Robin R. Mundill

This is a pretty solid, though brief, overview of the history of Jews in medieval England. Mundill's strongest when he's dealing with the legal and financial interactions of English Jews and Christians, particularly as he has quite a solid body of evidence to deal with. I'm not sure I quite understand all the various forms of financial interaction that were possible, but I think that's due less to Mundill's writing and more to my lack of a mathematical brain.

However, The King's Jews is much show more weaker when it comes to social/cultural history, both because of a much smaller amount of evidence and because it seems outside of Mundill's comfort zone. His methodology when using narrative sources is suspect (hagiographical texts cannot be used unquestioningly as historical sources!) and some of the conclusions he draws seemingly at odds with the evidence. For instance, after quoting from a bitingly anti-semitic letter by Robert Grosseteste, Mundill says "Grosseteste had a firm but enlightened attitude towards the Jews." Bwuh? There are also several typesetting errors, and something goes badly wrong with numbering the footnotes in one of the chapters. show less