Described by leading medievalist Robert Stacey as 'the most remarkable Jewish woman in medieval history', Licoricia's extraordinary story is not widely known. Her life was filled with notable achievements and dramatic reversals of fortune, played out against a backdrop of civil wars, political turbulence and rising antisemitism in early Plantagenet England. Twice married, twice widowed and the mother of five children, Licoricia rose from obscurity to become one of the wealthiest women in thirteenth-century England and one of the country's most successful Jewish financiers, providing loans to kings, queens, bishops and the nobility. She enjoyed a particularly close relationship with Henry III and helped to fund his lavishly-ornamented shrine to Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. Licoricia endured the horrors that engulfed the Jews of medieval England in the decades before their mass expulsion by Edward I in 1290. She and her family experienced the antisemitic legislation, local expulsions and massacres, which destroyed the country's once-thriving medieval Jewry. Eventually, she was murdered in her own home. Rebecca Abrams explores Licoricia's significance as a woman, as a Jew, and as a financier; her personal resilience and determination to stand up to power, and her place and that of her medieval Jewish community in the wider context of England in the reigns of the Angevin monarchs. How the fate of the Jews was inextricably connected to the profound social and political changes taking place in England, and the historic roots of English antisemitism and negative anti-Jewish myths and stereotypes still potent in the world today were formed.
