Jews, Heretics, and The True Cross: The Imperial Afterlives of St. Helena

St. Helena’s early fifteenth-century Leben in the Redaktion der Heiligen Leben was the first German prose life of the saint, written sometime between 1406 and 1475. The anonymous author drew on Latin and German editions of the Inventio crucis from the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) to craft a stand-alone hagiography of Helena. Helena’s story remained important throughout the Middle Ages for expressing Christian belief about Jewish witness to Christian truth and the power of the Cross to inspire conversion. Helena’s story was also instrumental in demonstrating imperial authority over both Christians and Jews. Over the course of the High Middle Ages, Helena’s legend increasingly served to justify Christian aggression toward Jews, including forced conversion and expulsion. As the first effort to synthesize a Leben from other sources, the Nuremberg Redaktion moves Helena’s Imperial authority and her discernment of the miraculous cross to the center of the story as a sustained argument for the conversion, displacement, and torture of Jews.