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An investigation into how racial stereotypes were created and used
in the European Middle Ages. Students in twelfth-century Paris held
slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans
madmen and the French as arrogant. On crusade, army recruits from
different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other's military skills.
Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted
derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under
colonisation, questioning their work ethic, social organisation,
religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the
alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and
their acceptance or rejection of Christianity. In this radical new
approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western
Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed
and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt
military strength and assert moral and cultural ascendance over
others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a
negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality
and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of
racialised others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious
lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed
by environmental medicine, an ancient theory that held that
location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of
peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school
textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this
book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of
power, crafting relationships within communities and towards
others.
In his groundbreaking Imagined Communities, first published in
1983, Benedict Anderson argued that members of a community
experience a "deep, horizontal camaraderie." Despite being
strangers, members feel connected in a web of imagined experiences.
Yet while Anderson's insights have been hugely influential, they
remain abstract: it is difficult to imagine imagined communities.
How do they evolve and how is membership constructed cognitively,
socially and culturally? How do individuals and communities
contribute to group formation through the act of imagining? And
what is the glue that holds communities together? Imagining
Communities examines actual processes of experiencing the imagined
community, exploring its emotive force in a number of case studies.
Communal bonding is analysed, offering concrete insights on where
and by whom the nation (or social group) is imagined and the role
of individuals therein. Offering eleven empirical case studies,
ranging from the premodern to the modern age, this volume looks at
and beyond the nation and includes regional as well as
transnational communities as well.
An investigation into how racial stereotypes were created and used
in the European Middle Ages. Students in twelfth-century Paris held
slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans
madmen and the French as arrogant. On crusade, army recruits from
different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other's military skills.
Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted
derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under
colonisation, questioning their work ethic, social organisation,
religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the
alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and
their acceptance or rejection of Christianity. In this radical new
approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western
Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed
and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt
military strength and assert moral and cultural ascendance over
others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a
negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality
and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of
racialised others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious
lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed
by environmental medicine, an ancient theory that held that
location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of
peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school
textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this
book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of
power, crafting relationships within communities and towards
others.
Tapping into a combination of court documents, urban statutes,
material artefacts, health guides and treatises, Policing the Urban
Environment in Premodern Europe offers a unique perspective on how
premodern public authorities tried to create a clean, healthy
environment. Overturning many preconceptions about medieval dirt
and squalor, it presents the most outstanding recent scholarship on
how public health norms were enforced in the judicial, religious
and socio-cultural sphere before the advent of modern medicine and
the nation-state, crossing geographical and linguistic boundaries
and engaging with factors such as spiritual purity, civic pride and
good neighbourliness.
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