Communities of Violence

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, kingship, sex, money, and disease, and that their actions were frequently contested by competing groups within their own society.

First Sentence

WHEN ARGUING for the irrational, even hysterical nature of acts of violence against minorities, medievalists often invoke both the Shepherd's Crusade of 1320, which attacked Jews, and the attacks on lepers and Jews of the following year.

Excerpt

WHEN ARGUING for the irrational, even hysterical nature of acts of violence against minorities, medievalists often invoke both the Shepherd's Crusade of 1320, which attacked Jews, and the attacks on lepers and Jews of the following year.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Communities of ViolencePaperbackPrinceton University Press1998-01-26
• Communities of violencePrinceton University Press1996-01-01