Life in a Time of Pestilence: The Great Castilian Plague of 1596–1601. Ruth MacKay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xiv + 276 pp. $39.99.

Abstract

seignorial power, especially the mals usos (bad customs) that tied peasants to the land. Finally, boundary disputes between Aragon and Old Catalonia over New Catalonia led to the erosion of many customary laws that disadvantaged the monarchy. By the book's end, then, Jaume I and his successors, mainly Pere II and Jaume II, have gained direct rule over Lleida and Tortosa, though nobles retained power outside the cities.Victory's Shadow has much to commend it for an upper-level history course and scholars interested in Catalonian society, lordship, or royal power. Barton does a masterful job interpreting a wide variety of published and unpublished charters, coins, court cases, and law codes from well-known archives, like the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, as well as less commonly utilized institutions in Lleida and Tortosa. Surprisingly, Barton does not discuss the foundation of those archives, which occurred under Jaume I. Indeed, Robert I. Burns, whose 1985 introductory volume to the Diplomatarium of the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia remains the standard English history of the Crown's archives, claimed, "An array of lawyers and scribes was more vital to [Jaume's] achievement than were the contingents of crossbowmen and knights" (9).Barton does much to support Burns's assertion, particularly in the twelfth century. Charters of settlement, surveys by Bertran de Castellet and Ponç the Scribe, the Usatges de Barcelona, Liber feudorum maior, and other documents enhanced the count-kings' fiscal efficiency and accountability over their aristocracy and allowed them to maintain their conquests. Yet Barton does not trace how these initial "rudimentary and unsystematic" parchments evolved into one of Europe's best kept archival systems, a key factor in comital-royal authority from the thirteenth century onward (96). In other words, the Crown of Aragon's victory over New Catalonia might have cast an even longer shadow than Barton suggests.