Youth, Violence and Cult: An Interdisciplinary Network on the case of William of Norwich, the ritual murder accusation and its historical legacy

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In 1144 the body of a youth, William, an apprentice tanner, was found on Thorpe wood outside Norwich. Rumours soon circulated about the unusual circumstances of his death, and the Jews of Norwich were accused by the youth's family of having killed him with intent. The king's representative in Norwich, the sheriff, protected the Jews, and the sad episode was all but forgotten. In 1150 a new member of the Cathedral Priory, Thomas of Monmouth, revived interest in the story, revisited its circumstances, and produced a powerful narrative which associated the Jews of Norwich with the death of the youth, murder with deep religious meaning, a re-enactment of the Crucifixion. This prompted the renewed accusation of the Jews, and the re-burial of William, now deemed a martyr. A local cult developed, and similar accusations soon arose in other towns of the Anglo-Norman domain: Bury St Edmunds, Gloucester, Blois, Lincoln, and then in the Rhineland. The narrative born in Norwich - which we know well from the twelfth-century manuscript that contains it alongside stories of the miracles which occurred at William's tomb - was enacted and re-told hundreds of times since then. In medieval Europe, in Catholic Europe, and even in some Muslim countries. The workshops proposed will explore historically the coming together of preoccupations with Youth, attitudes to Jews and the reaction to miraculous incursions into a Christian community. The coming together of scholars from so many different disciplines and areas of historical expertise will allow a deeper and more meaningful understanding to emerge, of the links between Youth and popular sentiment, emotion and devotion. It will allow the group of scholars to combine in an investigation of a seminar Christian myth, in Europe and beyond. The workshops will attend to the local and the specific in the case of William of Norwich and evaluate the wide impact which it has had over almost 800 years. The case of William of Norwich offers an engagement with collective reactions to violence against a Youth. The case of William of Norwich in 1144 prompted interaction between government and Norwich townspeople, over questions of law, justice and public order. It raised questions about religious authority: who was to decide whether William was a 'martyr' or not? It also spurred a monk of the cathedral to imagine a narrative which combined all elements of the Norwich case within an overarching Christian narrative which cast the Jews not only as killers of Christ, but as being intent on repeating that violence on the body of a Christian child.The network will bring together scholars with a wide range of expertises to discuss the case of William of Norwich within several different frames, in workshps and through a website. In Workshop I Historians of Norwich will help place the case within its context by considering the condition of children, the situation of Jews, the immediate reaction to the finding of the Youth's body, and the creation of first stirrings of cultic interest, and the making of the narrative account of ritual murder; Workshop II will consider the regional impact and spread of the narrative, in England and France, and the forms in liturgy and art taken by the ensuing cults of 'martyred' youths; Workshop III will consider the impact of the case in the longer term, into early modern Europe with its new religious delineations, and beyond into modern times. The workshops will also be accompanied by visits to the sites in Norwich, of visual material, and will benefit from a performative reading of the some of the accounts which linked so powerfully Youth, Violence and Cult.