Bibliographical Essay

The following gathers works into themes that illuminate medieval Christian violence against heretics, Jews and Muslims.

Conceptual overviews: Philippe Buc's Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) is an ambitious, longue duree exploration of Christianity's ability to generate violence.

David Nirenberg's Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013) both consider the immediacies of medieval violence against longer-term ramifications. Likewise, Religious Violence between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. Anna Sapir Abulafia (New York: Palgrave, 2002), examines the central dynamics of the medieval events with modern legacies. Also useful for the exhaustive, and often surprising, alliances between medieval religious life and medieval violence is Radoslaw Kotecki and Jacek Maciejewski (eds.), Ecclesia et violentia: Violence against the Church and Violence within the Church in the Middle Ages (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014).

Ideological support: Violence interpenetrated with the shaping of a mentality that justified violence against Christian others, that reflected it in text or image, or both. Dominique logna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000-1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), focuses on Peter the Venerable's intellectual contributions. On depictions in art, see Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and Alessia Trivellone, L’heretique imagine: heterodoxie et iconographie dans l’Occident medieval, de l’epoque carolingienne d l’inquisition (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009).

‘Convivencia’ in Iberia: While scholars have rejected any romanticising of convivencia, the coexistence of Jews, Muslims and Christians in both Islamic and Christian Iberia still produces rich work.

Mark D. Meyerson, ‘The Murder of Pau de Sant Marti: Jews, Conversos, and the Feud in Fifteenth-Century Valencia', in Oren Falk, Daniel Thiery, and Mark D. Meyerson (eds.), A Great Effusion of Blood? Interpreting Medieval Violence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 57-78, applies the anthropological model of honour cultures. Lucy Pick, Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), investigates how a thirteenth-century bishop managed the realities of religious diversity. Philippe Wolff, ‘The 1391 Pogrom in Spain: Social Crisis or Not?' Past & Present 50 (1971), 418, is a classic exercise in contextualising violence within social history.

Heresy as construction: R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2012) and Mark Gregory Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 12451246 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) argue that the organisational and theological coherence of ‘Cathars' (that is, Good Men and Women) was exaggerated or invented by clerics from scattered dissent or local custom. An energetic rejoinder is Peter Biller, ‘Goodbye to Catharism?' in a volume encapsulating the debate: Antonio Sennis (ed.), Cathars in Question (York: York Medieval Press, 2016), pp. 274-304. This debate is crucial for interpreting anti-heretical violence: scholars like Biller contend that ‘heresy as construction' devalues victims' faithful suffering, while the Pegg/Moore school emphasises the political or religious dynamics of violence for its actors.

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

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