Lisa Lam­pert exam­ines the link­ages of gen­der and Jew­ish dif­fer­ence in late medieval and ear­ly mod­ern Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture. In this inter­est­ing albeit com­plex mono­graph, the author explores how authors of that time employed oppo­si­tion­al cat­e­gories to con­struct the ide­al indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive iden­ti­ty of ​“Chris­t­ian” in con­trast to the fig­ures sig­ni­fied by the con­struc­tions ​“Jew” and ​“woman.” The bifur­cat­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Jew and Woman that she traces reflect an uneasy fig­u­ra­tion of Jews and women as both insid­ers and out­siders to the Chris­t­ian soci­ety these authors’ world­views rep­re­sent. She attends espe­cial­ly to the rep­re­sen­ta­tions at work in Chaucer’s Can­ter­bury Tales and Shakespeare’s Mer­chant of Venice, among oth­er exam­ples. In addi­tion to explor­ing the works of these peri­ods, Lam­pert dis­cuss­es how these devel­op­ments build on ear­li­er con­struc­tions and extend their influ­ence to the present day. Bib­li­og­ra­phy and index.