Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (review)

By centring his analysis on the shifting meanings of cruelty as it appears in narrative texts over a wide range of geographical and chronological contexts, Baraz has written a closely argued and important book that deepens our understanding of medieval and early modern societies. He moves emphatically beyond assumptions that medieval societies were inherently violent or cruel and instead analyses how ancient, medieval and early modern thinkers and writers defined and used terms and descriptions of cruel or unusually violent events.

After an introduction and a background chapter, there are five chapters organised chronologically with one on the late ancient period, three chapters on the medieval period – one each for early, central and late – and then a chapter for the Early Modern period. There are then six appendices with detailed background to the argument of the book itself. Baraz ranges across the ancient classical world, the medieval east and west, and early modern Europe with assurance and skill. He is at home with all the intricate, complex and very different sources and so can give the sort of wide-ranging overview required for analyses of shifts in meaning of concepts.

His argument is that, while the meaning of violent acts is self-evident, the meanings attached to extraordinary violence or cruelty are dependent on the historical and intellectual context and that this context changed dramatically during the antique and medieval periods. By the Early Modern period cruelty was seen as a defining feature of 'others', notably religious or ethnic groups different from the Christian western 'norm'. He argues that this transformation occurred primarily in the west, where the building blocks of the definitions of cruelty were in the Latin authors of the late antique period, and is not seen in Islamic or Eastern Christian cultures which reflect the divergent attitudes of the Greek from the Latin Christians in the formative late antique period.

He uses different sources in different periods, concentrating on intellectual definitions and discussions of cruelty where they exist, particularly for the ancient period. For the medieval period he depends on narratives of events that included descriptions that were either labelled cruel or were described in such a way that cruelty was implied by reference to acts of violence which had been described as cruel in other contexts. He finds that there were multiple perceptions of cruelty which varied over time and depended on the specific contexts.

In any study of changing perceptions in different contexts, definitions of terms are very important and Baraz gives this aspect of his study due weight in the introduction. He makes a careful distinction between violence and cruelty. He uses what he terms the modern sense of violence ('a quantifiable and comparable category' [p. 6]) and then gives a rough equation of medieval distinctions between violence and cruelty with modern differences between violence and crime. This is a thought-provoking split and one which he makes work for him in the context of the narratives he examines throughout the book. His distinction between violence and cruelty seems artificial and I am not totally convinced that the meaning of violence is so self evident and that it is cruelty which shifts in meaning in different contexts. Whether the distinctions between definitions of violence and cruelty apply in other contexts or with other medieval sources will emerge when his theories are tested by other scholars.

Since he is dealing primarily with narrative texts, he gives a great deal of attention to the lexical differences that he encounters. In chapter 1, he analyses the use of words that denote cruelty by authors throughout his period. In this analysis he is attempting to answer the question 'Why is cruelty in general ignored in some periods and discussed in others?' (p. 13). After an interesting discussion ranging across many authors he turns to descriptions of violent events in each of his five...