"York 1190: Jews and Others in the Wake of Massacre": Poster Contest

[read Karl on murderous hobbits first]
by J J Cohen

Would you like to win (1) a copy of Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England AND (2) a really cool Tiny Shriner T-shirt? Well, you can ... and at the same time assist a good cause: publicity for an important upcoming conference at Centre for Medieval Studies in York entitled "York 1190: Jews and Others in the Wake of Massacre."

The rules are simple.
(1) design a possible poster with suitable image for the conference
(2) email it to me (jjcohen[at]gwu[dot]edu)

We'll post the contenders here at ITM and conduct a poll for a winner. It's a good cause, you get to flex your creativity ... what could be better? Possible posters should be sent to me as .doc or image file by Friday July 3, 2009.

A summary of the conference appears below.
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York 1190:

Jews and Others in the Wake of Massacre

Monday 22 – Wednesday 24 March 2010

Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, King’s Manor, UK

The mass suicide and murder of the men, women and children of the Jewish community in York on 16 March 1190 is one of the most scarring events in the history of Anglo-Judaism, and an aspect of York’s past which is widely remembered around the world.

The York massacre was in fact but one of a series of attacks on local communities of Jews across England in 1189-90. These were violent expressions of wider new constructs of the nature of Christian and Jewish communities and they were also the targeted outcries of local townspeople, whose emerging urban polities were enmeshed within swiftly developing structures of royal government. This conference will therefore use the events of 1189-90 as a lens through which to reassess the rapid changes which were reconstructing communities and their relationship to royal and ecclesiastical government both locally and in national and European contexts. It will take advantage of the substantial amount of new work which has been done on twelfth-century England, notably on government and local power, ethnic identity, relationships with Europe, the development of distinct regional identities and new intellectual and religious models of community and pastoral care. The conference will bring together senior and junior scholars from a range of different disciplines and sub-fields to reinterpret the events of 1190 in the light of that new work. Our aim is to consider the massacre as central to the narrative of English history around 1200 as well as that of Jewish history.