The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume 7: The Early Modern World, 1500–1815. Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xvi + 1,136 pp. $215.

Abstract

controlling of Saxon women. It demonstrates that Saxon women’s rights were fluid and how that fluidity was captured in the images of the picture-books. Caviness here acknowledges that women and Jews are not represented in any given section of the Sachsenspiegel but, rather, are referred to in clauses peppered throughout Eike’s text. The picture-books, notes Caviness, therefore add extra-textual pictorial representations of both women and Jews in places where they are not seen in the legal text. This theme is continued in chapter 5 and its closer examination of Jews. Caviness parallels the fluctuating nature of settlement in German lands with the picture-books’ depiction of the Jewish male. Although stereotypical images of Jews do appear in the fourteenth-century picture-books, predominantly through clothing, Jews are also depicted as an object of compensatory projection. Caviness thus concludes that there is no fixed societal position of Jews in the picture-books between 1300 and 1600 and they are, instead, a reflection of the contradictory experiences of fourteenth-century Jewish communities in German lands. The final chapter returns to the question of reception, picking up where chapter 2 left off, and continues the story from the eighteenth century to the present. Here the discussion mostly centers on adopting the Sachsenspiegel as a cultural artifact, but one that, since the 1930s, became weighed down by nationalism and racism. Caviness has certainly contributed to the Sachsenspiegel ’s rehabilitation. This is a beautiful homage to Caviness’s long-term research partner Charles Nelson, and a well-presented examination of the legal standing of marginal groups in a society dominated by male Christians. It does well to draw on comparable examples to place the picture-books in a wider European context, and readers will be drawn in by the beautifully reproduced images. Some readers may feel misled by the title in that women and Jews are only fully treated in chapters four and five. The size and weight of the tome is also somewhat prohibitive in what might otherwise be a good introductory text for students. These critiques aside, this is an absorbing exploration of the Sachsenspiegel picture-books that will certainly be an asset to the bookshelves of scholars in diverse fields of study.