A01=Norman Simms
Author_Norman Simms
Category=JBSR
Category=QRVS5
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Jewish Studies
Religious Studies
Product details
- ISBN 9781934843321
- Weight: 885g
- Dimensions: 155 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jan 2009
- Publisher: Academic Studies Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Two groups were persecuted over four hundred years in what is now the south-western United States, each dissimulating and disguising who they truly were. Both now declare their true identities, yet raise hostility. The Penitentes are a lay Catholic brotherhood that practised bloody rites of self-flagellation and crucifixion, but claim this is a misrepresentation and that they are a community and charitable organisation. Marranos, an ambiguous and complicated population of Sephardic descendants, claim to be anousim. Both people have a complex, shared history. This book disentangles the web, redefines the terms, and creates new contexts in which these groups are viewed with respect and sympathy without idealising or slandering them. It uses rabbinics, literary analyses, psychohistory, and cultural anthropology to consolidate a history of mentalities.
Norman Simms is Associate professor at the Department of Humanities/English, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. He is the author of A New Midrashic Reading of Geoffrey Chaucer: His Life and Works, 2004; Crypto-Judaism, Madness, and the Female Quixote: Charlotte Lennox as Marrana in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, 2004; Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice in Biblical and Classical Literature, 2007
