the judicial record of the Italian states and Poland-Lithuania.

Blood Libel moves along two axes, one chronological and the other geographic. The chronological narrative begins with the consolidation of the main discursive elements of the ritual murder accusation and—perhaps more significantly—their dissemination to various parts of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on the backs of pilgrimage visits and the new medium of printed books and pamphlets. 1475 is an important chronological marker, Teter argues, because the Trent case marked the first time since the thirteenth century that the papacy failed to intervene forcefully and unambiguously in denouncing the libel, forbidding the erection of pilgrimage sites, and preventing the beatification of the supposed child martyr. The narrative's endpoint, roughly 1750 to 1775, encompasses several interconnected themes: a second wave of accusations and trials in Poland-Lithuania, with often murderous consequences; the unprecedented intervention of leaders of the Frankist movement (so-called “Counter-Talmudists”) in a public disputation in which they claimed the veracity of the accusation based on rabbinic sources; the drawn-out lobbying efforts of individual Polish Jews—as well as delegates from the Council of Four Lands—to get the papacy once more to denounce the blood libel; the investigation and report of Cardinal Ganganelli, which, Teter effectively demonstrates, was never officially published or disseminated; and, finally, the petering out of formal ritual murder trials under the weight of a growing climate of skepticism and the campaign for investigative and juridical reforms, which rendered a robust prosecution of such cases difficult, if not impossible.

The geographic axis, which runs in a northerly direction from the Italian Peninsula into Poland-Lithuania, while perhaps less obvious to the reader, nevertheless is also an original element in Teter's argument. To wit, the central features and decisive developments in what was to become the reigning paradigm of the ritual murder accusation transpired within a Catholic cultural and religious sphere in which individuals and communities shared and exchanged historical knowledge, collective memories, and legal precedents. To this one should add iconography and visual representation, as Teter's own discoveries regarding the role of the Trent case in the paintings said to represent local cases—in the Sandomierz church, for example—make clear.

Blood Libel is in many respects a remarkable work. A comprehensive narrative account, it is grounded in an exhaustive combing of archives in Poland, the Vatican, Austria, Belgium, and France, and a careful analysis of printed primary sources in multiple languages. Equally a study in legal and inquisitorial procedure, epistemology, and the history of the book, Blood Libel will easily secure its place as the authoritative work on the premodern accusation and its effects on the European imagination as well as its Jewish victims. The book does have weaknesses, however. At 539 pages (supplemented by a website containing additional images, interactive maps, and a full bibliography), it is longer than it needs to be. The alternating narrative and analytical chapters, particularly in the first half of the book, result in a good deal of repetition: works by Mojecki, Żochowski, Pikulski, and others; Bishop Hinderbach; the Sandomierz case; and even certain arguments, make repeat appearances in several chapters. Better editing and a stronger commitment to defining and limiting the scope of each chapter could have avoided this. Additionally, Teter has chosen to narrate and review too many separate cases, the details of which become repetitive in their own right. I fear that the inclusion of so much detail, an aspiration to be encyclopedic in its coverage, will obscure for many readers the impact of the book's larger arguments and originality. A more selective approach—for example, choosing to give a close reading to representative cases, or ones involving turning points or significant change—would have allowed the interpretive dimensions of Teter's work to stand out more boldly.

For Blood Libel does offer important, new arguments regarding this most persistent and troubling of Jewish historical experiences: the relative discontinuity and transience of the individual medieval cases; the foundational importance of the Trent case; the dissemination of Trent's narrative and iconography far beyond its Alpine borders; the papacy's turning away from its earlier, largely condemnatory, position on the blood libel; the puzzling robustness of the accusation in Poland-Lithuania; the failures and unanticipated successes of Jewish apologetic and diplomatic interventions in the eighteenth century; and, finally, the historical forces that lay behind the eventual end to ritual murder trials in Poland. These are many of the key contributions of Teter's scholarship, which should not be allowed to get lost in the detail.