A Fourteenth-Century Augustinian Approach to the Jews in Riccoldo da Monte Croce’s Ad nationes orientales

Lydia M. Walker, Western Michigan University

Abstract

The common description of the Christian attitude towards the Jews in the high and later Middle Ages is one of eventual and steady deterioration. The progressive decline of Jewish liberties and the rise of anti-Semitism, coming into greater development after the Rhineland massacres of 1096 and brought to its zenith with the expulsions from England (1290) and France (1306), have been attributed to a “changing theological and anthropological understanding of the Jew.”