Communities of Violence
European history, General non-fiction, Social issues
Summary
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