The first thing to be said about Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages is that the contents do not live up to the title. Perhaps this is an editor's decision rather than the author's, but the fact is that this is NOT anything like a comprehensive history of the subject. A better title might be A Study of a Few Incidents Involving Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Aragon and Catalonia in the First Half of the 14th Century. The buyer of this book will be disappointed on that score if he was expecting something more encompassing. Another disappointing aspect of this book is the author's disconcerting use of trendy post-modern jargon: it is full of talk of "discourses","narratives","structures", turning one's "gaze", "paradigms", and other terms which seem designed more to obtain tenure for the author than to convey real information and to constitute a satisfying work of history. The book does contain many interesting tales arising from the author's research into Catalonian and Aragonese archives, research which seems to be highly original on his part. Thus, we have vignettes of Christians, Jews, and Muslims gambling together and suing each other, incidents of interfaith sex and prostitutiuon, and intercommunal violence. (I was fascinated to learn that of Muslims applying for medical licenses in 14th century Valencia, most of them were women.) The governments of the time seem to have been largely ineffectual (a point the author does not explicitly make) with citizens resorting to assault, arson, and rioting often and refusing to obey the king or his officers, and petty nobles taking the law into their own hands. This book is not without its longeurs, but is in places very interesting; the reader who seeks a comprehensive account of the treatment of Jews and Muslims in Spain, much less in the rest of Europe, will simply have to go elsewhere. One hopes that at least the author made full professor.

In the complex and highly-charged debate that is the origins of persecution in the Middle Ages, Nirenberg's contribution is a useful and timely one. Broadly speaking, his thesis is a counter to the long view of Moore _et al_; what interests Nirenberg is the specific, the day-to-day functioning of violence in its social and political context. It is for this reason that he focuses mainly on particular incidents and localities - although certainly not at the expense of broadening his picture where necessary. His method is essentially a comparative one, contrasting particular events in France and Aragon in order to demonstrate the infinite variety and flexibility of medieval attitudes towards minorities. This use of case studies enables Nirenberg to explore his targets in much greater depth than would be possible in a generalised study, and this is, in many ways, his point: a focus on context, not unified theory.

This is an excellent counterpoint to the vast quantity of material on medieval persecution, with an intriguing conclusion: that day-to-day violence could have a systemic, stabilising function in medieval societies - particularly multi-cultural ones such as Aragon.