Monday, December 04, 2006  The Book I Did Not Write, Part II
Way back in August, I offered an excerpt from a misbegotten
ancestor of the book that eventually became Hybridity, Identity
and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles. That
post gave some examples of what I called fabulations, or I
promised to share a few more. A mere three months later, I do
so.  The first is taken from the chapter that became "Acts of
Separation," an overview of how medieval writers sorted the
intractable impurities of the world into the neat little boxes
of race. The original version of the chapter began with a
fabulation based on a case from the early thirteenth century: a
group of Norwich Jews were accused of kidnapping a five year old
boy and circumcising him. His father, the physician Benedict,
was most likely a convert to Christianity, and the circumcision
and renaming may have been performed to reclaim the child as a
Jew. Interestingly, the men who undertook the ritual seem to
have been confident that the ki