For much of the thirteenth century, Canterbury was home to a significant and thriving Jewish community. The documentary sources, provide wonderful insights into the Jewry and give details of where they lived. Indeed, a considerable amount of the surviving sources are concerned with Jewish properties, describing the scale, extent, and location of houses which were owned, or inhabited, by Jews in Canterbury. This paper will explore those sources to give a sense of the Jewish inhabitation of medieval Canterbury. It will also consider the interaction of Jews with their Christian neighbours. After all, there were no ghettos in medieval England, so Jew and Christian would have lived side by side and, in the case of Canterbury, there is every little evidence of any inter-religious animosity at all.

Dr Dean Irwin completed his PhD at Canterbury Christ Church University in 2020, on a scholarship from the School of Humanities. His thesis, supervised by Professor Louise Wilkinson and Dr Leonie Hicks, analysed the records generated by Jewish moneylending activities in England between 1194 and 1275/6. He is now an independent researcher exploring his many esoteric interests in medieval Anglo-Jewish history. He is a member of the Jewish Historical Society of England’s advisory board and a board member of the MedievalJewishStudiesNow! blog.

NB: Please take care to select the correct ticket type. In-venue tickets are £10 and online tickets are £9. If you book 10 or more tickets of any given type (e.g. 10 tickets to one lecture, or 1 ticket to 10 lectures) within a single transaction, then you should select the '10+' ticket type to get a discount. Schools can buy a single ticket for £95 which will grant online access to all of their students.

Live streams are accessed online via Microsoft Teams. Computers (PCs, laptops and Macs) can join using your web browser, but if you wish to attend using a tablet or phone, you will have to install the Microsoft Teams app. There will not be recordings available once the event has taken place, so please ensure you attend at the correct time.

As Covid-19 restrictions continue to change, please make sure you are aware of the current regulations before attending. Emails confirming the University's expectations will be sent out prior to the event.