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 particularizes and differentiates the forms of violence against various minorities in 14th-century Aragon. By recognizing immediate functions and motives, he calls into question received metanarratives on the topic of the persecution of religious minorities. He makes rich use of both Christian and Jewish archival resources, including correspondence, edicts, and judicial and financial records.

In his opening arguments, Nirenberg criticizes what he calls a “structuralist” approach to the topic of medieval persecutions, exemplified by Robert Moore (but also present in the works of Norman Cohn and Carlo Ginzburg). He recognizes and objects to both romanticized histories of Iberian convivencia (e.g. N. Roth) and lachrymose history (Ytzakh Baer).

He theorizes violence and aggression as “forms of association” which help to reify cultural and religious boundaries, and to facilitate forms of coexistence. As a result, he comes to assert the interdependence of violence and tolerance in the multi-religious environment of medieval Iberia (and by implication, throughout medieval Europe).

In the last chapter and epilogue, he presents his most intriguing efforts to problematize the approach to medieval persecutions as symptoms of mentalites evolved over a long duree. On the one hand, he provides a detailed account of the anti-Jewish riots of Holy Week, to emphasize the ritual and customary dimensions of persecuting violence. In this case, he tries to outline a somewhat symbiotic “marriage of enemies” being transacted between Christians and Jews. And then as something of a counterbalance, he discusses the pogroms of 1348 and their context. In this case, he addresses the sense of narrative discontinuity and transformation in exemplary violence, suggesting that on this basis it should not be considered a barometer of persistent changes.