by David Nirenberg
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Product Description
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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Average Customer Review:
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 On the perils of building and living with social walls, 2008-02-01
Nirenberg explores the medieval world of religious communities, always focusing on particular places and people. He finds a checkered pattern of close or explosive relations, not so unlike our modern somewhat paranoid times. The studies of communities in medieval Spain with their unstable mixtures of Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities are particularly fascinating. The long periods of mutually helpful relations are punctuated with episodes of inflammatory fear. Nirenberg shows that where popular superstition ran rampant, the religious leaders often denounced it. But these leaders were partly responsible for teaching people to blame their troubles on unbelievers. And by the late 1200s, the context of holy war was percolating into every corner of Christendom, affecting relations between cultural groups from the Balkans to Spain. Prussia launched a northern crusade against non-Catholic Slavs. France exterminated its Cathar heretics, suppressed the order of Templars, and repeatedly expelled its Jews. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 ruled that people of different religions must wear specific clothes to mark them as enemies in enemy uniform. The intent was to draw a social and sexual wall between Christians, Jews and Muslims. To block friendship and love from crossing that wall, the customs of Tortosa (in Spain) warned,
"If Jewish or Muslim males are found lying with a Christian woman, the Jew or Muslim should be drawn and quartered and the Christian woman should be burned, in such a manner that they should die. And this accusation can be brought by any inhabitant of the town without penalty...". (p. 132.)
All told, these studies of real people in real places offer insight we need now.
--author of "Different Visions of Love"
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting Theory, 2007-10-17
I think this book put forth some interesting arguments and interpretations of history. As a historian, I can say that it is always important to look at historical events and trends from as many angles as possible. Violence against religious minorities in the medieval era has to be seen as different from violence against minorities in the twentieth century because the settings for the two are completely different. I know that many people will find what the author has to say a bit far-fetched, but I believe it is better to be a little far-fetched than to offer yet another typically-held opinion. If there were no "far-fetched" interpretations, knowledge would never advance. Keep an open mind while reading this book. You will definitely learn something.
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Context, context, context, 2002-10-08
In the complex and highly-charged debate that is the origins of persecution in the Middle Ages, Nirenberg's contribution is a useful and timely one. Broadly speaking, his thesis is a counter to the long view of Moore _et al_; what interests Nirenberg is the specific, the day-to-day functioning of violence in its social and political context. It is for this reason that he focuses mainly on particular incidents and localities - although certainly not at the expense of broadening his picture where necessary. His method is essentially a comparative one, contrasting particular events in France and Aragon in order to demonstrate the infinite variety and flexibility of medieval attitudes towards minorities. This use of case studies enables Nirenberg to explore his targets in much greater depth than would be possible in a generalised study, and this is, in many ways, his point: a focus on context, not unified theory.This is an excellent counterpoint to the vast quantity of material on medieval persecution, with an intriguing conclusion: that day-to-day violence could have a systemic, stabilising function in medieval societies - particularly multi-cultural ones such as Aragon.
17 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
 Turning my gaze, 2001-12-07
The first thing to be said about Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages is that the contents do not live up to the title. Perhaps this is an editor's decision rather than the author's, but the fact is that this is NOT anything like a comprehensive history of the subject. A better title might be A Study of a Few Incidents Involving Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Aragon and Catalonia in the First Half of the 14th Century. The buyer of this book will be disappointed on that score if he was expecting something more encompassing. Another disappointing aspect of this book is the author's disconcerting use of trendy post-modern jargon: it is full of talk of "discourses","narratives","structures", turning one's "gaze", "paradigms", and other terms which seem designed more to obtain tenure for the author than to convey real information and to constitute a satisfying work of history. The book does contain many interesting tales arising from the author's research into Catalonian and Aragonese archives, research which seems to be highly original on his part. Thus, we have vignettes of Christians, Jews, and Muslims gambling together and suing each other, incidents of interfaith sex and prostitutiuon, and intercommunal violence. (I was fascinated to learn that of Muslims applying for medical licenses in 14th century Valencia, most of them were women.) The governments of the time seem to have been largely ineffectual (a point the author does not explicitly make) with citizens resorting to assault, arson, and rioting often and refusing to obey the king or his officers, and petty nobles taking the law into their own hands. This book is not without its longeurs, but is in places very interesting; the reader who seeks a comprehensive account of the treatment of Jews and Muslims in Spain, much less in the rest of Europe, will simply have to go elsewhere. One hopes that at least the author made full professor.
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