Description
Book SynopsisIn 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
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Winner of the 1998 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, American Historical Association Winner of the 1996 Premio del Rey Prize, American Historical Association Winner of the 1998 Best First Book in Iberian History Award, Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Winner of the 2000 John Nicholas Brown Prize, Medieval Academy of America "Nirenberg's argument is elegant and precise... [His] superb scholarship has done a great service in a matter of great importance, and not only to historians."--Edward Peters, Historian "[This book] is written with a stylistic flair that makes it a pleasure to read, a model of historical research and exposition at its best."--Marc Saperstein, American Historical Review "Nirenberg has ventured unescorted down all manner of unexplored paths... This is a highly sophisticated piece of work, clever in the best sense of the word, rich and variegated, a treasure-house of perceptive scholarship, sensitively nuanced, beautifully controlled, a delight to handle and a joy to read."--Peter Linehan, Medium Aevum
Table of Contents
Preface to the New Paperback Edition vii Acknowledgements xvii Abbreviations xix Introduction 3 Chapter One The Historical Background 18 Part One Cataclysmic Violence: France and the Crown of Aragon Chapter Two France, Source of the Troubles: Shepherds' Crusade and Lepers' Plot (1320, 1321) 43 Chapter Three Crusade and Massacre in Aragon (1320) 69 Chapter Four Lepers, Jews, Muslims, and Poison in the Crown (1321) 93 Part Two: Systemic Violence: Power, Sex, and Religion Chapter Five Sex and Violence between Majority and Minority 127 Chapter Six Minorities Confron Each Other: Violence between Muslims and Jews 166 Chapter Seven The Two Faces of Sacred Violence 200 Epilogue The Black Death and Beyond 231 Bibliography of Works Cited 251 Index 281
