Abstract

The metamorphosis implied in the title of this paper is the one undergone by the most natural of all forms of love, that of a mother for her child, into the most unnatural of all possible aberrations: mother-child cannibalism. One such episode is infamously attributed by Flavius Josephus, in bk. 6 of his De bello iudaico, to one Maria daughter of Eleazar in the besieged city of Jerusalem during the military expedition led by Vespasian’s son, and future emperor, Titus in 70 C.E. This episode plays a crucial role in the alliterative The Siege of Jerusalem, one of the two extant Middle English romances dealing with the Jewish war and the subsequent destruction of the Second Temple. The imagery of this popular romance, composed ca. 1390 in the NW of England, is characterized by an unusually high proportion of and obvious relish for violence that go hand in hand – at least according to the critical vulgate – with an equally virulent brand of anti-Judaism. Recent re-examinations of this romance, however, have convincingly argued in favour of a more nuanced assessment of its otherwise undeniable anti-Judaism. A comparative reading focusing on the cannibalistic-mother episode in The Siege of Jerusalem vis-à-vis the treatment of the same narrative material in the source-text, in combination with a brief examination of the pathetic element in the Middle-English poem’s representation of the sufferings of the inhabitants of Jerusalem under siege, helps reinforce this ‘revisionist’ approach