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Simon of Trent

In 1475 the death of the Christian child Simon (b. 1472–d. 1475) in the prince-bishopric of Trent led to the interrogation of members of the small local Jewish community and their subsequent conversion, expulsion, or execution as they confessed under torture to abducting the child and attacking his body with pincers before strangling him and dumping the corpse in a ditch. These confessions conformed to Christian narratives about the supposed ritual Jewish use of Christian blood and the supposed propensity of Jews to re-enact the sacrifice of Christ by means of the murder of Christian children or by attacking the Host. This particular incident of “blood libel” received considerable attention, which was both reflected in and driven by the activities of the nascent printing presses in Italian and German lands (see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Printing and the Book”). The composition of lurid Christian tales from Trent was encouraged by the local prince-bishop Johannes Hinderbach, who sought to promote the cult of Simon as a Christian martyr (see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Saints and Mystics: Before Trent). The body of Simon, displayed in the church of St. Peter, was imbued with miraculous power and attracted many pilgrims, who left donations for the reconstruction and embellishment of the church. Many images and objects associated with Simon proliferated and circulated despite warnings from the neighboring republic of Venice about the social and religious tensions provoked by such representations, and by hostile Franciscan preaching on the subject. At first, the papacy was suspicious of the cult of Simon and investigated accusations of judicial misconduct made against Hinderbach, as well as the claims of miraculous power associated with the body. Hinderbach was eventually cleared of wrongdoing and during the remainder of the century both the cult and accusations of ritual murder spread in northern Italy. The cult received papal support in 1588 and again in 1758 before being removed from the list of martyrs in 1965 at the time of the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) of the Second Vatican Council. The incident is significant as an example of the “blood libel” of Jewish ritual use of Christian blood (although it was far from the first of its kind in European history), and as a notoriously harmful episode in Jewish history. It is also notable as an early expression of the power of the printing press, as an example of the role of humanists in anti-Jewish writing and the construction of a saint (see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Humanism”), and for the abundance of objects and images it stimulated.