Tormented Voices

Thomas N. Bisson is Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History, Harvard University. Among his publications are Fiscal Accounts of Catalonia under the Early Count-Kings (1151–1213) and The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History.

Bisson has distinguished himself with a number of careful scholarly monographs on the politics and finance of southern France and Spain in the Middle Ages. But in this book, although he necessarily draws on this research, Mr. Bisson breaks new ground. A historian of the elite—of kings, parliaments and treasuries—turns his considerable analytic powers to the question of village society and culture. Catalonia, the author’s chosen area of research, has one of the richest documentary traditions in Europe, and in the last half-century scholars have begun to exploit with care and missionary zeal the cache of records that have survived. Focusing on a group of complaints from several Catalonian villages in the middle and late 12th century, Mr. Bisson tries to dispel layer after layer of distortion in these records in order to recover the ‘tormented voices’ of named and unnamed peasants who were at their wits’ end in resisting lordly power… This is a remarkable book, not only because it sets the record straight on rural violence in the Middle Ages, but because it is written with passion… Bisson succeeds in recovering the tormented voices of these Catalonian peasants, ‘what they spoke of in words that we have, or almost have; what some ones once, momentarily, thought memorable, and what I,’ the author writes, ‘have tried to read, to hear, to hold in the names and voices; in what we have of these people—and all that we have.’

• * Memorials People * Old Domains: Caldes de Malavella, Llagostera, and Vicinity * Old Domains II: the Ribes Valley * Barcelona's Second Hinterland * The Old Frontier: Font-rubi * A Further Frontier: Cabra, Argencola Power * An Order of Territorial Lordship * On the Threshold of Accountability * Profiles of Exploitative Power * The Nostalgia of Associative Lament * The Legitimation of Arbitrary Lordship Culture * Customary Solidarities * Customary Moralities: Faith * Customary Moralities: Honor and Shame Epilogue * Violence? * Suffering? * Appendix: Usage, Citations, and Abbreviations * Appendix: Glossary * Appendix: Aftermath: What Became of the Villages? * Appendix: The Memorials: A Register * Further Reading * Index