An investigation into how racial stereotypes were created and used in the European Middle Ages. Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other's military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonisation, questioning their work ethic, social organisation, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity. In this radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialised others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, an ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others.

A team of leading scholars in the fields of Medieval Literature and History examine the origins of European ethnic groups which subsequently developed into the nations of Europe. The contributors look at evidence for the existence of an ethnic consciousness among the dominant European groups; this later formed the basis of nation states. The reconstruction and invention of the past by medieval writers in search of ethnic origins for their own particular political or tribal groups is also studied from a literary and historical point of view.

An investigation into how racial stereotypes were created and used in the European Middle Ages. Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other's military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonisation, questioning their work ethic, social organisation, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity. In this radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialised others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, an ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others.

Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.

A consideration of the allegory of Christ the Divine Physician in medical and religious writings. Discourses of physical and spiritual health were intricately entwined in the Middle Ages, shaping intellectual concepts as well as actual treatment. The allegory of Christ as Divine Physician is an example of this intersection: it appears frequently in both medical and religious writings as a powerful figure of healing and salvation, and was invoked by dissidents and reformists in religious controversies. Drawing on previously unexplored manuscript material, this book examines the use of the Christus Medicus tradition during a period of religious turbulence. Via an interdisciplinary analysis of literature, sermons, and medical texts, it shows that Wycliffites in England and Hussites in Bohemia used concepts developed in hospital settings to press for increased lay access to Scripture and the sacraments against the strictures of the Church hierarchy. Tracing a story of reform and controversy from localised institutional contexts to two of the most important pan-European councils of the fifteenth century, Constance and Basel, it argues that at a point when the body of the Church was strained by multiple popes, heretics and schismatics, the allegory came into increasing use to restore health and order.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. For victims of persecution around the world, attracting international media attention for their plight is often a matter of life and death. This study takes us back to the news revolution of seventeenth-century Europe, when people first discovered in the press a powerful new weapon to combat religiously inspired maltreatments, executions, and massacres. To affect and mobilize foreign audiences, confessional minorities and their advocates faced an acute dilemma, one that we still grapple with today: how to make people care about distant suffering? David de Boer argues that by answering this question, they laid the foundations of a humanitarian culture in Europe. As consuming news became an everyday practice for many Europeans, the Dutch Republic emerged as an international hub of printed protest against religious violence. De Boer traces how a diverse group of people, including Waldensians refugees, Huguenot ministers, Savoyard office holders, and many others, all sought access to the Dutch printing presses in their efforts to raise transnational solidarity for their cause. By generating public outrage, calling out rulers, and pressuring others to intervene, producers of printed opinion could have a profound impact on international relations. But crying out against persecution also meant navigating a fraught and dangerous political landscape, marked by confessional tension, volatile alliances, and incessant warfare. Opinion makers had to think carefully about the audiences they hoped to reach through pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers. But they also had to reckon with the risk of reaching less sympathetic readers outside their target groups. By examining early modern publicity strategies, de Boer deepens our understanding of how people tried to shake off the spectre of religious violence that had haunted them for generations, and create more tolerant societies, governed by the rule of law, reason, and a sense of common humanity.