45. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages
A fascinating and disturbing book
David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages - Updated Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2015. First edition published 1996.
I'm a medieval dilettante. I know next to nothing about the medieval Mediterranean, compared to antiquity (or even to Georgian England, site of my fascination with the organisational history of the Royal Navy). The medieval Spains?What I know couldn't fill a page.
Communities of Violence is a history with a very specific focus. It sites itself in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, with some reference to Naples), and discusses the role of violence (from verbal violence to riot, threat of lawsuit to massacre) in the relationship between the majority community and minorities, with particular reference to Iberian Muslim and Iberian and French Jewish communities and also to lepers. It also discusses the place of violence between minority communities. Nirenberg begins his work by focusing on the explosions of violence attending the 1320 Shepherds' Crusade as it cut a swathe through France and into Aragon.
To describe his argument in briefer terms than it deserves: Nirenberg holds that everyday violence played an organising role in inter-community relationships and in the self-understanding of both minority and majority communities; that it set the terms which made co-existence and even a limited form of tolerance between communities possible. Many kinds of everyday violence were quasi-ritualised, or legal in form. The most extreme kinds of legal violence were reserved for sexual encounters between communities, and minority communities often policed their own women, in particular, more stringently than the majority community did. Extraordinary violence was frequently a response to political circumstances. Often, in the case of violence directed at Jewish or Muslim communities, it was a way to also attack the king or royal policy without framing those attacks as against the king. Such violence and the responses to it developed from different groups using and shaping the rhetoric -- the discourse -- around minorities to achieve political and social ends.
Nirenberg writes in a lucid style, and his discussion of the historical evidence is easy to follow. The subject matter is frequently horrifying, as is often true for violence, but his arguments are interesting. If you spend any time thinking about how (violent, honour-focused, confessionally chauvinistic) societies constitute themselves in settings where there are significant religious minority populations, this book is definitely good food for thought.