What do we mean when we talk about a "minority" in the Middle Ages? This collection of eighteen essays (fifteen in French and three in English) does not fully answer the question, but it goes a long way to display the variety and complexity of the issue. Each chapter challenges the reader to rethink and diversify the understanding of "minorities" in the medieval Mediterranean world, stretching well beyond mere numerical sub-groups to include issues of political, social, and economic power (or lack thereof), foreignness, gender and sexuality, orthodoxy and heresy, and views of "the other" between groups. The essays come together into a whole that is thought-provoking yet somewhat diffuse.
The volume originated as a colloquium held at Fontevraud in 2007, and some of the contributions still retain the direct speech of conference papers. Likewise, in keeping with its origins as a conference, the approach is unsystematic; while all of the contributions address a very broadly conceived theme of minorities in the medieval Mediterranean world, the coverage is patchy and reflects the research of individual authors. Nine of the essays relate to the Iberian Peninsula, leaving the remaining half of the collection to cover the rest of the Mediterranean world; two articles concern Portugal (perhaps only marginally Mediterranean), but there is nothing on Byzantium or the Greek East; there are two articles on Mamluk Egypt, but nothing on the Hafsids or other Muslim states; there is only one article on Jews (in Marseille), and nothing on dhimmi communities in the Dar al-Islam. This unstructured approach is not really a problem, so long as the reader is not expecting comprehensive coverage of the theme announced in the title.
The three editors of the volume (Stéphane Boissellier, François Clément, and John Tolan) each contribute essays to the collection, and Boissellier also wrote the introductory chapter. This introduction presents and justifies the diverse approach of the collection, discussing the various identities of minorities and emphasizing the need to understand the taxonomy of minority groups as conceived in medieval rather than modern terms. Boissellier does an excellent job of setting up the collection, just as the concluding essay, by Martin Aurell, summarizes and draws together the findings of the volume.
The essays set between the introduction and conclusion are grouped into five sections, some with rather cryptic titles, starting with "Vivre sa différence, de la marginalité à la minorité," which considers social and economic minorities (or marginalized groups) in the later medieval western Mediterranean, with essays on homosexuals in the Islamic west (François Clément), rural women in Portugal (Stéphane Boissellier), poverty and charity in Portugal (Bernardo Vasconcelos e Sousa), and serfs as a medieval minority (Paul Freedman). This section coheres reasonably well, in terms of region, issues, and time frame, though--as these authors point out--their subjects are often hard to define and sometimes hard to track. The second section, "Minorités de pouvoir, minorités au pouvoir," contains three chapters examining the status of Muslim groups and access to power. The first, by Sylvie Denoix, looks at the curious situation of the Mamluk elite in Egypt, who ruled the country yet never fully assimilated with the local population. The next two essays, by Ana Echevarría Arsuaga and Philippe Josserand, both discuss Muslims in late medieval Castile, looking, respectively, at mudejars in Avila and in the service of the Hospitallers in Cervera. The coverage of the third section is more obvious from its title: "Voyageurs, mercenaires et captifs, des minorités de fortune." It contains a nicely coherent group of essays on foreign minorities in Muslim lands: European merchants and funduqs in Mamluk Egypt (Pierre Moukarzel); North Africans living in the Near East (Abdellatif Ghouirgate); and Christians working or held captive in Muslim lands as seen through the writings of Ramon de Penyafort (John Tolan). The fourth section, "Minorités et contre-culture," puts an essay on Jews in Marseille (Juliette Sibon) together with two essays on Christian heresy, one on the ways in which Adoptionism set Spanish Christians apart from other Christians (Thomas Deswarte) and the other a more general consideration of twelfth-century heresy in Italy and its historiography (R.I. Moore). The fifth and final section, "Les minorités au miroir de la culture dominante," groups three studies of minorities perceived from particular viewpoints: the depiction of Franks in the twelfth-century Castilian chronicle of Sahagún (Charles Garcia); an analysis of Dino Compagni's account of the censure of Florentine magnates in the late thirteenth century (Céline Perol); and a look at papal responses to heresy (Damian Smith). The topical structure of these five sections seems forced at times. One might imagine other categorizations that would, for example, bring together essays on foreign minorities (European merchants in Egypt, Maghrebis in the Near East, and the French in Castile), elites as minorities (Mamluk rulers and Florentine magnates), or the three discussions of Christian views of heresy.
As Monique Bourin points out in the book's brief preface, the study of minorities (or perhaps more accurately, communities) is timely and relevant, especially with recent debates in Europe about the status of particular religious, linguistic, and regional groups within modern society. This book addresses many similar questions, within a medieval context, and as such it joins a growing historiography. The insights presented here are not especially new (for example, we find similar debates about the nature and scope of late medieval and renaissance minorities in the collection At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy, edited by Stephen Milner, 2005). Nevertheless, each individual essay in this reviewed collection is valuable in the way it contextualizes a broader problem within a specific place and time, and concentrates on a particular group and its conception as a minority. Although we may not gain a coherent picture of minorities in the medieval Mediterranean, we learn a great deal about the diversity and issues of individual minority groups.