Communities of violence : persecution of minorities in the middle ages / David Nirenberg.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-279) and index.

The Historical Background -- France, Source of the Troubles: Shepherds' Crusade and Lepers' Plot (1320, 1321) -- Crusade and Massacre in Aragon (1320) -- Lepers, Jews, Muslims, and Poison in the Crown (1321) -- Sex and Violence between Majority and Minority -- Minorities Confront Each Other: Violence between Muslims and Jews -- The Two Faces of Sacred Violence.

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. In Communities of Violence, David Nirenberg argues that violence in the Middle Ages functioned differently. In this provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks against minorities in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon. He argues that these attacks 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. -- from back cover.