Love Thy Neighbor, Love Thy Fellow: Teaching Gower's Representation of the Unethical Jew.
- Author/Editor
- Houlik-Ritchey, Emily.
- Title
- Love Thy Neighbor, Love Thy Fellow: Teaching Gower's Representation of the Unethical Jew.
- Published
- Houlik-Ritchey, Emily. "Love Thy Neighbor, Love Thy Fellow: Teaching Gower's Representation of the Unethical Jew." In Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other. Eds. Miriamne Ara Krummel and Tyson Pugh. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 101-15.
- Review
- As made clear by the collection's title, essays here are focused on teaching practices. Houlik-Ritchey thus places her remarks within this frame. Gower's tale "upholds Christianity and Paganism as ethically superior to Judaism based on each religious creed's putative interpretation of human responsibility to one's neighbors" (102). Her lesson "models how a theoretical perspective such as neighbor theory can crack open the seemingly smooth surface of a text's construction to reveal a rough terrain of reader expectations, authorial ambivalences, elisions, and contradictions" (103). Using Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents" as a beginning point, Houlik-Ritchey identifies the "neighbor" as "'faceless,' by which [theorists] mean that the neighbor is no single, predictable person or identity category; rather, the neighbor is the 'next person,' whoever that may turn out to be" (104). "The lesson advances by delving into the scriptural passages that Freud references, precisely to make visible the complex religious history embedded within and around the well-known phrase 'Love thy neighbor as thyself'" (105). Bringing in the essential passages from Jewish and Christian scripture [Lev. 19:18, 33-34; Lk. 10:25-37], and commentaries from Origen and Augustine, she shows that Gower takes the Jew's position from "a narrow interpretation of Leviticus 19:18" and the Pagan's from Luke 6:31, the "golden rule," and asks why does Gower use a pagan and not a Christian in the tale? (111) Her answer(s) are complex, but trace an etymological path for the students, via examinations of what the tale means by "love" and "felawe," from a "supersessionist" Gower to something less easily defined--perhaps, as she says, "pre-sessionist" (110). She points out how the tale of the "Jew and the Pagan" can then become a basis for discussing the "Prioress's Tale," concluding that "A neighborly reading elucidates not only the process by which each tale condemns a fictional Jewish ethics in favor of a supposedly more wide-reaching Christian (or proto-Christian Pagan) ethics but also foregrounds the adroit ways that Gower and Chaucer expose that very condemnation as itself ethically suspect" (115). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis