Aquinas and the Jews by John Y. B. Hood (review)

550 BOOK REVIEWS Popular Piety in Late Medieval England is nothing if not a comprehensive as well as an elegantly written monograph. Quite rightly determined that the religious houses of the diocese of Salisbury should not be "shunted into some obscure sideline of devotional interest," Dr. Brown begins his book with an admirable survey of the important role still being played by monks, nuns, and friars (as well as the clergy of Salisbury cathedral itself) into the early sixteenth century. Much more central to the purposes of this study are a series of chapters devoted to the complex web of pious and other activities focusing on the parish church. Here the author's ability to give due emphasis to so many important but very different themes, ranging from parish fraternities and chantry foundations to church-building, is highly impressive: and in many ways his pages on these subjects provide the most balanced and satisfying account of parish life in its entirety yet produced for any late medieval English diocese. More perhaps might have been said about the parish priests themselves; but the late Professor Hamilton Thompson would surely have welcomed so convincing an explanation of why their churches were so continually rebuilt from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Even more perceptive are Dr. Brown's comments on hospitals, private devotion, and Lollardy; and by yet another paradox it emerges that heresy and dissent tended to be most "intense" in towns like Devizes and Marlborough which otherwise seem most notable for their enthusiastic commitment to orthodox piety. Indeed, one of the most original features of an original book is its attempt to explain the considerable variations in late medieval popular piety within the diocese of Salisbury in terms of the highly diverse social and economic contexts of its three constituent counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, and Berkshire. Dr. Brown deserves a double round of applause, first for making a major contribution to our understanding of the medieval English church as a whole and, secondly, for a highly successful pioneering effort in the difficult art of writing a regional history of a universalist church. R. B. Dobson Christ's College University ofCambridge Aquinas and theJews. ByJohnY. B. Hood. [Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1995. Pp. xiv, 145. Paperback.) In the narrow compass of 159 pages Hood has provided a surprisingly full study of all the essential documentation left by Brother Thomas on his view of the meaning, the rights, and the disabilities of Jews in a Christian polity. After two deft chapters on the patristic background and on the general context of the thirteenth century, Hood has analyzed the thomistic sources. Here the Summa contra gentiles and the Summa theologiae, I—II, 98-105, and H-II, 10, 7-12, as well as the biblical commentaries by Thomas, in all of which Aquinas dealt with his perceptions ofJudaism and Christianity on a generally theoretical plane, are supplemented by the De regimine Iudaeorum. As Hood remarks, BOOK REVIEWS 551 this title is misleading; far from naming a treatise, it has been attached to list of responses to eight specific questions, five of which bear on Jews, posed to Aquinas by the Countess of Flanders. Historians will note that Hood has opted, correctly in this reader's opinion, for Marguerite of Flanders rather than the Duchess of Brabant as the feudal inquirer. A number of those questions involve the issue of usury on which Brother Thomas held an unbending, and faithfully Aristotelian, condemnation of any interest on any loan. Incidental to this list of ad hoc solutions is a passing reference to providingJews with work rather than growing rich in idleness by lending money at interest "as is done in parts of Italy" (p. 105). Three "theological pillars" grounded the positions of Aquinas as Hood reads them: the dispersion of the Jews as punishment for the crucifixion of the Messiah, the Pauline conviction that there will be an ultimate conversion to Christianity of a "remnant" of the Jews, and last, the Augustinian view that Jews give unwitting testimony to the truth of the Church: The Christological prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures could hardly have been forged by Christians . Hood reminds us...