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. Violence in the Middle Ages, however, functioned differently, according to David Nirenberg. In this provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks against minorities in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia).

He argues that these attacks - ranging from massacres to verbal assaults against Jews, Muslims, lepers, and prostitutes - 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, kingship, sex, money, and disease, and that their actions were frequently contested by competing groups within their own society.