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A review by aegagrus
Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422 by Tzafrir Barzilay
3.5
Poisoned Wells effectively reflects both the merits and the pitfalls of academic monographs. Everything is well-structured, well-sourced, and well-argued. Much of the book is also quite rigidly constructed, narrow in scope, and excessively concerned with justifying the uniqueness of its project. One common academic vice is absent: all of the writing is very accessible.
Barzilay focuses on two intense episodes of well-poisoning allegations, one stemming from southern France in 1321 and one occurring in the German-speaking lands between 1348 and 1350. The story he tells is fascinating: the evolution of well-poisoning from a highly localized concern targeting lepers to an established conspiracy implicating lepers, Jews, foreign Muslim rulers, and marginalized Christians including the indigent, the itinerant, and religious dissidents. The central claim of the conspiracy which emerged over several months in 1321 was that Islamic leaders were masterminding an operation in which Jews acted as intermediaries, recruiting lepers to join them in systematically poisoning European water sources in an attempt to overthrow Christendom. The comparison with modern notions of "triadic populism", in which the demonization of marginalized groups is justified by portraying the groups in question as agents of a more powerful and more distant enemy, is striking. Barzilay primarily works with records left by the persecutors: chronicles, court documents, and official correspondence. Using these sources, he is able to build up a compelling portrait of the way in which Inquisitorial action justified itself by creating an escalating paper-trail of intra-community allegations and coerced confessions which were nevertheless entirely legitimate and valid by their own legal standards; for Medievalists, the dialogue with the way in which investigations were carried out during the Witch panics and during the suppression of the (alleged) Cathar heresy is potentially fruitful.
Most importantly, wading into the debates surrounding causality, Barzilay nuances the issue but does not nuance it into oblivion. That is to say, in considering whether elite action or popular sentiment was the driving cause of these episodes of accusation and violence, Barzilay argues that while various cultural factors made these allegations convincing to the public, elite machinations were the driving force behind the "transfer" of allegations from lepers to other groups and the development of the elaborated conspiracy and its accompanying investigations (specifically focusing on power politics waged between centralized Court and Ecclesial bureaucracies and local power-holders like the lesser nobility, guilds, and burghers). Barzilay's account is nuanced enough to grant significant causal importance to both elite and popular factors but does not devolve into a wishy-washy causal emptiness in which no strong thesis is sufficiently "nuanced" to venture.
Most of the significant limitations of this project are acknowledged by Barzilay. He is generally not working with victims' experiences, and his explicit repudiation of the more generalized theses advanced by prior scholarship has lead to a work which is very narrowly focused on two historical episodes. This is very much Barzilay's intention, but the non-specialist reader may be left wishing he had undertaken more engagement with broader contexts.
Barzilay focuses on two intense episodes of well-poisoning allegations, one stemming from southern France in 1321 and one occurring in the German-speaking lands between 1348 and 1350. The story he tells is fascinating: the evolution of well-poisoning from a highly localized concern targeting lepers to an established conspiracy implicating lepers, Jews, foreign Muslim rulers, and marginalized Christians including the indigent, the itinerant, and religious dissidents. The central claim of the conspiracy which emerged over several months in 1321 was that Islamic leaders were masterminding an operation in which Jews acted as intermediaries, recruiting lepers to join them in systematically poisoning European water sources in an attempt to overthrow Christendom. The comparison with modern notions of "triadic populism", in which the demonization of marginalized groups is justified by portraying the groups in question as agents of a more powerful and more distant enemy, is striking. Barzilay primarily works with records left by the persecutors: chronicles, court documents, and official correspondence. Using these sources, he is able to build up a compelling portrait of the way in which Inquisitorial action justified itself by creating an escalating paper-trail of intra-community allegations and coerced confessions which were nevertheless entirely legitimate and valid by their own legal standards; for Medievalists, the dialogue with the way in which investigations were carried out during the Witch panics and during the suppression of the (alleged) Cathar heresy is potentially fruitful.
Most importantly, wading into the debates surrounding causality, Barzilay nuances the issue but does not nuance it into oblivion. That is to say, in considering whether elite action or popular sentiment was the driving cause of these episodes of accusation and violence, Barzilay argues that while various cultural factors made these allegations convincing to the public, elite machinations were the driving force behind the "transfer" of allegations from lepers to other groups and the development of the elaborated conspiracy and its accompanying investigations (specifically focusing on power politics waged between centralized Court and Ecclesial bureaucracies and local power-holders like the lesser nobility, guilds, and burghers). Barzilay's account is nuanced enough to grant significant causal importance to both elite and popular factors but does not devolve into a wishy-washy causal emptiness in which no strong thesis is sufficiently "nuanced" to venture.
Most of the significant limitations of this project are acknowledged by Barzilay. He is generally not working with victims' experiences, and his explicit repudiation of the more generalized theses advanced by prior scholarship has lead to a work which is very narrowly focused on two historical episodes. This is very much Barzilay's intention, but the non-specialist reader may be left wishing he had undertaken more engagement with broader contexts.