During my fellowship year at the Frankel Institute, I have been thinking through the labyrinthine terrain of the process involved in sacralizing time or making time holy. More specifically, I have been studying the making of anno domini (A.D., meaning “year of our Lord”), temporality, and the role of Jews in sacred Christian time. Part of my inquiry takes me to map the violence that inheres in anno domini time, a conception of time based on the terrifi- cally violent death of Jesus Christ. And while the bulk of my studies takes me to the medieval An (Un)Common period and particularly medieval England, my work also engages with two Hebrew chronicles, Time: Sacred and “Solomon bar Simson” and “Mainz Anonymous,” as well as Josephus’s Jewish Wars. Secular Crossovers My study of this issue begins in the sixth century with Dionysius Exiguus (ca. 470– Miriamne Krummel 544), who calculates a Paschal Table so that Christians can join their neighboring commu- nities, such as the Romans, the farmers, the pagans, and the Jews, in possessing a calendar with which to mark important days in the Christian time. Thus, in the sixth century, “common era time” is first mapped. Dionysius’s work also provided the Christian Church with a Paschal Table that calculated the dates of Easter well into the future and attempted to locate the year of Jesus’s birth. More indirectly, Dionysius’s Paschal Table contributes to the making of a universal temporality that attri- butes deicidal intentions to Jews. Although from its very inception anno domini was slated for a Christian sacred use, anno domini was never kept as a wholly Christian calendar. From its early days, charting anno domini time entailed translating Jewish time and pagan temporality to calculate and write Christian sacred time. Easter provides an example of my point: without knowledge of the date for the Jewish Passover on 14 Nisan ca. 3760, Easter could not be calculated because Christ’s Last Supper, a “layered” meal, was also allegedly a Passover 9 dinner. Even more fraught, the word Easter, to together the labors of Dionysius, Bede, and involve a second degree of “layered” temporal- Thomas of Monmouth. These three men in- ity, was built from the pagan Germanic name vested in the eventual construction of an anno for a month in its calendar: Eosturmonath. domini calendar that in the hands of Thomas These interlocking relationships cre- of Monmouth, in particular, recast historical ate a combustible situation that developed reality and replaced secular history with a into cataclysmic ruptures through the writing sacred story of Jewish vengeance and Chris- of the English monk known as the Venerable tian victimization. What ensues in the litera- Bede (672–735) who in the eighth century ture and the manuscript art that I study is a brought anno domini time into his Ecclesiastical continuous Freudian drama of attempting to History of the English People, and while Bede’s sever Christian reliance on Jewish tradition by history was ecclesiastical, it still presented it- writing stories and creating art that imagine self as a history. In this complicated encounter the impossibility of that debt. What follows between religion and history, Bede institution- this unavoidable debt is an increasingly nonvi- alized a tradition of investing secular tempo- able situation between Jewish and Christian rality with sacred time. A third combustible cultures: essentially, the more anno domini rupture materialized through the pen of the gains ascendancy in the Middle Ages, the more monk, Thomas of Monmouth (flourished ca. Jews find themselves marginalized—isolated, 1150s), who in his Life and Passion of William despised, and considered alien. of Norwich introduced the first known anti- Sacred Matters has five chapters, an Jewish blood libel into medieval temporality. introduction, and an epilogue. In a study of Thomas of Monmouth essentially contrib- the Hebrew chronicle, “Mainz Anonymous” uted to the conflation of secular and sacred (ca. 1096), and the Latin hagiography, “Life of spheres by forcefully setting his story during William of Norwich” (ca. 1144), chapter one the Easter/Passover holidays and mobilizing reveals to what extent children’s deaths both images of Christ’s crucifixion in his accusation underwrite community formation and signal against the Norwich Jews, whom he suggests important moments in Jewish and Christian murdered William. Thomas of Monmouth thus temporality. Chapter Two examines how the enflamed the passions of the Saxon denizens Middle English Siege of Jerusalem (ca. 1400) against the recently appearing Jewish resi- repositions Josephus’ Jewish War (ca. 78) as an dents and used a sacred story to do so. In es- English narrative and resituates Jewish time as sence, anno domini, calculating a violent death Christian temporality. Chapter Three studies pinned on outsiders to the majority culture, the marginalia that populates the margins of figures as a temporality that perpetuates hor- four 15th-century versions of Geoffrey Chau- ror, violence, and scapegoating. cer’s “Prioress’ Tale” that undo their links to My second book, Sacred Matters: The Chaucer’s authorship and remake themselves Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time, a into pieces that firmly position anno domini as full draft of which I completed during my fel- always already expressing English temporality. lowship year at the Frankel Institute, brings Chapter Four takes me to the Vernon Manu- 10 Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt Universitäts- script (ca. 1400) which I explore against two Hebrew chronicles, “Solomon bar Simson” (ca. 1096) and “Mainz Anonymous” (ca. 1096), as a way of studying how passionate narratives articulate themselves in time and form tem- poral memorbuches (memory books). Chapter Five ends the monograph with a remarkable moment in the 1400s when the York Mystery Cycle (ca. 1463–1477) repositions the word “Jew” as an entirely sacred designation: two York Plays upset a traditional category of “Jewish” evil by fastening the word, “Jew,” to the virtu- ous characters, such as Moses and Jesus, and suppressing the Jewishness of the villainous characters, namely Caiaphas and Annas. The York Plays thus disorder Jewish history and muddy the archetypal Jewish identity to unveil yet another version of temporal revisioning. Through this shift of the Jewish mark, the York Plays make visible how language can change history as literary identities are reassigned to suit a national narrative. Wholly devised out of stories that promote fear and terror, the medieval postco- lonial Jew that I write about in Sacred Matters embodies the staging ground for our own contemporary constructions of a barbaric and socially disruptive Other. In addition to reflecting on medieval narratives, Sacred Mat- ters interrogates the construction of difference and in so doing, aims to address our current concerns about and representations of racial, cultural, ethnic, and economic difference that The first folio (fol. 17v) of the medieval Hebrew intervene in the process of building empires chronicle “Mainz Anonymous.” on the disposable bodies of humans imagined as socially and biologically different. 11.