Anxiety and Vulnerability: Women and Ritual Murder in Medieval Western Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Anxiety and Vulnerability” examines Christian ritual murder and host desecration accusations against Jews in medieval Europe. Analyzing several charges from diverse locations reveals trends in conceptualizations of women in religious discourse between the two groups. Previous studies of these accusations have acknowledged the presence and importance of female characters, but have not treated them as a subject of study in and of themselves. This paper moves female characters from the margins of ritual murder and host desecration charges to the forefront, arguing for the necessity of examining gender in understanding the rhetorical power of these influential narratives. Andino argues that Christians viewed women as the weak links in their struggle against Jews, reflecting anxiety over marginal women and their ability to fulfill their roles in Christian society. In Jewish accounts of these events, representations of women centered on their bodies as sites of Jewish debility and Christian aggression. Both Christians and Jews conceptualized the vulnerabilities of their communities in terms of female weakness. Through their shortcomings, women offered the religious Other a point of entry into the community, enabling and legitimizing the danger of the Other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".