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siria's review
4.0
The subtitle is somewhat misleading—Nirenberg focuses not on the entire Middle Ages, but on a period of about two hundred years or so; his examination is not of all minorities but on Jews and Muslims (and to a lesser extent lepers); and his geographical concentration is not all of Europe, or even all of Western Europe, but rather southern France and Aragon. Though it doesn't quite accord with the expectations which its title raises, this is still a very fine book.
Nirenberg rejects the longue durée approach which sees incidents of violence against minorities as part of an inevitable, inescapable progression which can be directly linked to present day atrocities, and which ignores what may be long periods of stability between such incidents of violence (however horrifying those incidents may be). He argues for greater contextualisation of violent incidents by historians, and questions our assumptions that medieval people acted "irrationally" in response to unquestioned stereotypes—stereotypes and institutionalised bigotry, he argues, could be harnessed by people in order to achieve specific political or economic gains. The history of minorities also requires the unpacking of the history of the majority, as they are interdependent things. Nirenberg is careful to point to the horror of the events which he's describing, but there are times when his emphasis on violence against others as a means of identity formation skirts perilously close to that argument about the inevitability of violence which he refutes in others' work.
Nirenberg rejects the longue durée approach which sees incidents of violence against minorities as part of an inevitable, inescapable progression which can be directly linked to present day atrocities, and which ignores what may be long periods of stability between such incidents of violence (however horrifying those incidents may be). He argues for greater contextualisation of violent incidents by historians, and questions our assumptions that medieval people acted "irrationally" in response to unquestioned stereotypes—stereotypes and institutionalised bigotry, he argues, could be harnessed by people in order to achieve specific political or economic gains. The history of minorities also requires the unpacking of the history of the majority, as they are interdependent things. Nirenberg is careful to point to the horror of the events which he's describing, but there are times when his emphasis on violence against others as a means of identity formation skirts perilously close to that argument about the inevitability of violence which he refutes in others' work.
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