This book aims to introduce the landscape history of Catalonia to the international reader, and it largely accomplishes that goal. It assumes no prior knowledge of the history or language of the region on the one hand, or of archeological and landscape history terminology on the other. In that sense it would be appropriate for students, although the level of detail that it brings to its subject matter does not fit the needs of most Anglophone university courses. This is the sort of book I would recommend to a colleague or a graduate student who was beginning work on Catalonia for the first time and needed a solid understanding of the local landscape. It would also be of interest to landscape historians of other regions engaged in comparative work; the structure of the book lends itself particularly well to comparative analysis.
The text is divided into sixteen chapters, each relatively short. It also boasts seventy-seven figures and a helpful glossary of terms at the back. Each chapter gives a brief yet comprehensive definition of its subject matter, its evolution and characteristics, and then presents some individual case studies and discusses change over time or related phenomena. As many chapters deal with more than one subject, this structure is sometimes repeated within the chapter. Many chapters have the feel of a grab bag, with a wide variety of short sections that may or may not follow a clear logic (Chapter 5, on “new towns,” also includes a section on polyfocal villages, apparently because that was the only place to fit it in). Despite this, the reader is left with a solid understanding of the subject under discussion, the details of the Catalan case, and what remains unknown.
An introductory chapter (Chapter 1) provides general information on medieval Catalan history. Chapters 2 through 7 discuss various settlement types (with reference to work done on similar types elsewhere in Europe): so-called “open villages,” consisting of only houses; villages that grew up around a church and its zone of protection (sagreres or celleres in Catalan), castral villages centered on a fortification, and hamlets in more dispersed population areas. Different village types predominate in different regions of Catalonia; the chapters make clear that while “open villages” are most common in the Pyrenees, other regions tend to be dominated either by sagreres or by castral villages, depending on the relative strength of the ecclesiastical and secular lords there during the eleventh century. Chapter 3 also contributes to the complication of the traditional incastellamento narrative, noting that peasants’ own safety concerns coexisted with lordly pressure in a frontier environment, and that both of these could later give way to a practical need to relocate closer to fields and transport.
While this is essentially a rural history, the discussion of settlement patterns also includes two chapters on towns and cities, which could also be of interest to historians of the urban Catalan environment. Chapter 5 discusses “new” or planned towns, which appeared most often in Catalonia as elsewhere in Europe in the context of conquest and colonization. Larger cities (Chapter 7) are grouped according to Roman, Islamic, and post-conquest origin, and neighborhood types (including Jewish and Muslim quarters) and other elements are also discussed. It is unclear why Chapter 6, on hamlets and farmsteads, appears between these two “urban” chapters. The next two chapters concern themselves with patterns of cultivation (Chapters 8 and 9) and hydraulic structures (Chapter 10, on irrigated land, and Chapter 11, on milling, metallurgy, and salt production). The stress here is on continuities over time: from modern structures back to the medieval (and Roman or even pre-Roman) past, although where appropriate there is a nuanced discussion of the transition from Islamic to Christian rule.
Chapter 12 aims to reconstruct non-cultivated landscapes surrounding settlements through pollen analyses, of which there have been many in recent years. However, many of the conclusions drawn have more to do with shifting cultivation patterns than with larger ecosystems or non-cultivated species. This is not an environmental history, and there is little trace in the overall structure of the book of the tremendous growth in medieval environmental history as a discipline over the last decade or two. Nonetheless, the phenomena discussed here would be of use as a reference to environmental historians beginning work in the region.
Chapters 13 through 16 address what one might call “map features”: roads, boundaries, toponyms, and historical mapping projects. All these areas of study benefit from Catalonia’s unusual abundance of surviving documents from the Carolingian period. Roads can be older even than the villages they lead to (prehistoric in some cases), while boundaries of counties, bishoprics and parishes in Catalonia are often Roman or Carolingian. Chapter 15 discusses a range of place names, from those originating in a pre-Roman, Basque-like language, to early Catalan ones around the year 1000, while Chapter 16 summarizes scholarly mapping projects, including the author’s own work on the University of Lleida’s PaHisCat (Historic Landscape of Catalonia) project. The conclusion discusses methodological matters and the current state of the field.
The Historic Landscape of Catalonia is no less than an attempt to package up an entire thriving field of local scholarship and deliver it to another language community of scholars. As a consequence of its ambitious scope and depth, the book lacks a single overarching argument and makes little effort to seek clarity by generalizing major themes from the mass of case studies. The insistence on both accessibility and comprehensiveness leads to some oddities in the tone of the text, which assumes a very granular interest in the minutiae of the medieval Catalan landscape on the part of a reader who is simultaneously being introduced to the basics of medieval Catalan history. The book also makes frequent reference to analogous phenomena elsewhere in the Crown of Aragon, particularly in Valencia and the Balearic Islands. From the perspective of the Anglophone scholarly community, including those regions systematically would have broadened the usefulness of the text in some regards. Such an expanded lens, however, would probably have been unworkable in the level of detail that Bolòs brings to bear. And at the end of the day, it is the level of detail that makes this book a valuable reference work for students and scholars alike.