Penguins on Parade: The Life and Passion of William of Norwich

Some Penguin Classics have horrible tidings to convey. In the broader game of literature, there’s no real way around that. On paper, all books are like the spirits in the underworld encountered by Ulysses: they need human blood in order to give them the power to speak. Printed words never stole a man’s property or took a man’s life, but when they’re invested with human belief, they can recombine into something terrible. There’s no way to calculate the sheer amount of pain and misery that words have caused when recombined with readers in that way. The Bible and the Koran alone carry a slaughter-weight that could sink a continent.

We tolerate this potential because the recombination can work in the other direction too: printed words can also bring joy and personal transformation. They act telepathically; they slip straight past vocal defenses and into the mind, and they can’t be dislodged. On some level, most readers recognize that the dark side of this quiet magic is the price they pay for the bright side of it. Books have tremendous latent power, and if tragedies are leveraged on their words, readers are almost morally obligated to read those words, not only to understand the tragedies but also to refute the leverage.

Somebody at Penguin Classics must know these uncomfortable truths, obviously, and their new volume The Life and Passion of William of Norwich faces it squarely. The book, written by a monk of the Norwich Cathedral Priory named Thomas of Monmouth sometime around 1150, recounts the life and posthumous saintly career of a 12-year-old boy named William of Norwich, who was found dead in a forest just outside the city of Norwich in 1144. The boy’s family insisted that he’d been killed by a group of the town’s Jews, and although the local sheriff appears to have ignored the family’s complaints and stayed any vengeance against the Jews, the story stuck. It was only a few years later that monk Thomas began to craft a story designed to create a lucrative saint’s cult for William at Norwich – a saint’s life in which the Jews were characterized as thoroughly evil beings who regularly kidnap and ritually execute Christian children. It was William’s book, asserts historian Miri Rubin in her invaluable Introduction to this Penguin volume (featuring her own brand-new translation), that began the ‘blood libel’ against the Jews that informed every subsequent antisemitic pogrom.

Monk Thomas tells the story of pure, innocent William’s early life, and he lavishes a good deal of morbid energy describing the boy’s torture and death – a crucifixion in all but name, as Rubin puts it. The book is “a rich and challenging text that greatly informs our understanding of how Christian ideas about Jews developed and spread in the Middle Ages,” Rubin writes, rather charitably, and continues along in that vein:

Accounts such as the Life and Passion were disseminated widely as literature and as edifying tales, but were occasionally acted out in city streets or in law courts as individual Jews or groups of Jews were accused of child murder. This could lead to trials and executions, but it should be remembered that on occasion such accusations were also derided and dismissed.

I don’t know about “edifying,” but Rubin is entirely right in pointing out how interesting some of the stories are that Thomas of Monmouth relates about young William’s very busy and frequently belligerent afterlife, curing the sick and watching miscellaneous doubters like a hawk. Thomas relates the story of a man named Walter, once a servant of the Dean of Norwich, who badmouthed the little martyr so vocally that he got a nocturnal visit from the glowing dead boy, who took him in a vision to a ghastly open grave:

‘Do you know whose grave this was?’ When Walter said it had been his, William retorted with terrible warnings: ‘Then get in at once, you who have always been uttering blasphemies against me.’ Walter was terrified and did not dare to go against the word of the saint commanding him, and, as it appeared to him, he entered, too, and cudgelled him and at last left him broken in all his limbs. And so the sleeping Walter woke up in terror; and he felt the most violent pain in all his limbs, as if he had endured when awake the beating he had seen in the vision.

“Shaken by this punishment,” the narrative tells us about a man who’s just been beaten up by Casper the Not-So-Friendly Ghost in a dream, “from then on he began to venerate and love from the bottom of his heart him whom before he was in the habit of disparaging most despicably.”

“The Life and Passion,” Rubin writes,

is an attempt to apportion blame and to make a link between mythical time – the time of the Passion of Christ – with the medieval present. We approach the book all too aware of the terrible consequences of such narratives. Yet historians must wear this knowledge lightly, lest we confuse Thomas of Monmouth’s intentions with events that occurred much later.

This is just a bit too nicely diced. Thomas of Monmouth’s intentions were twofold: to promulgate a new saint’s cult for a religious center that was eager for the financial windfall, and to vilify the Jews. He poured those intentions into his book, and he did that very consciously. It’s true that he couldn’t foresee the Nuremberg rallies, but we aren’t confusing things to know that he would have loved them. Underneath its brittle pieties, his book is gummily ugly, and this is both the caution and the necessity of reading it.

There’s a distinct kind of bravery in Miri Rubin’s insistence that we engage with this text in order to learn what it can teach us, and there’s a distinct kind of bravery in Penguin’s decision to add it to the line of Classics despite its almost entirely unsavory contents and its thoroughly revolting subsequent history. Whether this exact kind of bravery will ever some day extend to the creation of a Penguin Classics Mein Kampf remains to be seen. My guess is that there’d be protests.