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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