In the wake of modern genocide, we tend to think of violence
against minorities as a sign of intolerance, or, even worse, a
prelude to extermination. Violence in the Middle Ages, however,
functioned differently, according to David Nirenberg. In this
provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks against minorities
in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon (Aragon,
Catalonia, and Valencia). He argues that these attacks--ranging
from massacres to verbal assaults against Jews, Muslims, lepers,
and prostitutes--were often perpetrated not by irrational masses
laboring under inherited ideologies and prejudices, but by groups
that manipulated and reshaped the available discourses on
minorities. Nirenberg shows that their use of violence expressed
complex beliefs about topics as diverse as divine history, kinship,
sex, money, and disease, and that their actions were frequently
contested by competing groups within their own society. Nirenberg's
readings of archival and literary sources demonstrates how violence
set the terms and limits of coexistence for medieval minorities.
The particular and contingent nature of this coexistence is
underscored by the book's juxtapositions--some systematic (for
example, that of the Crown of Aragon with France, Jew with Muslim,
medieval with modern), and some suggestive (such as African ritual
rebellion with Catalan riots). Throughout, the book questions the
applicability of dichotomies like tolerance versus intolerance to
the Middle Ages, and suggests the limitations of those analyses
that look for the origins of modern European persecutory violence
in the medieval past.
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