The Splendor and Opulence of the Past: Studying the Middle Ages in Enlightenment Catalonia 9781501772221, 9781501772245, 9781501772238

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: A Catalan Monastery and Its Circle of Historians
Chapter 1 Jaume Caresmar’s Life and Personality
Chapter 2 Catalonia in the Eighteenth Century
Chapter 3 The Catalan Language in an “Age of Decadence”
Chapter 4 Bellpuig de les Avellanes before Caresmar’s Era
Chapter 5 The Circle of Bellpuig and Other Learned Societies
Chapter 6 Caresmar’s Works
Chapter 7 Disamortization, War, and Neglect
Chapter 8 Wanderings and Destruction of Libraries and Archives
Conclusion: Medieval Catalonia and the Modern Centuries
Appendix 1 Surviving Works of Caresmar
Appendix 2 Works of Caresmar That Were Sent to Madrid but Never Published
Appendix 3 Discourses by Caresmar Read to the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE SPLENDOR AND OPULENCE OF THE PAST

A volume in the series

Medieval Socie­ties, Religions, and Cultures Edited by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Anne E. Lester A list of titles in this series is available at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu.

THE SPLENDOR AND OPULENCE OF THE PAST

S T U DY I N G T H E M ­ IDDLE AGES IN E N L I G H T E N M E N T C ATA LO N I A

Paul F reedman

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

​Copyright © 2023 by Paul Freedman All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2023 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Freedman, Paul, 1949–­author. Title: The splendor and opulence of the past: studying   the ­Middle Ages in Enlightenment Catalonia /   Paul Freedman. Description: Ithaca [New York]: Cornell University Press,   2023. | Series: Medieval socie­ties, religions, and   cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023003317 (print) | LCCN 2023003318   (ebook) | ISBN 9781501772221 (hardcover) |   ISBN 9781501772245 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501772238 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Caresmar y Alemany, Jaime, 1717–1791. |   Bellpuig de las Avellanas (Monastery)—­History. |   Catalonia (Spain)—­Historiography. | Catalonia (Spain)—  ­History—18th ­century. Classification: LCC DP302.C619 F74 2023 (print) |   LCC DP302.C619 (ebook) | DDC 946.7033—­dc23/eng/  20230131 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2023003317 LC ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/  ­2023003318 Cover image: Castell de Cardona. Photo by Domènec Nogués i Clusellas. Used by permission.

​For my friends Teófilo Ruiz and Scarlett Freund. Carpe diem.

C o n te n ts

Acknowl­edgments  ix Abbreviations  xiii

Introduction: A Catalan Monastery and Its Circle of Historians

1

1. Jaume Caresmar’s Life and Personality

19

2. Catalonia in the Eigh­teenth ­Century

48

3. The Catalan Language in an “Age of De­cadence”

82

4. Bellpuig de les Avellanes before Caresmar’s Era

105

5. The Circle of Bellpuig and Other Learned Socie­ties

133

6. Caresmar’s Works

167

7. Disamortization, War, and Neglect

203

8. Wanderings and Destruction of Libraries and Archives

235

Conclusion: Medieval Catalonia and the Modern Centuries

262

Appendix 1: Surviving Works of Caresmar  273 Appendix 2: Works of Caresmar That Were Sent to Madrid but Never Published  289 Appendix 3: Discourses by Caresmar Read to the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona  291 Bibliography  293 Index  321

A ck n o w l­e d gm e n ts

What follows concerns a group of medieval Catalan historians in the eigh­teenth ­century and in par­tic­u­lar Jaume Caresmar (1717–1791), a canon of the western Catalan convent of Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Notwithstanding this focused, not to say narrow, scope, the book has taken me de­cades of intermittent work. It is unlikely that I would have brought it to completion without the prolonged isolation imposed by the COVID-19 epidemic. I acknowledge my good fortune not to have suffered to the degree that so many o ­ thers did during this terrible period. I am not a fast or prolific writer, but usually I am able to wrap up specific tasks within a reasonable amount of time. This, however, has taken me more years than any other scholarly enterprise. Hence ­there are so many p­ eople who have helped me that to recognize every­one specifically would amount to an autobiography. My few words h ­ ere are not sufficient to represent the range and extent of my gratitude. For a long while I regarded this undertaking’s petty complexities as an intellectual companion more than as a proj­ect. This is partly b­ ecause the book reflects my interests in and experiences with the survival and destruction of documentation from the ­Middle Ages but also with the evolution of what was originally a response to a fortuitous circumstance and its unraveling complications. While Caresmar and the Bellpuig circle are familiar to anyone studying the sources for Catalan medieval history, the discovery in 2002 of an im­mense cartulary and other rec­ords of medieval history hidden in 1835 and subsequently forgotten initiated my research. I want in the first place to acknowledge the help, friendship, and support of Professor Flocel Sabaté, who informed me about the newly found documentation, facilitated my access to it, and collaborated with me in putting together information about Caresmar’s surviving work. He has made this book pos­si­ble. Dr. Robert Porta, the archivist for the Marist library and archive at Bellpuig de les Avellanes, has been extremely kind in facilitating in e­ very way my access to Caresmar’s manuscripts preserved ­there and materials for the history of the monastery. He has also given me assistance with the images of Bellpuig ix

x

A c k n ow l­e d g m e n ts

for this book. My time spent at the Marist foundation, lodged at the lovely ­hotel that occupies part of the monastery, has been spiritually enhancing and historically evocative, even inspirational. I am thankful for the kindness of every­ one at Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Much to my regret, I never met F ­ ather Eduardo Corredera, a member of the Marist community who, beginning in the 1950s, wrote extensively on Caresmar and the Bellpuig circle of historians. Insofar as I have accomplished anything, it is on the basis of ­Father Corredera’s indefatigable efforts, as diligent as Caresmar, his exemplar and subject, and more quietly patient. Francesc Fité, a professor of art history at the University of Lleida, shared with me his unique knowledge of the history of Àger, both its monastery and town, and about the archival holdings and artistic remains of western Catalonia. Montserrat Pagès i Paretas, another eminent art historian, has translated much of what I have composed for conference pre­sen­ta­tions and articles into Catalan and over many years she and her husband, the distinguished philologist Josep Moran i Ocerinjauregui, have been devoted friends of mine. ­Because of the scattering of what remains of Caresmar’s work and that of the other Bellpuig historians, I have sought the assistance of many archivists and librarians. I would like to recognize especially Dra. Araceli Rosillo, director of the Franciscan archives for Catalonia in Barcelona, and Anna Gudayol Torelló at the archives section of the Biblioteca de Catalunya, also in Barcelona. While only a small amount of Caresmar’s work is directly related to the ecclesiastical archive of Vic, I cannot neglect to mention my longstanding debt of gratitude to several ­people associated with the cathedral: F ­ ather Miquel Gros i Pujol, the archivist whose ninetieth birthday is this year 2023; Dr. Rafel Ginebra, who knows more about the vast collection than anyone ­else; and Dr. Ramon Ordeig i Mata, who has or­ga­nized, edited, and synthesized so many archival rec­ords of the Catalan M ­ iddle Ages as to equal or surpass the examples set by the ­g reat names of the past, not simply Caresmar or Jaume Pasqual for Catalonia, but ­g reat Eu­ro­pean historians such as Baluze, Deslisle, or Kehr. It is a plea­sure to acknowledge the enthusiasm and support of Cornell University Press, its editorial director, Mahinder S. Kingra, and the editors of this series, Professors M. Cecilia Gaposchkin of Dartmouth and Anne E. Lester of Johns Hopkins. Their kind encouragement has meant more to me than ­these two sentences convey. Ange Romeo-Hall supervised the editorial pro­cess, and I also thank Kristen Ashley Gregg and her colleagues in marketing at Cornell University Press for their kind help and enthusiasm. Dina Dineva composed the index, not a completely thankless task, but certainly a difficult and admirable one. I am grateful to Professor Jordi Bolos i Masclans of the University of Lleida for drawing the maps.



Ac k n ow l­e d g m e n t s

xi

I have many dif­fer­ent kinds of obligation to my Yale colleague Professor Hussein Fancy, not the least of which is bringing my work to the attention of the series editors. Professor Maureen Miller at Berkeley read an early version of the manuscript and gave me very helpful suggestions. I profited from the advice of Professor Roser Salicrú i Lluch at the University of Barcelona. My former student Dr.  Annalena Müller, an expert on early-­modern monasticism, not only read and commented on the text but did so more quickly than I would have thought pos­si­ble. I discussed aspects of this research with two distinguished, beloved, and recently deceased En­glish medievalist colleagues, J.  N. Hillgarth and Peter Linehan. Anne Lester invited me to present my work on Jaume Caresmar to the History Department Seminar at Johns Hopkins University. I benefited greatly from the comments of participants and want particularly to thank John Marshall for his extremely helpful suggestions. Research over many years was made pos­si­ble by grants from Yale University, especially the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies. I enlisted and benefited from the patient and meticulous copyediting of my current and former students Grant Halliday, Spencer Weinreich, and Sylvan Lebrun. Agnieszka Rec, a former undergraduate and gradu­ate student now with the Beinecke Library, has edited much of what I have published, always with a uniquely attentive eye for consistency and ear for the sense (or non-­ sense) of the words. My official copyeditor, Liz Schueler, showed me, among other ­things, how many ­mistakes lurk in what I complacently assumed was a pretty well-­turned out manuscript. Mary Ribesky at Westchester Publishing Services saw the manuscript through production. The dutiful statement that errors are all my own is even more than usually apt and necessary. ­Because of the length of time elapsed since I started on this book, the specific instances of aid and reinforcement merge into consideration of my c­ areer and my dependence on many forms of companionship and inspiration. In dedicating this book to Teófilo Ruiz and Scarlett Freund I express, inadequately but intensely, my plea­sure in their com­pany and the benefit I have received from their knowledge and friendship.

A b b r e vi ati o ns

ABEV ACA ACB ACN ADB AHN APFC BC BPA RABLB RAH RB

Arxiu i Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó (Barcelona) Arxiu Capitular de la Catedral de Barcelona Arxiu Comarcal de la Noguera (Balaguer) Arxiu Diocesà de Barcelona Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid) Arxiu Provincial dels Franciscans de Catalunya (Barcelona) Biblioteca de Catalunya (Barcelona) Arxiu del Monestir de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes Arxiu de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid) Real Biblioteca (Madrid)

xiii

Figure 0.1.  Former monastery of Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Photo­graph by the author.

Introduction A Catalan Monastery and Its Circle of Historians

In the summer of 2002, workers restoring the parish church of Vilanova de la Sal in rural western Catalonia discovered a false ceiling with a large chest hidden above. The chest held a trove of books and parchments relating to the former Premonstratensian community of canons at Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes located just a few kilo­meters away. The material found at Vilanova de la Sal included fourteen seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century printed books, many containing statutes and liturgy specific to the Premonstratensian Order, and approximately 350 single-­sheet parchments and papers recording property transactions. The documents ­were concealed in 1835, at the time of a massive state-­ordered confiscation of monastic properties, and subsequently forgotten. They rec­ord pious donations, land sales, leases, and litigation pro­cesses that go back to the eleventh ­century—­before the religious community was established in 1166. The first parchment chronologically, dated July 2, 1057, is a gift of the c­ astle of Les Avellanes by Count Ermengol III of Urgell to two military followers, the knights Miró Isarn and Hug Arnau.1 Such prefoundational documents w ­ ere saved ­because Bellpuig inherited ­earlier rights over land, c­ astles, and revenues. Its first benefactors w ­ ere the ruler, Count Ermengol VII, and a regional nobleman, Guillem II of Anglesola. 1. ​ACN, ACV200-85, Fons Ordre dels canonges regulars premonstratesos de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes, Administració del Patrimoni, Avellanes, 59. 1

2 I NT R OD U CT I ON

The contents of the trunk also included thirty-­six manuscript books, notes, and essays belonging to or written by Daniel Finestres (1702–1744), a canon and abbot of Bellpuig, who founded a circle of historians at the convent who ­were devoted to researching the medieval history of Catalonia. Further, ­there ­were hundreds of small books and pamphlets containing recent (i.e., late eigh­ teenth c­ entury and early nineteenth ­century) lists of properties, rec­ords of rent and other payments due from tenants, and assorted administrative transactions. Most significant for posterity was a massive five-­volume handwritten transcription of thousands of documents relating to lands and rights belonging to Bellpuig. This cartulary was created in the mid-­eighteenth c­ entury and provides new information about the history of the monastery over the course of six hundred years. Archival rec­ords ­were vital to religious establishments in order to prove claims over fields and vineyards, rents and dues owed by peasants, and other rights and real estate that frequently w ­ ere litigated or usurped. Documents from the distant past might prove church claims over the possession of territory, the collection of tithes, or privileges such as drawing off w ­ ater in a dry region. The defense of monastic property was the principal motive for drawing up the cartulary, according to our protagonist, Jaume Caresmar i Alemany (1717– 1791), a canon of Bellpuig who put together this massive enterprise. As a scholar, Caresmar was fascinated with the source materials for their own sake, however, and the cartulary amounted to a ­g reat historical piece of research as well as a series of ­legal proofs of possession. Caresmar, as we ­will see, was a dedicated, even obsessive, collector and transcriber of medieval texts. He could not have anticipated that his cartulary would dis­appear for over 160 years as a result of the state-­ordered seizure of monasteries and the auctioning off of their properties that began in 1835.

Bellpuig de les Avellanes and Its School of Historians This book is about Jaume Caresmar and a group of fellow canons at Bellpuig, historians who reclaimed Catalonia’s past and attempted to ensure its pro­gress in the Age of Enlightenment. This was a difficult undertaking, not only ­because the sources of Catalan history, especially its archival documentation, ­were both im­mense and neglected but ­because of the peculiar status of Catalonia within Spain, po­liti­cally subordinated but eco­nom­ically advanced, a prob­lem that has not been resolved in the centuries since Caresmar lived and died.



A C ATA L A N MON A STE R Y A ND I TS C I R CLE O F H I STO R I A NS

3

Map 1.  Catalonia and its comarques (subdivisions). Created by Jordi Bolòs i Masclans.

The story of the Bellpuig antiquarians has implications for the historical and cultural situation of Catalonia, a territory that enjoyed im­mense power and prestige in the ­Middle Ages, but whose autonomy in the modern era has often been repressed and its cultural identity ignored by the Spanish state. In the eigh­teenth ­century, the Principality of Catalonia, as it was referred to, consisted of the same territories in the northeast part of the Spanish state that now define it. Roussillon and other lands near the northern side of the Pyrenees mountains had belonged to Catalonia, but t­ hese w ­ ere annexed to France 2 by the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. Members of the Bellpuig circle ­were interested in the ­Middle Ages in part ­because of their concern for the history of the church, but also ­because the centuries between Charlemagne (who died in 814) and the Spanish arrival in the New World formed a period of efflorescence and power for the territory 2. ​On the paradoxical, or at least nonintuitive, effects of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, see Peter Sahlins, Bound­aries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

4 I NT R OD U CT I ON

whose major city, Barcelona, was among the ­g reat actors in Mediterranean trade, war, and po­liti­cal influence. Iw ­ ill give a short account of Catalonia’s medieval and early modern history in chapter 2 and ­will say something in chapter 3 about Catalan, a principal literary language of the ­Middle Ages that by Caresmar’s time had been eclipsed by Castilian (“Spanish”) in the world of learning and for official acts and administration. T ­ hese chapters are intended to provide the setting for the life and works of Caresmar that I discuss in chapters 1 (on Caresmar’s life) and 6 (concerning what he wrote). The more immediate contexts of eighteenth-­ century Catalonia, the collegiate spiritual community of Bellpuig, and other learned associations are the subjects of chapters 4 and 5. The two final chapters concern the posthumous significance of Caresmar’s proj­ects of historical preservation against the background of war, confiscation, and neglect that characterized the period between the Napoleonic wars (dating from 1808) and the Spanish Civil War (which ended in 1939). In addition to Caresmar and his associates and the evolution of Catalonia’s national identity, the third subject of this book is the loss and survival of medieval rec­ords. Catalonia has preserved an extraordinary amount of documentation, and it sometimes seems a place where for more than a millennium no one ever threw out anything with writing on it. The medieval historian of Catalonia, especially a foreigner feeling pressed for time ­because of a ­limited term for research support, occasionally has to suppress the wicked notion that it would have been fortunate if more rec­ords had disappeared, thereby alleviating the burden of investigation. And more material keeps on turning up since medieval rec­ords in Catalonia are not concentrated in a few par­tic­u­lar locations. For example, three parchments dating from 845, 848, and 960 w ­ ere discovered in 2019 at a farm­house in the remote northwestern comarca of Pallars Iussà.3 Nevertheless, despite the extraordinary wealth of Catalan historical documentation, much has vanished. This was sometimes by direct destruction, as with the burning of the ­g reat monastic library and archive of Ripoll in the disorders of 1835, but also out of carelessness, particularly the failure of the authorities to ensure the transfer of manuscripts, printed books, and archival documents from monasteries confiscated by the state. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, medieval materials w ­ ere decimated by theft, neglect, and the use of parchment manuscripts for such ­things (ironically) as bookbinding. As late as 1958, the personnel of the historical archive at Arenys de Mar, up the coast from Barce3. ​Communication from Ramon Ordeig i Mata. The parchments are in Sort, Arxiu Comarcal de Pallars Sobirà.



A C ATA L A N MON A STE R Y A ND I TS C I R CLE O F H I STO R I A NS

5

lona, intervened to prevent parchments from being sold for the purpose of being turned into paper glue. In the 1960s, Manuel Riu i Riu, a historian at the University of Barcelona, found extensive medieval rec­ords stored at a ski club near the town of Berga.4

Historical Preservation and Destruction The three subjects just mentioned—­Caresmar, Catalonia, and archives—­are interconnected. The fortuitous discovery of the rec­ords of Bellpuig in 2002 raises several questions: Why ­were the rec­ords hidden? Who ­were the p­ eople who hid them? Why ­were t­ hese materials deemed impor­tant at one time? What do modern historians of Catalonia and of the M ­ iddle Ages study? and How have the materials for their research been preserved? This last question reflects my personal experience of nearly fifty years of consistent and (to use an overworked term) passionate interest in medieval Catalonia. During the 1975–1976 academic year, I did the research for my dissertation at the cathedral archive of Vic, a small city north of Barcelona near the foothills of the Pyrenees. Vic had been a center of learning and po­liti­cal power, especially in the tenth through the twelfth centuries. Its cathedral archive and library seemed endless, the high-­ceilinged, dimly lit rooms above the cloister irregularly following one another. Everywhere t­here ­were rough wooden bookcases or tall cabinets with wire-­mesh doors. The setting conformed enchantingly to my idea of what a repository of medieval books and parchments should look like, even if the rooms ­were actually constructed at the beginning of the nineteenth c­ entury. In the majestic, if freezing, work area, smoking was not only permitted but encouraged—­each desk ­table had an ashtray. And such latitude might have been excusable on the grounds that no fire had been set by accident t­ here in over four hundred years. T ­ here had been a deliberate conflagration in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), set by radicals who regarded the church as a key collaborator with the insurgent forces of the fascist General Francisco Franco. Somehow, I did not give much thought to how hundreds of scorched documents had barely survived that crisis and ­were being slowly and painstakingly restored. From reading ­earlier inventories, I knew of some losses but was grateful that so much had been sal­vaged and 4. ​Examples from Flocel Sabaté, “Medieval Documentation and Archives in Catalonia ­after the 19th ­Century Upheavals,” in Identity and Loss of Historical Memory: The Destruction of Archives, ed. Igor Filippov and Flocel Sabaté (Bern: Peter Lang, 2017), 249–50.

6 I NT R OD U CT I ON

that I was allowed to rummage through drawers of toasted parchments dating from the tenth to the sixteenth ­century. Much l­ater I became more aware of what is kept in such archives and how contingent their contents are on circumstance and accident. Seeing my research ­career now from a longer view, I am induced to think about what I have worked on all this time and why. I hope the reader ­will find that the result is something more than an expression of self-­indulgence and that the labyrinth of Caresmar’s proj­ects and their subsequent dispersal says something about historical knowledge and the daunting obligation to protect it from ignorance and barbarism. The books and rec­ords of Bellpuig ­were concealed at Vilanova de la Sal in 1835 ­because the state ordered monasteries throughout Spain to be closed and their properties confiscated, a pro­cess known as disentailment or, an equally technical term, disamortization. This refers to the seizure or breaking up of property that hitherto was never supposed to be sold, divided, or diminished.5 Ordinary real estate passes to a new generation or is a negotiable asset that is eventually returned to an active market. Ecclesiastical property, however, was considered unalienable even if par­tic­u­lar parcels ­were in fact routinely bought and sold. The endowment of a monastery, cathedral, or even a mere parish church was supposed to be eternal, or at least to endure in secular perpetuity, much as was the case with certain kinds of aristocratic lands, entailed in order to prevent the dispersion of a f­amily’s wealth. Private university endowments are a con­temporary example of investments carried into a theoretically limitless ­f uture. Disamortization was a revolutionary step in the attempt of government officials and t­ hose of a secularist (in this po­liti­cal context Liberal) opinion to reduce or end the privileged position of the church, an ideological goal buttressed by the prospect of selling off millions of underexploited acres and accompanying rights to relieve state debt and to profit influential investors. Disamortization takes property away from an institution such as the church that has a “dead hand” or perpetual possession. In the Age of Enlightenment and during the revolutionary climate of the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, the church was regarded in progressive circles as a hindrance to economic growth and as unjustly enjoying archaic, feudal profits from poorly administered land. Monasteries ­were considered obsolete relics of the medieval past, an era regarded as obscurantist and whose seeming perpetua5. ​­Until recently in En­glish common law, certain secular landed estates ­were entailed (that is, indivisible and unalienable), passing from one male heir to the next. This situation has become widely familiar through the Downton Abbey tele­vi­sion series.



A C ATA L A N MON A STE R Y A ND I TS C I R CLE O F H I STO R I A NS

7

tion was considered barbarous. According to enlightened opinion, monks w ­ ere no longer (if they had ever been) engaged in a serious spiritual enterprise, yet ­here they w ­ ere, still possessing large properties from which they received rents but which they did not actively maintain. Such lands, portrayed as empty or undeveloped, ­were regarded by anticlerical observers as draining economic initiatives and immobilizing wealth to benefit superstition and unproductive holders of sinecures. The Liberals in Spain ­were the party of incipient capitalism, advocates of constitutional government and the reduction of aristocratic and ecclesiastical privileges. They represented a challenge to royal absolutism and clerical power and ­were intent on ending monasteries’ hold over land and revenues. While the early nineteenth c­ entury was an age of liberal revolution, ­there was a back-­ and-­forth of power whose shifts affected the position of the church. In light of recent pre­ce­dent, the canons of Bellpuig in 1835 made provision for their pos­si­ble return, in which case the cached archival trea­sure would be necessary in order to determine and restore what they had possessed before the disamortization. This was not unrealistic, for t­ here had been previous confiscations of monastic property, most recently in 1822, which had been followed by the restoration of the old regime in 1824, which returned at least some of the lost ecclesiastical properties. A ­ fter 1835, however, ­there was no rollback of the confiscations. Like many other monasteries, Bellpuig became a private estate. Monks returned in 1884 in the form of a Trappist community, but this pious initiative failed, and another private owner took over. The most famous artistic monument at Bellpuig, four fourteenth-­century tombs of the counts of Urgell with their sculpted limestone effigies, w ­ ere sold off by the banker who owned Bellpuig in 1906, and they are now in the Cloisters Museum in New York. In 1910 the Marist F ­ athers (a teaching order) established their Catalan headquarters at Bellpuig. The former convent was ­until recently shared as a Marist retirement home and a h ­ otel. ­Today the Marist residence for el­derly clergy is at Mataró, nearer to Barcelona, but ­there is still a small community of Marists who work at the monastery and on its properties. In any event, the Premonstratensians never returned, and the hiding place and the very existence of their documents ­were forgotten. Almost surely it was the rector of Vilanova de la Sal, Guillem Escaró, who hid the books, parchments, and papers. His ­brother was a canon of Bellpuig de les Avellanes, and the rector openly collected other remains of the former convent.6 Escaró’s caution was merited, if in certain re­spects too late, ­because 6. ​Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·leccionista a la Catalunya de la Il·lustració (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 2011), 150–51.

8 I NT R OD U CT I ON

for de­cades a­ fter the disamortization, even in the early twentieth c­ entury, the sale of manuscripts, books, and art looted from Bellpuig and neighboring churches was brisk.7 Given the nature of church property, it was never a good idea to discard anything related to land rights just b­ ecause it was old. One never knew when antique proof of possession would be useful. A confirmatory letter issued in 1116 by Pope Paschal II was introduced in 1797 as evidence about the owner­ ship of olive groves in a dispute between another Catalan chapter of ecclesiastical canons, Santa Maria de Vilabertran in the northeastern comarca of Alt Empordà, and a local notable. The only reason we have the text of this medieval papal document is ­because of the (relatively) modern lawsuit.8 The fate of Vilabertran’s rec­ords is an example of contingent accidents of preservation and destruction that w ­ ill be detailed in the last chapters. The original letter of Pope Paschal II to Vilabertran was lost in the nineteenth c­ entury, prob­ably as a result of the disamortization, even though, through roundabout means, almost one thousand Vilabertran parchments from before 1300 have been saved. Already during the war with Napoleon, several of Vilabertran’s illuminated manuscripts had been sent to Paris. The Vilabertran archive remained intact into the late nineteenth c­ entury. The properties of Vilabertran ­were sold off and the main building became a parish church. When the historian Francesc Monsalvatje visited and inventoried a number of its rec­ords at the turn of the ­century, Vilabertran was a local church with an unusually and impractically large archive.9 Another scholar, Joaquim Miret i Sans, was an avid collector of archival materials who at the end of the nineteenth ­century and beginning of the twentieth c­ entury bought hundreds of the earliest Vilabertran parchments, which he eventually gave to the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona (the equivalent of a national library). Just before the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the remaining documents w ­ ere moved from Vilabertran to the Diocesan Archive of Girona, by which time some had been lost and the collection remained in disarray u ­ ntil the end of the twentieth ­century.10 This is just one of many illustrations of the peculiar trajectories of dispersion and preservation of medieval documentation. 7. ​Cayetano Barraquer y Roviralta, Los religiosos en Cataluña durante la primera mitad del siglo XIX, vol. 3 (Barcelona: F. J. Altés y Alabart, 1917), 424–25. 8. ​Paul Freedman and Flocel Sabaté, “Two Twelfth-­Century Papal Letters to the Collegiate Church of Vilabertran (Catalonia),” Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 37 (1999): 48, 58. 9. ​Francisco de Monsalvatje y Fossas, Los monasterios de la diócesis gerundense, Noticias Históricas, vol. 14 (Olot: Juan Bonet, 1904), 69–93. 10. ​ Escriptures de Santa Maria de Vilabertran (968–1300), ed. Josep Maria Marquès (Figueres: Institut d’Estudis Empordanesos, 1995), especially xi–­xii.



A C ATA L A N MON A STE R Y A ND I TS C I R CLE O F H I STO R I A NS

9

The strategic policy of keeping documents, no m ­ atter how out of date they might be, has helped historians ­because church rec­ords from the medieval and modern centuries survive in ­great numbers. For the historian interested in society, not just in wars and g­ reat po­liti­cal events chronicled by contemporaries, everyday transactions such as ­wills, estate accounts, or land sales can be used to piece together how ­people lived, their ­legal status, and community organ­ization. They give information about topics such as demography, diet, and the status of ­women as financial actors. Any effort to look at how ordinary p­ eople lived in the medieval centuries is at least partly based on documentary evidence kept for reasons of ensuring ­later ­legal proof or simply out of a reluctance to dispose of texts.

Catalonia within Spain The canons of Bellpuig researched the M ­ iddle Ages, a bright period in their nation’s history that was eclipsed by the end of Catalan po­liti­cal and institutional autonomy. The blows to Catalan po­liti­cal distinction ­were the result of war and dynastic change, accompanied by the long-­term decline of the Catalan language as a vehicle for learned communication, a symptom of the power and prestige of Castilian culture. The canons’ activities as transcribers and historians would in turn salvage rec­ords and knowledge of the M ­ iddle Ages before the better-­known nineteenth-­century efflorescence of Romantic medievalism revived popu­lar interest in the past and Catalan nationalism restored the official use of the language. This revival increased scholarly and popu­lar attention to the ­Middle Ages, the period when Catalonia ruled the waves of the western Mediterranean and was a ­great power not only in Eu­ro­pean politics but in lit­er­ a­ture, art, and even cookbook writing. It is obvious that historical memory plays a role in po­liti­cal conflicts and demands, now as much as ever. The movement for Catalan in­de­pen­dence has gained strength in the twenty-­first ­century and has become the principal internal crisis besetting the Spanish government. Separatist grievances have much to do with current issues of taxation and distribution of state benefits, as well as with attempts by the Spanish state to reduce or nullify hard-­won Catalan autonomy, but they are also rooted in an understanding of the past by which Catalonia has always been dif­fer­ent, linguistically, culturally, and eco­nom­ically from its Castilian rival and at times master. According to widely disseminated opinion, Catalonia has always been progressive, forward-­looking, and enterprising but has been crippled by Castilian exploitation and domination, at least

10 I NT R OD U CT I ON

since the Bourbon dynasty’s triumph in the War of the Spanish Succession that ended in 1714, or (­going backward) perhaps since the u ­ nion of Aragon and Castile through the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469, or maybe the extinction of the House of Barcelona and the succession of a Castilian dynasty, the Trastámaras, in 1412. Long before the victory of the Bourbon forces and the consequent abolition of Catalan autonomous governmental and cultural institutions, the way had been paved, according to the Catalan consensus, for Castilian domination in its modern form. The antiquarian canons of Bellpuig are an unlikely group in certain re­spects: scholars working in a remote location rather than in cosmopolitan Barcelona; clerics interested in church history who shared the Enlightenment desire to encourage the progressive forces in Spain; erudite Catalans whose written communication was mostly in Spanish or Latin. They are links in a chain of historians ­going back to the ­Middle Ages who transcribed and so preserved documentation such as what was dramatically discovered in 2002. Centered on the eigh­teenth c­ entury, this study looks back to the efforts of scholars to understand the ­Middle Ages and forward to how the memory of that medieval period of Catalan glory has been retained and reworked during two centuries of chaos, neglect, and history-­effacing pro­g ress. During Caresmar’s lifetime, Spain experienced neither devastating civil war nor division within Chris­tian­ity nor anticlerical revolution. All was not peaceful and beneficent, however. The expulsion of Jews, Muslims, and even Muslim converts (Moriscos) destroyed most of the Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts and documentation, and even ­those monuments that survived ­were remodeled or put to other uses. A famous, or infamous, example of official vandalism was the alteration of the ­Great Mosque of Cordoba, in which an entire late Gothic cathedral church was inserted in the m ­ iddle of the former prayer hall beginning in 1523. King Charles V is reputed to have remarked that he regretted giving the bishop and chapter permission to undertake the proj­ect: “You desired what could be constructed anywhere, but ­here you had that which was unique in the world.” The fact that this same king built a Re­nais­sance palace in the Alhambra of Granada diminishes the reliability of this other­wise satisfying story.11 At any rate, ­these cultural traumas had no effect on the Christian patrimony of manuscripts and archives of the Christian kingdoms. The privileged situation of Spanish libraries and archives ended when Napoleon de­cided in 1808 to invade in order to block Britain’s Atlantic trade. Portugal had been easily taken over in 1807, but in order to hold that nation, 11. ​Glaire D. Anderson, “The Cathedral in the Mosque and the Two Palaces: Additions to the ­Great Mosque of Cordoba and the Alhambra during the Reign of Charles V,” Thresholds 25 (2002): 51.



A C ATA L A N MON A STE R Y A ND I TS C I R CLE O F H I STO R I A NS

11

Napoleon de­cided he needed to topple the weak Bourbon king of Spain in ­favor of Joseph Bonaparte, his ­brother. The campaign was initially successful, but British intervention in what was known as the Peninsular War and the re­ sis­tance of the Spanish irregular troops (the term “guerrilla” was in­ven­ted ­here) led to the eventual defeat of the Napoleonic forces. Brutal military campaigns produced the atrocities immortalized by Goya’s frightening art and such acts as the burning and sacking of the Catalan monastery of Montserrat along with its library and archive in 1811 and 1812. In 1814, with Napoleon vanquished, an era of po­liti­cal uncertainty ensued with frequent regime changes. The progressive-­minded Liberal party regarded the church as a reactionary force sitting on landed wealth that could be put to better use by the state and for the benefit of secular, private enterprise. Disamortization, the implementation of liberal policy, resulted in the loss of a heritage that was plundered or destroyed in iconoclastic riots and fires, leaving much of the artistic and documentary rec­ord to dispersion and decay. Accounting for lost ecclesiastical patrimony remains an ongoing effort. In 2004, a Yale gradu­ate student identified a miscata­loged manuscript in the University of Pennsylvania rare books library, bought in 1972, as a thirteenth-­century cartulary of the Aragonese monastery of San Andrés de Fanlo, stolen from the Cathedral of Huesca at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936.12 As part of another saga of restitution, the previously forgotten rec­ords of Bellpuig have been or­ga­nized by the regional archive, the Arxiu Comarcal de la Noguera in Balaguer.13 The fate of Bellpuig de les Avellanes and its archive forms the background for this account of the ­career and works of Jaume Caresmar and his circle, a group known as the erudits de les Avellanes. Caresmar was abbot briefly on two occasions, from 1754 to 1757 and again from 1766 to 1769, but his enduring contributions are related to his activities as an archivist and historian.14 Likened by his contemporaries to Jean Mabillon and Pierre de 12. ​ El cartulario del monasterio aragonés de San Andrés de Fanlo, siglos X–­XIII, ed. Carlos Laliena and Erc Knibbs (Saragossa: Universidad de Zaragoza, 2007). 13. ​“El fons Ordre dels canonges regulars premonstratesos de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes (1057–1835),” a printed cata­log in the ACN. 14. ​For Caresmar’s biography see Fèlix Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crítico de los escritores catalanes y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura de Cataluña (Barcelona: J. Verdeguer, 1836), 176–83; Jaime Oliver, “Biografia de Jaume Caresmar y Alemany, 1717–1791,” El Ateneo, Revista Mensual del Ateneo igualadino de la clase obrera, published in twenty-­two brief installments between numbers 102–103 (1894) and 135 (1896); Joan Mercader, Un Igualadí del segle XVIII: Jaume Caresmar (Igualada: Estudis Comarcals, 1947); Joan Mercader, Historiadors i erudits a Catalunya i a València en el segle XVIII: Caresmar i l’escola de les Avellanes; Mayans, el solitari d’Oliva (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1966), 6–35; Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, La escuela histórica avellanense, 2nd  ed. (Lleida: Instituto de Estudios Ilerdenses, 1971), 39–99; Xavier Baró i Queralt, “Caresmar i Alemany, Jaume,” in Diccionari d’historiografia catalana, ed. Antoni Simon i Tarrés (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 2003), 297–98.

12 I NT R OD U CT I ON

Marca, ­great seventeenth-­century pioneers of the historical science of diplomatics (how to verify and edit medieval documents), Caresmar shared with the French scholars a desire to study history not through layers of stories and chronicles, often based on false information, but by using original documents from the period being investigated. To do this involved exhuming from centuries of oblivion the rec­ords of archives, mostly ­those of churches that had guarded them but never used them for historical reconstruction. In pursuit of documents from medieval Catalonia, Caresmar visited more than a dozen church archives and was commissioned to cata­log several of the most impor­tant of them, notably the Cathedral of Barcelona, the Augustinian collegiate church of Àger, the Benedictine monastery of Gerri, and of course Bellpuig itself. Having been arranged in some kind of order, the neglected documents had to be verified. Caresmar followed his French exemplars’ rules and practices for distinguishing genuine from false texts. His principal concern was to transcribe and chronologically order the thousands of rec­ords surviving on parchment. From the cathedral of Barcelona alone, Caresmar copied 14,000 documents from the ninth to the fifteenth ­century, and from Àger, 2,500. This mass of material provided an account of the church in Catalonia, whose role in society was sufficiently impor­tant that its history reveals aspects of medieval Catalonia as a ­whole.15 Caresmar was primarily a scholar of ecclesiastical archives, but he was also interested in Catalan literary history, archeology and stone inscriptions (epigraphy), economic and demographic history, liturgy, and hagiography. He was a historian in an age that came before the development of scientific history in the nineteenth c­ entury, but his era saw pro­gress in understanding and relying on ar15. ​Some manuscripts of Caresmar’s Carta al Barón de la Linde (e.g., BC, MS 9363, f. 2r) and the first published edition of 1821 (pp. 1–2 of the book and 9–10 in the serialized version that same year, Periódico universal de ciencias, lit­er­a­ture y artes, no. 1, January 6, 1821) include a short prologue praising Caresmar composed by Joaquin Traggia (1748–1802), a member of the Real Academia de la Historia. This memorial first appeared in volume 1 of the Historia eclesiáastica de Aragón (1791), as noted by Joan Reglà in his introduction to the 1959 Barcelona edition of the Carta (xxxv). See appendix 1, no. 11. Traggia typified Caresmar as “digno de ser comparado con Marca y Mabillon, los sabios franceses que trabajaban en la grande obra diplomtica.” Torres Amat cites this eulogy in his Memorias (177), where he also says (178) that Traggia had proposed for Caresmar’s tomb inscription a comparison with the French seventeenth-­ century scholar Pierre de Marca (Vir in re Diplom. Cum Marca compar). The ­actual inscription, composed by Caresmar’s Bellpuig associate Jaume Pasqual, simply likens Caresmar’s accomplishments to t­ hose of the Maurist monks of Paris, a foundation with which de Marca and Mabillon w ­ ere associated. In his introduction to Caresmar’s study of the authenticity of archival documents (see appendix 1, no. 10), Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor, in 1790, placed Caresmar “in the class of the Mabillons, d’Acherys and Martins.” Jayme Caresmar, “Autenticidad de las escrituras contenidas en los Archivos, así públicos como privados, y en especial de los Archivos de las Iglesias,” in Seminario erudito, que comprehende varias obras inéditas, críticas, morales, instructivas, políticas, históricas, satíricas y jocosas de nuestros mejores autores antiguos y modernos, vol. 28, ed. Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor (Madrid: Blas Roman,1790), 53.



A C ATA L A N MON A STE R Y A ND I TS C I R CLE O F H I STO R I A NS

13

chival documents, not only as evidence in lawsuits, as before, but now as historical sources. The era of Caresmar’s activity has often been interpreted as the nadir of Catalonia’s po­liti­cal and cultural autonomy, from the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714 ­until the beginning of the war with Napoleon. The eigh­teenth c­ entury was at one time commonly and is still occasionally referred to as la decadència when Catalan governmental institutions w ­ ere swept away by Bourbon absolutism and Castilian hegemony and when the Catalan language was almost obliterated in ­favor of Spanish, at least in formal usage and documentation. What had been one of the major literary idioms of the ­Middle Ages was represented by almost nothing of high-­culture distinction during the entire eigh­teenth c­ entury and the first half of the nineteenth ­century. Yet the eigh­teenth ­century was an era of domestic peace and accelerating economic growth. It also saw a flowering of historical studies dedicated to restoring the memory of Catalonia in its glorious (or at least power­f ul) medieval centuries. Another apparent paradox is that almost all of the work by scholars such as Caresmar, designed to exalt Catalonia’s past, was written in Castilian or Latin, not in Catalan. While some of Caresmar’s notes and correspondence are in Catalan, he left only one completed work in that language, and this was ­because he never got around to writing the intended translations into the two learned languages, Spanish and Latin (see appendix 1, no. 18b). Preservation involved transcribing documents into durable compendiums such as cartularies in which specific rec­ords would be easier to find and read than the centuries-­old originals. A ­ fter completing the Bellpuig cartulary early in his ­career, Caresmar would go on to register and copy tens of thousands of such parchments and create historical tools to date and authenticate medieval sources.

Jaume Caresmar and His Work In certain re­spects, therefore, Caresmar exemplifies the popu­lar image of the monastic scribe, patiently engaged in a laborious work of copying. This might seem odd given that printing had been developed three hundred years e­ arlier. The tedious copying was in aid of large proj­ects to cata­log and render usable to a wider audience the historical heritage hidden away in unexplored and often completely unor­ga­nized archives and libraries. Before microfilm, the portable computer, and phones with good cameras—­that is, ­until not so long ago—­this was how an investigation of the primary institutional sources for the ­Middle Ages was carried out. In the 1970s, in the pro­cess of performing research for my doctoral dissertation in order to have a rec­ord of the extensive documentation

14 I NT R OD U CT I ON

Figure I.1.  Memorial fountain with bust of Jaume Caresmar, Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Photo­graph by the author.

for the twelfth ­century, I slowly transcribed hundreds of parchments using a pen, just as had been done for centuries, unaware that I was near the end time for a laborious, although rewarding, practice. Caresmar’s activities as a church historian and diplomatist might appear to be situated in what was already an old, merely antiquarian tradition, but he was a figure of the progressive Enlightenment as well, a member of a group focused on understanding the historical reasons for constraints on Catalonia’s economic pro­g ress in order to restore its prosperity. Caresmar is most re-



A C ATA L A N MON A STE R Y A ND I TS C I R CLE O F H I STO R I A NS

15

nowned for an essay in the form of a letter to Manuel de Terán, the Barón de la Linde, the Spanish intendente general (governor) of Catalonia, purporting to demonstrate that Catalonia had been richer and more populous in the past.16 This thesis, written in 1780, formed part of a historically minded survey titled Discurso sobre la agricultura, comercio e industria del principado de Cataluña (Discourse on the agriculture, commerce, and industry of the Principality of Catalonia), which considered Catalonia’s economic resources and their previous inadequate exploitation and offered a program of economic development and po­liti­cal reform. As with many of Caresmar’s other works, neither the Carta nor the larger Discurso of which it formed a part appeared in print immediately, its publication victimized by the same lethargy, inefficiency, and po­liti­ cal intrigue that stymied the attempted implementation of reform. The Carta would be printed in 1821 as a book and would also be serialized in the ephemeral weekly journal Periódico universal de ciencias, literatura y artes; the Discurso would not appear in print ­until the end of the twentieth ­century.17 Caresmar’s argument in the Carta was a significant and (eventually) widely noticed contribution to debates about the g­ reat prob­lem of Spanish history: the nation’s waning strength in the modern world of Eu­ro­pean power politics in comparison with the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when Spain had been the leading continental realm and master of a world empire. The perpetually difficult position of Catalonia within the Spanish state and its intensified subordination to Castile in the eigh­teenth ­century appeared to be both a symptom and a cause of the decline of Spain as a ­whole. In his introduction to the 1959 edition of Caresmar’s Carta, Joan Reglà remarks that, above all, Caresmar was a man of the Catalan Enlightenment.18 Most of Caresmar’s activity, however, was devoted not to ­matters of po­liti­cal economy but rather to the history of the church. His intense energy and productivity manifested themselves in dispersed and often uncompleted works of ecclesiastical history, including transcriptions of documents, notes, lists, cata­ logs, and essays. Caresmar was a pioneer in the use of sources from archives 16. ​ Carta del Dr.  D. Jaime Caresmár, canónigo premostrantense del monasterio de nuestra Señora de Bellpuig de las Avellanas, dirgida al muy ilustre Sr. D. Manuel de Teran, baron de la Linde, intendente general interino del egército y principado de Cataluña; en la cual se prueba ser Cataluña en lo antiguo más poblada, rica y abundante que hoy (Barcelona: José Torner, 1821; rev. ed., Barcelona: Asociación de Bibliófils de Barcelona, 1959; repr., Igualada: Centre d’Estudis Comarcals, 1979). See appendix 1, no. 11. 17. ​ Discurso sobre la agricultura, comercio e industria del Principado de Cataluña (1780), ed. Ernest Lluch (Barcelona: Junta de Comerç, 1997). The text of the Carta, minus the greeting and closing address to the intendente, is on pages 119–97, with the title “Consistencia antigua y moderna de Cataluña, en la que se prueba ser en lo antiguo más poblada, rica y abundante que hoy.” 18. ​ Carta al Barón de la Linde, ed. Juan Reglá (Barcelona: Asocaición de Bibliófils de Barcelona, 1959), xvi.

16 I NT R OD U CT I ON

and libraries rather than relying on descriptive works or chronicles.19 His own prolific composition, however, remains difficult to grasp by reason of his impatient and inconsistent method of working, exacerbated by the destruction and scattering of the unpublished material that he left at his death. As a result, although he is commonly praised as a modernizing thinker and an advocate for critical historical inquiry, very ­little of his written work is read anymore, and, indeed, not all that much can be read. He left many incomplete compositions, and much of what he did finish was not published; the manuscripts of his oeuvre that have not been lost have been scattered and mixed up. That few of Caresmar’s writings appeared in print during his lifetime compared with his voluminous notes is not in itself so unusual. Scholars and literary writers often accumulate piles of jottings, drafts, unfinished essays, outlines, and copies or excerpts of the observations of ­others. The Benedictine monk Martín Sarmiento (1695–1772) published only a few studies of Spanish and Galician poetry, but most of his intellectual output, encompassing research on the Galician language and botany along with travel writing, is in twelve manuscript volumes now at the library of the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid.20 The physicist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) developed a three-­tiered note-­taking system in seventeen volumes, most of them published ­after his death as his “scrapbooks” (Sudelbücher).21 Such notes and essays should not be considered mere trash that the author never threw out. Long a­ fter the advent of printing but before late twentieth-­ century methods of easy mechanical copying and then digital preservation, it was useful to maintain an assemblage of working materials or­ga­nized around pos­si­ble ­f uture proj­ects, or as a set of notes and excerpts serving to aid memory and arrange information of long-­term value. This formed what was, ­after the writer’s demise, a literary estate that could be exploited by scholars interested in the same areas or by an executor or biographer, much in the way that drafts and revisions are incorporated into analyses of the creative pro­cesses of poets and novelists t­ oday.22 19. ​Ramon Grau i Fernàndez, “Els intel·lectuals entre la Ilˑlustració i les tradicions nacionals,” in Història, política, societat, i cultura dels Països Catalans, ed. Borja de Riquer, vol. 5 (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1995), 326–43. 20. ​Marcelino Gesta y Leceta, Índice de una colección manuscrita de obras del Rmo. Padre Fr. Martín Sarmiento (Madrid: Vda. y Hijos de Gómez Fuentenebro, 1888). On Sarmiento’s reasons for refraining from publishing his work, see Eduardo Pardo de Guevara y Valdés, Fray Martín Sarmiento, el amador de la verdad (1695–1772) (La Coruña: Diputaciön Provincial, 2002), 8–9. 21. ​Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 69. 22. ​I owe this concept of a “literary estate” to Eef Overgaauw of the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, who gave a fascinating talk titled “Authors, Scribes and Archivists: Literary Estates in Germany in the Fif-



A C ATA L A N MON A STE R Y A ND I TS C I R CLE O F H I STO R I A NS

17

This useful detritus might be put into booklets or grouped together as quires or codices. As we ­will see, Caresmar’s younger associates Josep de Vega i Sentmenat, Gonzalo Saura, and Josep Martí attempted in this fashion to collect and order the documents Caresmar possessed at his death in 1791, but ­these papers ­were already disor­ga­nized and incomplete. The miscellanies currently at Bellpuig de les Avellanes, which migrated several times and w ­ ere nearly destroyed during the Spanish Civil War, are bound into volumes with white leather covers that may represent ­either Caresmar’s efforts or ­those of his de facto literary executors. But as the list of Caresmar’s works in the three appendices to this study shows, ­these are only a fraction of Caresmar’s dispersed and hard-­to-­reconstruct legacy. Caresmar had a quixotic personality. Although identified with Bellpuig, he spent his ­later years in Barcelona, describing himself as unfit for life in a religious community by reason of his intellect and sensitivity. The survival of his own prolific output, like that of the ­Middle Ages itself, is contingent, partial, and accidental. Caresmar left well over a hundred books, articles, and collections of miscellaneous historical material, although what counts as a “work,” as opposed to mere notes, is not always easy to determine. The fate of Caresmar’s copious but confused writings exemplifies what has been lost in the po­liti­cal vicissitudes that followed his demise, vicissitudes hardly confined to the Iberian Peninsula. All of Eu­rope has experienced a loss of medieval documentation ­because of warfare, the smashing of supposedly idolatrous sacred art, sculpture, and stained glass, or ­simple carelessness. Religious wars and conflicts caused a considerable part of this destruction. ­England was spared foreign invasion, but the confiscation of monasteries by King Henry VIII in 1539 and the iconoclastic Puritans during the Civil War and Commonwealth of the seventeenth ­century resulted in the loss and scattering of books and archival documents. ­There are 295 surviving manuscripts from Saint Augustine’s monastery in Canterbury, out of at least 2,000 existing at the time of the Dissolution. A thousand manuscripts from the abbey of Glastonbury ­were destroyed and just sixty can now be identified, dispersed in no less than thirty libraries.23 From the newly purified churches, religious art was taken out and broken or burned, and most of the figurative stained glass was replaced by plain win­dows.24 teenth ­Century” at the XX Colloquium of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine, held in New Haven, Connecticut, in September 2017. 23. ​Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 51–54. 24. ​Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in E­ ngland, 1400–1580, 2nd  ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

18 I NT R OD U CT I ON

Germany was wrecked by the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which created in its wake im­mense cultural transfers. ­After the Catholic League seized Heidelberg in 1622, the Duke of Bavaria sent the library of the Protestant count of the Palatinate in Heidelberg to the Vatican. The duke, now appointed Elector Palatine to replace the deposed Protestant prince, sent 5,000 printed books and 3,500 manuscripts “as booty and in demonstration of my most obedient and due affection.”25 Pope Alexander VIII in 1689 bought the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden a­ fter her death, and the Vatican Library was enriched by t­hese books and manuscripts, many taken from Bohemian and German cities plundered by Swedish troops in the Thirty Years’ War. And this purchase was fortunate b­ ecause the royal palace in Stockholm, where the queen’s library had been located, burned in 1697. Compared with ­these catastrophes, Catholic Spain enjoyed immunity from disasters and disorders affecting its ecclesiastical patrimony. That would change beginning in 1808 when Napoleon invaded.

25. ​Ovenden, Burning the Books, 172–73.

C h a p te r   1

Jaume Caresmar’s Life and Personality

Twenty-­four kilo­meters north of the town of Balaguer, the former collegiate chapter of Bellpuig de les Avellanes sits in an oasis of trees and vineyards surrounded by a hilly and deserted landscape. ­Today t­ here is a remnant of an adjoining village of Avellanes whose inhabitants frequently quarreled with the canons, especially over the perennial prob­ lem of ­water rights.1 The nearest substantial agglomeration is Vilanova de la Sal (population 105), where the rec­ords ­were secreted in 1835. Jaume Pasqual, an associate of Caresmar’s, described Bellpuig as “one of the most solitary” of monasteries, commanding a view of a valley that is peaceful, empty, to be sure (desierto si), but “delicious and joyful.”2 This was not the original site established by followers of an ascetic leader named Joan of Organyà in 1166. As the result of a gift of land from Count Ermengol VII of Urgell (r. 1153–1184), they initially congregated at what is now known as Bellpuig el Vell (Old Bellpuig) on Mount Malet, a dramatic but impractical location with insufficient w ­ ater. Shortly thereafter another donor, Guillem d’Anglesola, founded what was at first a separate pious community 1. ​Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, La escuela histórica avellanense, 2nd  ed. (Lleida: Instituto de Estudios Ilerdenses, 1971), 49–50. 2. ​BC, MS 729, Jaume Pasqual, “Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta,” vol. 5, f. 89r, transcribed in Jaime Oliver, “Biografia de Jaume Caresmar y Alemany, 1717–1791,” El Ateneo, Revista Mensual del Ateneo Igualadina de la clase obrera 11, no. 114 ( January 1895): 3. 19

20 Chap t e r  1

Map 2.  The comarca of La Noguera. Created by Jordi Bolòs i Masclans.

at Avellanes (avellanes are hazelnuts), a village with a sustainable w ­ ater supply situated close to Mount Malet. The two Premonstratensian foundations merged, expanding the second and more favorable site. By 1195 the community was referred to as Bellpuig de les Avellanes. The road to the north leaves Balaguer and rises to above five hundred meters by the time it arrives at Bellpuig. Another fourteen kilo­meters northward is Àger, the site of what was once another chapter of canons, considerably richer in the M ­ iddle Ages than Bellpuig. Its buildings are now in a ruinous condition, victimized by the Carlist Wars and disamortization. Documents from Àger’s archive have survived the disruptions, although they are now divided among three principal and four subordinate archives. Between 1766 and 1768, Caresmar arranged and copied more than twenty-­five hundred Àger rec­ords. Traveling from Balaguer to Àger, one passes cultivated fields (mostly wheat) and livestock, but the territory seems deserted and t­ here are few vehicles on the road. Although it has fewer than seven hundred permanent residents, Àger is fairly lively. It is a destination for skydivers b­ ecause of its proximity to the appropriately named Montsec (dry mountains), a spur of the Pyrenees that juts up abruptly to the north. In 2010, the Catalan government established an



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

21

“astronomical park” with a small observatory, taking advantage of the purity of the air and lack of light pollution. The few inhabited places, including the monastery of Bellpuig, adhere to regulations limiting night illumination. Jaume Caresmar entered Bellpuig in 1742 at the age of twenty-­five, and a­ fter mandatory probationary periods as postulant and novice, he received his permanent vocation in November 1743. He was born in 1717 to modestly prosperous parents. His ­father, Ramon, was a shoemaker who in 1716 married Rosa Alemany.3 The name “Caresmar” is not typically Catalan, and the ­family (their original name was perhaps Karesman) emigrated from Germany during the seventeenth ­century. His grand­father seems to have been a mercenary soldier who served first in Puigcerdà on the (newly drawn) Pyrenean border with France and l­ater in the central Catalan town of Igualada, where Jaume was born.4 ­Little can be reconstructed regarding Jaume’s early life. His f­ ather died in 1726, and with his ­mother and paternal grand­father he moved to San Andreu de la Barca, west of Barcelona. He was educated by the Jesuits of the prestigious Col·legi de Cordelles in Barcelona, receiving a doctorate in theology and philosophy. While higher degrees ­were uncommon among regular clerics in the eigh­teenth ­century, the community at Bellpuig was one of unusual intellectual distinction. Caresmar was absent from Bellpuig during much of his nearly fifty-­year ser­ vice. He spent his time traveling throughout Catalonia to explore, or­ga­nize, and transcribe archival material, visiting Sant Cugat del Vallès (1761), Gerri (1763), and Àger (1768). He also worked at Poblet, Sant Joan de les Abadesses, Montserrat, Lavaix, and Sant Miquel de Cuixà—­the last of ­these in what was by this time France. He spent time in Paris in 1785 in order to research a history of the Premonstratensians.5 Caresmar’s journeys and furious pace of work ­were undertaken despite chronic poor health. From 1772, a­ fter completion of his second term as abbot (1766–1769), ­until his death, Caresmar lived in Barcelona.6 In 1777, he turned down the king’s designation making him abbot for a third term, and with some difficulty he was able to persuade the royal court and his fellow canons to sanction his refusal.7 3. ​Jaime Oliver, “Biografia de Jaume Caresmar y Alemany,” El Ateneo 10, nos. 102 and 103 (1894): 971. 4. ​Ernest Lluch, La Catalunya vençuda del segle XVIII: Foscors i clarors de la Il·lustració (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1996), 208n; Ernest Lluch, “La construcció de la imatge de Catalunya a la Il·lustració: L’aportació de l’escola de les Avellanes,” in Creences i ètnies en una societat plural, ed. Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré (Lleida: Pagès, 2002), 154. 5. ​Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez, “Sepulcres, altars i relíquies. Els canonges il·lustrats de Bellpuig de les Avellanes i la recerca històrica,” in De Bellpuig a Bellpuig: Els Premonstratesos de les Avellanes a Artà (Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2019), 159. 6. ​Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, “Caresmar y Barcelona,” Analecta Sacra Taraconnensia 37 (1964): 111–27. 7. ​Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 65.

22 Chap t e r  1

One of the few ­things we know about Jaume before his entrance into religious life is that he visited the g­ rand monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallès, just northwest of Barcelona. Founded in the late ninth ­century, the monastery is one of the oldest Benedictine h ­ ouses in Catalonia. Accompanying him was Josep de Pons, vicar-­general of the diocese of Vic, who was something of a mentor. The monastery made an impression on Caresmar as he recalled at forty years’ distance in the Carta al Barón de la Linde (Letter to the Baron de la Linde). As the Carta was written in 1780, the visit to Sant Cugat must have taken place in 1740, when he was twenty-­three, two years before he became a canon.8 Although it had been seriously damaged during the War of the Spanish Succession (which had just ended when Caresmar was born), Sant Cugat retained an amazingly rich archive, including a massive cartulary with approximately fourteen hundred copies of documents from before the mid-­thirteenth ­century.9 As with almost all monasteries, the library and archive of Sant Cugat would be broken up ­after 1835, most of its thousands of single-­sheet parchments g­ oing to the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, although hundreds ended up at the abbey of Montserrat. Bellpuig de les Avellanes, founded in the late twelfth c­ entury, was not a traditional monastery of the Benedictine or Cistercian type but a ­house of Premonstratensian canons following a communal rule yet allowing a degree of autonomy to its members. Canons w ­ ere clerics, although not necessarily priests, and their way of life resembled that of monks sufficiently so that it is acceptable, if imprecise, to refer to foundations such as Bellpuig as monasteries.10 The vari­ous rules for canons, traced back to a set of practices elaborated by Saint Augustine in the early fifth ­century, emphasized austerity, poverty, and at times preaching. Their common ele­ment was to revive what was considered the vita apostolica, to imitate the way of life of the apostles described in the New Testament “Acts of the Apostles.” Rather than seeking a stable, isolated distance from the world in the manner of a traditional monastery, the Augustinian canons engaged with the lay world, often situating their communities in towns and preaching to lay audiences. Among the earliest texts in the Catalan vernacular is a group of six sermons known as the Homilies of Organyà (Organyà is a village in the diocese of Urgell not far from Bellpuig). Com8. ​Joan Mercader, Historiadors i erudits a Catalunya i a València en el segle XVII XVIII: Caresmar i l’escola de les Avellanes; Mayans, el solitari d’Oliva (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1966), 6–7. 9. ​ Cartulario de “Sant Cugat” del Vallès, ed. José Rius Serra, 3 vols. (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigciones Científicas, 1945–1947). 10. ​King Charles II designated Bellpuig as a “monasterio real” around 1682. Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, Páginas de historia catalana: Santa María de Bellpuig de les Avellanes (Barcelona: Institut de Germans Maristes Catalunya, n.d.), 162.



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

23

posed around 1200, likely in Organyà itself, the sermons w ­ ere prob­ably addressed to the Augustinian community ­there but w ­ ere also intended to reach a lay public, reflecting what would now be considered an “outreach mission” typical of the apostolic life.11 The Premonstratensians ­were a version of the Augustinian Order established by Saint Norbert of Xanten along with a few companions in 1120 in the forest of Prémontré (hence “Premonstratensian”) west of Laon. I ­will describe the founding of the Premonstratensians canonry of Bellpuig and the spread of the Augustinian movement in Iberia ­later (chapter 4). For Caresmar, Bellpuig’s distinction was its intellectual atmosphere. During the eigh­teenth c­ entury, a time of stagnation for many of the venerable monastic communities founded in the ­Middle Ages, Bellpuig had a flourishing community. Notwithstanding the impressive title “royal monastery,” conferred in about 1682, it was never an especially rich or prominent institution, but while the memberships of other rural monasteries declined from the fifteenth to the eigh­teenth ­century, Bellpuig maintained itself. Without crediting notions of ethnic purity or exaggerating cultural preservation, one can say that the fact that the Bellpuig canons ­were almost entirely from Catalonia gave it a certain cohesion. Caresmar was attracted to this par­tic­u­lar ecclesiastical foundation by the reputation of the canon and former abbot Daniel Finestres (1702–1744), a poet, lexicographer, and historian. Finestres was the youn­gest of twelve siblings, many of them distinguished for their religious and erudite callings. The oldest, Josep Finestres (1688–1777), a leading intellectual of eighteenth-­century Spain, was a professor of civil and canon law at the University of Cervera and a scholar of the classics.12 Jaume Finestres (1695–1769) was a monk at Poblet and the author of a five-­volume history of that monastery.13 Pere Joan (1691–1769), who taught canon law at Cervera and served as a canon of the cathedral of Lleida, was the author of an unpublished history of the church and city of Lleida and an episcopology. Ignasi (1702–­?) was a member of the Hieronymite community at the 11. ​On the editions of the Homilies and the theories about their origins and context, see Josep Moran i Ocerinjauregui, “Homilies d’Organyà. Edicions i estudis nous,” in Estudis d’història de la llengua catalana (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2004), 73–108. Joaquim Miret i Sans discovered the homilies at Organyà in 1904, and so they ­were unknown to Caresmar. 12. ​On the life of Josep Finestres, see Luciano Gallisá y Costa, De vita et scriptis Iosephi Finestres et a Monsalvo, iurisconsultus Barcinonensis in Cervariensi Academia iuris civilis primarii antecessores emeriti commentariorum libri IIII (Cervera: S. Bou et Baranera, 1802); Ignasi Casanovas, Josep Finestres: Estudis biogràfics (Barcelona: Balmes, 1931). On his interests, particularly with regard to Latin and classical culture, see Josep Closa i Farrés, “La tradició europea en la lectura dels clàssics dins la Universitat de Cervera,” in Miscel·ània d’homenatge a Enric Moreu-­Rey, ed. Albert Manent and Joan Veny, vol. 2 (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1988), 53–71. 13. ​Jaime Finestres, Historia del Real Monasterio de Poblet, 5 vols. (Cervera: Joseph Barber, 1753– 1755; reprinted with a sixth update volume, Barcelona: Orbis, 1947–1955).

24 Chap t e r  1

Vall d’Hebron (within the modern city of Barcelona), where he was librarian and archivist.14 Caresmar completed his novitiate just a few months before Daniel Finestres’s untimely death from tuberculosis. Finestres had promoted the expansion of theological and philosophical learning and revived intellectual and communal life at Bellpuig. The cache of books and documents rediscovered at Vilanova de la Sal in 2002 included notes by Daniel Finestres for a history of Bellpuig along with other jottings concerning liturgy, lists of bishops and abbots, and church history. Finestres had collected sources that could serve as the basis for an account of the monastery and its priories, but during his short life no synthetic work emerged from this effort. In a letter written in 1765, Caresmar recalled that when he arrived, the Bellpuig parchments ­were in chaotic disorder and that no one knew how to read medieval writing. This implies a rather jaundiced evaluation of Finestres’s skills that is neither generous nor accurate.15 Daniel Finestres fits a common profile of an eighteenth-­century litterateur familiar with ancient Latin and Greek culture and possessing many other interests. In 1764, his ­brother, the now el­derly professor Josep Finestres, wrote to another distinguished scholar that he had obtained a favorable impression upon meeting Caresmar, who, in spite of his delicate health, was extremely hardworking. While Caresmar’s Latin was neither flawless nor elegant, it did not reflect discredit on the “Ciceronian ­Fathers,” meaning the Jesuits of Cordel·les in Barcelona, who had schooled him.16 Caresmar was less physically and mentally comfortable in the world than the renowned sage of Cervera. His ailments led him to take the medicinal ­waters at Sant Hilari de Sacalm more than once. At times he complained about the climate of both Barcelona and Bellpuig, and it is unclear which he considered worse for his tubercular tendency aggravated by overwork.17 ­Whether in sickness or in relatively good health, Caresmar was impatient and irascible, focused as he was on history, archives, historical documents, and above all preserving the rec­ords of the past by transcribing them. His enthusiastic modern biographer, ­Father Eduard Corredera, admits that Caresmar was gloomy and crabbed (hosco), as is often the case with scholars, Corredera adds, isolated as they are among books, papers, and parchments.18 14. ​Francisco Castellón, “El canonge Finestres, primer historiador de Lleida,” in Arrels cristianes: Presència i significació del cristianisme en la història i la societat de Lleida (Lleida: Pagès, 2007), 249–52. 15. ​Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 44. 16. ​Mercader, Historiadors i erudits, 18; Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, Història de la literatura catalana, vol. 3 (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1986), 89. 17. ​Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 55, 63. 18. ​Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 80–81. The healing w ­ aters of Sant Hilari ­were famous, and the third part of the Discurso sobre l’agricultura, comercio y industria de Cataluña in 1780 (for



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

25

Like many ­people who live alone in a large city (as he did during his last two de­cades), Caresmar disliked being both­ered by neighbors or colleagues but at the same time valued the animated comings and ­goings of the urban atmosphere. In his Latin history of Bellpuig (composed in the 1770s), he digresses into an uncharacteristically personal tirade about how awful small communities are. For a contemplative man it is better to ­either be a hermit, he claims, or live in a city. What is intolerable is to be confined to a village, compelled to deal with uncultivated members of the lower and m ­ iddle classes.19 This observation appears in the context of remarking on the solitude of Bellpuig and his gratitude for the fact that the places the abbot Pere had repopulated in the late thirteenth c­ entury ­were now uninhabited.20 In Barcelona, Caresmar chose to dwell not, as would have been expected, in proximity to other clergy or in a residence owned by the church but rather in rooms rented from a merchant in one of the commercial districts, surrounded by activity but immured during long days spent in ecclesiastical archives. Conscientious on behalf of his monastery, at least in the first de­cades of his affiliation, Caresmar appreciated its peaceful setting but chafed at its insularity and the tedium of corporate devotion. He was dutiful enough to accept a share of administrative l­abor, and he was sufficiently esteemed by the community that he was elected to three terms as abbot: 1754–1757, 1766–1769, and 1777 (declining this last one). He was entrusted with other missions, especially ­those involving the defense of the monastery’s rights over land, revenues, and w ­ ater. In late 1759, he was in Barcelona to deal with l­egal suits over the Mallola spring, a vital source of w ­ ater located a few miles north of the monastery. Local farmers had diverted its ­water to their fields, taking advantage of the upheavals provoked by the War of the Spanish Succession when the canons had abandoned Bellpuig. Caresmar was able to marshal evidence ­going back to a donation made in 1210 granting the chapter the right to use the ­water as it wished. During this stay in Barcelona, Caresmar resided with an unidentified relative and used his time to look at archival documents relevant which Caresmar contributed the second part) devotes a section to Sant Hilari and its springs. Lluch, La Catalunya vençuda, 213. 19. ​BC, MS 9339, ff. 273v–74r; and BPA, Fons antic, Caixa 17, Llibre 36, pp. 675–76, Jaume Caresmar, “De rebus ecclesiase sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum” (appendix 1, nos. 23, 37): “Audeo proferre: viris cenobitis nulla pestis magis noxia quam propinquitas, seu commoratio oppidulorum, vel etiam urbecularum . . . ​Unde viris asceticis melius consultam censeo aut in abdita solitudine latere, aut in urbibus magnis commorari.” The passage appears on page 234 in the translation by Eduardo Corredera. Jaume Caresmar, Historia de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de las Avellanas. En el 360 [sic] aniversario del de Jaime Caresmar (Balaguer: Romeu, 1977) (appendix 1, no. 17). 20. ​Lluch, “La construcció de la imatge,” 155; Lluch, La Catalunya vençuda, 208n.

26 Chap t e r  1

to his historical interests as well as attending to the lawsuit, which was ultimately resolved in Bellpuig’s f­ avor.21 Caresmar’s ability to continue his investigations while in ser­vice to the community is especially evident during his second abbatial term. He learned of his election while working in the summer of 1766 to order and copy documents from the archive at Àger. Caresmar managed to persuade the archpriest of Àger as well as the Real Cámara of Castile, a royal advisory council and sponsor of his proj­ect, to allow him to have the archival materials transported from Àger to the relative comfort of Bellpuig, where he devoted the next two years si­mul­ta­neously to administration and finishing the transcriptions.22 By the time he declined a third term in 1777, he had definitively moved to Barcelona and his intellectual pursuits outweighed the putative obligation of communal tasks. Reflecting on his motivations, Caresmar said that he felt within a burning fire when he saw previously unremarked archival documents, experiencing a passionate desire to copy them.23 This inner illumination (or conflagration) resulted in constant activity that was not generally characteristic of the life of ancien régime canons: frequent travel, the copying of tens of thousands of parchments, and altercations with other scholars and clerics. Caresmar was restless yet capable of heroic feats of concentration. This self-­described mania for transcribing was part of an overall desire to compile notes and or­ga­nize the bewildering mass of Catalonia’s ecclesiastical documentation. In this Caresmar pursued what was a common method of gathering and ordering information. The compilatory impulse was particularly characteristic of ecclesiastical history in the early modern period. Taking notes was not just a temporary expedient to facilitate synthetic writing (to be discarded once the book or article was finished) but rather a permanent tool and research product that might be shared with ­others or repurposed. The manner in which scholars of this era, the golden age of note taking, kept track of research information has been the subject of revelatory studies.24 As ­will be 21. ​Corredera, La escuela historica avellanense, 51–52; Alberto Velasco and Joan Yeguas Gassó, “Intel·lectualitat i encàrrecs artístics al segle XVIII: Els erudits de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes,” Urtx 25 (2011): 44–45. 22. ​Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 61–62. 23. ​Lluch, “La construcció de la imatge,” 154. 24. ​For example, Anthony Grafton, “Church History in Early Modern Eu­rope: Tradition and Innovation,” in Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Re­nais­sance World, ed. Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–26; Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), especially 62–116; Anke te Heesen, “The Notebook: A Paper Technology,” in Making ­Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 582–89.



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

27

demonstrated in further and perhaps fatiguing detail, Caresmar combined extraordinary productivity with a tendency to leave work unfinished or to change his mind about priorities and proj­ects. With the discovery of the hidden documents, we are in a position to appreciate the fruits of Caresmar’s early efforts to cata­log and copy the Bellpuig archive. He seems to have immediately taken over the Augean task of organ­ izing its contents. Compilation of the five-­volume cartulary began in 1746 and was completed in 1753, which is relatively quick considering how much material had to be found, ordered, and copied. The work comprises over two thousand folios (four thousand pages). Among the many and ­bitter ironies of Caresmar’s legacy is that one of his most ambitious and successful works was forgotten u ­ ntil 2002. The cartulary was a team effort, something Caresmar would not duplicate subsequently. He had four canons to help him with the transcription, but for most of his ­career, Caresmar preferred to work alone. True, he contributed to proj­ects launched by o ­ thers, such as España Sagrada, the diocese-­by-­diocese series of histories and documents of medieval Spain undertaken by Henrique Flórez (Caresmar was particularly involved in volumes 28 and 29, dealing with Vic and Barcelona, respectively), or the French government’s efforts to collect documentation from Roussillon and other northern-­Pyrenean regions of Catalonia that had belonged to the Catalan principality u ­ ntil 1659. However, Caresmar seldom directly collaborated as opposed to engaging in what was essentially contract work. Caresmar was not without friends among his contemporaries. In what seem to have been his happiest years, the first de­cade or so of living in Barcelona, he was part of an informal salon (tertulia) encouraged by the cultivated bishop of Barcelona, Josep Climent, whose episcopacy lasted from 1766 to 1775. The members of this circle ­were interested in the Enlightenment agenda of improving the economy and living standards of the country, the traditional subjects of theology and history, and the study of the Catalan and Castilian languages.25 The ideals of the Catholic Church, according to the outlook of this circle, ­were compatible with reform, secular pro­g ress, and the application of reason and science to the material world.26 25. ​Ramon Corts i Blay, L’arquebisbe Fèlix Amat (1750–1824) i l’última Il·lustració espanyola (Barcelona: Facultat de Teologia de Catalunya, 1992), 343–50. 26. ​Miquel Batllori was a prominent defender of the notion of a Catholic enlightenment in Catalonia. See La Il·lustració, vol. 9 of his Obra completa (Valencia: Tres i Quatre, 1997). His approach was ridiculed by Josep Fontana in La fi de l’Antic Règim i la industrialització (1787–1868), vol. 5 in Història de Catalunya, edited by Pierre Vilar (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1988), 92–122. Mireia Campabadal i Bertran discusses the applicability of the term “enlightenment” to the Catalan intellectual world in La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona en el segle XVIII: L’interèes per la historia, la llengua i la literatura

28 Chap t e r  1

Caresmar also corresponded with scholars outside Barcelona. He frequently exchanged letters with Pere Trelles, abbot of the ancient Benedictine foundation of Camprodon, who had once been a canon at Bellpuig. Manuel Abad Illana was a Premonstratensian in Castile who shared Caresmar’s interests in the history of their order. They maintained a correspondence even with Illana’s appointment as a bishop in Amer­i­ca, first at Tucumán in Argentina and ­later at Arequipa in Peru. Another contact was Jaume Campins, a well-­off merchant in Cádiz, introduced by Illana to Caresmar, who described Campins as “a good Christian, although a man of business,” devout enough to have installed a private chapel in his ­house. Although Campins planned to make the journey to Catalonia, the two never managed to meet. Caresmar confided in Campins, sending him copies of his works on Bellpuig, and they enjoyed a warm friendship despite (or perhaps aided by) the impossibility of achieving an ­actual meeting.27 The connection to Barcelona was reinforced by membership in its principal learned society. On March 23, 1750, Caresmar was elected to what in 1752 become the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona (Royal Acad­emy of Belles-­Lettres of Barcelona).28 Along with the circle of Bellpuig historians and the University of Cervera, the Barcelona Acad­emy was a center of attempts to revive and expand knowledge of Catalan history. Caresmar was actively engaged with the acad­emy, presenting at least fourteen talks on dif­ fer­ent antiquarian subjects to his colleagues (see appendix 3). His experience with the Barcelona Acad­emy shows some of the petty as well as the serious conflicts Caresmar attracted. A hint of difficulties to come occurred in the autumn of 1752. Caresmar is first mentioned in the acad­emy’s minutes in connection with something beyond merely being pre­sent when, in accord with regulations requiring members to submit their prospective publications for approval if they wanted to identify themselves as academicians, Caresmar presented a sermon and another academic fellow, F ­ ather Agustí 29 Riera, pointed out some necessary modifications. Perhaps it was the sermon catalanes (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona and Abadia de Montserrat, 2006), 337–44. See also Javier Antón Pelayo, “The Enlightenment in Catalonia,” Catalan Historical Review 6 (2013): 61–71; Francesc Torralba Rosselló, “La Il·lustració a Cataluna,” Afers: fulls de recerca i pensament 13, no. 29 (1998), 287–96; Santiago Riera i Tuèbols, Una visió de la il·lustració catalana (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2003). 27. ​Corredera, La escuela histórica avallanense, 81–85. 28. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 27–78. 29. ​Joaquim Miret i Sans, “Dos siglos de vida académica,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 9 (1917–1920): 29 (the nature of Riera’s suggestions is not recorded). In the acad­ emy minutes that Miret i Sans edited, Caresmar’s election is not noted, but Campabadal (La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 387) lists it as taking place on the same day as that of Rafael de Cascante, March 23, 1750, accompanying the Academia de la Pasión, a solemn annual observance held in honor



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

29

on Isaiah 53:8 (King James version), “Who s­ hall declare his generation,” contained in one of Caresmar’s manuscripts at Bellpuig de les Avellanes (appendix 1, no. 22b). What­ever its subject, this sermon was never published. The three extant printed sermons by Caresmar date from ­earlier, 1749–1750 (appendix 1, nos. 1–3). He had preached in Barcelona on the Immaculate Conception in 1750 and another discourse on Saint Tecla (whose date is unknown). In 1774, he told Jaume Campins that both sermons w ­ ere ready for publica30 tion, but neither ever appeared in print. On July 3, 1765, the acad­emy rebuked Caresmar ­because in a book defending the authenticity of Saint Severus, a martyr to Roman persecution and considered the first bishop of Barcelona, he had named himself as an academic without having sought prior approval. An investigative committee was appointed.31 The result of the inquiry is unknown, but if ­there was a penalty, it could not have been serious, b­ ecause Caresmar continued his involvement in the acad­emy’s plans and proceedings. The defense of Severus may have been intended to please the bishop and chapter of Barcelona. At any rate, they accorded him entry into the capitular archive in 1770, six years ­after the book’s publication.32 Caresmar’s defense of the sanctity of Severus took issue with the opinion of another scholar, Gregori Maians (1699–1781, Castilian, Gregorio Mayans), an internationally renowned humanist from Valencia, who in 1742 had hypothesized that the supposed first bishop of Barcelona had never existed but rather was confused with an au­then­tic bishop of Ravenna.33 Although Maians is better known, he and Caresmar bear certain similarities: massive erudition, prolific writing (Maians’s published collected letters occupy twenty-­five thick volumes),34 and a critical approach to historical sources. They of Eastertide. The sermon is mentioned in the Actas for September 6 and October 4, 1752. Miret i Sans, “Dos siglos de vida académica,” 25. On the pro­cess of obtaining permission to publish, see Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 102–5. 30. ​Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 47. 31. ​Miret i Sans, “Dos siglos de vida academica,” 99. 32. ​Ramon Grau i Fernàndez, “Les batalles de la historiografia crítica,” in Historia de la cultura catalana, ed. Pere Gabriel, vol. 3 (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1996), 176; Javier Antón Pelayo, “La historiografía catalana del siglo XVIII: Luces y sombras de un proyecto ilustrado y nacional,” Revista de historia moderna 18 (2000): 305. 33. ​Maians’s critique had appeared in a biography of the sixteenth-­century man of letters, Nicolás Antonio, introducing an edition of the latter’s Censura de historias fabulosas. See Gregorio de Mayans, “Vida de Nicolás Antonio,” in Nicolás Antonio, Censura de historias fabulosas (Valencia: A. Bordazàr de Artàzu, 1742), xxiii. Caresmar’s defense of the authenticity of Barcelona’s first bishop was Sanctus Severus Episcopus et martyr sedi et civitati barcinonensi noviter assertus ac vindicatus (Vic: Petrus Morera, 1764) (appendix 1, no. 5). 34. ​Gregori Maians, Epistolario de Gregorio Mayans i Siscar: Transcripción, notas y estudio, 25 vols. (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Oliva, 1972–2011).

30 Chap t e r  1

both abandoned positions of administrative responsibility, although this was more dramatic in Maians’s case as he resigned the prominent post of royal librarian in Madrid in 1739 to reside in the small town of Oliva, along the coast between Valencia and Alicante. He was sufficiently remote from the g­ reat world to have been dubbed “el solitario de Oliva.” Of Caresmar it can be said, as the modern scholar Antonio Mestre remarked about Maians, that his defeats and frustrations ­were caused in part by personal flaws, unavoidable circumstances, and fi­nally, especially in Caresmar’s case, the acts and attitudes of po­liti­ cal and ecclesiastical authorities.35 Despite Maians’s failure to accomplish all of his intellectual proj­ects, he was more successful than Caresmar in getting his work published and enjoyed a greater intellectual prominence, his solitude notwithstanding. Maians had active correspondence with Eu­ro­pean intellectuals, including savants from Germany, the Low Countries, ­England, and even Voltaire. Maians also has enjoyed better fortune posthumously in that much more has been written about him than Caresmar.36 Their intellectual emphases differed. Primarily a classicist and jurist, Maians was also a historian of the Castilian language and lit­er­a­ture and the renowned author of a biography of Cervantes. Maians had l­ittle concern for Catalan or anything connected to the history of Catalonia or Valencia. Caresmar sent him a copy of his defense of Severus as a courtesy, to which Maians could not be both­ered to respond ­because, he said, he was too busy.37 ­Later Maians expressed guarded re­spect for Caresmar, and in one of his many letters to Josep de Vega i Sentmenat, who was friends with both, Maians thanks him for sending a manuscript of Caresmar’s disquisition on the See of Tarragona’s claims to primacy over the Spanish church, hoping that it might soon be published.38 In fact, it would not appear ­until 1924, one of the victims of intrigues in Madrid that obstructed the printing of many of Caresmar’s finished works (see appendix 1, no. 14).

35. ​Antonio Mestre Sanchis, Mayans: Proyectos y frustraciones (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Oliva, 2003), 9. 36. ​Antonio Mestre Sanchis is the principal modern scholar for Maians. He has several collections of articles: Influjo europeo y herencia hispánica: Mayans y la ilustración valenciana (Valencia: Diputación de Valencia, 1987); Don Gregorio Mayans y Siscar entre la erudición y la política (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1999); Mayans: Proyectos y frustraciones. See also Mestre Sanchis, Historia, fueros y actitudes políticas: Mayans y la historiografía del XVIII (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Oliva, 1970); and the papers from a conference, Actas del Congreso Internacional sobre Gregorio Mayans: Valencia-­Oliva, 6 al 8 de mayo de 1999 (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 1999). 37. ​Maians, Epistolario, 16:244 (May 9, 1763). Caresmar was pleased about taking on “el célebre valenciano Mayans.” Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 53. 38. ​Maians, Epistolario, 17:435 ( July 29, 1783).



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

31

The dispute with Maians, like the unauthorized publication of the short work on Saint Severus, does not appear to have damaged Caresmar’s standing within the Real Academia. In 1776 and 1780, he was appointed to a committee charged with checking materials for a projected history of Catalonia, and he would also read nine papers before the acad­emy following the incident.39 The exchange over Saint Severus was not, however, the most serious of Caresmar’s scholarly controversies. A sharper confrontation began in the late 1770s. This amounted to the inverse of the Saint Severus affair, with Caresmar now rejecting rather than defending the authenticity of miracles popularly attributed to Barcelona’s patroness Saint Eulalia, another Roman martyr. According to hagiographic tradition, during the Diocletianic persecutions at the opening of the fourth ­century, Eulalia (at the age of thirteen) defied the Roman governor of Barcelona. She was publicly whipped and tortured but refused to recant her Christian beliefs. It is said that at the moment of her death, a dove flew out of her mouth and then snow fell to cover her naked corpse. Caresmar found that ten of the miracles supposed to have occurred just ­after the death of Saint Eulalia had no basis in Roman-­era tradition but rather ­were l­ ater pious inventions. The miracles in question affected plans to change the liturgical commemorations in honor of the patroness, ceremonies that included the enumeration of her miracles. Caresmar’s reservations about the cult got him into trou­ble with the Barcelona cathedral canons and earned him notoriety among the urban common ­people who denounced what they considered his impious, even blasphemous, attack on the protector of the city. Caresmar appears to have been victimized by his trust that his research into the miracles, intended for the eyes of Bishop Gavino de Valladares alone, would not find its way to the cathedral chapter or beyond, to the public. His confidential report came into the hands of a Dominican scholar, Domènec Ignasi Bòria de Llinars, also a member of the Barcelona Acad­emy, who then wrote a vitriolic attack on Caresmar.40 This denunciation received permission for publication from the acad­emy at a session on January 13, 1779, attended by Caresmar—­a terrible humiliation, one imagines.41 Caresmar defended his opinion in 1782 with a treatise written ­under the fictitious name of Agustín Sala, and this, in turn, was met by a rebuttal published in 1786 in which Bòria, although titling his opus a refutation of Sala, 39. ​Miret i Sans, “Dos siglos de vida academica, 99, 103–6. 40. ​Domingo Ignacio Boria y de Llinás, Nuestra paysana, patrona y tutular Eulalia, vindicada en la mejor porción de las glorias de su pasión y triunfo (Barcelona: Bernardo Pla, 1779). 41. ​Miret i Sans, “Dos siglos de vida academica,” 109–10.

32 Chap t e r  1

refers to his opponent on almost ­every page of the 250-­page text ­under the thinly disguised initials of “P. C.” (Padre Caresmar).42 The bishop of Barcelona disciplined Bòria, depriving him of the right to preach and hear confessions, but now Caresmar was victimized by the populace of the city, urged on by his intemperate clerical opponent. He was mocked in scurrilous verses and p­ eople threw stones at him in the street.43 The canons of Barcelona set up a commission to look into his writings, and in 1789, ­after almost two de­cades spent working on the cathedral’s medieval rec­ords, Caresmar was barred from that archive; according to the commission, Caresmar was exiled b­ ecause his transcriptions (by this time he had made about fourteen thousand of them) w ­ ere unreadable.44 In extensive reports on Catalan ecclesiastical archives and libraries carried out early in the nineteenth c­ entury, Jaime de Villanueva denounced the ingratitude of the Barcelona canons and their ill treatment of Caresmar. Admitting that Caresmar’s handwriting was imperfect (referring to him as “the El Greco of diplomatists”), Villanueva nevertheless deemed unpardonable the lack of appreciation shown for Caresmar’s copies, which, a­ fter his expulsion and death, the chapter had not even seen fit to bind in codices but rather left as mere piles of papers.45 Exiled from the Barcelona cathedral archive, Caresmar was allowed by the bishop to work in the episcopal archive (what is now the diocesan as opposed to the cathedral archive, which is administered by the canons). Caresmar continued in that occupation ­until he died of a stroke in 1791.46

Caresmar as a Historian Modern historical scholarship attempts to use as much original data as pos­si­ ble to reconstruct the past. The most reliable information, it is assumed, comes from the rec­ords left ­behind by historical actors, not so much their memoirs, which are self-­serving, as documents written in response to the situations they 42. ​Agustín Sala [Jaume Caresmar], Censura sobre algunos hechos del Martirio de Santa Eulalia Barcelonesa [. . .] (Madrid: Joachín Ibarra, 1782); Domingo Ignacio Boria y de Llinás, Justa repulsa del argumento negativo y equivocaciones en que cimentaba la defensa de su censura que dio a luz el M. R. P. Mro. Fr. Agustín Sala [. . .] (Madrid: Hilario Sant Alonso, 1786). Sometimes Bòria spells out the initials “P. C.” as “P. Censor,” since Caresmar was acting in the role of censor in investigating the saint’s miracles. 43. ​Rubió i Balaguer, Història de la literatura catalana, 3:90–92. 44. ​Mercader, Historiadors i erudits, 27. 45. ​Jaime Villanueva, Viage literario a las Iglesias de España, vol. 12 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1850), 86–87. 46. ​Mercader, Historiadors i erudits, 27–28; José Sanabre, El Archivo Diocesano de Barcelona (Barcelona: Fidel Rodríguez, 1947), 20–22; Oliver, “Biografia de Jaume Caresmar y Alemany,” El Ateneo 10, nos. 106 and 107 (1894): 1003.



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

33

faced. The purpose of historical writing is not always solely informative or objective, however. For the Enlightenment particularly, but still ­today, history was composed to inspire, warn, or instruct. Like poetry, history was supposed to teach righ­teous conduct and thought, but to achieve its positive effects by true prose accounts of past deeds. The traditional Catalan history that dominated the medieval and early modern periods extolled the heroism and conquests of the Catalans. In par­tic­u­lar, four ­great medieval chronicles exalt thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­century military exploits: that of King Jaume I describes the seizure of Majorca and Valencia from the Muslims; Bernat Desclot writes about the Catalan defeat of the French Angevins in Sicily; Ramon Muntaner’s narrative concerns the takeover of Athens and other Byzantine territories by Catalan mercenaries; and King Pere III “the Ceremonious” offers his assessment of a devastating and inconclusive war with Castile. The Baroque historians of the seventeenth c­ entury continued the medieval orientation ­toward warfare, but with more piety and a more national emphasis. For historians such as Jeroni Pujades (1568–1635) and Esteve de Corbera (1563–1632), Catalans ­were exemplary and steadfast Christians. The first Iberian nation to profess the faith and equally precocious in expelling the Moors (as far back as Charlemagne), Catalonia was also distinguished by never having been contaminated by Protestantism.47 A combination of pride and grievance was manifest in a flood of widely diffused pamphlets and other short works published in the wake of the Revolt of the Catalans (1640–1652). The Catalans w ­ ere likened to the Trojans as victims of aggression; the mistreatment of Catalonia was also said to resemble the Castilian atrocities committed in the New World cata­loged by Bartolomé de las Casas. Catalans claimed as their defender the French king Louis XIII, nicknamed “the Just,” who was considered the heir of Charlemagne. A sign of the times is that many of ­these tracts meant to rouse the Catalans to insurrection ­were written in Castilian, in part to justify the Catalan revolt to t­hose outside the principality but also reflecting Castilian’s status as the language of written communication. Gaspar Sala’s Proclamación Católica (1641), a defense of Catalan liberties addressed to King Philip IV and the municipal councilors of Barcelona, was translated into French, Dutch, and Italian but never appeared in a Catalan edition.48 47. ​Xavier Baró i Queralt, “L’escriptura de la historia i l’identitat catalana de Jeroni Pujades (1568–1635) a Antoni de Capmany (1742–1813),” Biblio3W: Revista bibliogràfica de geografia y ciencias sociales 21, no. 1 (2016): 5–13, https://­revistes​.­ub​.­edu​/­index​.­php​/­b3w​/­article​/­view​/­26361​/­27807. 48. ​On seventeenth-­century historiography, see Escrits polítics del segle XVII, ed. Eva Serra, 2 vols. (Vic: Eumo, 1995); Antoni Simon and Jesús Villanueva, “El cercle erudit i històric barcelonès dels anys

34 Chap t e r  1

One can obtain a sense of Caresmar’s view of the utility and importance of his work from the preface to his last proj­ect, a transcription of rec­ords (dating back to the ninth ­century) in the Mensa Episcopal section of the Episcopal Archive of Barcelona. In the prologue, titled “Motivos de la obra” (Reasons for the work), Caresmar identifies four reasons for making transcriptions: to acquire an accurate knowledge of the contents of an archive in order to defend rights (in this case, t­ hose of the bishop of Barcelona); to benefit notaries and ­others who might need to obtain past rec­ords but cannot read or access the original documents; to preserve deteriorating antique and fragile rec­ords; and to ensure against deliberate or accidental destruction or loss.49 This emphasis on the original sources reflects the methodological belief that historical writing should be based on materials created during the period ­under study. Friedrich Hortleder (1579–1640), a professor at the University of Jena and a historian of the German Empire whose par­tic­u­lar focus was on the Reformation-­era wars, likened the purity of archival documents to that of a ­water spring, in contrast to second­hand, unexamined accounts in which the accretion of inaccurate information was like the stream picking up dirt and sand as it flows away from its source, thus losing its clarity. The archive was that source, the wellspring of truth.50 Rulers started keeping rec­ords long before this, of course, and w ­ ere well aware of the ­legal and financial importance of what they contained. Sometimes they even made historical inquiries, as in 1388 when King John I of Aragon-­Catalonia instructed a bailiff to search the royal archive for evidence that the servile peasants of his realm could no longer be considered unfree ­because their servitude had originally been imposed for a l­imited period of time that had now expired.51 During the eigh­teenth ­century, the notion that historians should rely on archives more than on legends and literary chronicles was gradually accepted. ­These repositories, often guarded by authorities uninterested in scholarship, vint i trenta dels Sis-­cents i la revolució catalana de 1640,” Revista de Catalunya 122 (1997): 40–53; Antoni Simon i Tarrés, “La historiografia del segle del Barroc (de Jeroni Pujades a Narcís Feliu),” in Història de la historiografia catalana, ed. Albert Balcells (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2004), 93–116. 49. ​ADB, Mensa Episcopal, Caresmar, vol. 1, f. 1r; presented in Sanabre, El Archivo Diocesano de Barcelona, 21–22. 50. ​Markus Friedrich, The Birth of the Archive: A History of Knowledge, trans. John Noël Dillon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 169–70. Michel-­Ralph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), shows how archival collections are affected by who makes and saves documents. 51. ​ACA, Cancel·leria, Registre 1955, ff. 105v–106r. See Paul Freedman, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 181. Nothing came of this since the notion was based on a legend of an original peasant sin of not resisting the Muslims, for which a centuries-­long, but finite, punishment had been imposed.



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

35

­ ere vital for reconstructing the events of the past. As another German scholar, w the church historian Philipp Julius Rehtmeyer (1678–1742), observed: “Someone who wanted to write a chronicle of Brunswick or some such work without archives and preserved documents would be just like someone who set out to work on a religious book without first diligently gathering readings from the Bible.”52 Once the archival rec­ords ­were located, they still had to be copied and interpreted. Caresmar was, of course, passionate about transcription. His internal fire provided the energy to register and transcribe archival rec­ords with endurance and speed, but he found it harder to put his thoughts together synthetically. Even in his most influential work, the Carta al Barón de la Linde, having stated his dramatic thesis—­that Catalonia had been richer and more populous in the past—­the rest amounts to proofs for his assertions in the form of lists resembling transcribed note cards. Caresmar’s writing style was more argumentative than lucid. As Ernest Lluch pointed out, one comes away from reading Caresmar with an impression of a man struggling between his ideas and how to express them.53 A passion for transcription combined with difficulty articulating concepts does not mean that Caresmar was a mere antiquarian, happily collecting information for o ­ thers to use in aid of more grandiose formulations. Caresmar interested himself in large proj­ects of modernization. As we s­ hall see, he undertook work for Antoni de Capmany, the g­ reat economic theorist of the Catalan Enlightenment, supplying data on Catalonia’s historical enterprises, population, and governance. But Caresmar had his own theories, which often contradicted ­those of Capmany, who (correctly) was optimistic about economic pro­g ress achieved during the eigh­teenth ­century, whereas Caresmar believed that Catalonia had enjoyed a higher standard of living in the Roman and medieval past. Caresmar may be considered an Enlightenment historian of the countryside, emphasizing (what­ever his opinion about living ­there) the rural under­ pinnings of Catalan wealth accumulation, whereas Capmany was entranced with the economic vitality of Barcelona.54 Both, however, agreed that the common p­ eople, the peasants, and urban menestrals (artisans, storekeepers, small-­ scale merchants) ­were underappreciated and the foundation not only of the Catalan economy but of its moral and historical cohesion. 52. ​Friedrich, Birth of the Archive, 167. 53. ​Ernest Lluch, El pensament econòmic a Catalunya (1760–1840): Els orígens ideològics del protectionisme i la presa de consciència de la burgesia catalana (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1973), 57. 54. ​Pierre Vilar, Procès històric i cultura catalana: Reflexions critiques sobre la cultura catalana (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1983), 20.

36 Chap t e r  1

Ecclesiastical History and the Evaluation of Sources Although best remembered ­because of the Carta, which states his opinions on Catalonia’s secular past, Caresmar was essentially a historian of the church. His publications, proj­ects, and transcriptions dealt with saints, ecclesiastical institutions, and church rec­ords. Investigating such topics goes beyond the pro­cess of merely accumulating parchments given that it separates genuine sources from legendary and forged accounts and requires techniques of analy­sis of authenticity pioneered in France beginning in the seventeenth ­century. Catalan history writing during that era was still dominated by a methodology appropriately likened to the Baroque style in art, relying not on original rec­ords but rather on chronicles, literary works, and stories mingling historical, pseudo-­historical, and mythical ele­ments.55 Elaborately decorative and rhetorical, Baroque historiography possessed what Ramon Grau describes as a horror vacui—­every available space had to be filled in with ornamental layers of literary and in­ven­ted accounts of the past and so crowding the historical canvas.56 The first volume of the Corònica universal del Principat de Catalunya, by Jeroni Pujades, published in 1609, is an example of this omnivorous and indiscriminate tendency. Pujades, a late instance of a learned author writing in Catalan, took the first part of his history up to 714 and the coming of the Muslims.57 He translated the six initial books composing part 1 into Castilian and added two more parts (twelve books), bringing the story as far as 1162. The volumes subsequent to the first ­were published in 1829–1832, long ­after Pujades’s death.58 The chronicle of Pujades accumulates heterogeneous material, mixing legends and forgeries with genuine information. No documents ­were edited, nor w ­ ere ­earlier accounts subjected to any sort of criticism.59 Careful examination of the authenticity of medieval sources was already starting in France at the time of Pujades and has even ­earlier exemplification in the notorious exposure of the so-­called Donation of Constantine as a forgery, demonstrated by Lorenzo Valla in Italy in 1440. The tradition of humanist schol55. ​Simon i Tarrés, “La historiografia del segle del Barroc,” 93–116. 56. ​Grau, “Les batalles,” 169. On the Baroque style in Catalonia, see essays in El barroc català: Actes de les jornades celebrades a Girona els dies 17, 18 i 19 de desembre de 1987, ed. Albert Rossich and August Rafanell (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1989). 57. ​Jeroni Pujades (Hieronym Pviades), Coronica Vniversal del Principat de Cathalvnya (Barcelona: Hieronym Margarit, 1609). 58. ​Jeroni Pujades, Corónica universal del Principado de Cataluña, ed. Fèlix Torres Amat et al., 8 vols. (Barcelona: J. Torner, 1829–1832). On the tortured history of efforts to publish the chronicle, see Eulàlia Miralles, Sobre Jeroni Pujades (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2010). 59. ​Grau, “Les battales,” 165–70.



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

37

arship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was innovative and thought-­ provoking, amounting, as scholarship in recent de­cades has shown, to more than literary preoccupations or unquestioning devotion to Graeco-­Roman anti­ quity.60 Catalonia lagged in this regard and embraced a critical method only in the aftermath of its defeat at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714 and the reception of a more critical approach to history.61 The impetus for a scientific (in the sense of impartial and meticulous) analy­ sis of historical sources came not from Enlightenment secular rationalism but from techniques of investigating church history, beginning with efforts to judge the origins and reliability of saints’ legends. No form of sacred or secular history was more complex and encrusted with layers of dubious elaboration than the deeds of the Catholic saints over the course of more than fifteen centuries, beginning with the first martyrs. To the nonbeliever it might appear that the entire enterprise, premised as it was on the super­natural, had nothing to do with reliability, but in fact, the study of hagiography was and remains focused on reconstructing the lives of real ­people and ascertaining what the original or at least early accounts of their miraculous exceptionality entailed. In defending the authenticity of Saint Severus, on the one hand, and undermining the posthumous legends about Saint Eulalia, on the other, Caresmar may seem to have changed his historiographic standards. Some of this seeming inconsistency is circumstantial, caused by the presence or absence of validating con­temporary or near-­contemporary evidence. Caresmar did not start from a position of skepticism about miracles or sanctity. What mattered was ­whether the accounts came from ­those writing at or near the time of the saint’s life and death, in which case they should be trusted. The establishment in 1620 of the Bollandists, a subset of the Jesuit Order dedicated to writing updated lives of the saints, is an early indication of the need to separate venerable attributions of sanctity, martyrdom, or miracles from ­later pieties, falsifications, or inventions. This im­mense and still, four hundred years ­later, unfinished proj­ect began with all the saints whose feast days fall in January and over the past four centuries has moved through the calendar as far as the end of November, where it has now been halted.62 60. ​See, for example, essays in Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 61. ​On the plethora of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Iberian historical inventions, see Katrina B. Olds, Forging the Past: In­ven­ted Histories in Counter-­Reformation Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 62. ​David Knowles, ­Great Historical Enterprises: Prob­lems in Monastic History (London: Thomas Nelson, 1963), 3–32; Jan Marco Sawilla, Antiquarianismus, Hagiographie und Historie im 17. Jahrhundert: Zum Werk der Bollandisten. Ein wissenschaftshistorischer Versucht (Tübingen: Walter de Gruyter, 2009).

38 Chap t e r  1

Verification of the written remains of the past was extended beyond hagiography to apply to the entirety of church history and eventually to secular history as well. Benedictine monks of the French Congregation of Saint Maur, founded in 1621, pioneered the science of researching archival documents, dating them, and assessing their reliability on the basis of language, paleography, and conformity to established l­egal forms.63 The magisterial editions of the ­Fathers of the Church put together by the Maurists, as they w ­ ere known, are still admired for their exacting standards of scholarship. Beginning in the early eigh­teenth c­ entury, the Maurists also took over the Gallia Christiana proj­ect, a diocese-­by-­diocese history and collection of documents that served as the model for the monumental, multivolume church histories and editions of sources undertaken for Spain by Henrique Flórez (España Sagrada, 1747–1886) and Jaime Villanueva (Viage literario a las Iglesias de España, 1803–1852). Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), Luc d’Achery (1609–1685), and Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741) are among the most notable representatives of the Maurist school. In De re diplomatica (1681), Mabillon classifies historical rec­ ords and shows how to determine ­whether they are genuine, false, or interpolated by examining handwriting (paleography), writing style (language and formulas), seals, signatures, and other marks of authentication.64 D’Achery collaborated on an im­mense proj­ect to write the lives of saints who ­were Benedictine monks, and he also edited the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Lanfranc of Canterbury, and Guibert de Nogent. Since the Italian Re­nais­sance, humanist scholars had been engaged in purifying the texts of Roman and Greek writers to come up with reliable editions. Philology and deep familiarity with classical texts made it pos­si­ble for ­these experts to purge errors, misreadings, interpolations, and pseudonymous works. Mabillon and o ­ thers of his circle and era applied t­ hese techniques to medieval texts that had previously been regarded as barbarous in style and content, in keeping with the conventional humanist contempt for the “Gothic” ­Middle Ages. D’Achery’s Spicilegium most closely anticipated Caresmar’s ambitions ­because it consists of editions of medieval documents, including secular as well as sacred texts, collected from an assortment of archives. ­After d’Achery’s death, Étienne Baluze, who ­will be discussed below in connection with the historiography of Catalonia, and Edmond Martène (1654–1739), another Mau-

63. ​Knowles, ­Great Historical Enterprises, 35–62. 64. ​Jean Mabillon, De re diplomatica libri VI (Paris: Ludovicus Billaine, 1681). On Mabillon, see Blandine Barret-­Kriegel, Jean Mabillon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988); Anthony Grafton, Inky Fin­gers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Eu­rope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 78–104.



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

39

rist, expanded and completed the Spicilegium proj­ect.65 In the 1720s, at the same time that the Spicilegium appeared in its final form, Martène and his colleague Ursin Durand (1682–1771) published a nine-­volume collection of medieval treatises, books, and documents illustrative of historical as well as religious ­matters.66 French critical historical approaches influenced ­those referred to in Castile and Aragon as novatores, scholars who ridiculed the fabulous histories and forgeries lacking any con­temporary, let alone archival, validation. In the second part of the seventeenth ­century, historians such as the Aragonese Pedro Abarca (1618–1697) and the Castilians Gaspar Ibáñez de Segovia, Marquis of Mondéjar (1628–1708), and Luis de Salazar y Castro (1658–1734) paved the way for a source-­based historiography in which false chronicles ­were rejected and archival documentation was paramount. Their efforts led to the founding of the Real Academia de la Historia in 1738 and the opening to researchers of the previously secret archive of the Crown of Castile at the ­castle of Simancas and that of the Spanish overseas empire in Seville.67 Caresmar and other Catalan historians of his era w ­ ere influenced by the same Maurist currents, but particularly by ­those French historians who concerned themselves with the lands across the Pyrenees.68 A monument of French historical research embodying the collection of original materials was the humorously titled Marca hispanica, by the archbishop of Toulouse, Pierre de Marca (1594–1662), published posthumously in 1688.69 It is a vast compendium (1,489 folios) of historical description and documentation with the purpose of demonstrating that b­ ecause of its Carolingian origins as the frontier with Islam, the territory that would l­ater become Catalonia, the so-­called Marca hispanica (the Spanish march or frontier, hence the play on the word “Marca” in the title), had always legally been part of France. Originally prepared in the 1660s, Marca hispanica had a tendentious purpose in the context of the redrawing of the Spanish-­French border stemming from the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which gave to France the former Catalan counties of Roussillon, Vallespir, 65. ​Luc d’Achery, Spicilegium sive collectio veterum aliquot scriptorum qui in Galliae bibliothecis delituerant, 3 vols. (Paris: Montalant, 1723). 66. ​Edmond Martène and Ursin Durand, Veterum scriptorum et monumentorum historicarum, dogmaticorum, moralium, amplissima collectio, 9 vols. (Paris: Montalant, 1724–1733). 67. ​Richard Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 256–89. 68. ​ On this scholarship see Christian Guilleré, “Pierre de Marca à la fin du XXe siècle: L’historiographie française et l’histoire de la Cata­logne,” in Catalunya i Europa a través de l’edat mitjana, ed. Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré (Lleida: Pagès, 2002), 31–53. Cf. the reception of Mabillon in Italy: Arnaldo Momigliano, “Mabillon’s Italian Disciples,” in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), 277–93. 69. ​Pierre de Marca, Marca Hispanica sive limes Hispanicus [. . .] (Paris: Franciscus Muguet, 1688).

40 Chap t e r  1

Conflent, and Capcir as well as part of Cerdanya. De Marca, bishop of Couserans and then archbishop of Toulouse, was appointed as “visitor” to Catalonia by Louis XIV during the French occupation and was a principal negotiator of the treaty.70 Marca hispanica consists of an account of the history of Catalonia to 1258, followed by editions of chronicles, a description of the Catalan interests in Sicily, and a discussion of the many crises of the ­fourteenth ­century. Lest one draw too clear a contrast between up-­to-­date French scholarship and obsolete Baroque eclecticism, it should be noted that de Marca used without attribution materials from the unpublished volumes of the chronicle of Pujades that he had taken back to France ­after his sojourn in Catalonia.71 ­After a historical narrative, ­there follow 532 rec­ords from the ninth to the sixteenth c­ entury. De Marca’s secretary Étienne Baluze (1594–1662) contributed an introduction and the last part of the historical survey and was principally responsible for the appendix of documents. Baluze was a professor of canon law, librarian to the king’s minister of state Jean-­Baptiste Colbert, and a collector of medieval manuscripts.72 He edited the letters of Pope Innocent III and a collection of church councils, and he wrote biographies of the popes of the Avignon period. His ­career also shows the relevance and danger of historical expertise, for Baluze was disgraced a­ fter mobilizing his credibility in defense of what proved to be invalid genealogical claims by the Cardinal de Bouillon, Baluze having authenticated documents that ­later proved to have been forged. Beginning with his earliest published work, Caresmar invoked ­these French historians as models for the scrupulous collection of archival sources and accurate assessment of their veracity. Nevertheless, he was susceptible to an older, indiscriminate historiography that accepted layers of stories along with verifiable accounts.73 In his life of Saint Severus, he invoked Mabillon, d’Achery, de Marca, and other French scholars. At the same time, he refused to follow Maians in denying the existence of Saint Severus b­ ecause in the absence of manifestly l­ater or confected documents, the tradition of the ­people was to be considered valid.74 70. ​On Pierre de Marca, see François Gaquère, Pierre de Marca (1594–1662): Sa vie, ses oeuvres, son gallicanisme (Paris: Lethielleux, 1932). 71. ​James Amelang, “The M ­ ental World of Jeroni Pujades,” in Spain, Eu­rope and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, ed. Richard Kagan and Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995), 212. 72. ​Émile Fage, Étienne Baluze. Sa vie, ses ouvrages, son exil, sa défense (Tulle: Imprimerie Grauffon Administrative et Commerciale, 1899; repr., Paris: Slatkine, 1971). 73. ​Grau, “Les batalles,” 176–77. 74. ​Jayme Caresmar, Sanctus Severus Episcopus et Martyr, [12].



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

41

Caresmar was not the first Iberian scholar to receive the new historiographic science. Beginning in late seventeenth-­century Andalusia and spreading to Valencia in the early eigh­teenth ­century, the works of Mabillon and other Maurists ­were read attentively and their teachings about authentication ­were applied to national and local history. A key figure is the Dominican scholar Jacinto Segura (1688–1751), whose Norte crítico of 1733 is among the most influential works of historical criticism written in Spain during this period. Although like Caresmar he made an exception for an especially revered saint (in this case Saint James and his association with Compostela), Segura provided standards of verification and outlined methods of reading and evaluating historical sources. His approach was especially impor­tant for Gregori Maians.75 Peninsular historiography has always involved attempts to assert or dispute the fundamental unity of Spain. The agenda of Castilian historians as far back as Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada in the thirteenth c­ entury was to impose retrospectively the supremacy of Castile. In the case of Ximénez de Rada, this was joined to exalting the primacy of the archbishops of Toledo. But even long ­after the ecclesiastical agenda had become irrelevant, twentieth-­century literary and po­liti­cal histories by renowned scholars like Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz treated other languages, lit­er­a­tures, and regions as subordinate to a consistent Spanish (i.e., Castilian) identity. The existence of an in­de­pen­dent Portugal, according to Sánchez-­Albornoz, was an unfortunate historical accident.76 Not surprisingly, early modern Catalan scholars w ­ ere intent on denying Castilian hegemony and proving the deep roots and per­sis­tent real­ity of a distinct Catalonia, notwithstanding the ­union of crowns (i.e., between Castile and Aragon) in 1474. Responding to both French attempts to annex Catalonia and Castilian aggrandizement as represented by Juan de Mariana’s Historia de rebus Hispaniae (1592), Catalan historical legends w ­ ere in­ven­ted or repurposed to assert the retrospective autonomy of Catalonia. One example is the madeup story about ninth-­century Catalan nobles led by Otger Cataló (a false etymology for “Catalonia”) throwing off the Muslim yoke in­de­pen­dently of Charlemagne. Another is the appealing, although equally imaginary, derivation of the heraldic symbol of Catalonia, four red bars on a golden field. According to legend, a count of Barcelona serving the Carolingian army was 75. ​Antón Pelayo, “La historiografía,” 299. 76. ​Ariel Guiance, “Portugal, un azar histórico: El pasado lusitano y la historiografia de Claudio Sánchez-­Albornoz,” Revista portuguesa de história 42 (2011): 109–30.

42 Chap t e r  1

wounded in ­battle. The grateful monarch wet his hand with the blood from the count’s wound and changed the plain gold coat of arms by drawing the red lines with his fin­gers. Still another cycle of stories centers around Guifré I, a real figure conflated with ­later counts, who supposedly rebelled against Carolingian mistreatment, setting up the basis for Catalan in­de­pen­dence. This act of self-­assertion was legitimated by the inability of the first Capetian king of France, Hugh Capet, to come to the aid of the Catalans a­ fter the sack of Barcelona by Muslim forces in 985.77 Such in­ven­ted accounts of Catalan heroism and historical legitimation ­were impor­tant to Jeroni Pujades at the beginning of the seventeenth c­ entury and to an equally eminent and indiscriminate successor, Narcís Felíu de la Penya, a ­century ­later.78 Consultation of sources and increasing sophistication about authenticity failed to drive out the patriotic eclecticism of the Baroque. Pere Serra i Postius, a fabric dealer in Barcelona and member of the Real Academia de Buenas Letras, assembled in 1726 a collection of tales demonstrating divine and especially angelic solicitude afforded to Catalonia, upholding the tradition of Pujades against de Marca’s attempt to annex its history to that of France. Serra i Postius had been a partisan of the Hapsburg claimant in the Succession War and mourned the triumph of the Bourbons, the suffering of besieged and defeated Barcelona, and the extinction of Catalan liberties. He also composed an account of the life, martyrdom, and miraculous afterlife of Santa Eulàlia.79 Historians such as Caresmar rejected the credulity of the Baroque tradition and its lack of interest in archival sources. His research and that of the other Bellpuig historians did not, however, reflect a complete dismissal of piety, patriotism, or tradition. A limitation of historiography in Catalonia before the French Revolution was that once the authenticity of early texts had been veri77. ​Anna Cortadellas i Vallès, Repertori de llegendes historiogràfiques de la Corona d’Aragó (Barcelona: Curial and Abadia de Montserrat, 2001), 124–25, 129, 131; Miquel Coll i Alentorn, Guifré el Pelós en la historiografia i en la llegenda (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1990); Paul Freedman, “Cowardice, Heroism and the Legendary Origins of Catalonia,” Past & Pre­sent 121 (November 1988): 3–28. Charlemagne was revered as a saint in the diocese of Girona. See Jules Coulet, Étude sur l’Office de Girone en l’honneur de Saint Charlemagne (Montpellier: Coulet et Fils, 1907). 78. ​Narciso Felíu de la Peña y Farell, Anales de Cataluña, 3 vols. (Barcelona: Juan Pablo Martí, 1709). See Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, Repressió borbònica i resistència identitària a la Catalunya del segle XVIII (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2020), 92–118. 79. ​Pere Serra i Postius, Prodigios y finezas de los Santos Ángeles hechas en el Principado de Cataluña (Barcelona: Jaime Suriá, 1726); Serra i Postius, Trecenario de la insigne virgin e invencible martyr, la noble Santa Eulalia (Barcelona: Juan Jolis, 1746). See José Luís Bertrán, Antonio Espino, and Lluis Ferran Toledano, “Pere Serra i Postius y el criticismo historiográfico en la Barcelona de la primera mitad del siglo XVIII,” Manuscrits, revista d’història moderna 10 (1992): 315–29.



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

43

fied and accepted, their ­actual contents ­were not subjected to criticism.80 Agreement among authorities was more impor­tant than what the texts recounted. This is evident with regard to hagiography. As long as the rec­ord of the saint’s life and miracles was au­then­tic, in the sense that date, authorship, and textual tradition could be verified, what it actually reported need not be further investigated or challenged. Applied to church history and secular ­matters, this meant that content was accepted irrespective of logic or contradictory evidence. Ramon Grau puts this very well: “­There was an impor­tant methodological limitation to the critical ecclesiastical historiography of the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. Once the authenticity of the document was established, the facts it contained ­were considered equally au­then­tic regardless of their intrinsic credibility in the light of natu­ral reason.”81 Related to this limitation of critical analy­sis was a reluctance to reject the authority of tradition or to go against endorsement by revered figures of the past. This was characteristic of the French scholars on whom Caresmar and his contemporaries modeled themselves. Mabillon defended (against spirited criticism) the authenticity of the sacred Tear of Vendôme (supposedly shed by Jesus when he learned of the death of Lazarus). Relying on the authority of Eusebius, the distinguished ecclesiastical historian, Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637– 1698) was willing to accept the putative letters between Jesus and the king of Edessa.82 The emphasis on archival as opposed to narrative evidence privileged original documentation what­ever its drawbacks as regards accuracy or plausibility. Anything backed up by archival rec­ords was to be considered verified.83 Caresmar was passionate about making sense of the im­mense documentary rec­ords for medieval Catalonia, but he was not worried about how they got into the archives. As he wrote in 1774 in an essay on the authenticity of archival rec­ords, the fact that originals or copies have been kept intact for centuries should give them credence.84 To doubt the reliability of cartularies and 80. ​Ramon Grau i Fernàndez, “Els intel·lectuals entre la Ilˑlustració i les tradicions nacionals,” in Història, política, societat i cultura dels Països Catalans, ed. Borja de Riquer, vol. 5 (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1995), 339; Antón Pelayo, “La historiografía,” 302. 81. ​Grau, “Els intel·lectuals,” 5:302: “La historiografía crítica eclesiástica de los siglos XVII y XVIII tenia marcado un límite metodológico importante. Una vez establecida la autenticidad del documento, los hechos consignados por él eran considerados igualmente auténticos con independencia de su credibilidad a luz de la razón natu­ral.” U ­ nless other­wise indicated, all translations are my own. 82. ​Bruno Neveu, “Mabillon et l’historiographie gallicane vers 1700,” in Érudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 193–94. 83. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 205–10. 84. ​Jayme Caresmar, “Autenticidad de las escrituras contenidas en los Archivos, así públicos como privados, y en especial de los Archivos de las Iglesias,” in Seminario erudito, que comprehende varias obras

44 Chap t e r  1

other copies of original documents would undermine the legitimacy of churches and monasteries whose rights and privileges depended on solemn charters issued by secular and ecclesiastical rulers.85 As with hagiography, Caresmar’s assumption was that antiquity is in itself legitimating when in fact the supposedly oldest royal privileges to ecclesiastical establishments are ­those most likely to be forgeries or to have been interpolated. Although he was somewhat alienated from the monastery, Caresmar is justly considered the leading member of the School of Bellpuig de les Avellanes, whose principal purpose was to rescue the memory and documentation of Catalan ecclesiastical institutions. His own approach to historical sources was certainly up to date, for, as we have seen, he acknowledged his debt to the French Maurist historians and to the technical expertise, if not the unpatriotic (from a Catalan perspective) conclusions, of de Marca and Baluze. A fellow member of the Barcelona Acad­emy, Josep de Móra i Catà, Marquis of Llo (1694–1762), was even more oriented than Caresmar t­ oward France and its historical methodology. His noble title was conferred in 1750 by Louis XV despite the fact that Móra was not a French subject, nor did he ever live in Roussillon, where Llo is located.86 Móra had an unusually cosmopolitan experience, having visited the ­g reat cultural centers of Eu­rope and being familiar with French, German, Italian, and Latin. As early as 1730, he had presented to the acad­emy an account of manuscripts in the library of the monastery of Sant Jeroni de la Murtra, this at a time when other academic disquisitions ­were on topics such as ­whether the star that guided the Three Kings to the Christ child accompanied them all the way from the Orient or just from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.87 Following royal recognition of the acad­emy in 1752 and the reassertion of its mission to further historical research, a book of essays on historical methineditas, críticas, morales, instructivas, políticas, históricas, satíricas y jocosas de nuestros mejores autores antiguos y modernos, vol. 28, ed. Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor (1790): “Para que dichas escrituras tengan autoridad, basta-­les ser antiguos y haverse conservado á pesár de las inclemencias de los tiempos en los Archivos públicos ó privados” (68). 85. ​“Dudar de la fé de estos libros, seria exponer los titulos del Real Patronato que adquirieron los soberanos con la fundación y dotación de las Iglesias y Monasterios,” Caresmar, “Autenticidad de las escrituras,” 59. 86. ​For the circumstances of the award of the title, see François-­Pierre Blanc, “Le marquisat de Llo et le droit féodal: Contribution à l’histoire des fiefs de dignité en Roussillon au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales du Midi 131 (2019): 441–56. 87. ​On Móra i Catà, see Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, especially 158–68; Cristina Juher, “La frontera entre lingüística i història literària en els erudits catalans del segle XVIII. El cas par­tic­ul­ar de Josep de Móra, Marquès de Llío,” Estudi general: Revista de la Facultat de Lletres de la Universitat de Girona 22 (2002): 101–23. On the Three Kings discussion, see Grau, “Les batalles,” 9.



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

45

odology appeared in 1756 that would ­later be considered the first volume of a series of Memorias published by the acad­emy. Apart from an introductory history of the acad­emy, its 667 pages ­were the work, directly or indirectly, of the Marquis of Llo. ­Under the overall rubric Observaciones sobre los principios elementales de la historia, a series of essays by the marquis dealt with how to evaluate manuscripts and printed books as historical evidence, offering discussions of handwriting, Latin language evolution, and other means of understanding the documents’ contexts and testing their authenticity.88 I ­will have occasion to describe further the schemes of the Barcelona Acad­ emy to forward the investigation of Catalan history. The 1756 Memorias constitute the high w ­ ater mark of t­ hese efforts. Caresmar and o ­ thers attempted to fulfill Móra’s agenda ­after the death of the marquis in 1762 but without substantial success. Plans for the timely appearance of subsequent volumes of the Memorias on charters, seals, coins, and inscriptions ­were not fulfilled. The second issue of the Memorias was delayed for more than a c­ entury, ­until 1868, and while it included an essay by Móra on “tradition” as an aid to historical research, the rest is a conventional collection of vari­ous con­temporary authors’ learned essays. In conformity with the prevailing outlook, Móra, like Caresmar, allowed for some modification of the critical approach to history. Historians writing about their own realm, inspired by a reasonable degree of patriotic fervor, ­were to be preferred u ­ nless they “did not know how to moderate their love of country.” The pursuit of objective historical truth should not go so far as to undermine the ruler and the nation.89 None of the erudite historians of eighteenth-­century Catalonia w ­ ere as consistently rigorous in their evaluation of sources as Gregori Maians in Valencia, but in consulting the vast and disor­ga­nized source material rather than recycling chronicles and in learning and teaching how to read and or­ga­nize ­these rec­ords, they preserved and effectively elucidated the past. Caresmar’s method of working rapidly but changing his mind and not always finishing his proj­ects makes what survives of his work difficult to evaluate. Nevertheless, his transcriptions and t­ hose of his associates have had crucial significance

88. ​ Real Academia de Buenas Letras de la Ciudad de Barcelona: Origen, progressos y su primero junta general, baxo la protección de Su Magestad, con los papeles que en ella se acordaron (Barcelona: Francisco Suriá, 1756). This would be considered the first volume of a series of Academic Memorias. The first article in volume 2 was the long-­delayed part 3 of Móra i Catà’s “Observaciones sobre los principios elementos de la historia,” titled “Tradición,” 1–50. 89. ​Antón Pelayo, “La historiográfia,” 301.

46 Chap t e r  1

in preserving rec­ords whose originals would l­ater be lost during the upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Caresmar’s major innovation was to or­ga­nize material chronologically, as was the case with his initial compilation of the Bellpuig cartulary. Medieval cartularies put together for an ecclesiastical or secular lord ­were presented in terms of rec­ord type so that for churches, privileges of exemption, endowments from rulers and found­ers, and subsequent donations w ­ ere grouped together. The traditional cartulary was also or­ga­nized by geography with documentation classified according to provinces or places. In order to view the historical trajectory of an institution such as a monastery, however, it was better to see how it developed over the years. The chronological princi­ple would characterize Caresmar’s archival proj­ects and also his historical accounts, which tend to have an annalistic, one-­thing-­after-­another style. Taxonomy by chronology may now seem self-­ evident, and, of course, it was applied to chronicles long before Caresmar. Baluze had already ­adopted it in his pre­sen­ta­tion of texts in Marca hispanica. Caresmar, however, brought this practice to archival ordering and applied it to his own cata­logs and arguments. As indicated in the Barcelona and Vic volumes of España Sagrada, Caresmar was already regarded as a ­g reat historian during his lifetime. The epitaph for his tomb at Bellpuig, erected in 1801 and carved in stone, refers to his

Figure 1.1.  Plaque with an epitaph to Jaume Caresmar, Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Courtesy of the Archive of the Monastery of Bellpuig de les Avellanes.



J au m e Car esm ar ’ s Lif e a n d P e r s o n a l i t y

47

expertise in paleography and diplomatic and puts him in the com­pany of the pioneers of the science of evaluating medieval documents. Written by Jaume Pasqual, the epitaph singles out for par­tic­u­lar notice Caresmar’s role in illuminating the history and lit­er­a­ture of Catalonia. Within the sculpted laurel garland surrounding the text are a pen and inkwell, along with symbols of his status as abbot and doctor and repre­sen­ta­tions of his books on Saint Severus and the history of Bellpuig. ­There are also reminders of his role in bringing back w ­ ater from the spring at Mallola to the monastery as well as an allusion to his passionate interest in the counts of Urgell.90 Early in the nineteenth c­ entury, Jaime de Villanueva in his Viage literario praised Caresmar’s erudition and his exacting standards for drawing conclusions from documents.91 In a letter written in 1824, the archivist of the Crown of Aragon Pròsper de Bofarull, himself as indefatigable a copyist as any of the Bellpuig circle, referred to the “immortal Caresmar.”92 As ­will be demonstrated, Caresmar was considerably more than a passive transmitter of historical information.

90. ​“Rei diplomaticae et paleographicae peritissimus in societatem herculei laboris novae artis diplomaticae concinnandae a Marurinis Monachis ascitus, operum et symbolum contulit.” The tomb epitaph is at Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Its text is reproduced in Fèlix Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario critico de los escritores catalanes y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura de Cataluña (Barcelona: J. Verdeguer, 1836), 177. The symbols and their significance are described in Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·lecccionista, a la Catalunya de la Il·lustracó (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 2011), 40–43. 91. ​“En todo cuanto escribió este literario, además de la erudición que poseía, resplandece la crítica y el juicio exacto de las cosas, y la gravedad con que procedía aun en los puntos oscuros, sin abandonarse á la golosina de conjecturar: tentación terrible para los anticuarios.” Villanueva, Viage literario a las iglesias de España, 12:89–90 92. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i colˑlecionista, 149n374.

C h a p te r   2

Catalonia in the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury

Jaume Caresmar was born three years ­after Barcelona fell to the Bourbon forces, thus ending the War of the Spanish Succession. The siege had gone on for a year and three months, with five thousand Catalan troops holding off an army of forty thousand commanded by the Duke of Berwick. The day of the breach of the walls and final capitulation, September 11, 1714, has been marked since 1880 as Catalonia’s national holiday. The twentieth-­century historian Jaume Vicens Vives referred to 1714 as “zero hour,” marking the extirpation of the principality’s old institutions but also the beginning of the building of modern Catalonia.1 It is also relevant to the position of Catalonia in modern Spain that with the triumph of Francisco Franco in 1939, any observance of September 11 was banned. In 1977, two years ­after Franco’s demise, public ceremonies ­were again allowed.2 Some polities mark their national day by celebrating past accomplishments (uprisings or declarations of in­de­pen­dence, for example), while o ­ thers memorialize a heroic defeat such as the B ­ attle of Kosovo (1389) for the Serbs or Culloden (1746) for the Scots, seeing them as evidence for against-­the-­odds survival. The 1. ​Jaume Vicens Vives, “La Guerra del Francès,” in Moments crucials de la història de Catalunya (Barcelona: Editorial Vicens Vives, 1962), 266. 2. ​Gary McDonogh, Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power in the Industrial Era (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2014), 36. On that occasion in 1977 more than one million ­people turned out in Barcelona. 48

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

49

date of a crucial ­battle may be a festive occasion for the heirs of one side and a sad recollection for descendants of the other. The B ­ attle of the Boyne (1690) in Ireland, at which the troops of William III (a Protestant) defeated the forces of the deposed En­glish king James II (a Catholic), is a boisterous holiday for the Unionist Protestants of Northern Ireland and a grim anniversary for Irish Catholics. During the three de­cades of “Trou­bles” in Northern Ireland that began in the late 1960s, annual parades of the Orange Order and Ulster Loyalists commemorating the Protestant victory at the Boyne River provoked (and ­were intended to provoke) violent altercations with Catholics.3 The 1713–1714 siege of Barcelona was a truly desperate affair since the Catalans ­were resisting implementation of the Treaty of Utrecht, which the ­g reat powers had already signed, settling the dynastic succession question in ­favor of the Bourbons. Abandoned by their erstwhile En­glish and Austrian allies, the Catalans held out with futile tenacity, invoking the example of the Maccabees.4 September 11 is remembered as a harbinger of the long-­term repression of Catalan culture.5 The victorious army formally took possession of the starving city on September 12, and at the o ­ rders of the Duke of Berwick, spared it from being plundered. If ­there ­were any doubt about Barcelona’s abject situation, however, the rapid construction of the massive fortress of the Ciutadella, for which the greater part of the neighborhood of La Ribera was leveled, clarified the new real­ity. This was not a defensive structure but rather a garrison built to intimidate urban subjects. The Ciutadella symbolized the end of Catalan constitutional liberties. What had formerly been the preponderant partner of the Kingdom of Aragon was now directly ruled, along with the rest of Spain, from the royal court in Madrid. Once a rival to Venice and Genoa for control of the Mediterranean, Barcelona was now the capital of a conquered territory whose subversion had 3. ​Marc Mulholland, Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 4–7. King William, who married Mary, ­daughter of the deposed Stuart king James II, was of the Dutch House of Orange-­Nassau, hence the adoption of the color orange by Irish Protestants. July 12 is actually the date of the ­Battle of Aughrim (according to the calendar then in force). It came a­ fter the ­Battle of the Boyne (old style July 1; modern calendar June 23), but the two ­were assimilated during the eigh­teenth c­ entury and Boyne took on more significance, perhaps b­ ecause of the presence of King William. In Derry/Londonderry, December 1 is marked by the Orange Order to commemorate the “apprentice boys” who resisted the siege by the army of James II against the wishes of the town governor, whose effigy is burned on ­these occasions. 4. ​Cristian Palomo Reina, “Catalan National Identity in the 18th ­Century. The War of the Spanish Succession and the Bourbon Regime,” in Historical Analy­sis of the Catalan Identity, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), 199. 5. ​On the immediate events, the Bourbon rule and historical memory, see the collection of essays 1714: Cataluña en la España del siglo XVIII, ed. Antonio Morales Moya (Madrid: Cátedra, 2014).

50 Chap t e r  2

been put down by force. The victorious Bourbons, although of French origin, intensified Castilian preponderance by dissolving Catalonia’s autonomous institutions and undermining its separate culture. When King Philip V abolished Valencia’s and Aragon’s privileges in 1707, he stated his intention “to reduce all the kingdoms of Spain to the same laws, practices, customs and tribunals, each equally subject to the laws of Castile, which are so praiseworthy and acceptable throughout the world.” The Decrees of Nueva Planta following the Succession War extended a similarly repressive centralizing conformity to Catalonia. Henceforth, Spain’s internal affairs ­were ­under the control of the Council of Castile, a committee of royal ministers responsible for the entirety of the kingdom.6 In much of Catalan historiography since the mid-­nineteenth ­century, the Bourbon period is represented as the “denationalization” of Catalonia, the nadir of its po­liti­cal and cultural fortunes.7 According to this view, the victory of Philip V and the abolition of Catalan institutions by Nueva Planta attempted, although ultimately unsuccessfully, to end Catalan distinction. The extirpation of liberties was successful in the medium term in accelerating what is known as the decadència of the Catalan language, its use increasingly confined to lower-­class or domestic contexts while Castilian dominated law, lit­er­a­ture, learning, and administration. It is at least a seeming paradox (already recognized in the late eigh­teenth ­century) that this era of po­liti­cal subordination was also one of domestic peace, accelerating economic growth, and cultural accomplishment. Catalonia was the most prosperous and expansive part of the kingdom. The eminent twentieth-­century French historian of Catalonia, Pierre Vilar, provided a thorough and generally accepted description of Catalonia’s growth from the late seventeenth ­century u ­ ntil the war with Napoleon.8 Expansion was particularly evident by the latter half of the eigh­teenth ­century, although, as w ­ ill be discussed, Caresmar in his 1780 Carta al Barón de la Linde thought this growth still fell short of matching the favorable situation of the ­Middle Ages. For some Catalan nationalist historians, prosperity occurred despite Bourbon oppression. Another school, following Vilar, considers governmental policies such as the erasing of internal customs levies, mercantilist tariffs to protect industry, and the end of the monopolies possessed by Andalusian ports on New World trade to have benefited Catalonia. In the nineteenth ­century, 6. ​John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 69, 100–101. 7. ​Discussed in Roberto Fernández, Cataluña y el absolutismo borbónico: Historia y política (Barcelona: Universitat de Lleida, 2014), 274–347. 8. ​Pierre Vilar, La Cata­logne dans l’Espagne moderne: Recherches sur les fondements économiques des structures nationales, vol. 2 (Paris: S. E. V. P. E. N, 1962).

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

51

the accelerated industrialization of Catalonia, particularly its strength in textile industries, would encourage an increasingly self-­conscious nationalist discourse as well as a rediscovery of Catalan culture and a revival of the Catalan language that goes ­under the name of La Renaixença (Re­nais­sance).9 Although this movement presented itself, as the term “Renaixença” obviously suggests, as a phoenix-­like rebirth from cultural obliteration, the condition of Catalan culture was ­really not so dire in the eigh­teenth ­century; the language was not completely marginalized, and circles such as that of Caresmar’s Bellpuig show a lively and constructive awareness of Catalan history. Some historians regard the preservation of Catalan culture in the eigh­teenth c­ entury as a form of re­ sis­tance, whereas ­others see no concerted campaign to repress it in the first place, but the consensus now reduces the supposedly revolutionary accomplishments of the soi-­disant literary Re­nais­sance of the nineteenth ­century. For the found­ers of the Romantic Renaixença, the de­cadence and powerlessness of the eigh­teenth ­century w ­ ere offset by recollecting the glorious medieval era when Catalans expanded from their core lands in the Pyrenees mountains and Barcelona to seize Muslim-­held territories in Valencia to the south as well as the Balearic Islands. The late thirteenth and f­ourteenth centuries witnessed Catalan conquests of Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, Corsica, and even Athens and other parts of Greece. The memory of this composite set of territories, sometimes referred to as a Catalan “empire,” has informed Catalan nationalism in the modern era, symbolically evidenced by the street names of the nineteenth-­century Eixample neighborhood of Barcelona, the murals decorating the Barcelona city hall, and the enshrining of the “four g­ reat chronicles” of the thirteenth and f­ourteenth centuries, texts recounting Catalan feats of arms and expansionist victories.10 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catalonia constituted a nation in the early modern sense of ­people inhabiting a delimited territory with a common attributed genealogy, and it retained medieval l­egal customs, administrative institutions, and some of its traditional privileges.11 In 1628, the Basque chronicler Esteban de Garibay could write that “Catalonia is one of the power­ ful states that in our days we find among the Kingdoms of Spain.”12 Compared 9. ​Not to be confused with the fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­century Re­nais­sance that began in Italy, described in Catalan by the word “Renaixament.” 10. ​The twentieth-­century historian Ferran Soldev­ila referred to the famous chronicles as “the four Gospels of Catalonia.” Xavier Baró i Queralt, “L’escriptura de la història i la identitat catalana de Jeroni Pujades (1568–1635) a Antoni de Capmany (1742–1813),” Biblio3W: Revista Bibliográfica de Geografía y ciencias sociales 21, no. 1 (2016), 5–13, https://­revistes​.­ub​.­edu​/­index​.­php​/­b3w​/­article​/­view​/­26361​/­27807. 11. ​Xavier Torres Sans, Naciones sin nacionalismo: Cataluña en la monarquía hispánica (siglos XVI–­ XVII) (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2008), 89. 12. ​Cited in Palomo Reina, “Catalan National Identity in the 18th ­Century,” 191.

52 Chap t e r  2

with the sway of Catalonia in the late M ­ iddle Ages, however, its ancien régime autonomy was reduced, if not altogether subordinated to Castilian hegemony. Added to this was the eclipse of Catalan, formerly among the leading languages of Eu­rope for love lyr­ics, chivalric poetry, religious prose, and philosophical texts. In the eigh­teenth ­century, apart from sermons, ­children’s schoolbooks, and comical poetry directed to or composed by the lower ­orders of society, ­little was published in Catalan as opposed to Castilian, the language of high culture. In this chapter, I ­will first outline the rise of Catalonia as a Eu­ro­pean power (from the ninth to the fifteenth ­century) and then the series of what ­were regarded retrospectively as defeats, betrayals, or evidence of declining fortunes (1410–1714) before returning to the eigh­teenth ­century.

Medieval Catalonia Catalonia as a national concept corresponds to a somewhat ambiguous polity historically and po­liti­cally. The term “Catalan,” used in order to describe a specific commonality, is first attested in the Liber maiolichinus, a Pisan chronicle written between 1117 and 1125, which refers to the Catalanenses (i.e. the “Catalan men”), and ­later to the “Catalan army” that seized the Muslim-­held island of Majorca in 1114, aided by Pisans and soldiers from Languedoc.13 The self-­awareness of the Catalans as constituting a distinctive ­people with par­tic­ u­lar rights is evident in 1188 when King Alfonso of Aragon, who was also Count of Barcelona, was compelled by the nobles to promise not to appoint vicars in the territory u ­ nless they w ­ ere Catalans (nisi Cathalanum).14 By this time t­ here was a po­liti­cal and geo­g raph­ic­ al territory referred to as the Principality of Catalonia, a collection of counties of which most, but not all, ­were ruled by the Count of Barcelona. Why ­these never became a separate, in­de­ pen­dent kingdom has to do with the ruler already having the royal title for Aragon and ­later Majorca, Valencia, Sicily, and Naples as well as an atavistic memory of Catalonia’s Carolingian origins. The ruler of Catalonia in the strict sense remained Count of Barcelona, a title that went back to the era of Charlemagne, never prince or king of Catalonia.15 13. ​ Liber maiolichinus de gestis Pisanorum illustribus, ed. Carlo Calisse (Rome: Forzani, 1904), verses 756, 785 (p. 35). 14. ​Flocel Sabaté, “Catalan Identity Discourse in the Late Medieval Mediterranean: Creation and Contrast with Neighboring Identities,” in Memories in Multi-­ethnic Socie­ties: Cohesion in Multi-­ethnic Socie­ties in Eu­rope from c. 1000 to the Pre­sent, ed. Przemsław Wiszewski, vol. 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 350–51. 15. ​Christian Palomo Reina, “Noves perspectives per a una qüestió no resolta: Per què Catalunya fou un principat i no un regne?,”Anuario de estudios medievales 50, no. 1 (2020): 323–52.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

53

­There is no clear, agreed-­upon moment of origin in which a po­liti­cal entity called Catalonia was proclaimed. The basis for the f­ uture Catalonia was created in the Carolingian era, 751–987, with the establishment of frontier counties wrested from the caliphate of Cordoba. The first of the contested regions was Septimania, comprising much of what would l­ ater be Languedoc and Roussillon, in modern times belonging to southern France. Military campaigns across the Pyrenees resulted in the Frankish conquests of Girona in 785 and Barcelona in 801.16 ­These w ­ ere not wars of religious liberation, pitting a monolithic Christian army against Saracens along the lines of The Song of Roland, a twelfth-­century French war story set in Spain that has Charlemagne’s forces proclaiming that “Christians are right; pagans [i.e., Muslims] are wrong.” Before their conquest by the Carolingian forces, Girona and Barcelona had a substantial, prob­ably majority, Christian population that had accepted Islamic rule since 711 or shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, once the armies loyal to Charlemagne had gained territories comprising what was ­later referred to as the Marca hispanica, the inhabitants felt themselves to be part of the realm of the Carolingians. They ­were so loyal, in fact, that long ­after the authority of the Franks or Francia (France) had ceased to be effective beyond the Pyrenees, the counts of Barcelona, ­until the late twelfth ­century, dated their documents by referring to the regnal year of the Carolingian emperors and kings and, a­ fter 987, their Capetian successors. The development of a cult of Saint Charlemagne in late medieval Girona reworked and commemorated this historical fealty.17 The Carolingian administration or­ga­nized territories into counties; at vari­ ous times the Spanish March consisted of as many as fourteen of them. Barcelona, Girona, Empúries, and Roussillon ­were situated along the coast; the interior Pyrenean territories included Besalù, Vallespir, Conflent, and Cerdanya, and further south and west, Osona and Urgell. 16. ​For the history of “pre-­Catalonia” and early Catalonia, see Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Els primers comtes catalans (Barcelona: Teide, 1958); Cullen Chandler, Carolingian Catalonia: Politics, Culture, and Identity in an Imperial Province, 778–987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Albert Benet i Clarà, El procés d’independència de Catalunya (897–989) (Sallent: Institut d’Arqueologia, Història i Ciències Naturales, 1988); Thomas N. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 19–40; Adam Kosto, “Aragon and the Catalan Counties before the Union,” in The Crown of Aragon: A Singular Mediterranean Empire, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 70–91; Michel Zimmermann, En els orígens de Catalunya. Emancipació política i afirmació cultural (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1989); Zimmermann, “Les origines carolingiennes de la Cata­logne,” in Catalunya i Europa a través de l’edat mitjana, ed. Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré (Lleida: Pagès, 2002), 11–30; Josep Maria Salrach, Catalunya a la fi del primer mil·leni (Vic: Eumo, 2004). 17. ​On the cult of Charlemagne in Girona, see Jules Coulet, Étude sur l’Office de Girone en l’honneur de Saint Charlemagne (Montpellier: Coulet et Fils, 1907); Joan Amades, Costumari català: El curs de l’any, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Salvat, 2001), 607–8.

54 Chap t e r  2

As Charlemagne’s empire divided and its components warred against each other, peripheral areas such as the Spanish March ­were neglected and left to themselves. The office of count, the ruler of a county, became hereditary, and the families holding the title became de facto in­de­pen­dent of the nominal central authority. No name was consistently given to the collectivity of counties forming what would ­later become Catalonia. In the tenth ­century, the preeminent Count of Barcelona sometimes described himself as the ruler of Gothia, connecting to the pre-­Islamic Visigothic kingdom and also to Septimania across the Pyrenees, but ­there was no sense yet that ­these counties ­were completely divorced from Western Francia or from the caliphate of Cordoba, whose suzerainty they sometimes recognized.18 Legendary accounts of Catalan origins involving heroism or defiance centered on the reign of Count Guifré I “the Hairy” (870–897). A chronicle known as the Gesta comitum Barcinonensium (Deeds of the counts of Barcelona), dating from shortly a­ fter 1160, depicts Guifré as the son of a count of Barcelona mistreated by knights of the Frankish court, unjustly accused of fomenting vio­lence, and then assassinated. Regretting this episode of bullying and murder, the Frankish king sends the young Guifré to be nurtured at the court of the Count of Flanders, where the lad seduces the count’s ­daughter. Found out by the Countess of Flanders, Guifré promises to marry the girl if he succeeds in obtaining his rightful patrimony. He returns across the Pyrenees disguised as a pilgrim. His m ­ other recognizes him b­ ecause, according to the Gesta, his hair grows in places where other men usually do not have it (hence the sobriquet). The nobles acclaim Guifré, and with their aid he kills the Frankish count appointed ­after his ­father’s death, marries his Flemish fiancée, and effects a rapprochement with the king of France. While visiting the royal court, he is told that the Saracens have invaded his homeland. The king turns down his request for aid but promises that if the young count on his own successfully expels the e­ nemy, he and his heirs could possess the county of Barcelona forever, f­ ree of Frankish lordship or suzerainty. Victorious over the invader, Guifré thus establishes in­de­pen­dent rule and transmits his territorial power to his descendants.19 This legend confuses or conflates the accomplishments of the real Count Guifré in the late ninth ­century with an Islamic expedition of 985 that resulted 18. ​Zimmermann, “Les origines carolingiennes,” 24–27. 19. ​ Les “Gesta comitum Barchinonensium” (versió primitiva), la Brevis Historia i altres textos de Ripoll, ed. Stefano Maria Cingolani (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2012), 119–23. See Michel Zimmermann, “Les origines de la Cata­logne d’après les Gesta comitum Barcinonensium: Mythe fondateur ou récit étiologique?,” in Liber largitorius: Études d’histoire médiévale offertes à Pierre Toubert par ses élèves (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 517–43.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

55

in the sacking and destruction of Barcelona. This too would live on as a foundational catastrophe seen as establishing an in­de­pen­dent Catalonia. Borrell, Count of Barcelona, ­really did appeal for help from the Carolingian ruler Lothar (who died in 985) and his successor, Louis V. The West Frankish (or, as we can start to call them, French) kings ­were in an awkward situation. It is hardly likely that in their decrepit state they could have sent any help to Barcelona even had they so desired. A delicate and not easily engineered dynastic change in 987 resulted in the accession of Hugh Capet, the first of a lineage that would rule France for over three hundred years, with only two interruptions. Hugh’s representative did send a letter to Count Borrell promising aid if the count would come to Aquitaine to perform homage, but nothing resulted from this. Although ­there is no formal arrangement granting in­de­pen­ dence to the county of Barcelona on the order of what the Gesta comitum claims, modern historians have recognized the failure of assistance from France and the beating back of the Muslim incursions as points of departure for something that can be called Catalonia.20 Positing a gradual pro­cess, what Ramon d’Abadal termed a “march t­ oward sovereignty” and Josep Maria Salrach called a “pro­cess of national formation,” became the standard modern way for Catalan historians to frame the nation’s origins. Abadal also referred to an evolution “from the Visigoths to the Catalans.”21 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a high point of con­temporary Catalan self-­confidence, the authorities chose 1988 to commemorate the millennium of Catalonia.22 The period of the ­Middle Ages was still considered 20. ​Stefano M. Cingolani, La formació nacional de Catalunya i el fet identitari dels catalans (785–1410) (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2015), 58–75; Paul Freedman, “Symbolic Implications of the Events of 985–988,” in Symposium Internacional sobre els orígens de Catalunya, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1991), 117–29; Michel Zimmermann, “­Hugues Capet et Borrell: À propos de ‘l’in­de­pen­dence’ de la Cata­logne,” in Catalunya i França meridional a l’entorn de l’any Mil. (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1991), 59–64. 21. ​Abadal, Els primers comtes catalans. The second part, 207–341, is titled “La marxa a la sobirania.” Josep Maria Salrach, El procés de formació nacional de Catalunya (segles VIII–­IX) (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1978); Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Dels Visigots als Catalans, 2nd ed., ed. Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1974). The first volume of t­ hese collected essays is subtitled “La Hispània visigòtica a la Catalunya carolíngia”; the second is “La formació de la Catalunya in­de­pen­dent.” On Catalan approaches as well as the attitude of historians from outside Catalonia, see Cullen Chandler, “Carolingian Catalonia: The Spanish March and the Franks, c. 750–­c. 1050,” History Compass 11, no. 9 (September 2013), https://­compass​.­onlinelibrary​.­wiley​.­com​/­doi​/­abs​/­10​.­1111​/­hic3​.­12078. 22. ​Vari­ous events ­were held ­under the rubric “Catalunya 1,000 Anys,” commemorating the millennium of the “po­liti­cal birth” (naixement politic) of Catalonia. The book listing ­these events, published by the Catalan Generalitat, the autonomous government, is La commemoració del mil·lenari de Catalunya, which did not appear ­until June 1990. Chandler (Carolingian Catalonia) opposes this view, arguing for a deeper and longer-­lasting identification with Charlemagne’s dynasty. A recent finding calls into question the notion that 988 marks the end of communication between the kings of France and Catalonia, hence the beginning of Catalonia. Adam Kosto has authenticated a privilege of Hugh

56 Chap t e r  2

formative for Catalan identity and was useful for reinforcing its con­temporary cultural and po­liti­cal image.23 Catalonia’s origins ­were also presented as foundational evidence for its enduring orientation to Eu­rope. This was emphasized during the post-­Franco economic expansion and cultural exuberance as Spain was in the pro­cess of joining the Eu­ro­pean Union. Catalan po­liti­cal and intellectual leaders renewed an assertion current in the late eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries that, unlike the rest of Spain, Catalonia was enthusiastically in touch with Eu­ro­pean culture as well as a modernizing force for the nation’s economy. Supposedly this Eu­ro­pean orientation originated with Catalonia’s Carolingian incubation, distinguishing it from the rest of the Iberian Peninsula that had not experienced the influence of the Franks. A conference on feudalism held in Girona in 1985 was accompanied by the commemoration of the twelve hundredth anniversary of the city’s fall to the Frankish army in 785 u ­ nder the rubric “Girona: 1,000 years of Eu­ro­pean Vocation,” leaving it open w ­ hether 785 or 985 marked the beginning of Girona’s trans-­Pyrenean mission.24 In any event, discerning the exact moment when Catalonia arose seems less in­ter­est­ing to historians at the pre­sent moment, perhaps ­because of the pessimistic outlook of the twenty-­first ­century. Current strug­gles over Catalan in­de­pen­dence invoke con­temporary politics and resentments more than a real or ­imagined medieval past. Following the traumatic destruction of Barcelona in 985, the counties composing the former Spanish March of the Carolingians reversed the balance of power with Islamic Spain with surprising rapidity. Catalan armies sacked Cordoba, the capital of the caliphate in 1010. The brief seizure of Cordoba was a Capet to the Catalan monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes dated 991, several years ­after the supposed in­de­pen­dence and thirty-­seven years ­after what had been regarded as the last surviving royal privilege, one to Sant Cugat del Vallès in 954. Adam Kosto, “Un diplôme, inédit de ­Hugues Capet, a. 991: Un nouveau dernier diplôme royal franc pour les comtés catalans?,” Journal des savants (2020): 539–61. The text of the document is transcribed 559–61. 23. ​An international scholarly conference on the origins of Catalonia, held in late 1989, was more cautious as, in keeping with what Abadal had formulated, its contributions ­were not centered on 985–988 but rather encompassed the eighth through the eleventh centuries. Symposium Internacional sobre els Orígens de Catalunya (segles VIII–­XI), 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1991), published by the Millennium Commission of the Generalitat. 24. ​The story of this meeting is an example of academic politics and the evolution of Catalan historiography. Its proceedings ­were published by what was then the Col·legi Universitari de Girona, soon to become the full-­fledged Universitat de Girona. La formació i expansió del feudalisme català, ed. Jaume Portella i Comas (Girona: Col·legi Universitari de Girona, 1986) = Estudi General 5–6 (1985–1986). Seventeen years ­later, one of the organizers of the 1985 event, the creatively subversive professor Miquel Barceló, described the circumstances of the 1985 meeting, retrospectively mocking the notion of Girona’s millennium of intellectual investment in Eu­rope, writing that neither he nor Jaume Portella ever accepted this fatuous formula of “Eu­ro­pean outlook.” El feudalisme comptat i debatut: Formació i expansió del feudalisme català, ed. Miquel Barceló et al. (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2003), 12.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

57

raid, not a Christian conquest, and it resulted from civil war within the caliphate, the Catalans taking advantage of an alliance offered by one of the factions. Nevertheless, the military strength of the Catalans and the chronic weakness of the Islamic forces in the eleventh ­century allowed the former to extort large amounts of gold as tributes from the divided taifa states (party kingdoms) that replaced the caliphate. Some of this wealth benefited the port city of Barcelona; much of it was invested all over Catalonia in c­ astles and other military structures and equipment. One theory for the etymological origin of “Catalonia” is the proliferation of c­ astles and their lords (castlàns), hundreds of them.25 Within the territories that made up medieval Catalonia, the church established seven dioceses, with the archbishop of Tarragona holding the title of metropolitan. Eventually, t­here w ­ ere approximately forty Benedictine monasteries, twenty-­nine Cistercian foundations, and ninety h ­ ouses of canons, as well as seventy commands of the military o ­ rders (primarily Hospitallers and Templars) and over a hundred mendicant friaries (Dominicans and Franciscans).26 ­These ecclesiastical h ­ ouses had a significant role as o ­ wners of land and rights and holders of jurisdiction that at vari­ous times included control over markets, coinage, the administration of justice, and the raising of troops. Church authorities generally collaborated with the rulers of Catalonia in their military conquests, routine administration, and spiritual support. As a unified body with its head in Rome, the church was perceived by Eu­ro­pean kings as an impediment to royal authority, but in Iberia, the Christian rulers, b­ ecause of their success against Islam, exerted more control over the church than was the case elsewhere, giving them a species of ecclesiastical prestige and moral right convertible into practical sway. By 1100, the counts of Barcelona emerged as the most power­ful princes within the former Spanish March. A ­ fter a period of turbulence, especially from 1020 to 1060 when the castlàns and greater barons defied the public authority, the count renewed his power using oaths of military loyalty and other feudal innovations along with money, legislation, and dynastic prestige to create and extend effective rule.27 The early twelfth ­century saw Barcelona’s annexation of the counties of Cerdanya and Besalù as well as the resolution of a succession 25. ​A prob­lem with this theory is that Catalonia was not unique. The inventory in Els castells catalans, 6 vols. in 7 parts (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1990–1993), is staggeringly large, but all of medieval Eu­rope, ­after all, was crowded with ­castles. The origin of “Castile” might also refer to its network of ­castles. 26. ​Flocel Sabaté, “Medieval Documentation and Archives in Catalonia ­after the 19th ­Century Upheavals,” in Identity and Loss of Historical Memory: The Destruction of Archives, ed. Igor Filippov and Flocel Sabaté (Bern: Peter Lang, 2017), 190–91. 27. ​Pierre Bonnassie, La Cata­logne du milieu du Xe à la fin du XIe siècle: Croissance et mutations d’une société, 2 vols. (Toulouse: Université de Toulouse-­Le Mirail, 1975–1976).

58 Chap t e r  2

crisis in the neighboring Kingdom of Aragon with the marriage of Count Ramon Berenguer IV to the child heiress Petronilla. While Ramon Berenguer kept his relatively modest comital title, his son Alfonso I (Alfonso II of Aragon) was both count of Barcelona and king of Aragon. The vari­ous units of his realm remained separate in their institutions and language. The prestige of the royal title meant that Aragon played an outsize role in proportion to its ­actual demographic, economic, and cultural strength. Economic and cultural preponderance remained with Barcelona, however, and the territories increasingly coming to be known as Catalonia. The expansion of Catalonia was not inevitable. The faltering taifa states w ­ ere replaced by power­ful reformist Islamic religious-­military movements, the Almoravids (1085–1146) and the Almohads (1146–1224), which for a time checked the Christian forces’ advance. Nevertheless, looked at from a chronological distance, the Catalan conquests can be seen as ongoing and divided into three parts. The first part was the seizure of territory south and west of Barcelona, beginning with Tarragona in 1118 and culminating in 1148–1149 with the fall of Tortosa near the delta of the Ebro River and of Lleida westward ­toward Aragon. By the second half of the twelfth ­century, Catalonia was conventionally defined as a territory bounded by Tortosa to the south, the fortress of Salses in Roussillon at the north, and the city of Lleida in the west.28 A second expansionist phase began with the taking of Islamic territories beyond Catalonia: the Balearic Islands (beginning with Mallorca, 1229) and the kingdom of Valencia (1238). In current parlance, t­ hese are referred to as països catalans, parts of greater Catalonia defined in linguistic terms even if, as in some of the regions of Valencia, most of the inhabitants speak Castilian. The designation països catalans is not universally accepted, and in Valencia and the Balearic Islands it is sometimes viewed as an expression of Catalan cultural imperialism. The medieval expression for this realm of several parts with dif­fer­ent laws and languages was the “Crown of Aragon,” communicating both the preeminence of the Aragonese ruler’s title and the multifarious nature of royal and comital authorities.29 The revolt of the Sicilians against French-­Angevin lordship in 1282, an event memorialized as the Sicilian Vespers (­because it started one after­noon, at the 28. ​Sabaté, “Catalan Identity Discourse,” 351. 29. ​J. Lee Shneidman, The Rise of the Aragonese-­Catalan Empire, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1970), provoked a counterargument by J. N. Hillgarth that ­there was no empire. J. N. Hillgarth, The Prob­lem of a Catalan Mediterranean Empire, 1229–1327 (supplement no. 8 to the En­glish Historical Review) (London: Longman, 1975). The term “empire” remains useful, however, as implied by the title of a collection of articles: The Crown of Aragon: A Singular Mediterranean Empire, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Leiden: Brill, 2017). In his introductory chapter, “The Crown of Aragon in Itself and Overseas: A Singular Mediterranean Empire,” Sabaté describes what made it “singular,” especially the scattered, diverse, and un­co­or­di­nated nature of its territories (1–36).

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

59

time of the sacred office of vespers), begins the third stage of involvement beyond the Catalan core territories. The Sicilian turmoil drew in Aragon-­Catalonia ­because of a dynastic claim based on marriage with the deposed German imperial f­amily, the Hohenstaufen, whom the Angevins had defeated in southern Italy. Sicily was strategically impor­tant, lying as it does in the center of the Mediterranean, and it also came to supply Barcelona with a large portion of its wheat. Possession of Sicily made it pos­si­ble to intimidate the North African Islamic states, trade with the central and eastern Mediterranean, and rival Venice, Genoa, and Marseille for control of the entire Mediterranean. For both defensive reasons and offensive opportunities, the centuries a­ fter the Sicilian Vespers saw the Catalans attempting to take over other Mediterranean islands, from Corsica to Castellorizo. A private com­pany of Catalan mercenaries seized the Duchy of Athens from the beleaguered Byzantine Empire in the early ­fourteenth c­ entury. ­Whether this constitutes an a­ ctual empire or was more an unwieldy set of factitious enterprises has been discussed for a long time, but certainly, the Catalans exerted influence on and extracted wealth from a far-­fl ung set of territories during the high and late ­Middle Ages. Catalonia was not spared the spate of fourteenth-­century disasters. It suffered greatly from the Black Death of 1348–1349. Peter the Ceremonious (r. 1336–1387) engaged in frequent wars with King Peter the Cruel of Castile, and violent persecutions of Jews culminated in savage peninsula-­wide pogroms in 1391. The kings of Aragon ­were heavi­ly invested in the ­Great Schism (1378– 1417), supporting the Avignonese pope Benedict XIII, a relation of Queen Maria de Luna, even a­ fter the resolution in f­ avor of a new pope at the Council of Constance. Difficult as this era was, it saw some of the grandest royal and civic building proj­ects. The awe-­inspiring church of Santa Maria del Mar in what was once the port neighborhood and the walls of Barcelona ­were constructed at this time, as was the cathedral of Girona. Many monastic cloisters ­were remodeled in the ­fourteenth ­century, and this period also represents the flowering of Gothic painting and sculpture. The death of the childless King Martin I the Humane in 1410 marked the end of the Catalan House of Barcelona. The succession of Ferdinand of Antequera, a member of the ruling Trastámara ­family of Castile, was the contested result of division among Catalonia, Valencia, and Aragon and a defeat for Jaume of Urgell, who might have been considered the legitimist candidate had f­amily and nationality mattered more than anything e­ lse. The Compromise of Caspe (1412) was seen by many l­ater historians as the first of a series of disasters leading to the eclipse of Catalonia and the rise of Castilian hegemony. Even at the time, the losing side—­partisans of the ill-­fated Count of Urgell, imprisoned

60 Chap t e r  2

during his last twenty years ­after a fruitless revolt in 1413—­lamented the elimination of Catalonia’s natu­ral lord in ­favor of “a strange new man.”30 The astute Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), ambassador to the Spanish court, said that Martin I was the last ruler of the Crown of Aragon to have been a Catalan, an observation not just about individual linguistic or cultural identity but about in whose interests the ruler exerted his power.31 Subsequent setbacks began with a civil war in two phases, lasting from 1462 ­until 1472 and 1484 to 1486, that combined a succession dispute, a peasant insurrection, intrigues involving the Trastámara ruler’s Castilian ambitions, and a revolt of nobles and townsmen against King John II.32 A. F. C. Ryder titled a book about this conflict The Wreck of Catalonia, seeing the domestic conflict as the key event in the long-­term undoing of what had formerly been a prosperous and well-­administered realm.33 The population of Barcelona, ravaged by the Black Death, recovered only partially and slowly. In 1700 the city had still not equaled even its post–­Black Death size in 1370, although, on the eve of a long and difficult war, it remained charming, dynamic, busy, and festive.34 It is a mark of the eighteenth-­century upswing that between 1714 and 1789 the number of Barcelona’s inhabitants tripled.35 The population of Catalonia doubled in that same period.36

Catalonia and Castile The Union of Crowns growing out of the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon with Isabella of Castile in 1469 looks, from the Castilian perspective, like the triumphant finale to the M ­ iddle Ages as it created a unified Spanish state and was followed in 1492 by the simultaneous conquest of Granada (the last Muslim part of the peninsula) and the first voyage of Columbus, establishing the 30. ​Bisson, Medieval Crown of Aragon, 36. 31. ​Sabaté, “Catalan Identity Discourse,” 359. 32. ​Although the beginnings of decline w ­ ere sometimes set e­ arlier, according to Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, for example, Pere el Ceremoniós i els inicis de la decadència política de Catalunya (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1972). Peter III, “the Ceremonious,” ruled from 1336 to 1387. 33. ​A. F. C. Ryder, The Wreck of Catalonia: Civil War in the Fifteenth ­Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 34. ​Albert Garcia Espuche, Barcelona 1700 (Barcelona: Editorial Empúries, 2010). 35. ​McDonogh, Good Families of Barcelona, 20. 36. ​Vilar, La Cata­logne dans l’Espagne moderne, 3:13–181. This has been updated by Llorenç Ferrer i Alòs, “Una revisió del creixement demogràfic de Catalunya en el segle XVIII a partir dels registres parroquials,” Estudis d’història agrària 20 (2007): 17–68; and by Carlos Martínez Shaw, “La Cataluña del siglo XVIII bajo el signo de la expansión,” in España en el siglo XVIII: Homenaje a Pierre Vilar, ed. Roberto Fernández (Barcelona: Crítica, 1983), 68–70.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

61

basis for a global Spanish empire. During that same fateful year, the Jewish inhabitants, or at least t­hose who refused conversion, w ­ ere ordered expelled, a mandate justly remembered as an atrocity but greeted at the time with Messianic enthusiasm by the Christian faithful encouraged by royal spokesmen. Catalan historiography has traditionally seen the birth of the early modern Spanish nation as a terrible setback, thereafter holding the businesslike and cultivated Catalans in thrall to Castile’s extravagant piety and militarism. Although Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia retained their representative and judicial institutions, t­ here was no doubt about which constituent of Spain was preponderant. Castilian hegemony was confirmed by the conquest of a colonial empire and the increasing involvement of Spain with Eu­ro­pean affairs, the latter vis­i­ble in the attempt of the Hapsburg kings Charles I and Phillip II to combat the Reformation as well as the Ottomans, to retain the Netherlands, and to defeat Catholic France and Protestant E ­ ngland. The overextension of Spain’s ambitions and the eventual exhaustion of its resources became evident in its failure to defeat Protestantism in northern Eu­rope and with the rebellion and in­de­pen­dence of the Netherlands in the late sixteenth ­century. The po­liti­cal and economic eclipse of Barcelona and Catalonia was matched by cultural marginalization. The wealth of the Indies was funneled through Cádiz and Seville while Barcelona fell ­behind Venice and even Valencia as a maritime trading power. Catalan textiles and banking w ­ ere weakened by competition from Genoa, encouraging self-­defeating protectionism. Catalan culture ebbed with the economy. As w ­ ill be discussed in the next chapter, while the Catalan language flourished in everyday use, t­ here is no doubt that Catalan lit­er­a­ture was enfeebled. The eventual defeat of Spain’s attempt to dominate Eu­rope was tied to the French victory in the Thirty Years’ War and a series of revolts against Castilian domination from Portugal to Catalonia. The Revolt of the Catalans or the War of the Reapers (guerra del segadors as it is known in Catalonia) began in the spring of 1640, a peasant as well as urban constitutional uprising that was put down by the royal authorities a­ fter twelve violent years.37 The national anthem of Catalonia, “Els Segadors,” composed in the 1890s as a tribute to this revolt, is another example of fervent commemoration of a historic catastrophe. Notwithstanding this defeat, Catalonia retained its distinct governmental institutions, particularly the Generalitat, a committee drawn from the three parliamentary estates (clergy, nobility, and common p­ eople). The Generalitat collected taxes and ensured that royal officials observed the constitutions of Catalonia, a 37. ​J. H. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain, 1598–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).

62 Chap t e r  2

set of laws and procedures that ­limited the discretionary power of the central authority.38 In addition, the city of Barcelona kept its self-­governing rights as first codified in a royal decree of 1283, known from its first words as Recognoverunt proceres. Nevertheless, the mid-­seventeenth ­century can be considered the postmedieval low point of Catalonia’s fortunes, especially for Barcelona. It lost much of its population, and economic activity declined owing to competition with French and Italian merchants, food supply prob­lems, and disease.39 The countryside, too, was devastated, torn apart in the de­cades before the uprising of 1640 by bandit gangs.40 At times t­ hese groups coalesced as politico-­ social factions, Nyerros versus Cadells, the former taking their name from a ­castle named Nyer, and the latter from a noble ­family. The factions traced their origins back to the thirteenth ­century, and in theory, the Nyerros represented the interests of the rural aristocracy, whereas the Cadells ­were for the peasants. However, the division was more an expression of feuding and settling scores rather than a social conflict. A ­ fter 1640, the Nyerro/Cadell legacy was that of re­sis­tance to authority irrespective of faction, resembling other local rebellions against injustice and oppression.41 Despite the near anarchy of some rural districts, a revival of the Catalan economy was underway at the end of the seventeenth c­ entury, aided by increased agricultural and small-­scale trade activity in the more prosperous rural regions (i.e., not the mountains) and smaller port towns.42 The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) was, to understate the situation, a setback to that tentative prosperity. The Bourbon triumph has been presented dramatically (in my opinion melodramatically) as “the end of the Catalan nation.”43 Some Catalan historians have viewed the Succession War as a civil conflict between Castile, supporting the Bourbon candidate Philip V, and the Crown of Aragon, in ­favor of Archduke Charles. This, however, focuses on merely one 38. ​On the nature of public law in Catalonia, see Victor Ferro, El dret públic català. Les institucions a Catalunya fins al Decret de Nova Planta (Vic: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1987). 39. ​James S. Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490–1714 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986), 11–23. 40. ​Joan Reglà i Campistol, El bandolerisme català del barroc (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1966); Xavier Torres i Sans, “El bandolerisme català del Barroc: ‘Fill de la misèria’ o de la benestança?,” in El barroc català: Actes de les jornades celebrades a Girona els dies 17, 18 i 19 de desembre de 1987, ed. Albert Rossich and August Rafanell (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1989), 47–60. 41. ​Xavier Torres i Sans, Nyerros i Cadells: Bàndols i bandolerisme a la Catalunya moderna (1590–1640) (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1994). For a larger and l­ater context, see Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963). 42. ​Pedro Molas Ribalta, El comerç i estructura social a Catalunya i València als segles XVII i XVIII (Barcelona: Curial, 1977), 47–69. 43. ​Salvador Sanpere y Miquel, Fin de la nación catalana (Barcelona: L’Avenç, 1905).

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

63

aspect of what amounted to the first European-­generated world war, most of whose ­great b­ attles (Blenheim, Ramillies, Malplaquet) took place outside Spain, and whose theaters of b­ attle extended to Hungary, Italy, Bavaria, and the New World. Its origins lay in fears that if Spain w ­ ere ruled by the grand­son of Louis XIV, French sway over Eu­rope and overseas colonies would be irresistible.44 This was an eminently predictable war. The last Hapsburg ruler, Charles II (1665–1700), was sickly and known to be incapable of fathering ­children. He managed to survive longer than expected, so the crisis at his death was anticipated and hence avoidable: “Of no man is it more true to say that in his beginning was his end; from the day of his birth, they ­were waiting for his death.”45 In 1697, the Treaty of Ryswick ended the Nine Years’ War fought between France, on the one hand, and the ­Grand Alliance of ­England, Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria, on the other. Ryswick, more a truce than a treaty, checked French ambitions in the Low Countries and Germany but left unresolved the question of Spanish succession. The temporary peace ended when Charles II fi­nally died on November 1, 1700. The two claimants to his throne, the Bourbon duke Philip of Anjou and the Hapsburg archduke Charles, w ­ ere both descendants of King Philip IV of Spain. In his ­will, Charles II had declared Philip his heir, but this was resisted by the same ­Grand Alliance that had fought the Nine Years’ War and for the same reason: the fear of French domination.46 The war should be understood partly as a dynastic conflict, a continuation of the century-­long ­battles between Hapsburg and Bourbon. It was also a strug­gle between the En­glish and the French over naval and colonial supremacy with a latent conflict between nominal allies, the ascending power of E ­ ngland, and the ultimately declining sway of the Dutch. Despite retrospective efforts in Spain to portray the war as an ideological confrontation between an absolutist Bourbon program and a constitutionalist Hapsburg tendency, neither side had a consistent policy with regard to governing in general and dealing with Catalonia’s historical privileges in par­tic­u­lar. Some Catalan historians have argued that had the Austrians won, Catalonia would have retained its parliamentary institutions, but 44. ​On the war, see Henry Kamen, The War of Succession in Spain, 1700–1715 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969); La Guerra de Sucesión en España y la batalla de Almansa. Europa en la encrucijada, ed. Francisco García González (Madrid: Silex, 2009); Joaquim Albareda i Salvadó, La Guerra de Sucesión de España (1700–1714) (Barcelona: Crítica, 2010). On Catalonia and the Crown of Aragon, see Francisco Javier Palao Gil, “The Crown of Aragon in the War of the Spanish Succession,” in Britain, Spain and the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713–2013, ed. Trevor J. Dadson and J. H. Elliott (London: Routledge, 2014), 18–38. On approaches to the history of the conflict, see David García Hernán, “La Guerra de Sucesión en España: Luces y sombras en la historiografía ­actual,” in 1714: Cataluña en la España del siglo XVIII, 71–93. 45. ​John Langond-­Davies, Carlos: The King Who Would Not Die (New York: Prentice Hall, 1963), 3. 46. ​On Charles II and the lead-up to the war, see Luis Ribot, “El dictamen ‘más firme a la seguridad de mantener inseparables los reinos de mi corona’. La sucesión de Carlos II,” in 1714: Cataluña en la España del siglo XVIII, 21–43.

64 Chap t e r  2

this minimizes the Hapsburg attachment to the same princi­ples of absolutism as the Bourbons.47 In the early years of the war, the Austrians ­were exalted in Catalonia as a bulwark against French (Bourbon) expansionism. ­After 1707, the ­enemy was Castile with the Hapsburgs cast in the unlikely role of defenders of a Catalan republic.48 At first, however, the Bourbon candidate was acclaimed in Catalonia. Philip V was feted on his arrival in Barcelona in 1701 where he presided over the first parliament (Corts) of the Crown of Aragon to be summoned in over a c­ entury. ­There the king solemnly confirmed the constitutional privileges of Catalonia. Ironically, in view of what was to come, the definitive edition of Catalonia’s customary laws and legislation was issued (in Catalan) ­toward the end of the honeymoon period between the Bourbon claimant and Catalonia.49 A l­ittle over a de­cade ­later, Philip would abolish the liberties and procedures enshrined in that collection. In 1705, the preponderant po­liti­cal classes of Catalonia switched to the Austrian side. Reasons for this fateful decision included a recollection of French mistreatment during the Nine Years’ War (of par­tic­u­lar importance to the clergy and peasantry but also reflecting Barcelona’s siege in 1697), the unpop­ u­lar and intransigent administration of the viceroy Francisco Antonio Fernández de Velasco, and the blandishments of the renewed G ­ rand Alliance that offered expanded commercial access to connect Catalonia to profitable ventures beyond the Mediterranean.50 What­ever the under­lying reason for this shift of loyalty, once it was de­cided, the majority of Catalans remained faithful, foolishly so, to the losing Austrian cause. Catalonia was never united in embracing the Hapsburgs. Some small towns of the pre-­Pyrenees foothills such as Ripoll, Manlleu, and Berga as well as in the plains of western Catalonia (the town of Cervera, for example) ­were steadfast supporters of Philip V. Even Barcelona had Bourbon partisans, known as felipistas or botiflers, who fled the city when it was taken by Austrian 47. ​Josep Fontana, “La Guerra de Successió i les Constitucions de Catalunya: Una proposta interpretativa,” in Del patriotisme al catalanisme: Societat i política (segles XVI–­XIX), ed. Joaquim Albareda (Vic: Eumo, 2001), 13–30; Antoni Simon i Tarrés, Construccions politiques i identitats nacionals: Catalunya i els origins de l’estat modern Espanyol (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2005), 429. 48. ​Ricardo García Cárcel, “El austriacismo: Representación y realidad,” in Actes del Congrés “L’aposta catalana a la Guerra de Successió (1705–1707)” (Barcelona: Museu d’Histôria de Catalunya, 2007), 165–75. 49. ​ Constitutións y altres drets de Cathalunya compilats en virtut del capitol de Cort LXXXII de las Corts per la S.C.Y.R. Majestat del Rey Don Philip IV nostre Senyor celebradas en la Ciutat de Barcelona, any MDCCII (Barcelona: Joan Pau Marti y Joseph Llopis Estampers, 1704). 50. ​J. H. Elliott, Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 78–88.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

65

forces in 1705.51 For the majority of Catalans, however, devotion to the Austrians at the latter stages of the war might be considered both admirable and quixotic.52 At any rate, the Hapsburg candidate, Archduke Charles, withdrew his claim to the Spanish crown ­after the death of his ­brother Emperor Joseph I and Charles’s election to succeed him in 1711. This mollified E ­ ngland and the Netherlands, which w ­ ere no more willing to see Spain u ­ nder the same ruler as Austria and the Holy Roman Empire than to have a common king of France and Spain. War fatigue brought France and the opposing alliance closer to an agreement as eventually embodied by the treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt, and Baden. Deserted by their former Eu­ro­pean allies and most of the nobility and clergy, the ­people of Barcelona nevertheless held out against the forces of Philip V u ­ ntil the ­bitter end, September 11, 1714. For the Spanish state, the terms of the 1714 peace treaties ­were better than might have been expected. Philip V was compelled to renounce any claim to rule France, and so Spain’s in­de­pen­dence from French interests was confirmed. Designs for partitioning peninsular Spain had come to naught, except that Britain retained its occupation of Gibraltar and Menorca. Although Spanish possessions in Italy ­were ceded to Austria and Savoy, some ­were ­later retaken. The Spanish Netherlands became the Austrian Netherlands, but the excision of its extra-­Iberian Eu­ro­pean possessions was perhaps favorable to an overextended Spanish monarchy, as was the retention of Spain’s colonial empire, a source of profit during the eigh­teenth ­century. ­After his difficult victory, King Philip V instituted punitive mea­sures, although not immediately. It took three years from the fall of Barcelona to promulgate the Nueva Planta legislation that abolished most of Catalonia’s autonomous institutions, and another year for the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the university system to be announced. Philip made no secret of his anger and contempt ­toward the Catalans, but his chronic disabilities diminished the effect of his intentions over his long reign. During the thirty years between his victory in the Succession War and his death in 1746, the king was afflicted by recurring bouts of depression, and even when relatively well, he paid scant attention to m ­ atters of state. Queen Elizabeth Farnese and a series of adventurers who had her ear directed a haphazard 51. ​Ricardo García Cárcel, “La Guerra de Sucesión, una guerra poliédrica,” in 1714: Cataluña en la España del siglo XVIII, 50–51. 52. ​Catalan grievances and calls for re­sis­tance, especially at the final stage of the war, are edited and commented on in Escrits polítics del segle XVIII, vol. 1, ed. Joaquim Albareda and Josep M. Torras i Ribé (Vic: Eumo, 1996).

66 Chap t e r  2

and costly foreign policy centered on Italy to the neglect of improving the administration of Spain itself.53 The Spanish king’s grand­father Louis XIV had counseled him in the aftermath of the Bourbon victory at Almansa (1707) to deal harshly with Aragon and Valencia, but at the end of the war recommended restraint t­ oward the Catalans, warning of their ineradicable resentment. For other advisers, however, the Catalans’ stubbornness showed ­there was ­little point to preserving their institutions, for their ingratitude and subversion rendered useless any conciliatory gestures or negotiations. The peace agreement between Spain and the United Kingdom signed at Utrecht in July 1713 stated that the Catalans should receive amnesty and retain their “properties and honor.” Expressing a degree of remorse over the “case of the Catalans,” the British government managed to secure from King Philip the continuation of Catalonia’s private l­egal customs and procedures (­those governing inheritance, marriage, property, and other ­matters not touching the state).54 Notwithstanding such minor concessions, the implementation of Nueva Planta was intended to unify Spain u ­ nder one efficient government and to punish Catalonia by eradicating ­those institutions and immunities that had perpetuated its presumptuous intransigence. An occupying army of twenty to thirty thousand took up residence, and, as mentioned previously, the Ciutadella was built to intimidate the restive city of Barcelona. The Catalan parliament (Corts) and its permanent del­e­ga­tion, the Diputació de la Generalitat, ­were abolished as was Barcelona’s municipal council, the Consell de Cent. The medieval provinces (vegueries) ­were replaced by an arbitrarily drawn, ahistorical system of delegated subdivisions (corregimientos). A heavy tax (catasto) was levied on property, income, and businesses (initially it was prob­ably twice the burden paid by Castilians).55 A royal capitán general was appointed to rule in a threefold capacity: as the king’s representative, military commander, and governor of Catalonia. His power was considerably greater than that of the former viceroys, who had seldom shown up in Barcelona, except for ceremonial occasions.56 The subregional corregidores ­were usually military officers and almost always Castilian. The higher levels of the church hierarchy ­were also Castilianized. The monarch imposed Spanish as the language of administration, although a more thorough effort to limit the use of Catalan in public discourse would occur only ­later in the c­ entury. The five Catalan universities ­were closed, including the one in Barcelona, the largest and most renowned, and a new one was created at Cervera, a small and not especially prosperous town in the remote interior. 53. ​Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 67–115. 54. ​Palao Gil, “Crown of Aragon,” 32–37. 55. ​Elliott, Scots and Catalans, 94–95. 56. ​Joan Mercader, Els capitans generals (segle XVIII) (Barcelona: Teide, 1957), especially 25–54.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

67

The consensus among historians outside of Spain has tended to regard the Bourbon period as prosperous when the nation’s international position and prestige ­were restored. ­These scholars give credit to the monarchs and their servants. The distinguished American historian Richard Herr, for example, summed up the reigns of Philip V, Ferdinand VI, and Charles III as eighty-­eight years of “remarkable moral and material pro­g ress.”57 Catalan historiography, not surprisingly, has not usually embraced a similarly optimistic attitude. A current of Catalan learned opinion regards the period ­after Nueva Planta as a harsh, unmitigated, if fi­nally unsuccessful, repression of Catalan identity.58 Beginning in the late eigh­teenth ­century, however, it was increasingly recognized that if the era of Bourbon absolutism was one of po­liti­cal and cultural decline for Catalonia, it also saw accelerating prosperity. The rulers’ desire to harness the Catalans’ energy in order to achieve that prosperity can be interpreted in terms of the Eu­ro­pean phenomenon of “enlightened despotism” by which monarchs such as the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II or Peter the G ­ reat of Rus­sia modernized their realms by investment in economic growth, infrastructure (such as better roads, ports, and canals), and po­liti­cal unification. One has to distinguish, however, between programs of reform and the actions and intentions of the rulers. Charles III, typified as a progressive absolutist, became considerably more mistrustful of change by the mid-1770s and even before then did not go so far as to embrace the scientific rationalism of would-be philosophes.59 Joaquim Albareda makes a case for using the formula “reformist absolutism” rather than “enlightened despotism” to describe Spanish progressive ideas that included what might be considered oppressive: controlling the church and limiting its allegiance to outside forces (Rome), imposing a military occupation, instituting uniform laws and administrative structures, closing the subversive University of Barcelona to centralize all higher education in provincial Cervera, and prohibiting the use of Catalan for official documents and proceedings.60 Certain policies of the Bourbon kings did benefit Catalonia, notably protectionism that nurtured Catalan manufacturing, particularly woolen, silk, and 57. ​Richard Herr, The Eigh­teenth ­Century Revolution in Spain (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1958), 11. 58. ​Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, Repressió borbònica i resistència identitària a la Catalunya del segle XVIII (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2020); Josep M. Torras i Ribé, Misèria, poder i corrupció a la Catalunya borbònica (1714–1808) (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2020); Torras i Ribé, introduction to Escrits polítics del segle XVIII, ed. Eva Serra, vol. 2 (Vic: Eumo, 1996), 5–35. 59. ​Francisco Sánchez-­Blanco, El absolutismo y las Luces en el reinado de Carlos III (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2002). 60. ​Joaquim Albareda Salvadó, “La Catalunya il·lustrada del segle XVIII,” Ausa 18, no. 143 (1999): 520.

68 Chap t e r  2

cotton textiles, complemented by the abolition of interior customs duties; granting permission in 1758 to form commercial associations, notably the Real Junta Par­tic­u­lar de Comercio in Barcelona (usually referred to by its shortened Catalan name, the Junta de Comerç); and fi­nally, in 1778, allowing Barcelona direct trade access to transatlantic colonies. In the late eigh­teenth ­century, Catalonia produced commodities such as printed cotton cloth (known as “indianes”), leather goods, fabricated metal objects, and fortified wine (brandy) and exported them to other parts of Spain, to its American colonies, and to foreign countries. The latter product was shipped in such large quantities that the world price was set by the market in the other­wise unprepossessing town of Reus (not far from Tarragona; the comarca of Baix Camp).61 Catalonia also had an extensive shipbuilding industry. In­de­pen­dent of the intentions or policies of the Bourbon rulers, Catalonia in the eigh­teenth c­ entury experienced population growth, economic resurgence, po­liti­cal stability, and, notwithstanding the use of the term “decadència,” the advancement of culture.62 The prosperity of Catalonia pre­sents a paradox of po­liti­cal repression and economic expansion that troubled Catalan observers. An early nineteenth-­century article in the Barcelona periodical El Vapor reflects a common attitude that the repressive government a­ fter 1714 “left us at least the recompense of work and the glory of rescuing the entire Realm from misery.”63 Similarly, ­later in the ­century the historian Antoni Aulèstia i Pijoan remarked: “the reigns of Ferdinand VI and Charles III began to quench the po­liti­cal fire, and from that point, our p­ eople satisfied themselves with seeking consolation in work, so wisely encouraged by ­those monarchs.”64 The twentieth-­century historian Ferran Soldev­ila offers a similar analy­sis, noting that Catalans ­were willing to accept the privation of po­liti­cal liberty—­that they formed a mere province of the Spanish crown—­but increasing wealth eventually brought about the awakening of a sense of national spirit in the Renaixença.65 Historians in more recent years have sometimes considered the success of Catalan re­sis­tance to be more the result of central government ineptitude than 61. ​Raymond Carr, Spain 1808–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 22. Generally, Francesc Valls Junyent, La Catalunya atlántica: Aiguardent i teixits a l’arrencada industrial catalana (Vic: Eumo, 2004). 62. ​Martínez Shaw, “La Cataluña del siglo XVIII bajo el signo de la expansion.” 63. ​Joan-­Lluís Marfany, Nacionalisme espanyol i catalanitat (1789–1859) (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2017), 81. 64. ​As cited in Ramon Grau i Fernández, Antoni de Capmany i la renovació de l’historicisme polític català (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2006), 17: “Los regnats de Fernando VI y Carles III acabaren d’apagar lo foch polític, y allavors nostre poble s’fanyà en buscar un consol en lo treball tan sàbiament fomentat per aquells monarques.” 65. ​Marfany, Nacionalisme espanyol i catalanitat, 82–83.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

69

of any deliberate aims on the part of the royal court. In any event, according to a prevailing consensus, Catalans never accepted marginalization or the effacement of their distinction.66 Certainly, the pace of Catalan entrepreneurial expansion was not solely ­because of enlightened Bourbon policymakers but rather reflected the initiatives of peasants, artisans, and merchants released from the frequent warfare of the previous c­ entury and able to exploit a countryside less troubled by banditry and feuding. Enric Moreu-­Rey suggested a way out of the contradiction between cultural and po­liti­cal repression and economic efflorescence by emphasizing both the constructive policies of the Bourbon administrators during the mid-­ eighteenth c­ entury and the initiatives of the Catalans, who, far from being po­liti­cally passive, or­ga­nized opposition to centralized oppression while taking advantage of such openings as the grudgingly enlightened monarchy allowed.67 Ernest Lluch distinguished dif­fer­ent periods and changing attitudes during the era of Bourbon absolutism: first, the per­sis­tence of a Catalan pro-­ Austrian agenda into the 1740s, followed by the reception of economic and po­liti­cal ideas from France and Germany, remonstrances with the rulers, and a program of improvement taking advantage of forward-­looking policies, particularly ­under King Charles III (r. 1759–1788).68 Key moments include an official pre­sen­ta­tion of grievances in 1760 (in Catalan, Memorial de greuges; in Castilian, Memorial de agravios) by representatives of Barcelona, Saragossa, Valencia, and the city of Majorca at the Cortes summoned by the newly crowned Charles III.69 The complaints focused on the domination of Castilians in the lands of the former Crown of Aragon and the insufficient repre­sen­ta­tion of delegates from t­ hese territories in the makeup of the Cortes. They called for the restoration of municipal governments and other institutions abolished by Nueva Planta. In the course of denouncing the imposition of foreign (i.e., Castilian) officials, the delegates implicitly defended the importance and status of the Catalan language. The Castilians’ ignorance of Catalan meant that they w ­ ere unable to effectively administer the territories committed to them. Another milestone was the publication in 1768 of Francesc Romà i Rossell’s Los señales de la felicidad de España (The signs of the happiness of Spain), the 66. ​Sobrequés i Callicó, Repressió borbònica. 67. ​Enric Moreu-­Rey, El pensament il·lustrat a Catalunya (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1980). 68. ​Ernest Lluch, La Catalunya vençuda del segle XVIII: Foscors i clarors de la Il·lustració (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1996), especially 55–119. 69. ​Text in Escrits polítics del segle XVIII, ed. Joaquim Albareda and Josep M. Torras i Ribé, 2:91– 113. See Enric Moreu-­Rey, El “Memorial de Greuges” de 1760 (Barcelona: Mediterànnia, 1968).

70 Chap t e r  2

first treatise since the early eigh­teenth c­ entury by a Catalan to offer an agenda for po­liti­cal and economic reform.70 His work reflects the hopes of Catalan intellectuals during the early years of Charles III that an “absolute, moderate, and enlightened” royal government would bring about drastic change for the better. In po­liti­cal terms, Romà hoped for the amelioration of Catalonia’s defeat in 1714 along the lines of Empress Maria Theresa’s irenic attitude t­ oward Hungary. Romà emphasized the Catalans’ energy and utility to Spain as merchants and workers. He wrote a favorable account of Barcelona’s guilds in 1767, a year before Los señales de la felicidad. Following the mercantilist theories of Jakob Friedrich von Bielefeld and Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, advisers to King Frederick the ­Great of Prus­sia, Romà advocated state intervention to encourage production and the demand for what was being produced, including a prominent role for the military. The army’s responsibility to aid construction proj­ects and economic growth was a feature of the German cameralist theory of state administration of economic policy intended to mobilize a productive population and reinforce the aims of the state.71 The perception of an opening in the Bourbon system for constructive reforms was not completely misplaced. ­Under Charles III, mea­sures w ­ ere undertaken to improve tax collection and the ­r unning of the army, aid public education, and modernize Spain in accordance with Enlightenment princi­ples. ­Those princi­ples included what was perceived as reining in the wealth and po­ liti­cal pretensions of the church. In January 1767, the king ordered the expulsion of the Jesuit Order (consisting of about three thousand members) and confiscation of their properties, which included hundreds of secondary and higher education institutions. Portugal in 1759 and France in 1762 had already suppressed the Jesuits, but in this instance, the king’s dislike of the order was paramount, along with a general intolerance of any power­f ul interests with foreign connections. The official reason for the order’s suppression was its supposed encouragement of the Motín de Esquilache (the Esquilache Mutiny) in 1766, a revolt in Madrid against new clothing regulations prohibiting long capes and broad-­ brimmed hats. ­These decrees ­were enacted at the instigation of the king’s Sicilian-­born secretary of state for war and finance, Leopoldo de Gregorio, Marquis of Squillace (rendered in Spanish as Esquilache). The ordinances w ­ ere 70. ​Francisco Romà y Rossell, Las señales de la felicidad de España y medios de hacerlas eficaces (Madrid: Antonio Muñoz del Valle, 1768). See Lluch, La Catalunya vençuda, 179–206; and Ernest Lluch, El pensament econòmic a Catalunya (1760–1840): Els orígens ideològics del protectionisme i la presa de consciència de la burgesia catalana (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1973), 11–33. 71. ​Marc Raeff, The Well-­Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Rus­sia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1983).

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

71

for the purpose of aiding law and order (capes ­were good for hiding weapons, and hats concealed the wearer’s face) but also intended to modernize (i.e., make more French) the standard kind of clothing. Stirred up by this meddling, but also by an unsupportable rise in the price of bread, a mob sacked the Esquilache palace. The king was forced to depart Madrid to take refuge at the palace of Aranjuez. He dismissed Esquilache but used the riots as an opportunity to expel the Jesuits, accusing them of fomenting the “mutiny.” The expulsion decree was justified as a mea­sure to curb priestly influence over secular affairs and Jesuits’ loyalty to Rome.72 More absolutist centralizer than administrative or economic reformer, Charles III nevertheless put into effect policies that aided the material advancement of Catalonia. This work was entrusted to royal appointees, notably from 1742 to 1767 (with an interruption between 1746 and 1749) the capitán general Santiago Miguel de Guzmán, second marquis de la Mina, who supervised the construction of the Barceloneta neighborhood to h ­ ouse fishermen, sailors, and o ­ thers associated with the port, in some mea­sure compensating for the destruction of the Ribera neighborhood in the aftermath of the Succession War. Mina also undertook to improve the lighting of Barcelona’s streets and repair the roads throughout the countryside.73 This notion of centrally dictated beneficence was belied by an uprising in 1773, directed against military conscription and the quartering of troops in ­house­holds. Another sign of the burden of government was the 1768 royal ordinance that reduced still further the position of the Catalan language by requiring all education to be given in Castilian. Although presented as a reform unifying the country, this was essentially an expression of rationalized forced conformity, of despotism with a minimum of enlightenment.

Catalonia and the Image of Spain What­ever the a­ ctual effects of Enlightened rulership and economic expansion, Spain was regarded from outside its frontiers as a proud, retrograde, superstitious nation retaining the remnants of a world empire but no longer playing a major part in the diplomatic concert of Eu­rope. The “decline of Spain” has been a perennial preoccupation of historians. One of the most impor­tant works on the history of Catalonia, The Revolt of the Catalans, by the late Sir 72. ​Constancio Eguia Ruiz, Los jesuítas y el Motín de Esquilache (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1947); Laura Rodríguez, “The Spanish Riots of 1766,” Past & Pre­sent 59 (1973): 117–46; Sánchez-­Blanco, El absolutismo y las Luces, 59–78. 73. ​Mercader, Els capitans generals, 104–6.

72 Chap t e r  2

John Elliott is subtitled “A Study in the Decline of Spain.” How could the sixteenth ­century’s greatest Eu­ro­pean power, master of more than half the New World, become, by 1700, an economic backwater, victimized, or marginated by ­Great Power politics? The northern Netherlands was definitively lost in 1648, Jamaica was taken by ­England in 1655, northeastern parts of Catalonia ­were ceded to France by the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, western Hispaniola (the f­ uture Haiti) was lost to the French in 1664, and Portugal regained its in­de­pen­dence in 1668.74 The defeat of Spain’s overweening ambitions has been attributed to religious fanat­i­cism, manifested by the expulsion of productive populations of Jews and Muslims, and the power of the Inquisition. It has also been blamed on a putative Castilian contempt for productive ­labor and preference for fighting, honor, self-­mortification, or frivolity.75 The “Black Legend” (leyenda negra) is how this collection of often luridly negative images of Spain is described, first in­ven­ted by Protestants and followed by Enlightenment thinkers. ­These images ­were reinforced by the disturbing portrayals of war and religious oppression by Francisco Goya and Romantic-­era tales of Gothic imagination such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The French Enlightenment more dispassionately outlined what would become a foreign consensus, that Spain was an example of wasteful misuse of resources, as Montesquieu, in par­tic­u­lar, observed in his Persian Letters (1721), distinguishing between fictitious wealth (accidental possession of gold) and the real prosperity that comes from a hardworking, thrifty population.76 In the nineteenth-­century United States, Spain’s history was used to exhibit the dangers of Catholic superstition and imperial arrogance. The first American historian of Spain, W. H. Prescott (1796–1859), saw similarities between his own country and late medieval Spain, both on the verge of ­great conquests. Prescott asserted that Spain provided a lesson to the United States by way of a negative example.77 74. ​Earl J. Hamilton, “The Decline of Spain,” Economic History Review, 1st. ser., 8 (1938–1939): 168–79; J. H. Elliott, “The Decline of Spain,” Past & Pre­sent 20 (November 1961): 52–75. Henry Kamen, “The Decline of Spain, a Historical Myth?,” Past & Pre­sent 81 (November 1978): 24–50, questions the validity of this established terminology. 75. ​Ricardo García Cárcel, La leyenda negra: Historia y opinión (Madrid: Alianza, 1992); Charles Gibson, The Black Legend: Anti-­Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New (New York: Knopf, 1971); J.  N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700: The Formation of a Myth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 76. ​Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes (Paris: Pierre Marteau, 1721), 24, 75, 108. See Guillaume Barrera, “Spain,” in Dictionnaire Montesquieu, ed. Catherine Volpilhac-­Auger, http://­dictionnaire​-­montesquieu​ .­ens​-­lyon​.­fr​/­en​/­home​/­. Accessed February 4, 2023. 77. ​Richard Kagan, “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain,” American Historical Review 101 (1996): 423–46.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

73

Beginning in the early seventeenth ­century, Spanish intellectuals themselves ­ ere aware of this apparent decline. Policy-­minded observers known as arbiw tristas devised proj­ects and recommendations to reform what they saw as a society debilitated by unproductive wealth, absentee landholding, and luxury. All historical eras produce moralists urging a return to the upright and frugal values of the past, but the seventeenth-­century arbitristas identified specific economic and social f­ actors of deterioration such as the chronic lack of state funds, depopulation (especially the desertion of the countryside), the domination of trade by foreign merchants, and the absence of local enterprise. Between 1598 and 1665, at least 165 published reformist economic tracts ­were printed.78 Some of the perceived obstacles to pro­g ress ­were attitudes and institutions considered relics of the medieval past, notably popu­lar superstition encouraged by the church. Credulity and ignorance bolstered the reactionary sway of the church, regarded by po­liti­cal economists as both the repressor of innovation (most obvious in the per­sis­tent power of the Inquisition) and the inefficient holder of poorly exploited agricultural lands. Some culpability was allocated to self-­defeating government policies that discriminated against the potentially most productive segments of society, such as the long-­standing prohibition on the Mediterranean ports (i.e., in Catalonia and Valencia) engaging in trade with the Spanish colonies of the New World. Furthermore, what would now be called the backward infrastructure of Spain—­its primitive roads and stagnant harbors—­impeded economic development. In addition to ­these practical difficulties was the imputed character of the Spanish population, reputed to despise science, thrift, and economic activity in ­favor of war and honor on the part of the aristocracy and idleness on the part of the poor. In his Persian Letters, Montesquieu portrays the Spanish as having rapidly achieved an empire, exterminated the subjugated New World inhabitants, and then dissipated their undeserved wealth, leaving their homeland desolate and poor. All that remained of Spain’s previous grandeur was its inhabitants’ invincible arrogance.79 At the same time, the reign of superstition and religious intolerance, symbolized by the power of the Inquisition, contributed to the torpor and misery of Spain.80 The distinction between genuine prosperity, which stems from the industriousness of the p­ eople, and false or short-­lived riches was reiterated by economic theorists of the eigh­teenth ­century, concerned as they w ­ ere with what ­factors make some nations prosperous and ­others impoverished. More than a 78. ​J. H. Elliott, “Self-­Perception and Decline in Early Seventeenth-­Century Spain,” Past & Pre­sent 74 (February 1977): 41–61. 79. ​Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes, nos. 122, 136. 80. ​Herr, Eigh­teenth ­Century Revolution, 58.

74 Chap t e r  2

c­ entury before Montesquieu, the arbitrsita Martín González de Cellorigo (1570–1630) lamented that the condition of Spain was that nobody works: the rich enjoy dissipated leisure while the poor beg for alms, leaving few p­ eople of the middling sort “whom neither wealth nor poverty prevents from pursuing the rightful kind of business enjoined by Natu­ral Law.”81 In the late eigh­ teenth ­century, the Catalans portrayed themselves as exemplars of this middling sort. Although held back by Castilian fecklessness, they worked diligently and created wealth. According to the most optimistic scenario, the Catalans would lead (or drag) Spain into modernity and parity with Enlightenment Eu­rope.

Capmany and Caresmar Catalan po­liti­cal and historical advocates of Enlightenment pro­gress acknowledged the unfavorable trajectory of Spain’s economic history, though they denied it had anything to do with some fundamental national character flaw. The leading Catalan social observer and reformer, Antoni de Capmany i de Montpalau (1742–1813), lamented the condition of Spain before 1714, likening it to “a corpse, without spirit or strength to feel its own debility.”82 He blamed this condition on the effects of wars and rebellions during the seventeenth ­century, however, rather than innate Spanish temperament.83 While endorsing Montesquieu and Voltaire’s praise of work and commerce, Capmany and other Peninsular po­liti­cal economists active in the late eigh­teenth ­century rejected their belief that Spain historically and culturally lacked diligence, thrift, or inclination t­ oward productive l­abor. Antoni de Capmany devoted his long ­career as a writer and politician to exalting the role of Catalan merchants, artisans, and workers, particularly the ordinary inhabitants of Barcelona.84 His writings are significant not only for their insight and judgment but also for their long view of economic conditions, one that incorporates a historical sensibility and historical evidence. 81. ​Quoted in Elliott, “Decline of Spain,” 66. 82. ​Cited by Kamen, “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?,” 25. Capmany was flattering the reigning dynasty, but he was also convinced, more than Caresmar, that t­ here had been substantial recent pro­g ress. 83. ​He refers to “causas accidentales y pasajeras” for the retrocession of the Catalan economy. Francisco José Fernández de la Cigoña and Estanislao Cantero Núñez, Antonio de Capmany (1742– 1813): Pensamiento, obra histórica, política y jurídica (Madrid: Fundación Francisco Elías de Tejada y Erasmo Percopo, 1993), 63. 84. ​On Capmany and his importance, see Pierre Vilar, “Capmany i el naixement del mètode històric,” in Assaigs sobre la Catalunya del segle XVIII, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Curial, 1979), 83–90 (the essay was originally published in French in 1933); Lluch, El pensament econòmic, 35–54; Grau, Antoni de Capmany i la renovació, 35–55; Fernández de la Cigoña and Cantero Núñez, Antonio de Capmany.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

75

Caresmar provided much of the background for Capmany’s analy­sis and program of improvement. Both Caresmar and Capmany emphasized the industriousness of the Catalans, which, if properly encouraged by state policies, could transform Spain. Pace Montesquieu, the nation’s prob­lems ­were not ingrained but rather remediable. While he believed in the role of the state, Capmany rejected the common praise of enlightened centralization as the sole motor for economic growth. The sovereign might establish factories and other centers of enterprise, but only p­ eople of the proper temperament would render them productive.85 Capmany offered a program of reform based not on centralized commands but rather on economic opportunity. The government tended to direct its policies of economic enhancement to rural areas in keeping with the recommendations of the minister of the trea­sury, Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, as laid out in his Discurso sobre el fomento de la industria popu­lar (Discourse on the promotion of popu­lar industry) of 1774. To some extent, it was against this program of dispersed industrialization that Capmany directed his Memorias históricas sobre la marina, comercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona (Historical notes on the shipping, commerce, and arts of the ancient city of Barcelona), published in 1779.86 ­Here Capmany defended the artisans and guilds of Barcelona that Campomanes and other royal officials tended to regard as subversive and self-­interested. Although involved in this effort, Caresmar remained more convinced than Capmany that the countryside was the most promising locus of pro­g ress.87 This was in keeping with the French physiocrats’ emphasis on agriculture as the fundamental basis of national wealth, though the French teachings emphasized the efficient productivity of large units rather than the enterprise of peasant ­family farms. A perceptive and stylish writer about society, Capmany resided for most of his adult life in Madrid, a city he loved (much to the annoyance of many l­ater Catalan intellectuals). From 1785 ­until the Napoleonic invasion, he represented the municipal government of Barcelona before the royal court.88 Capmany 85. ​Capmany discusses this in his 1779 Memorias históricas sobre la marina, comercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona, bk. 3, excerpted in Emili Giralt, Ideari d’Antoni Capmany (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1965), 32–45. See also Grau, Antoni de Capmany i la renovació, 45–66. 86. ​Antonio de Capmany y de Montpalau, Memorias históricas sobre la marina, comercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona, 2 vols. (Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1779). 87. ​Grau, Antoni de Capmany i la renovació, 37–55. As Grau points out, Capmany in his Discurso económico-­político en defensa del trabajo mecánico de los menestrales, y de la influencia de sus gremios en las costumbres populares, conservación de las artes y honor de los artesanos, published ­under a pseudonym in Madrid in 1778, praises Campomanes as a promoter of industry and education but asserts he underestimates the role of guilds and artisans. 88. ​Ramon Grau i Fernàndez, “Un patriota d’altres temps: Antoni de Capmany i la historiografia racionalista,” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics 22 (2011): 101.

76 Chap t e r  2

identified Barcelona as the engine of Catalan prosperity, past, and ­f uture. The glories of Catalan history w ­ ere not, for him, the medieval Mediterranean conquests but rather the development of the city, its wealth, laws, and commercial institutions, the l­abor of artisans and merchants. Capmany worked with scholars such as Caresmar who ­were closer to Catalan archival and library sources and who could furnish the evidentiary background for understanding the origins and evolution of Catalonia’s situation within the Spanish state. Caresmar supplied much of the historical information for Capmany’s Memorias.89 As the title implies, this is an extended discussion of the wealth of Barcelona that celebrates the role of its hardworking population.90 The heroic deeds of the medieval Catalan monarchs as memorialized by the four g­ reat chronicles ­were pos­si­ble only ­because Barcelona’s citizens created a commercial structure as well as a society favorable to arts and letters.91 A prosperous and enlightened ­f uture too would depend on encouraging the energy of the enterprising urban population. The second volume of the Memorias consists of nearly five hundred historical proof texts, most likely selected by Caresmar. In the prologue to volume 2, Capmany praises Caresmar as a “most learned man” (varón doctíssimo) and as the restorer of the science of diplomatic.92 Capmany was foremost a po­liti­cal economist, concerned to demonstrate the conditions favorable to economic expansion. Outliving Caresmar, he would play a role in the effort to create a constitutional monarchy at the Cortes of Cádiz (1810–1813). In the agitated po­liti­cal climate of the Napoleonic “War of In­de­pen­dence” and the schemes for radical reform generated by the weakness of the Spanish monarchy, Capmany used historical examples for po­liti­cal as well as economic restructuring. As discussion of a constitution was underway at the Cortes of Cádiz in 1812, Capmany pointed to the medieval Crown of Aragon with its divers customs and multiple legislative bodies as a model 89. ​The two supplements to the Memorias from 1792 contain transcriptions of documents supporting the arguments of the work. The incorporation into the Memorias is discussed in Ramon Grau i Fernández, “El círculo virtuoso de Capmany: Las relaciones entre la sociedad barcelonesa y la corona en la baja edad media,” in Renda feudal i fiscalitat a la Catalunya baix-­medieval: Estudis dedicats a Manuel Sánchez Martínez, ed. Jordi Morelló Baget, Pere Orti Gost, and Pere Verdés Pijuan (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2018), 683–84. 90. ​Vilar emphasizes this point in “Capmany i el naixement del mètode històric.” On Capmany’s defense of the common ­people and their po­liti­cal as well as economic importance, see Grau, Antoni de Capmany i la renovació, 48–56. 91. ​Marfany, Nacionalisme espanyol i catalanitat, 541–42. 92. ​As noted by Fernández de la Cigoña and Cantero Núñez, Antonio de Capmany, 72. See also Lluch, El pensament econòmic, 57–73; Ernest Lluch, “La construcció de la imatge de Catalunya a la Il·lustració: L’aportació de l’Escola de les Avellanes,” in Creences i ètnies en una societat plural, ed. Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré (Lleida: Pagès, 2002), 153–65.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

77

of repre­sen­ta­tional participatory government.93 Not that he wanted literally to restore Catalonia’s former constitutional condition, but rather that a unified Spain would benefit from similar institutional limitations on monarchical absolutism. Unity, according to Capmany, was not the kind of tyrannical uniformity Napoleon imposed on France where t­here ­were (at least legally) no longer provinces or nations, neither Normans nor Provençals. Such an oppressive elimination of internal distinctions would be intolerable for Spain, which would then have no Aragonese, Asturians, or Catalans, with the consequent loss of its essential character and laudable diversity.94 Caresmar did more than serve as a ­humble research assistant to the ­g reat Capmany. He was the author of what was ­later called the Carta al Barón de la Linde, written in 1780 and so contemporaneous with the Memorias. Its tone was more purely historical and more pessimistic than the Memorias as it argued that formerly (en lo antiguo) Catalonia was more populous, rich, and abundant than t­ oday.95 What was to become known separately as the Carta formed the second section of a three-­part work, the Discurso sobre la agricultura, comercio e industria del principado de Cataluña, prepared in 1780 for the royal governor (intendente) of Catalonia, Manuel Terán, Barón de la Linde, in his capacity as ex officio head of the Barcelona Junta de Comcerç.96 It is worth giving the full, prolix title, indicative of its purpose and tone: “Discourse concerning agriculture, commerce and industry, with the inclusion of information concerning the nature and condition of each part or vicariate forming the Principality of Catalonia, with the purpose that, by the indefatigable zeal and well-­attested wisdom and patriotic love of the Royal Committee of Commerce of Barcelona, it might 93. ​Flocel Sabaté, “Constructing and Deconstructing the Medieval Origin of Catalonia,” in Historiography and the Shaping of Regional Identity in Eu­rope: Regions in Clio’s Looking Glass, ed. Dick E. H. De Boer and Luís Adão da Fonseca (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 258–59. Capmany was not alone in using medieval pre­ce­dent to justify constitutional and contractual checks to royal absolutism. To some extent, ­these arguments ­were intended to appeal to conservatives as proof that limiting the monarchy did not depend ideologically on French radical or Enlightenment ideas. Carr, Spain 1808–1939, 96–97. 94. ​Mireia Campabadal i Bertran, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona en el segle XVIII: L’interès per la historia, la llengua i la literatura catalanes (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona and Abadia de Montserrat, 2006), 319–20. 95. ​ Carta del doctor D. Jayme Caresmár, canónigo premostrantense del monasterio de nuestra Señora de Bellpuig de las Avellanas, dirgida al muy Il. Sr. D. Manuel de Teran, baron de la Linde, intendente general interino del egército y principado de Cataluña, en la cual se prueba ser Cataluña en lo antiguo más poblada, rica y abundante que hoy (Barcelona: José Torner, 1821; rev. ed., Barcelona: Asociación de Bibliófils de Barcelona, 1959; repr., Igualada: Centre d’Estudis Comarcals, 1979). See appendix 1, no. 11. 96. ​On this office in Catalonia, see Eduardo Escartín Sánchez, “Los intendentes de Cataluña en el siglo XVIII. Datos biográficos,” in Historia social de la administración española. Estudios sobre los siglos XVII y XVIII (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1980), 249–68. The Barón de la Linde is discussed on pages 263–65.

78 Chap t e r  2

be pos­si­ble to proceed to repair the effects of ignorance and the damages inflicted over time, and to promote and perfect already existing institutions.”97 At one time it was thought that the entire Discurso was written by Caresmar. Ernest Lluch was particularly forceful in making this assertion in the 1970s and 1980s. He l­ater retracted this “youthful imprudence” but continued to regard Caresmar as responsible for the coordination of the Discurso.98 The second part, encompassing Caresmar’s historical discussion, was the background for the central purpose of reform, conceived in Enlightenment terms as necessary by reason of popu­lar ignorance. What is dif­fer­ent from the standard program of policymakers, or would-be policymakers, is the assertion of the superiority of the past. This reinforces a typical discourse of intervening abuse: a glorious distant past and a dark m ­ iddle period. The misfortunes of recent centuries ­were often, though not in this case, attributed to superstition or more particularly to the church. In Caresmar’s formulation, however, the ­Middle Ages, far from being an age of ignorance and poverty between the splendor of the classical and the modern accomplishments of science and reason, was the apogee of Catalan felicity and the decline began at the end of the medieval period, in the fifteenth ­century. ­Later, particularly in the late nineteenth c­entury, the M ­ iddle Ages would be magnified by nationalist sentiment, not always accompanied by Catholic piety. The Discurso is a disquisition on the wealth of nations and a geography of the Catalan economy. Its stated purpose was to advance the happiness of the ­people of Catalonia, reflecting the preoccupation of thinkers of the eigh­teenth ­century with what appears in the American Declaration of In­de­pen­dence as “the pursuit of happiness” and h ­ ere as a somewhat more collective and regalist responsibility of the state for “la felicidad de los pueblos” (the happiness of the ­people).99 It was put together by a group that included Caresmar but whose other members have not been identified with certainty. Unpublished ­after it was prepared in 1780, perhaps the Discurso was intended as a private memorandum to a high government official, but Caresmar’s tendentious second section, 97. ​ Discurso sobre la agricultura, comercio e industria, con inclusión de la consistencia y estado en que se halla cada partido o veguerío de los que componen el Principado de Cataluña, dirigido uno y otro a que, por el infatigable celo y bien acreditada sabiduría y amor patriótico de la Real Junta Par­tic­ul­ar de Comercio de Barcelona, se pueda proceder al reparo de lo que han destruido la ignorancia y la injuria de los tiempos y a promover y perfeccionar los establecimientos que actualmente existen. 98. ​Lluch, El pensament econòmic, 57–59; Lluch, “Jaume Caresmar i el Discurso sobre la agricultura, comercio e industria del Principado de Cataluña 1780,” Recerques 10 (1980): 177–81. Lluch’s modification is in “La construcció de la imatge de Catalunya a la Il·lustració,” 163. 99. ​On this concept as it played out in Bourbon Spain, see Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 56–92; Sánchez-­Blanco, El absolutismo y las Luces, 49–53.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

79

which contrasted past glories with pre­sent immiseration, may have made the text more controversial than would have been the case for a more forward-­ looking plan. Diplomatically, but not insincerely, Caresmar gives the Bourbon monarchs credit for the recent improvement in Catalonia’s social and economic position.100 Nevertheless, the work implies that Catalonia has been harmed by centuries of misguided priorities and policies of its Castilian rulers. The first part of the Discurso is an examination of agriculture, commerce, and the arts looked at from the writings of the Genevan banker (and French finance minister) Jacques Necker, advocating state sponsorship of improvement proj­ects but also a decentralized and more representative government. The third part examines the dif­fer­ent regions of Catalonia and describes their economies, industries, and populations in accordance with a questionnaire that is now lost.101 Not ­until 1997 was the entire Discurso published.102 Caresmar’s contribution, however, the Carta, had an in­de­pen­dent life. A copy now in the Biblioteca de Catalunya was prepared for publication in 1801. It bears the endorsement of Madinabeitia (first name unknown), the state attorney in Barcelona (fiscal) who described the Carta as “a very useful ­little work” (una obrita muy util). The fiscal required only a few alterations, especially suppressing references to “a certain ­family.” A month l­ ater, Madinabeitia’s superior returned the same manuscript text to the fiscal to make the necessary excisions, but nothing more was accomplished, and the obrita had to wait ­until 1821 to be published.103 It was well known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not so much as proof of Castilian oppression as an indication of ­earlier Catalan awareness of that oppression. Along with Antoni de Capmany, Caresmar and the o ­ thers involved in writing the Discurso rejected the centralist view of guilds, town privileges, or the church as archaic obstacles to pro­gress. Local institutions and customs encouraged economic expansion. Growth must be based on the desire to obtain wealth and an increasing population, not on centralizing instructions. The effort of peasants was particularly impor­tant for Caresmar, but he also emphasized rural industry, the presence of mills, the commercialization of agriculture, and the fabrication of textiles. 100. ​Lluch, El pensament econòmic, 64. 101. ​Lluch, La Catalunya vençuda, 209–41. Necker was the author of a book on wheat and public policies and a comparative treatise on Eu­ro­pean nations and commercial legislation. 102. ​ Discurso sobre l’agricultura, comercio e industria del Principado de Cataluña (1780), ed. Ernest Lluch (Barcelona: Alta Fulla, 1997). 103. ​BC, MS 9363, f. 61r. The library received this manuscript in 2010 as part of a bequest by the Alòs-­Moner i Vila f­amily. Anna Guadayol, “Un recorregut par­tic­u­lar per la història de la cultura a Catalunya: Els papers de la família Alòs-­Moner,” Estudis Romànics 36 (2014): 439–46.

80 Chap t e r  2

The Memorias and the Discurso are considered two of the three g­ reat textual proj­ects of the eigh­teenth ­century, the third being the literary dictionary of Catalan writers fi­nally brought into being by Fèlix Torres Amat in 1836.104 Caresmar was involved in all ­these designs: a contributing author to the Discurso, a research aide for the Memorias, and one of admittedly numerous persons involved in the centuries-­long effort to publish a biographical dictionary of Catalan writers. Ernest Lluch regarded ­these three works as monuments to the growth of Catalonia’s sense of its past accomplishments and pre­sent promise, situating the initial po­liti­cal and cultural efflorescence of Catalonia in the eigh­teenth c­ entury rather than with the literary Renaixença of the nineteenth c­ entury.105 Perhaps this exaggerates the impact of the unpublished Discurso.106 It also tends to place the accomplishment of the literary dictionary too early since it was a product of the early nineteenth ­century, even if its origins go back much further. Nevertheless, it is certain that the last de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century saw vigorous speculation and realistic proposals regarding secular improvement. As already indicated, Caresmar was not completely aligned with Capmany’s views extolling Barcelona and urban development. Much of the Discurso emphasizes the value of manufacturing, particularly for exports, but Caresmar was more impressed by the traditional forms of agricultural tenure and their productivity. He emphasized the importance of emphyteutic land tenure, by which a peasant tenant was given favorable terms in order to bring previously unproductive land into cultivation. In return for his sustained l­ abor, the peasant paid a small rent and benefited from a long, even heritable lease. Caresmar’s estimation was on a parallel track to the central government’s emphasis on rural development and an a­ ctual increase in the extension of arable land and viticulture, commercialization, and specialization. Over the course of the eigh­teenth ­century, t­ here was an approximately fivefold increase in land revenues.107 In keeping with both absolutist and physiocrat ideas, King Charles’s councillors mistrusted the regional particularism of Catalonia, its nostalgia for former liberties, and the stubborn ability of artisan guilds to stand in the way of royal regulation. They wanted to encourage rural development, which would create a growing economy without encouraging urban turbulence.108 104. ​On which see Anna Guadayol and Eulàlia Miralles, “Notas sobre la formació de les Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crítico de los autores catalanes de Fèlix Torres Amat,” Barcelona Quaderns d’Història 12 (2005): 93–100. 105. ​Lluch, La Catalunya vençuda, 34. 106. ​Marfany, Nacionalisme espanyol i catalanitat, 543. 107. ​Vilar, La Cata­logne, 2:481; Martínez Shaw, “La Cataluña del siglo XVIII,” 70–79. 108. ​Grau, Antoni de Capmany i la renovació, 52–54.

Cata lo n ia i n t h e Ei g h­t e e n t h ­C e n t ury

81

A historian of the ­Middle Ages, Jaume Caresmar was not out of place in his era. He represents the ancien régime perpetuation of such well-­established institutions as the Catholic Church in alliance with, and to some extent subject to, state and aristocratic interests. His cultural outlook was oriented to France for its tradition of ecclesiastical history, source collection, and historical criticism but also for its Enlightenment reasoning about po­liti­cal economy. He was affiliated with intellectual institutions in Catalonia: the Real Academia, the University of Cervera, the Junta de Comerç, and of course the circle of Bellpuig historians. Long before it made sense to speak of Catalan nationalism or national identity, Caresmar was immersed in the history of Catalonia and described its medieval accomplishments. That he wrote about this mostly in Castilian, occasionally in Latin, but almost never in Catalan is only an apparent paradox. The eigh­teenth ­century, at one time regarded as the benighted era of decadència, saw the erosion of the use of Catalan in official and cultivated writing, but the survival of Catalan was never in doubt. Reduced to a provincial language, perhaps, it was never a rustic or rural idiom that the upper classes used only to speak to their ­children or servants. The condition of the Catalan language and its implications for Caresmar are examined in the following chapter.

C h a p te r   3

The Catalan Language in an “Age of De­cadence”

In his 1779 Memorias históricas sobre la marina, comercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona, Antoni de Capmany remarks that Catalan is “an antique, provincial language, dead ­today as far as the republic of letters is concerned and unknown in the rest of Eu­rope.”1 This famous (or infamous) observation introduced a Castilian translation of an allocution given in Catalan by King Martin of Aragon-Catalonia to the parliament (Corts) assembled in 1406 at Perpignan. The king’s oration surveyed the magnificent history of Catalonia, particularly its Iberian conquests and Mediterranean expansion. While acknowledging that ­human glory is as naught in the eyes of God (Isaiah 40:6–8, King James version), the king nevertheless considered it his duty to honor and extol Catalan accomplishments, invoking Ecclesiastes 44:1, “Let us now praise famous men.”2 1. ​Antonio de Capmany y de Montpalau, Memorias históricas sobre la marina, comercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona (Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1779–1792; reprinted Barcelona: Cámara Official de Comercio y Navigación de Barcelona, 1961–1963), citation to this second edition, vol. 2, part 2 (“Apéndice de algunas notas y de varios documentos y noticias [. . .],” no. XXII), 846: “Pero como la lengua Catalana en la que está extendido el original, es ya antiquada en el mayor número de los vocablos y por otra parte sería inútil copiarla en un idioma antíguo provincial, muerto hoy para la República de las letras y desconocido del resto de Europa, nos ha parecido más propio trasladar este precioso monumento, que pocos leén y muchos menos entienden, vertiéndolo en lengua Castellana para universal inteligencia de los lectores.” 2. ​The royal encomium has been reprinted many times, notably in a collection of texts related to the Catalan Corts in the series “Els nostres classics,” in Parlaments a les Corts Catalans, ed. Ricard Albert and Joan Gassiot (Barcelona: Barcino, 1928), 58–72. 82

Th e Cata l a n La n g uag e i n a n “Ag e  o f  D e­c a d e n c e ”

83

Capmany’s estimation of the status of Catalan has become a kind of negative locus classicus, repeated as an unfortunate and quin­tes­sen­tial example of a Catalan Enlightenment intellectual whose dismissive attitude runs c­ ounter to the modern elevation of Catalan as a mea­sure of identity, distinction, and re­sis­tance.3 Despite his contempt for the language, some historians have portrayed Capmany as representative of the painful paradoxes of the eighteenth-­ century decadència by which a defense of Catalonia’s historic greatness and economic accomplishments could be accompanied by an assumption that its cultural legacy was extinguished.4 In Capmany’s era, however, the Catalan language did not unilaterally determine collective identity, and that is the point of this chapter. Subsequent to his treatment of King Martin’s speech, Capmany would devote considerable energy to editing and translating from Catalan into Castilian a fundamental code of maritime law, the thirteenth-­century Llibre del Consolat de Mar (Book of the tribunal of maritime trade). ­Here he describes the Catalan original as written in a language that is ancient (rancio) and “half dead” (semi-­muerto), but he is r­ eally describing the archaic medieval form of Catalan rather than making a statement about the language as such, which, on the page following this remark, he calls “the provincial language of my homeland” (la lengua provincial de mi patria).5 This chapter looks at Catalan in Caresmar’s time in light of what seems to be a paradox that a scholar so devoted to Catalonia’s past should write voluminously in Castilian, in Latin secondarily, and in Catalan seldomly. Capmany regarded the intimate importance of the Catalan language and its public irrelevance with neither satisfaction nor regret. He was fond of Castilian and wrote on “the excellence of the Castilian language” as well as assembling a collection of examples of Spanish eloquence.6 His deprecation of Catalan was not ­because of po­liti­cal or aesthetic preferences but b­ ecause of practical reasons. Castilian was the language of commerce and public discourse—­tout court, one might say. The Junta de Comerç of Barcelona put forward in 1786 a proposal to encourage the study of the principal languages 3. ​Ramon Grau i Fernàndez and Marina López, “Antoni de Capmany: El primer model del pensament politic català modern,” in El pensament polític català del segle XVIII a mitjan segle XX, ed. Francesc Artal and Albert Balcells (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1988), 21. 4. ​Examples in Grau and López, “Antoni de Capmany,” 22–24. 5. ​ Código de las costumbres marítimas de Barcelona, hasta aquí vulgarmente llamado Libro del Consulado, nuevamente traducido al castellano, con el texto lemosin restiuido á su original integridad y pureza . . . ​, ed. Antonio de Capmany, 2 vols. (Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1791), 1:xxvii–­xxviii. 6. ​Antonio de Capmany i de Montpalau, Observaciones críticas sobre la excelencia de la lengua castellana (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1991), which reprints the first part of Capmany, Teatro historico-­critico de la eloquencia española, 5 vols. (Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1786–1794).

84 Chap t e r  3

of international trade and noted that Catalans must know enough Castilian to speak and write it correctly.7 The eighteenth-­century Republic of Letters communicated in Latin, French, Italian, and latterly En­glish and Spanish.8 ­Every era’s intellectuals use a small number of learned languages in order to facilitate international communication; at times only one language is used, a status Latin held in the Eu­ro­pean ­Middle Ages and En­glish possesses for scientific fields in the con­temporary era. Capmany and Caresmar’s choice of language reflects the gradual disappearance of Catalan from administrative and learned discourse.9 As has already been remarked, the term “decadència” is misleading as applied to the eigh­ teenth ­century, ­because the ­actual use of Catalan was not endangered and ­because the decline in its social status began much e­ arlier, in the fifteenth ­century. In addition, the nadir of its use in government and publications came ­later, in the early nineteenth c­ entury. In a study of the book industry, Ernest Lluch identifies the pro­cess of decay as having taken place over many centuries, from 1476 to 1860, amounting to a long-­term adversity. Except for 1641– 1643, when pamphlets marked the Revolt of the Catalans, the number of books printed annually in Catalan never exceeded twenty, and in only a few of the years before the War of the Spanish Succession did the number even arrive at ten. It is noteworthy that during the latter war, almost all the tracts arguing the Catalan cause ­were, in contrast to the 1641 insurrection, written in Spanish.10 The golden age of Catalan printing was the incunabula period; twelve books in Catalan appeared in 1493 and fifteen in 1495.11 Other­wise, members of the Catalan intelligent­sia, even in periods of relative freedom, ­were uninterested in forwarding the publication of Catalan-­language works. Particularly striking is the absence of what would be considered memorable lit­er­a­ture in Catalan during the period of the Spanish Golden Age (1500 7. ​Jordi Ginebra Serrabou, “La lengua catalana en el siglo XVIII. Una lengua doméstica?,” Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment 35 (2012): 108. 8. ​Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos, “Cultura e ilustración: Interpretaciones catalanas del siglo XVIII,” in 1714: Cataluña en la España del siglo XVIII, ed. Antonio Morales Moya (Madrid: Cátedra, 2014), 295. 9. ​Catalan linguistic and literary de­cadence is asserted by, among o ­ thers, Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, Història de la literatura catalana, vol. 2 (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1985) and vol. 3 (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1986), 11–261; Antoni Comas, Literatura: La Decadència (Barcelona: Dopesa2, 1978). A contrary view is that of Albert Rossich, “Es vàlid avui el concepte de la decadència de la cultura catalana de l’època moderna? Es pot identificar decadència amb castellanització?,” Manuscrits 15 (1997): 127–34. 10. ​James S. Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490–1714 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986), 191. 11. ​Ernest Lluch, La Catalunya vençuda del segle XVIII: Foscors i clarors de la Il·lustració (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1996), 35–53. On early printed books, see also Manuel Llanas, El llibre i l’edició a Catalunya: Apunts i esbossos (Barcelona: Gremi d’Editors de Catalunya, 2000), 17–23; Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, Llibreters i impressors a la Corona d’Aragó (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1993), 19–195.

Th e Cata l a n La n g uag e i n a n “Ag e  o f  D e­c a d e n c e ”

85

to the death of Calderón in 1681). T ­ here are few enduring fictional or poetic works from this era in Catalonia composed in ­either Catalan or Castilian in contrast to the richness of the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. Catalonia did produce notable theological, philosophical, and historical writers ( Juan Luis Vives, Michael Servatius, Jerónimo Zurita, Antonio Agustín), but they wrote in Latin or Castilian.12 Jeroni Pujades published the first volume of his chronicle of the Principality of Catalonia in 1608 in Catalan, but “for the sake of universal understanding,” he switched to Spanish ­after that.13 As opposed to its precipitous literary marginalization, Catalan as an institutional language experienced only a gradual falling off in use and reduced prestige. Catalan officials ­were careful to preserve the ceremonial use of their language in government acts, especially when addressing officers of the Spanish crown. T ­ hose officials responded in Castilian, but the acts of implementation for the ordinances they w ­ ere bringing from the royal court w ­ ere drawn up in Catalan. ­After 1714, however, ­every administrative document was in Castilian, not simply from a desire to punish the Catalans but for the typically Enlightenment as well as absolutist passion for efficiency and consistency. Municipal and ecclesiastical mandates remained in Catalan in order to make sure the usually monolingual Catalan population understood them, not b­ ecause of some dogged re­sis­tance to Castilian. The notion that any appearance of Catalan in the eigh­teenth ­century represents an effort to keep the flame of Catalan identity alive is misleading.

Nation and Language As stated in the previous chapter, Capmany exalted the constitutional practices of Catalonia and the medieval Crown of Aragon as models for a liberal Spanish administration, but if his patria was Catalonia, his nación was Spain. It is impossible to fit him retrospectively into e­ ither a narrative of opposition to Bourbon despotism or a mistaken acquiescence to it, both of which assume an anachronistic form of Catalan particularity. We can see from his life and writings that Capmany considered the reform and renewal of Spain as primary and the m ­ atter of language as inessential. On the occasion of the ceremonial reburial of Capmany’s ashes in Barcelona in 1857, Victor Balaguer described Capmany’s life as a “prolonged martyrdom,” an arduous attempt to restore the glories of his country, its language, 12. ​Rubió i Balaguer, Història de la literatura catalana, 2:7–9. 13. ​Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona, 190.

86 Chap t e r  3

and lit­er­a­ture.14 This portrayal of Capmany as a tragic hero of Catalan re­sis­ tance, implausible at the time, did not receive wide ac­cep­tance, and despite the enthusiasm that had brought back Capmany’s remains from Cádiz, where he had died, the intellectuals of Barcelona ­later forgot about him except as a figure of the war against Napoleon. U ­ ntil well into the twentieth c­ entury he was seldom taken seriously as a historian.15 In the eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, a thorough sense of being Catalan did not depend on using the language in ­every circumstance. It is therefore only an apparent paradox that intellectuals such as Capmany or Caresmar wrote l­ittle to nothing in Catalan, even when praising Catalonia’s past and its culture. Two of Caresmar’s works are entirely in Catalan. The first is an opinion from 1757 on the right of lesser clergy to wear a pectoral cross on their garments (see appendix 1, no. 18b). According to a letter accompanying the copy of this treatise in the Barcelona Acad­emy of Belles-­Lettres, it was composed in connection with a lawsuit involving an attempt by abbots to prohibit anyone of inferior rank from wearing a cross on his chest. Caresmar asked his academic correspondent Ramon de Ponsich y Camps if he thought it might be appropriate to have his essay read before the members. He apologized for the text being in Catalan, promising f­uture translations into Latin and Castilian in order to send copies to Madrid and Rome.16 Caresmar had equal, if not greater, fa­cil­i­ty writing in Latin or Castilian, so why he de­cided this treatise should be in Catalan is unknown. It is the only learned work presented in Catalan to the Real Academia in Barcelona during the eigh­teenth ­century, although t­ here ­were hortatory, lighthearted, and poetic discourses in that language.17 The other example of Caresmar’s written use of Catalan is in a series of notes on documents from the collegiate church of Àger. The ­actual transcriptions and summaries are in a separate volume and rendered in Latin, but the title of this rec­ord of twenty-­six hundred Àger documents is in Catalan: “Compendi de tots els instruments antichs y moderns que’s troban en lo arxiu de la Molt Insigne Iglesia Colegial de Sant Pere de Àger” (Compendium of all the 14. ​ Reseña de la función cívico-­religiosa celebrada en Barcelona el 15 de julio de 1857 para la traslación de las cenizas de D. Antonio de Capmany y de Montpalau (Barcelona: Imprente Nueva de Jaime Jépus y Ramón Villegas, 1857), 56–57, as cited in Grau and López, Antoni de Capmany, 20. 15. ​Pierre Vilar, “Capmany i el naixement del mètode històric,” in Assaigs sobre la Catalunya del segle XVIII, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Curial, 1979), 86–87. 16. ​RABLB, MS 639 (formerly lligal 10, no. 2). 17. ​Mireia Campabadal i Bertran, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona en el segle XVIII: L’interès per la història, la llengua i la literatura catalanes (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona and Abadia de Montserrat, 2006), 222.

Th e Cata l a n La n g uag e i n a n “Ag e  o f  D e­c a d e n c e ”

87

antique and modern instruments found in the archive of the noble Collegiate Church of Àger).18 See appendix 1, no. 36. Caresmar was hardly unique in writing on Catalan history and culture without employing the Catalan language to do so. The circle of Bellpuig, as well as the members of Real Academia, finished works in Castilian and occasionally (especially with the Bellpuig group) in Latin. Even discourses on the excellence of the Catalan language (and they w ­ ere numerous) w ­ ere composed and published in Castilian. Gonzalo Saura, a disciple of Caresmar’s at Bellpuig, wrote one such Spanish treatise in praise of Catalan in 1807.19 Gabriel Casanova’s oration extolling Catalan, given in 1793 to the Real Academia, was also delivered in Castilian.20 On the other hand, not only ­were private conversations between or among learned ­people conducted in Catalan, but many letters exchanged among academicians w ­ ere in the familiar id21 iom of the patria. Despite the apparent hegemony of Castilian, a considerable amount of basic Catalan language instruction was prepared, notably Josep Ullastre’s Gramàtica cathalana (1743) and Josep Pau Ballot’s Gramatica y apologia de la llengua cathalana (1815).22 Ballot wrote his book during the Napoleonic annexation of northeastern Spain, a brief period when Catalan was declared an official language in an effort to win over public opinion.23 The defenders of Catalan denied that it was merely a dialect or that it was rustic, harsh sounding, or impure ­because of borrowing from other languages. They praised its suavity, abundance, and harmony, the supposedly close filiation with Latin, and its many and ingenious opportunities for rhyming. But more than anything ­else, they emphasized Catalan’s marvelous concision. Carles Ros i Hebrera (1703–1773), the author of twelve treatises on Valencian spelling and grammar as well as dictionaries and essays acclaiming the Valencian form of Catalan, wrote an entirely monosyllabic poem of ten lines, whose 18. ​The Catalan notes are found in BC, MS 834, and the “Compendi” is MS 941. 19. ​Ramon Miró Baldrich and Pep Vila Medinyà, “La defensa de la llengua catalana de Gonzalo Saura (1807),” Urtx: Revista cultural de l’Urgell 23 (2009): 413–51. 20. ​Manuscript in RABLB, Arxiu, 1r lligall, núm. 18, ed. Francesc Feliu et al., Tractar de la nostra llengua catalana: Apologies setcentistes de l’idioma al Principat (Vic: Eumo, 1993), 169–78. 21. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 218–22. 22. ​Josep Ullastre, “Breu tractad de las llenguas que des de l’antiguitad han usat los habitants del que vui és Principad de Cathaluña,” in BC, MS 176 and 756; Josep Pau Ballot i Torres, Gramatica y apología de la llengua cathalana (Barcelona: J. F. Piferrer, 1815), 9–23. 23. ​Baldrich and Vila Medinyà, “La defensa de la llengua catalana,” 423; Josep Moran i Ocerinjauregui, “Català i castellà als segles XVIII i XIX,” in La multiculturalitat i les llengües (Actes del Seminari del CUIMPB-­CEL 2006), ed. Joan Martí Castell and Josep M. Mestres i Serra (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2007), 189.

88 Chap t e r  3

opening also works in En­glish, another language with many monosyllabic words: Gens de por li té a la mort Lo qui viu en lo món bé (No fear of death has he who leads a good life in the world).24 A poetic exposition of the Holy Trinity by Ignasi Ferreres (d. 1794), a medical doctor and a literary savant, consists of ninety-­two lines, ­every word a monosyllable. This appeared in the text of a speech delivered in 1766 before a learned group called Comunicació Literària. The title is Apologia de l’idioma cathalà, vindicant-lo de les impostures d’alguns estrangers que lo acusen d’aspre, incult i escàs (A defense of Catalan, defending it from the impostures of certain foreigners who accuse it of being harsh, uncultivated, and slight).25 Apart from its aesthetic qualities, what made Catalan worthy of acclaim, according to eighteenth-­century advocates, was its importance in the M ­ iddle Ages. In an annex to his historiographic studies in the first Memorias of the Real Academia de Buenas Letras, the Marquis of Llo pointed out that the kings of Aragon spread Catalan with their conquests and that they often addressed other rulers in this language. The ­mother tongue of several medieval popes was Catalan, and they too occasionally used it for letters.26 Capmany noted that in the ­Middle Ages, Catalan was spoken at the royal court, from the church pulpit, in the deliberations of representative assemblies, in judicial proceedings, and in academic discourse.27 Dating back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the laws governing the powers of the ruler and the relations among the nobility ­were issued in Catalan as well as Latin.28 24. ​Antoni Comas, Les excel·lències de la llengua catalana, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2009), 53. On the frequency of monosyllabic words as an advantage according to eighteenth-­century writers, see also Mireia Campabadal i Bertran, “Sobre la concepció de la poesia catalana al segle XVIII,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 48 (2001–2002): 239–41. ­Whether Valencian is a dialect or variety of Catalan or constitutes a separate Romance language is the subject of sometimes harsh controversy. See Hans-­Ingo Radatz, “ ‘Katalanisch’ oder ‘Valencianisch’?: Zum sprachlichen Sezessionismus im Land València,” Zeitschrift für Katalanistik / Revista d’estudis catalans 6 (1993): 97–120. 25. ​Josep Romeu i Figueras, “Poemes inèdits d’Ignasi Ferreres, escriptor del segle XVIII,” Llengua & Literatura 3 (1988–1989): 121–23. The poem appeared in Ballot, Gramatica y apología de la llengua cathalana, xix–­xxiii. The first complete printed edition of the Apologia was Neus Faura i Pujol, “La Apologia del idioma cathalà d’Ignasi Ferreres,” Anuario de filología 3 (1977): 457–507. 26. ​Álvarez Barrientos, “Cultura e ilustración,” 302–3; Antoni Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres des de la seva fundació l’any 1700 (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 2000), 40. 27. ​Comas, Les excel·lències de la llengua catalana, 17–20. 28. ​Joan Bastardas, Usatges de Barcelona. El Codi a mitjan segle XII (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1984); Usatges de Barcelona i Commemoracions de Pere Albert, ed. Josep Rovira i Ermengol (Barcelona: Barcino, 1933); Elisabet Ferran i Planas, El jurista Pere Albert i les Commemoracions (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2006).

Th e Cata l a n La n g uag e i n a n “Ag e  o f  D e­c a d e n c e ”

89

In the ­Middle Ages, Catalan was a widely understood language of poetry, beginning with the love lyr­ics of the troubadours. An exile in Rome a­ fter the War of the Spanish Succession, the cathedral sacristan of Girona, Antonio de Bastero, wrote a book on the debt the Tuscan (Italian) language owes to Provençal, which itself, along with all Latinate vernacular languages found south of the Loire and north of the Pyrenees (Gascon, Occitan, Poitevin), derived, he asserted, from Catalan. Words, phrases, style, and in fact the very idea of elegant vernacular rhyming in lingua toscana came from Catalan via Provençal.29 This would become a standard argument, as in Gabriel Casanova’s 1793 oration, asserting that all the nations of Eu­rope had learned from the Catalan troubadours how to compose poetry in the vernacular. The arrogant Italians might have convinced the world that they w ­ ere the first to versify in the vulgar tongue, but the inventors ­were the “Provençal” poets, inspired by the beauty of the Catalan language.30 The lyrical poetry of the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries was written in Occitan, Provençal, Catalan, Galician, and almost ­every variety of Romance language, hence the fluidity of the bound­aries of Provençal or what was termed llemosí, meaning the group of southwestern Eu­ro­pean languages situated between French and Castilian. Castilians also used llemosí as a term of opprobrium, a way of claiming that Catalan was ­little more than a regional dialect. Catalonia and Valencia produced eminent literary figures who enjoyed Eu­ ro­pean reputations, the most famous being Bernat Metge (1350–1413), who wrote Lo somni, a four-­part dream vision dialogue; the brooding poet Ausias March (1400–1459), and Joanot Martorell (1410–1468), author of the romance Tirant lo Blanch (1490). In Don Quixote, Cervantes praises Tirant lo Blanch for its realism, an exception to the absurd fictions of most chivalric tales that so deluded his protagonist. As remarked e­ arlier, medieval Catalonia gave rise to widely read historical works, including, but not l­imited to, the four g­ reat chronicles of King James I, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner and King Peter the Ceremonious. The writings of the phi­los­o­pher, mathematician, orientalist, and extraordinary polymath Ramon Llull (1232–ca. 1313) come to about 250 books and treatises in Catalan, Latin, and Arabic. His didactic novel Blanquerna (1283) is considered the first literary prose composition in Catalan. Llull’s status resembles that of Dante for Italian as the exemplar who elevated the spoken language to literary 29. ​Antonio Bastero, La Crusca Provenzale ovvero le voci, frase, forme, e maniere di dire, che la gentilissima e celebre Lingua Toscana ha preso dalla Provenzale (Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi, 1724). See discussion in Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 39–41. 30. ​Campabadal, “Sobre la concepció,” 238–39; Mireia Campabadal i Bertran, “La recepció dels clàssics medievals catalans al segle XVIII,” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics 15 (2004): 34.

90 Chap t e r  3

respectability.31 Unlike the chronicle authors, however, Llull, suspected of heretical leanings, was not often mentioned in eighteenth-­century treatises on the beauties of the Catalan language. Catalan’s medieval status was retrospectively impor­tant to justify the encomiums of linguistic patriots, for it had been a court language and an idiom of lit­er­ a­ture, history, religious meditation, and didactic works. By the early modern period, however, Catalan was substantially circumscribed as an idiom of upper-­ class communication in ­favor of Castilian. This differentiates Catalan from Slovenian or Estonian, for example, which ­were similarly revived in the nineteenth ­century u ­ nder the influence of Romanticism and Nationalism. T ­ hese languages had never been used, however, in cultivated or official discourse by princes or the aristocracy. When in 1689 Johann Weichard von Valvasor published his massive history in praise of Krain (Slovenia), he used German just as the members of learned Catalan circles in the eigh­teenth ­century wrote in Castilian.32 Unlike Catalan, however, ­there was no background of courtly, chivalric, or erudite body of writing in Slovene, whose literary standing begins only with France Prešeren’s “Garland of Sonnets” (Sonetni venec), which appeared in 1834, a year ­after Carles Aribau’s Catalan “Ode to the Fatherland” (Oda a la Pàtria).33 Hungarian had been employed in the court of the kings of Hungry, but t­here was no widely circulated lit­er­a­ture in the language, and Latin was used in law, including parliamentary deliberations, ­until 1848. In places with strong state centralization or depopulation (caused by famine, persecution, or immigration), native languages declined into eventual obsolescence. The p­ eople and princes of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales had used Gaelic, Irish, and Welsh, but to varying degrees; their use was reduced in the nineteenth ­century. Gaelic and Irish would be on life support in the twentieth ­century, spoken by only a tiny percentage of the population. ­There was never any question about the survival of Catalan, despite vari­ ous periods of prohibition and persecution, notably and most recently u ­ nder the Franco dictatorship, especially in the 1940s and 1950s. The everyday use of Catalan was not confined to the lower classes, even if it became infrequent in published writing. The Bourbon victory (1714) and the decrees of Nueva Planta (1717) discouraged the use of Catalan in administrative and learned settings and l­ ater in education, but authorities regularly in contact with the rural 31. ​Núria Silleras-­Fernández, “La formación de la identidad lingüística catalana (siglos XIII–­XVII) en su contexto peninsular y mediterráneo: Un prefacio,” in La formación de la identidad lingüística catalana (siglos XIII–­XVII), ed. Vicente Lledó-­Guillem (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2019), 14. 32. ​Johann Weichard von Valvasor, Die Ehre dess Herzogthums Crain (Laibach: Wolfgang Moritz Endler, 1689). 33. ​France Prešeren, Sonetni venec (Ljubljana: Nova Revija, 1995).

Th e Cata l a n La n g uag e i n a n “Ag e  o f  D e­c a d e n c e ”

91

and urban populations, notably the church, ­were allowed, and even sometimes required, to retain Catalan for such ­things as elementary grammars, catechistic texts, or sermons. Parish registers ­were to be kept only in Catalan.34 Among the grievances presented in 1760 (the Memorial de greuges referred to in the previous chapter) was that clergy of Castilian origin w ­ ere incapable of preaching in Catalan and therefore mystified audiences that, outside the larger cities, did not understand Castilian. The authors of the Memorial de greuges also reproached the government for appointing magistrates whose ignorance of Catalan made them incapable of interpreting the substantial body of Catalan law not supplanted by the Nueva Planta legislation.35 As regards linguistic pluralism, the response of the Crown was not helpful. In a royal order (real cédula) issued from the palace of Aranjuez in 1768, Charles III mandated the use of Castilian in primary schools and in the teaching of Latin and rhe­toric, recommending that it be the sole language of church administration and judicial pro­cesses.36 This convinced Bishop Josep Climent of Barcelona that a definitive Castilian-­Catalan-­Latin dictionary should be composed, and the Real Academia in Barcelona took this up as a collective task, one of many that never came to fruition. ­Under dif­fer­ent patronage, such a dictionary was put together by Josep Esteve, Josep Bellvitges, and Antoni Juglà and published in 1803, but this was based on a 1696 book by Joan Lacavalleria and so not regarded as a g­ reat advance.37 The intention to create an authoritative Catalan dictionary has been interpreted ­either as evidence for the revival of interest in the language or as a capitulation to the official program of Castilianization, preparing a rulebook for Catalan preparatory to its effective replacement by Castilian. Maria Campabadal has shown that ­there was, in fact, widespread concern to improve and regularize Catalan for the sake of its modernization and restoration and that the defense of the beauty, historic importance, and utility of Catalan was widespread, especially within the Barcelona Acad­emy.38 Moving from the normative or theoretical to the everyday, how ­were Catalan and Castilian actually used between Nueva Planta and Napoleon? The wealthy members of society conversed in Catalan but a­ dopted Castilian for 34. ​Josep Moran i Ocerinjauregui, “La llengua en l’església a Catalunya,” in Episcopus: El bisbat de Vic i l’església a Catalunya en el context europeu, ed. Carme Sanmartí and Marc Sureda (Vic: Eumo, 2021), 401. 35. ​Ginebra, “La lengua catalana en el siglo XVIII,” 112. 36. ​Ginebra, “La lengua catalana en el siglo XVIII,” 113. 37. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 224–39. 38. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 223–60, especially 248: “L’afany vindactiu i apologètic de la llengua catalana fou una constant en el discurs de tot el Setcents i la corporació barcelonina [i.e., the Real Academia] no en podia pas restar al marge.”

92 Chap t e r  3

their public and commercial life.39 The upper classes ­were increasingly familiar with Castilian, while the lower classes had a rudimentary knowledge at best. Among ­those who possessed fa­cil­i­ty in both languages, the decision about ­whether to use Catalan or Castilian was determined by circumstance, practicality, and preference, not by formal government ­orders. Catalan was relegated to private use, not b­ ecause of some pro­cess of degeneration or persecution but b­ ecause of a practice of diglossia—­that is, using dif­fer­ent languages for specific purposes. Diglossia is dif­fer­ent from moving back and forth between two languages in a single discourse. Conversations in the United States, for example, are sometimes conducted in what is referred to as “Spanglish,” which mixes En­glish and Spanish even within a single sentence. In a diglossic system, however, language choice depends on a distinction between circumstances that call for using one or another, often everyday talk versus ceremonial, public, or written communication. B ­ ecause each social setting has an appropriate idiom, t­here is no mixture. The formal context might require the use of an antique language such as Latin, or (until the founding of the state of Israel) Hebrew, or that of a dif­fer­ent, power­ful linguistic community (Castilian), or a revived or newly applied national language (modern Hebrew, Indonesian). ­There are par­tic­u­lar variations owing to the interaction of power and prestige. The members of medieval universities communicated in Latin even though this had not been an ordinary spoken language for centuries. Postcolonial elites might continue to speak in the language of their schooling. In Java, for example, some members of the upper ­orders, especially ­women educated in Dutch schools, continued to use that language among themselves for de­ cades ­after 1948 when in­de­pen­dence was proclaimed. Javanese was their maternal language, and Dutch was what they spoke with old school friends. Although Indonesian, a version of Malay and a trading lingua franca, was declared the national language, some of the Javanese elite in the immediate aftermath of in­de­pen­dence perceived it as lacking expressive subtlety and cultural prestige. In some diglossic social contexts, one language was employed to communicate with servants, peasants, or other members of lower social ­orders, while another was brought out for cultivated discourse. Thus, at certain times and in refined circles in imperial Rus­sia, French was spoken at the court, for example, while Rus­sian was used for intercourse with ordinary p­ eople. In Esto39. ​Catalan would continue to be used for documents produced by the Barcelona municipal trea­ sur­er’s office u ­ ntil 1831 and was standard for notarial rec­ords ­until 1862. Ginebra, “La lengua catalana en el siglo XVIII,” 107.

Th e Cata l a n La n g uag e i n a n “Ag e  o f  D e­c a d e n c e ”

93

nia, German was the aristocratic language, Rus­sian the state language, and Finnish or Estonian the idiom of the commoners. Catalan was never just a “domestic language,” l­imited to familial confines; rather, members of all classes spoke it informally.40 In eighteenth-­century Catalonia, the Barcelona bourgeoisie and the rural gentry spoke Catalan not only to their servants or tenant farmers but also among themselves.41 The use of Catalan in writing was more problematic. Defending the need for a Catalan grammar book, Josep Pau Ballot lists common situations of correspondence calling for written Catalan: nobles writing to their servants, landlords to tenants, ladies to their families, nuns to their relations, and husbands to their wives. H ­ ere ­there is indeed a sense of Catalan having a lower-­status association. Nevertheless, it should be used correctly, and Ballot laments that although spoken all the time, Catalan is often written down erroneously, with ridicu­lous and unintelligible expressions. What ­will become of us, he asks, if we write with such imprecision?42 The use of Castilian in the eigh­teenth ­century was a sign of social prestige, or at least indicated an expectation of upward social mobility. Joan-­Lluís Marfany likens the deployment of fluent Castilian to other signs of upper bourgeois status, such as having a cook, a box at the opera, a coach, or a residence on the Carrer de la Mercè (in Spanish, the Calle de la Merced).43 Pace Ballot, written Catalan circulated outside of domestic situations. ­Those of a learned or literary turn used Catalan for compositions they did not intend to publish but rather to circulate among friends. One of the outstanding works of a ­century admittedly not rich in g­ reat Catalan lit­er­a­ture is the Calaix de sastre, a picturesque diary kept for sixty years by Rafael d’Amat de Cortada i de Sentjust, Baron of Maldà (1746–1819).44 Calaix de sastre literally means “the tailor’s drawer,” a meta­phor for a loosely or­ga­nized miscellany—in En­glish a place where one keeps objects of no apparent immediate use but not to be thrown away ( James Amelang has suggested “grab bag” as an appropriate

40. ​Ginebra, “La lengua catalana en el siglo XVIII,” 105–16. 41. ​Joan-­Lluís Marfany, La llengua maltractada: El castellà i el català a Catalunya del segle XVI al segle XIX (Barcelona: Empúries 2000), 21–22. 42. ​Ballot, Gramatica y apologia, 25, discussed in Marfany, La llengua maltractada, 307. Ballot’s was not the only grammar published during the supposed decadència; t­ here w ­ ere dozens of eighteenth-­ century instructional texts, such as Ignacio de los Valles, Summa de temps y altres rudiments de la gramatica, and explanations of Latin and Spanish grammar written in Catalan, such as the Latin textbook known as Sensus Erasmiani or Gramatica magna. Ginebra, “La llengua catalana en el siglo XVIII,” 110. 43. ​Joan-­Lluís Marfany, Nacionalisme espanyol i catalanitat (1789–1859): Cap a una revisió de la Renaixença (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2017), 107. 44. ​On this figure, see Vicenç Pascual i Rodríguez, El Baró de Maldà: Materials per una biografia (Barcelona: Serra d’Or, 2003).

94 Chap t e r  3

translation).45 The work consists of sixty volumes, of which only se­lections have ever been published.46 The baron read parts of his diary to friends, but his intention was to create a personal rec­ord (not for publication) of social events, travel, visits with friends, and anecdotes. He paid par­tic­u­lar attention to ­music and gastronomy. Calaix de sastre is in Catalan ­because it recorded quotidian events and Catalan was the quotidian language. The style is inelegant, and the text is full of Castilianisms typical of the spoken Catalan of the era.47 Nevertheless, it is entertaining, lighthearted in the main, and it exhibits the personality of a man who was often irritated, sometimes even outraged, but seldom bored. Poetry, satire, comedy, almanacs, and books of popu­lar piety ­were published in Catalan.48 Its use was associated neither with peasant culture nor with elite forms of secular lit­er­a­ture but rather with everyday life and comedy, like the sainet, for example, a short, jocose theatrical production. This body of social satire was devalued by ­those who created the nineteenth-­century Renaixença—­ their models being the elevated sentiments of medieval lyric and romance.49 The existence of a vast popu­lar lit­er­a­ture in Catalan that flourished during the putative de­cadence was ignored b­ ecause it did not meet the specifications of high culture. Poetry in Catalan in this period often was a jeu d’esprit on the order of the monosyllabic creations mentioned above, but it could also express an elevated tone. In the eigh­teenth c­ entury, a considerable amount of Catalan poetry was presented before the Real Academia, and its members produced the greatest volume of serious poetic work anywhere in Catalonia—­for example, funeral commemorations and poems on morality or religion.50 The original Academia de los Desconfiados presented a collection of Catalan dirges on the death of King Charles II and an edition of the poems of Francesc Vicent Garcia, a Catalan writer (1579–1623) known as “the Rector of Vallfogona.” Garcia was well regarded as a playwright but renowned for his poems, which are amorous, world-­weary, satiric (even scatological) meditations on h ­ uman folly, 45. ​Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona, 205. 46. ​The largest se­lection is Calaix de sastre, ed. Ramon Boixareu, 11 vols. (Barcelona: Curial, 1987–2003). 47. ​Comas, Literatura: La Decadència, 70. 48. ​An in­ter­est­ing list of vari­ous published works in Catalan is given by Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, Repressió borbònica i resistència identitària a la Catalunya del segle XVIII (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2020), 306–12. 49. ​Albert Barrera i Vidal, “Les débuts de la Renaixença catalane: Entre le libéralisme bourgeois et le passéisme nostalgique,” Zeitschrift für Katalanistik / Revista d’estudis catalans 1 (1988): 106–19. 50. ​Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 109–33; Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 266–73.

Th e Cata l a n La n g uag e i n a n “Ag e  o f  D e­c a d e n c e ”

95

death, solitude, and disillusionment.51 His sonnets and ten-­line poems inspired a school known as Vallfogonisme whose poets called themselves the “rectors” of this or that rustic location. García is regarded ­either as the last ­great poet in Catalan before the Renaixença or as the quin­tes­sen­tial example of Catalan literary de­cadence ­because of his heavi­ly Castilianized idiom and frivolous topics. A ­ fter ­these initial efforts, l­ittle of the poetic discourse of the academicians was ever published. The serious business of the acad­emy was the study of history, carried out almost exclusively in Castilian. The church continued to use Catalan ­because the majority of the faithful could not understand Castilian.52 Preaching in Catalan resembled the efforts of New World missionaries to learn the indigenous languages in order to communicate. The well-­established concern for American natives was used in the 1760 remonstrance against the Spanish crown: how was it that the government required ecclesiastical ministers to understand and speak the languages of the Indies while remaining indifferent to the incomprehension of Catalan and Valencian laborers?53 Sermons, the teaching of catechism, and a considerable amount of devotional lit­er­at­ure w ­ ere delivered and composed in Catalan throughout the eigh­teenth ­century. The language survived within privileged circles as well. The rec­ords of the Barcelona cathedral chapter of canons ­were kept in Catalan u ­ ntil 1855, for example.54 Some situations provided more choice than a strict diglossia would suggest. Letters between learned men might be in Catalan or Castilian. ­Until 1754, the prominent law professor Josep Finestres wrote in Catalan to Ignasi de Dou, his fellow jurist and former student at Cervera, but thereafter he wrote in Castilian. Similarly, Caresmar and Finestres first corresponded in Catalan but switched to Castilian in the 1760s.55 Jaume Pasqual’s attitude was rather 51. ​ Nenias reales y lágrimas obsequiosas, que á la inmortal memoria del gran Carlos Segundo Rey de las Españas dedica y consagra la Academia de los Desconfiados de Barcelona (Barcelona: Rafael Figuerò, 1701); Francesc Vicent García, La Armonia del Parnàs, més numerosa en les poesies vàries de l’atlant del cel poètic, lo Dr. Vicent Garcia, rector de la parroquial de Santa Maria de Vallfogona [ . . .] (Barcelona: J. Rubió, 1703). On the acad­emy and the influence of the rector of Vallfogona, see Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 285–305. 52. ​On the use of Catalan in the church, see Joaquim M. Puigvert i Solà, “Església, cultura i llengua a la societat catalana del Setcents,” in La llengua catalana al segle XVIII, ed. Pep Valsolobre and Joan Gratacós (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1995), 225–86. 53. ​Ginebra, “La lengua catalana en el siglo XVIII,” 112. 54. ​Joan-­Lluís Marfany, “ ‘Minority’ Languages and Literary Revivals,” Past & Pre­sent 184 (August 2004): 153; Josep Moran i Ocerinjauregui, “Consideracions sobre els liberals espanyols i la llengua catalana,” in Treballs de lingüística històrica catalana (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1994), 178. In general on the church and the use of Catalan, see Marfany, La llengua maltractada, 211–305. 55. ​Marfany, La llengua maltracada, 332; Josep Closa i Farrés, “La tradició europea en la lectura dels clàssics dins la Universitat de Cervera,” in Miscel·lània d’homenatge a Enric Moreu-­Rey, ed. Albert Manent and Joan Veny, vol. 2 (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1988), 57.

96 Chap t e r  3

dif­fer­ent. According to Villanueva, or at least according to what he had been told, Pasqual refused to answer the letters of Catalan correspondents who wrote to him in Castilian.56 However, when it came to an extended letter to the Marquis of Capmany (not to be confused with Antoni de Capmany) about the history of the female Cistercian monastery of Vallbona, Pasqual wrote his disquisition in Castilian.57 The Valencian polymath Gregori Maians wrote thousands of letters, the vast majority in Castilian, although some that w ­ ere intended for publication as well as most of t­ hose written to correspondents abroad w ­ ere in Latin. None ­were in Valencian/Catalan, although he always spoke it at home. When he was named to a high office in Valencia and was preparing to move to the city from his quiet dwelling in the village of Oliva, he urged his f­amily to practice Castilian.58 ­There is one peculiar example of Catalan used in an official text—­peculiar ­because it was written outside of Catalonia, in Andorra. Now a recognized state and member of the United Nations, Andorra, whose population speaks Catalan, was for centuries an anomalous survival of medieval governance. ­Under the dual lordship of the bishop of Urgell and the count of Foix (the latter superseded by the king and then the president of France), it remained neutral and unmolested in its Pyrenean fastness. In 1748 Antoni Fiter i Rossell completed his Manual Digest de las Valls neutras de Andorra (Digest [of the laws] of the neutral valleys of Andorra), combining the history, privileges, laws, and administrative procedures pertaining to the six parishes on e­ ither side of the Valira River that form Andorra.59 Fiter consulted archives in France and Spain and used sources written in Latin, French, Spanish, and vari­ous forms of Occitan, but wrote his comprehensive law book in Catalan.60 In keeping with the conventional modesty displayed by authors introducing their work, Fiter apologizes for employing the llengua del Pais, whose defect (vici) is actually a virtue: Catalan cannot be made to conform to the 56. ​Jaime Villanueva, Viage literario a las Iglesias de España, vol. 12 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1850), 91–92. 57. ​Written in 1803 and published as Carta del P. Jaime Pascual, canónigo premostratense de Bellpuig de las Avellanas al M. I. Sr. Marqués de Capmany (Barcelona: Valentin Torras, 1837; repr., Valls: Consell Comarcal de l’Urgell, 1991). Marià de Sabater i de Vilanova, Marquis of Capmany (1757–1837), was for a long time the head of the municipal government of Cervera and a professor of law at the university. He wrote an unpublished history of Cervera, titled “Noticias históricas de la fidelissima ciudad de Cervera.” 58. ​María José Martínez Alcalde, Las ideas lingüísticas de Gregorio Mayans (Valencia: Universitat de València, 1992), 272–73, 285. 59. ​Antoni Fiter i Rossell, Manual Digest de las Valls neutras de Andorra (Andorra la Vella: Govern d’Andorra, 1987). 60. ​On the Manual Digest, its context, and afterlife, see a collection of articles in connection with an exhibit commemorating the redaction of the work ­after 250 years: Manual Digest, 250è anniversari (Andorra la Vella: Ministeri de Turisme i Cultura, Andorra, 1991).

Th e Cata l a n La n g uag e i n a n “Ag e  o f  D e­c a d e n c e ”

97

artificial, ornamented style fash­ion­able in this era. An Andorran, Fiter asserted, should communicate in the language of his nation. Catalan encouraged the author to write plainly but also conformed to his explicit desire that outsiders not find it easy to discover how Andorra has preserved its liberties. To this end, he also enjoined that only manuscript copies be made and that they be kept within Andorra.61 His instructions ­were observed ­until 1987, when the first printed edition appeared in connection with the new policy of Andorra to modernize its international po­liti­cal position. Andorra’s neutral status was maintained from the sixteenth c­ entury through the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and ­after. Fiter states that Andorra is part of the Principality of Catalonia, historically, linguistically, and in terms of its customs. Nevertheless, he emphasizes that since the expulsion of the Moors, it has been ­free from all laws, legislation, and regulation affecting the Catalan polity.62 The Catalan government and cultural institutions have made no claim to po­liti­cal or historical control over Andorra. Even the most ambitious maps of Catalonia do not incorporate Andorra, the only nation-­ state whose official language is Catalan, into the “països catalans.” Caresmar, as far as I can tell, never mentions Andorra. We can see that, with a few isolated exceptions, Castilian displaced Catalan for public and learned discourse. It gained status in the eigh­teenth ­century at the expense of Latin as well. Phi­los­o­phers, historians, and economic theorists such as Feijóo, Sarmiento, Capmany, and Jovellanos wrote in Spanish. Gregori Maians wanted both to preserve Latin and to magnify Spanish. Near the end of his life, he wrote that the study of Latin had been his principal aim ­because of the beauty of classical poetry and prose and its necessity for the study of (Roman) civil law.63 For Maians, Latin remained the international language of learning, required for scholarship except for the study of mathe­ matics, anatomy, and practical subjects. Nevertheless, he argued that one should write in Spanish if one wishes to address a larger cultivated public. His Cartas morales ­were published in Spanish, which Josep Finestres lamented ­because they would then have no audience outside of Spain.64 61. ​Fiter, Manual Digest, prologue, 7. 62. ​Fiter, Manual Digest, bk. 1, chap. 3, 44–57. The title of the chapter is “Valls de Andorra son propia y verdadera Cataluña, com âpart de aquest Principat; Andorrans són pròpiament Catalans en tot rigor, y gosan com â tals varias prerrogatives en ell.” Book 1, chapter 4, pages 59–69, bears the heading “Valls de Andorra no obstant de ser part de Cataluña, may han dependit desde la expulcio dels Moros de ellas, del Governs, delas Lleys, tant civils, que Criminals, dela Politica, Economia, Usatges, ni altra disposicio Secular de dit Principat, si de las Canonicas, Eglesiasticas, Provincials, y Diocessanas, respectivament, lleys y Costums de ell.” 63. ​Martínez Alcalde, Las ideas lingüísticas de Gregorio Mayans, 248. 64. ​Martínez Alcalde, Las ideas lingüísticas de Gregorio Mayans, 274.

98 Chap t e r  3

The lack of foreign appreciation of Spanish as a language of erudition annoyed Maians, who resented the ascendancy of French in the Eu­ro­pean intellectual world. A serious, majestic, yet suave language, Spanish was the most magnificent of t­ hose derived from Latin, Maians asserted, but it was unjustly ignored in the rest of Eu­rope, where works in that language ­were not even being translated.65 Latin preserved its authority in fields such as the academic study of law, not surprising since that was based on Roman texts. Finestres corresponded in Latin, Catalan, Castilian, and French and also followed learned publications in En­glish and German, but he never considered composing academic studies of jurisprudence in anything but Latin. His mastery was exhibited at the age of fourteen when he won an award in rhe­toric for an eight-­line epigram.66 New regulations for the University of Cervera issued by the king in 1749 mandated that formal lectures and disputations be in Latin, although explication could be given in “Romance, sea en idioma Castellano.” Classes in mathe­matics, exceptionally, could be given entirely in Castilian.67 An example of the three-­part rather than binary division of learned communication is the eighteenth-­ century percentages of books published by the firm Bros i Oliva in Girona: 21 ­percent in Catalan, 23 ­percent in Latin, and 56 ­percent in Castilian.68 Jaume Caresmar wrote in Castilian, in Latin, and infrequently in Catalan. The reason for his choice of idiom is not always readily apparent from the content. He wrote two histories of Bellpuig de les Avellanes: the first, a Castilian annals of the monastery completed in the early 1750s; the second, the Latin De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis, delivered to the Real Academia in 1773. It is unclear why he undertook two separate studies and why he chose dif­fer­ent languages. Perhaps this was b­ ecause the Spanish work is broader in context, beginning with the eighth-­century Muslim conquest, which took place long before the ­actual foundation of Bellpuig, and it has some aspects of a regional history as opposed to the more ecclesiastically focused De rebus.69 Of the sixteen allocutions that we know Caresmar delivered to the Real Academia, one was certainly in Latin, a lost treatment of the church Council of Elvira in the early fourth ­century, presented in 1771. The 1773 offering of the De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis may have been recited in Castil65. ​Martínez Alcalde, Las ideas lingüísticas de Gregorio Mayans, 276–83. 66. ​Fèlix Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario critico des los escritores catalans, y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura de Cataluña (Barcelona: J. Verdeguer, 1836), 252. 67. ​ Estatutos y privilegios apostolicos y reales de la Universidad y Estudio General de Cervera (Cervera: Josef Barber, 1750), titulo XV, 66–67. 68. ​Llanas, El llibre i l’edició a Catalunya, 36. 69. ​See the discussion of ­these histories in chapter 6, concerning Caresmar’s works.

Th e Cata l a n La n g uag e i n a n “Ag e  o f  D e­c a d e n c e ”

99

ian, but the minutes of the acad­emy refer to Caresmar as having read “part of the history he is composing in Latin concerning his monastery.”70 As noted ­earlier, he gave his treatise on the right of lesser clergy to wear a pectoral cross to the acad­emy in Catalan.

The Nineteenth ­Century In this book—­centered as it is on Jaume Caresmar, who died in 1791—­the nineteenth c­ entury is relevant to the degree that it saw the simultaneous development and unraveling of Enlightenment trends. What continued and accelerated ­were industrialization, commercialization, and the decline of ecclesiastical wealth and authority. The power and competence of the Spanish state w ­ ere unimpressive, however, ­whether its stated goals ­were progressive or reactionary. With constant, sometimes violent changes of regime and the inability to create a broadly supported government ­until the last part of the ­century, the Enlightenment dream of beneficent authoritarianism ended, as did the notion of an alliance of liberal clergy with liberal politicians. The state-­sponsored confiscations of monastic property doomed Bellpuig de les Avellanes and almost all of the monastic establishments Caresmar had devoted his scholarly life to researching. At the same time, the historical memory of the ­Middle Ages would become romanticized and mobilized in ser­vice of ideas of the Catalan nation unforeseen by Caresmar or anyone ­else in his era. In the early nineteenth ­century, Castilian continued to be identified as the language of pro­gress. In a work denouncing the Inquisition, published in 1811 during the meeting of the Cortes of Cádiz, Antonio Puigblanc, a Catalan delegate, asserted that the common goal of reforming the institutions of Spain required that his compatriots abandon el idioma provincial. Failure to do so would result in Catalans remaining foreigners in their own country and losing the benefits of enlightenment (ilustración) facilitated by a common language.71 In certain re­spects, Capmany’s ambition to see Catalonia lead Spain into economic modernity was realized in the course of the nineteenth ­century as, along with the Basque country, Catalonia became the wealthiest and most industrialized part of the Spanish state. Capmany’s notion of popularizing the medieval past of Catalonia would also be affected, but not in the way he had 70. ​Joaquim Miret y Sans, “Dos siglos de vida académica,” Boletin de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 9 (1917): 105. See appendix 3, section B. 71. ​Natanael Jomtob [Antonio Puigblanc], La Inquisición sin mascara ó disertación en que se prueban hasta la evidencia los vicios de este tribunal, y la necesidad de que se suprima (Cádiz: José Niel, 1811), 306, as noted in Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 213.

10 0 Chap t e r  3

intended. Rather than the parliamentary institutions of the medieval Crown of Aragon being used as a model for the democ­ratization of Spain, the ­Middle Ages became the touchstone of a revival, Renaixença, of a Catalan culture separate from Castile and the rest of Spain. In terms of the daily use of Catalan, ­there was no need for a linguistic Renaixença since t­here had been no decadència preceding it. T ­ here is also a chronological displacement in that while the Renaixença is conventionally supposed to have begun with Carles Aribau’s Oda a la Patria (1833), the first two-­ thirds of the ­century saw the continued loss of ground on the part of Catalan as a language of public discourse. Only around 1871 was the term “Renaixença” used, as opposed to despertament (awakening) or restauració (restoration).72 The most rigid diglossia prevailed during what is conventionally presented as the first de­cades of the Renaixença. By 1850 the educational system (in Castilian) had expanded to encompass the rural population and the urban lower classes. The c­ entury of maximum Castilianization was the nineteenth, not the eigh­teenth.73 Popu­lar songs in Castilian ­were all the rage.74 The split between speaking Catalan en famille and writing in Castilian for public affairs was sharper and more complete. Never was Catalan as close to being abandoned as it was in the early nineteenth c­ entury.75 Language abandonment is precisely what happened in Ireland during the nineteenth c­ entury, particularly a­ fter the famine of 1848 and the waves of outmigration that followed, to the point that at pre­sent only 1 ­percent of the population speaks Irish. The Irish have not lost their sense of national identity, however, b­ ecause nationalism does not depend on language distinction.

The Revival of Catalan With the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of King Ferdinand VII, a reactionary government attempted to put back unchanged the conditions of the old order, even the Inquisition. In 1820 a liberal regime took power and forced the king to make concessions, but a French-­led invasion in 1823 by a force called the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis once more propped up the king’s absolutist claims. The liberal movement, however, was unstop72. ​Álvarez Barrientos, “Cultura e ilustración,” 308. 73. ​Marfany, Nacionalisme espanyol i catalanitat, 423. 74. ​Marfany, “ ‘Minority’ Languages and Literary Revivals,” 143. 75. ​Marfany, La llengua maltractada, 342, 417, 479.

Th e Cata l a n La n g uag e i n a n “Ag e  o f  D e­c a d e n c e ”

101

pable. This was a revolution in that it represented the eventual triumph of capital, industry, markets, and money over court, aristocracy, and church.76 Unfettered by deference ­toward historical tradition, the Liberals ­were entranced by pro­g ress, unity, and efficiency. Their program of Castilianization was therefore more ambitious and effective than that of the ancien régime. In 1870 the government of General Prim (who was in fact a Catalan) ordered that, for administrative purposes, every­thing written in another language be translated into Castilian. All personal names and place-­names ­were henceforth referred to in their Spanish forms (e.g., Gerona or Lérida rather than Girona, Lleida). Church catechisms and pastoral communication ­were to be issued in Spanish. Writing in 1877, the literary and historical writer Joaquim Rubió i Ors (1818–1899) observed that the abolition of po­liti­cal liberty in the eigh­teenth ­century had not threatened Catalan but that it was imperiled ­under the constitutional governments of his ­century.77 The wave of cultural patriotism referred to as the Renaixença began as an advocacy conducted for the most part in Castilian. Indeed, as had been the case for de­cades, the pro­g ress of Catalonia was thought to require that ordinary Catalans become competent in Castilian. When Joaquim Roca i Cornet spoke before the Real Academia in Barcelona about the unjust Eu­ro­pean neglect of “our beautiful language” and the need for its restoration, he meant Castilian. Rediscovery of medieval architecture, excursions to famous sites and monuments, the invention and popularity of photography, and the appearance of books such as the 1839 Recuerdos y bellezas de España (Memories and beautiful sights of Spain) created a historically romanticized Catalan regionalism that at first had ­little to do with language. Victor Balaguer’s classic collection of Catalan folklore was presented in Castilian in 1866 as Cuentos de mi tierra.78 Even the 1859 revival of the poetic competitions, the medieval Jocs florals, was introduced by Manuel Milà i Fontanals (1818–1884) “with enthusiasm mixed with some sadness,” as he acknowledged the modern preeminence of Castilian but hoped that “in a corner of our breast” an affection for Catalan could be retained. A leading proponent of the Renaixença, Milà i Fontanals was a professor of Spanish lit­er­a­ture, indeed one of the found­ers of that discipline. His published correspondence from 1840 to 1860 contains nothing in Catalan.79 Similarly, Pròsper de Bofarull (1777–1859), the director of the Archive of the 76. ​Josep Fontana, La revolució liberal a Catalunya (Vic: Eumo, 2000). 77. ​Moran, “Consideracions sobre els liberals espanyols,” 179–83. 78. ​Marfany, Nacionalisme espanyol i catalanitat, 584–86, 757; Josep Fradera, Cultura nacional en una sociedad dividida: Cataluña, 1838–1868 (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003), 253. 79. ​Marfany, “ ‘Minority’ Languages and Literary Revivals,” 156.

10 2 Chap t e r  3

Crown of Aragon for most of the early part of the c­ entury, wrote all of his letters to his nephew, the jurist Salvador Brocà i Bofarull, in Castilian.80 Once the Catalan language fi­nally became the object of solicitous attention and when serious lit­er­a­ture started to be composed in Catalan, ­g reat selectivity was exercised with regard to what tone or level of the language was to be propounded. The ­Middle Ages w ­ ere attractive to architects of the Romantic period and to the Catalan literary revival. Rubió i Ors lamented the neglect of Catalan, and in introducing his collection of poems in homage to the medieval troubadours, Lo Gayté del Llobregat (1841), he denounced con­ temporary Castilian lit­er­a­ture for its skepticism, its brooding affectation, and its immoral themes, offering in its place a series of Catalan lyr­ics celebrating innocent love, historical veracity, and re­spect for religion.81 The Catalan bourgeoisie, patrons of the literary revival, did not want a self-­ portrait but rather an escape. Restoration of Catalan expressed the fear of the effects of wealth and industrialization on an endangered culture rather than a symbol of newfound power and confidence. Themes we associate with the Eu­ro­pean novel of the nineteenth c­ entury are missing from Catalan writing of the Renaixença: emotional turmoil, sexual obsession, unchivalric vio­lence, generational conflict, intellectuals versus the ­middle classes, or art versus commerce. As already observed, the literati ­were not fond of the au­then­tic survivals of Catalan poetry in popu­lar songs, off-­color anecdotes, satires, and other expressions of low life. They wanted an ennobled rural tradition without its original gross ele­ments, amounting to historical sentimentality and folk mythification.82 The first Catalanist Congress met in 1880, and the Catalan cultural center (Centre Català) began in 1882. The conservative nationalist movement, the Lliga Catalana, started in 1887, and fundamental nationalist texts also appeared in the de­cade of the 1880s, notably the Memorial de greuges (1885), whose title repeats the remonstrances of 1760, and Valenti Almirall’s Lo Catalanisme of 1886.83 More broadly, popu­lar symbols of Catalan folkloric identity date from this era: the sardana dance, the flag of four red stripes on a yellow background, and the national anthem, Els segadors, commemorating the 1640 revolt.84 80. ​Moran, “Consideracions sobre els liberals espanyols,” 175. 81. ​Fradera, Cultura nacional en una sociedad dividida, 289; Moran, “Català i castellà als segles XVIII i XIX,” 191. 82. ​Fradera, Cultura nacional en una sociedad dividida, 141–83. 83. ​Giovanni  C. Cattini, “The Advent and Politicisation of Distinct Catalan Identities (1860– 1898),” in Historical Analy­sis of the Catalan Identity, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), 270. Almirall also published the first newspaper in Catalan, Diari Català, beginning in 1879. 84. ​Cattini, “Advent and Politicisation,” 270–82.

Th e Cata l a n La n g uag e i n a n “Ag e  o f  D e­c a d e n c e ”

103

Thus, despite the centralizing efforts of Liberal governments and the initial hesitancy of the linguistic and literary Renaixença, Catalan not only survived but flourished. Perhaps the most revealing comparison is not with Irish or Scots Gaelic but with the medieval languages closest to Catalan, namely Occitan, and Provençal. As with Catalonia, nineteenth-­century poets and intellectuals in southern France rediscovered their medieval past and praised the vernacular troubadour poets. The reputation of Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914) outweighed that of any Catalan literary figure of the period. Mirèio, Mistral’s long poem of young love thwarted by f­ amily and society, established his fame in 1859, but almost no one read the original Provençal version, relying instead on Mistral’s own French translation. Mistral was a founder of the Féliberge movement to rescue the Occitan language (of which Provençal is considered a variety) and received the Nobel Prize in 1904 both for his poems and for his efforts to preserve and codify Provençal. None of this prevented the near extinction of what at the opening of the nineteenth c­ entury had been widely spoken regional languages. The evaporation of Occitan and Provençal, in contrast to Catalan’s survival, is partly due to the efficiency of the French state and its assimilating institutions (schools, the military, and the civil ser­vice), in contrast with Madrid’s inept efforts at cultural centralization. It also has something to do with Catalonia’s wealth compared with the rest of Spain, quite dif­fer­ent from Ireland in relation to E ­ ngland or Provence in relation to Paris.85 What­ever its fondness for self-­serving mythmaking about its past—­indeed, perhaps aided by it—­Catalonia can boast of having so far withstood both the hostile pressures of authoritarianism and the seductive corrosion of globalization. The flowering of Catalan as a normal written language and as a national identity marker was the result of wider social changes, not of an exclusively literary movement. Beyond the decorative, medievalist creations of Catalan literary writers, what demonstrates a shift in popu­lar attitudes are t­ hings like the creation of working-­class choral socie­ties by Anselm Clavé (1824–1874), the success of the Catalan plays of Fréderic Soler, who was known as Pitarra (1839–1895), and the appearance of periodicals such as the Calendari del Pagès 85. ​A point emphasized by Barrera i Vidal, “Les débuts de la Renaixença catalane,” 108–9. He quotes from Victor Balaguer’s poem of 1862 “Los quatre pals de sang,” which is about the (mythical) origins of the Catalan coat of arms, four red bars on a golden field. This story tells how the first native count of Barcelona, Guifré, was wounded in the ser­vice of the king of the Franks. The monarch used the blood flowing from the count’s wound to trace out four bars on a plain gold shield as a token of gratitude and recognition of heroism. According to Balaguer, the first bar is for justice, the second for liberty, the third for law and the fourth symbolizes industry.

10 4 Chap t e r  3

(The Peasant’s Calendar).86 The fame and accomplishments of the greatest nineteenth-­century poet, Jacint Verdaguer (1845–1902), reflected rather than created the revival of Catalan. Throughout the twentieth c­ entury, what­ever the attitude of the central government, a preference for Catalan and a sense of comfort speaking it w ­ ere common, even among a social elite accustomed to using Castilian for work and public discourse. In the play Gente Bien (The right p­ eople), by Santiago Rusiñol (1861–1931), a recently ennobled industrialist, acknowledging that his social elevation means the f­ amily ­will have to use Castilian for all public conversation, knows it ­will be hard: “When I speak Castilian for a few hours, my throat becomes dry as toast. But it is the fashion, so we must speak it.”87

86. ​David Cao Costoya, “Catalonia: Unique Consciousness and Collective Identity in the First Half of the 19th ­Century: Notes and Consideration,” in Historical Analy­sis of the Catalan Identity, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), 265–66. 87. ​Gary McDonogh, Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power in the Industrial Era (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986), 119.

C h a p te r   4

Bellpuig de les Avellanes before Caresmar’s Era

Jaume Caresmar belonged to the Order of Premonstratensian canons, whose rule was followed at Bellpuig de les Avellanes. For over two centuries a­ fter its foundation in 1167, the chapter was favored by the counts of Urgell, two of whom w ­ ere buried ­there.1 During the thirteenth and early f­ ourteenth centuries, Bellpuig was at the height of its wealth and influence. Its canons (usually numbering around twenty-­four) held ­castles, vineyards, mills, ­water rights, and extensive cultivated lands.2 In 1230, profiting from King Jaume I’s conquest of Majorca, Bellpuig received the church at Artà on the 1. ​On the foundation of Bellpuig and its early history, see BC, MS 9339, Jaume Caresmar, “De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum in Catalonia, ordinis canonicorum regularium S. Augustini Praemonstratensium, libri VIII” (hereafter cited as “De rebus” A), ff. 1r–80r; BPA, Fons antic, Caixa 17, Llibre 36, Jaume Caresmar, “De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum,” (hereafter cited as “De rebus” B), pp. 1–162. “De rebus” B ends in 1314, and “De rebus” A goes to 1435. Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez translated “De rebus” B as Historia de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanas en el 360 [sic] aniversario del nacimiento de Jaime Caresmar (Balaguer: Romeu, 1977); the relevant passages h ­ ere are on pages 15–72. On t­hese dif­fer­ent versions, see appendix 1, nos. 17, 23, and 37. More up to date, although still based on Caresmar, is Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, Páginas de historia catalana: Santa María de Bellpuig de les Avellanes (Institut de Germans Maristes, , n.d.), 15–111; Corredera y Gutiérrez, “Santa María de Bellpuig de las Avellanas y los condes de Urgel (breve relato histórico),” Ilerda 31, no. 1 (1971): 115–41; Francesc Fité i Llevot, “El monestir premonstratès de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes, panteó comtal,” in De Bellpuig a Bellpuig: Els premonstratesos de les Avellanes a Artà (Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2019), 47–97. 2. ​Fité, “El monestir premonstratès,” 60–74. 105

10 6 Chap t e r  4

Figure 4.1.  Cloister of Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Courtesy of the Archive of the Monastery of Bellpuig de les Avellanes.

eastern coast of the island, where it created a satellite religious community called Bellpuig d’Artà.3 Bellpuig de les Avellanes also held dependent churches at Santa Maria de Cervoles west of the monastery, Santa Maria d’Aguilar just to the southwest, the former Cistercian convent of Santa Maria de Bonrepòs to the northeast (located in the region [comarca] of Pallars Jussà), and Sant Nicolau de Fondarella to the southeast (Segrià). The latter was a hospital but also h ­ oused personnel from Bonrepòs who moved ­there shortly ­after the donation of Sant Nicolau in 1224.4 Count Ermengol X, who died in 1314, made Bellpuig his burial place and planned for its substantial expansion, but the end of his rule marked the extinction of the Cabrera dynastic line. Ermengol X had set resources aside for finishing the church and cloister and rebuilding the monastic complex, but the succeeding counts appropriated t­hese funds for other purposes. Only in the eigh­teenth c­ entury, beginning shortly before Caresmar’s entry, was a substantial construction campaign undertaken. 3. ​Josep Amengual i Batle, “Una presència dels canonges premonstratesos segons el model colonial: Bellpuig d’Artà (1230–1425),” in De Bellpuig a Bellpuig, 99–118. 4. ​Antoni Pladevall and F. Català Roca, Els monestirs catalans (Barcelona: Destino, 1978), 63. Even more isolated than Bellpuig, Bonrepòs retained between one and three pious residents and was dissolved only by the 1835 disamortization.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

107

Bellpuig never attained the prominence of the Cistercian foundations of Poblet and Santes Creus, favored by the count-­k ings of Aragon-­Catalonia, nor was it endowed with the traditions of learning and liturgy enjoyed by the Benedictine monasteries of Montserrat and Ripoll. Its territorial power was less than that of its neighbor to the north, the collegiate foundation of Àger, which successfully defended its exempt status against claims by the bishops of Urgell and of Lleida. Other ecclesiastical foundations had greater sway and prestige, but Bellpuig nevertheless exercised a quite respectable lordship over a substantial part of northwestern Catalonia and experienced a resurgence of energy and intellectual distinction in the eigh­teenth ­century.

Augustinians and Premonstratensians As a Premonstratensian collegiate chapter, Bellpuig was staffed by canons aided by lay and clerical adjuncts. Originally, as with the Cistercians, the Premonstratensian ­houses included pious laymen (conversi), whose devotion took the form of agricultural, craft, or ser­vice l­abor rather than prayer. The conversi wore the same garments as the canons and learned a few Latin prayers, participating in some church ceremonies. They lived apart, however, and, except for an occasional well-­born affiliate, w ­ ere subordinated to the canons. The number of conversi and their significance w ­ ere reduced in the course of the thirteenth ­century as the Premonstratensians gave less emphasis to self-­ sufficiency and became conventional landlords. In addition, laypersons wanting a religious vocation ­were increasingly attracted to the Franciscans and Dominicans, which offered associate membership to “tertiaries.” At Bellpuig the conversi dis­appeared altogether.5 ­There is scant and indirect evidence that Bellpuig ever had female members, although its subordinate foundations did. A document from 1203 involving a  land acquisition refers to the abbot along with the ­brothers and ­sisters of Bellpuig, but no mention was made of ­women in the foundation documents, nor is t­here any other indication of them being associated with this establishment.6 During the first de­cades of the order, the Premonstratensians created double monasteries and separate female foundations thereafter.7 Bonrepòs, 5. ​Ulrich G. Leinsle, Die Prämonstratenser (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2020), 42–43. 6. ​Fité, “El monestir premonstratès,” 72; Corredera, Páginas de historia, 47–48. 7. ​Shelley Amiste Wolbrink, “­Women in the Premonstratensian Order in Northwestern Germany, 1120–1250,” Catholic Historical Review 89 (2003): 387–408; Franz J. Felton, “Frauenklöster und -­stifte im Rheinland im 12. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Frauen in der religiöse Bewe-

10 8 Chap t e r  4

originally a Cistercian monastery with male and female sections, perpetuated this structure when it passed into the control of Bellpuig.8 The archetypal canon was a priest who served a bishop in a cathedral, one of a group participating in the liturgy. Canons ­were responsible for guarding and administering their cathedral’s property, r­unning its school, choir, and library, organ­izing alms, and giving sacraments. They took on a corporate identity as the cathedral chapter, collaborators (ideally) with the bishop, but distinct as a body. Periodically, as with the Rule of Saint Chrodegang of Metz in 763 and enactments of the Council of Aachen in 816–819 held by Emperor Louis the Pious, canons ­were “reformed,” meaning that their tendency to live in­de­pen­dently and luxuriously off the revenues of their offices was checked by requiring a renunciatory common life. This was hard to enforce since their f­amily connections made them locally prominent figures. By the eleventh ­century, communities of canons ­were usually separate from episcopal supervision. The Rule of Aachen governed both cathedral chapters and the organ­ization of collegiate churches—­that is, establishments of clergy apart from episcopal sees but not focused on prayer in the manner of monasteries. Eleventh-­ century reformers regarded canons as lax, believing that they tended to concern themselves with their individual property, possessions, and material well-­being. A set of regulations attributed to Saint Augustine was used to turn canons back to a life of prayer, poverty, and community. This so-­called Augustinian Rule resulted from a spiritual movement inspired by renewed attention to the mission of Christ’s apostles, who had possessed every­thing in common, embraced poverty, and devoted themselves to spreading God’s Word.9 In the wake of the late eleventh-­century Gregorian Reform of the papacy and its reaffirmation of the spiritual mission of the church, the efflorescence of Augustinian canons was part of a clerical reengagement with the lives of ordinary Christians.10 gung des hohen Mittelalters,” in Reformidee und Reformpolitik im spätsalisch-­frühstaufischen Reich (Mainz: Gesellschaft für Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 1992), 251–98. 8. ​Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, “El Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Bonrepòs (un priorato premonstratense),” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 38 (1965): 231–80. 9. ​Nikolas Jaspert, “La reforma agustiniana: Un movimiento europeo entre ‘piedad popu­lar’ y ‘política eclesiástica,’ ” in XXXII Semana de Estudios Medievales, Estella, 18 a 22 de julio de 2005 (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2006), 387. 10. ​On the Augustinian Order and its origins, see Charles Dereine, “Les origines de Prémontré,” Revue d’histoire ecclésastique 42 (1947): 352–78; Yannick Veyrenchie, “Quia vos estis qui sanctorum patrum vitam probabilem renovatis . . . Naissance des chanoines réguliers jusqu’à Urbain II,” in Les chanoines réguliers: Emergence, expansion (XIe –­XIIIe s.) (Saint-­Étienne: Université de Saint-­Étienne, 2009), 29–69; essays collected in Norbert von Xanten. Adlinger—­Ordenstifter—­Kirchenfürst, ed. Kaspar Elm (Cologne: Wienand, 1984); Norbert von Xanten und der Orden der Prämonstratenser. Sammelband zur historischen Vortragsreihe im Norbertjahr 2009/2010, ed. Clemens Dölken (Magdeburg: Norbertus-­Verlag, 2010).



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

109

The Augustinian Order created or restored a Christian community type standing between the isolation of the monks and what would now be called the public-­facing role of the secular clergy. The canons w ­ ere not as concerned with contemplation and prayer to the exclusion of the world as ­were monks, but unlike secular clergy, they obeyed a communal rule and renounced personal property. They might or might not be involved in administering the sacraments or preaching sermons. The Gregorian Reform of the mid and late eleventh c­ entury tried to separate the church from subordination to lay interests and to solidify the distinction between clerical and secular ways of life. Its agenda centered on clerical celibacy, the abolition of simony (payment to a secular power for clerical office), and reinforcement of papal authority. While the reform strug­gled to liberate the church from secular control, its proponents also wanted to intensify clerical influence on the laity. As would occur throughout the history of the church, the desire to renounce the world had to be reconciled with active intervention to bring about its spiritual transformation. If the Augustinian movement instilled more rigor into the life of canons, the Premonstratensians ­were one of the forces within Augustinianism pushing to sharpen that rigor as regards community, austerity, and, to some extent, engagement with the laity. Rather than simply isolating the clergy from worldly corruption, reformers such as Norbert of Xanten (ca. 1080–1134), founder of the Premonstratensians, encouraged canons to minister to the world, following the example of the apostles in the New Testament to engage actively with lay ­people. This vita apostolica reiterated the importance of the common life, imitating the apostles who ­were enjoined by Jesus to take nothing for themselves individually but rather to share every­thing. The apostles ­were sent out ­after Pentecost to preach to the populace, and so the medieval canons saw it as their duty to update the mission of Christ’s original followers by improving the spiritual life of lay Christians.11 Augustinian foundations differed in their manner of life and how they related to secular society. Some chapters ­were urban; ­others, like Bellpuig, ­were located in monastic isolation. Certain foundations oriented themselves around liturgical ceremonials, ­others committed to the l­abor of communal life, and 11. ​On Augustinian expansion on the Iberian Peninsula, see Johannes-­Josef Bauer, “Die ‘vita canonica’ an den katalansichen Kollegiatskirchen im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 21 (1963): 54–82; Ursula Vones-­Liebenstein, Saint-­Ruf und Spanien: Studien zur Verbreitung und zum Wirken der Regularkanoniker von Saint-­Ruf in Avignon auf der iberischen Halbinsel (11. und 12. Jahrhundert), 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996). For the Iberian Premonstratensians, see Flocel Sabaté, “Los Premostratenses: Creación de la Orden e inicial expansión ibérica,” in Entre el claustro y el mundo: Canónigos regulares y monjes premostratenses en la Edad Media, ed. José Ángel García de Cortázar and Ramón Teja Casuso (Aguilar de Campoo: Fundación Santa Maria la Real, 2009), 125–62.

11 0 Chap t e r  4

still ­others engaged in military and crusade-­related activities. Although some emphasis was initially placed on preaching and other interactions with the laity, the Augustinian canons tended to turn away from ­these proj­ects, which the mendicant ­orders would take up in the thirteenth c­ entury. The new o ­ rders had a more dramatic style of preaching and a more effective relationship with the urban poor. The diversity of Augustinian purposes was both a strength and a weakness, giving the order flexibility to respond to dif­fer­ent needs and pious inclinations but also blurring its mission and at times simply adding another layer of ecclesiastical holders of lands and rights.12 The twelfth c­ entury was the golden age of the Augustinian movement. Four popes between 1124 and 1159 had previously been regular canons: Honorius II, Innocent II, Lucius II, and Adrian IV.13 In 1989 Karl Bosl characterized the years from 1050 to 1150 as “the c­ entury of Augustinian canons,” although si­mul­ta­neously Joseph Avril remarked that t­ hese canons represent a forgotten, if impor­tant, aspect of church history.14 Unlike the Carthusians’ emphasis on ­silent contemplation or the Cistercians’ combination of prayer, meditation, and crusade preaching, the Augustinians did not have a well-­defined set of prescribed obligations, or, put more positively, they creatively ­adopted what was referred to as a vita mixta, an intermediate state between pure contemplation and action in the world. What all Augustinians had in common, at least at the time the order was established, was a desire to infuse the secular world with spiritual purpose rather than separating themselves from it according to the monastic example. Sixty-­nine Augustinian ­houses w ­ ere created in Catalonia before 1200.15 Some w ­ ere new foundations like Bellpuig, while ­others had already existed as canonical communities as far back as the tenth c­ entury (Santa Maria de Solsona, Sant Feliu de Girona) before the Augustinian movement took them over.16 Catalan donors and clergy favored what was known as the ordo antiquus of the Augustinian Rule. T ­ hese collegiate chapters observed a common life without private property and practiced a moderate regime as regards diet and 12. ​Jaspert, “La reforma agustiniana,” 416–20. 13. ​Jaspert, “La reforma agustiniana,” 390. 14. ​Karl Bosl, “Das Jahrhundert der Augustinerchorherren,” in Historiographia Medievalis: Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters: Festschrift für F.-­J. Schmale zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Dieter Berg and Hans-­Werner Goetz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 1–17; Joseph Avril, conclusion to Le monde des chanoines, XIe–­XIVe s. = Cahiers de Fanjeaux 24 (Toulouse: Privat, 1989), 363. 15. ​Jaspert, “La reforma agustiniana,” 384. 16. ​Manuel Riu i Riu, “La canònica de Santa Maria de Solsona. Pre­ce­dents medievals d’un bisbat modern,” Urgellia 2 (1979): 211–56. On the collegiate canons in Catalonia, see Bauer, “Die ‘vita canonica’ an den katalanischen Kollegiatkirchen,” 54–82.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

111

ascetic practices, embracing neither the liturgical complexity of the Benedictine tradition nor the contemplative isolation of the Cistercians. Introduced in the early twelfth ­century, the ordo novus was more severe, influenced as it was by Cistercian austerity. Its followers, the Premonstratensians most importantly, ­were more e­ ager than the monks to have contact with the laity in keeping with their imitation of the apostles. The first explic­itly Augustinian foundation in Catalonia was Santa Maria de Serrabona (Roussillon), established in 1082 by Viscount Bernat of Cerdanya.17 Many Augustinian chapters ­adopted the model set by Saint Ruf of Avignon, the exemplar of what might be considered a moderate but well-­organized and reformist set of ordo antiquus practices. Beginning in 1084 with the collegiate church of Santa Maria de Besalù, the Saint Ruf movement was given charge of Catalan church communities, including the cathedral chapters of Barcelona, Vic, and Tortosa.18 The Saint Ruf practices emphasized community and renunciation of private possessions. This way of life was sufficiently austere to provoke re­sis­tance, as occurred at the cathedral chapter of Vic during the episcopacy of Berenguer Sunifred de Lluçà in the 1080s. The diffusion of the Augustinian movement owed much to Saint Ruf, but also to the enthusiasm of Catalan religious leaders like Bishop Berenguer, whose frustrated attempt to change the lifestyle of his cathedral canons was offset by the creation of reformed or restructured Augustinian chapters at Manlleu, l’Estany, Manresa, and Sant Joan de les Abadesses. In the diocese of Girona, Abbot Pere Rigau reor­ga­nized Vilabertran and Cervià.19 Notwithstanding their pious intentions, nobles often established religious communities in order to impose control over territory, as was the case with the ­great military lord Arnau Mir de Tost in founding Àger or the Anglesola ­family and the counts of Urgell with regard to Bellpuig.20 Despite the relatively modest support of the rulers of Barcelona and Aragon, the Augustinians w ­ ere successful in Catalonia.21 The aforementioned figure of 17. ​Josep Moran i Ocerinjauregui, Les homilies de Tortosa (Barcelona: Curial, 1990), 35. 18. ​Vones-­Liebenstein, Saint-­Ruf und Spanien. See also Moran, Les homilies de Tortosa, 24–46. 19. ​Vones-­Liebenstein, Saint-­Ruf und Spanien, 107–55; Pilar Sendra Beltrán, “La canònica agustiniana de Sant Tomás de Riudeperes (Osona): Un treball pendent,” Lambard: Estudis d’art medieval 11 (1998–1999): 79–85; Roger  E. Reynolds, “An Early Rule for Canons Regular from Santa Maria de l’Estany (New York, Hispanic Society of Amer­i­ca, MS HC 380/819),” Miscel·lània litúrgica catalana 10 (2001): 165–91; Lluís To Figueres and Ignasi Bellver i Sanz, “Les fundacions de Santa Maria de Cervià i Santa Maria de Vilabertran en el context de la societat feudal (1053–1069),” Annals de l’Institut d’Estudis Gironins 29 (1987): 9–26; Josep M. Masnou Pratdesaba, “Santa Maria de l’Estany i la consolidació d’una canònica agustiniana a principis del segle XIII,” Miscel·lània litrúrgica catalana 29 (2021): 281–335. 20. ​Jaspert, “La reforma agustiniana,” 395–96. 21. ​The counts of Barcelona ­were involved in the establishment of Santa Eulalia and Santa Anna in mid-­twelfth-­century Barcelona. Nikolas Jaspert, Stift und Stadt: Das Heiliggrabpriorat von Santa Anna

11 2 Chap t e r  4

sixty-­nine foundations is greater than the sixty-­one created in all the rest of Spain. Equally discordant is the merely respectable number of forty-­seven Catalan Benedictine monasteries in contrast with the over five hundred monasteries in Castile, León, Navarre, and Aragon.22 The movement’s cultural influence in Catalonia is evident in sermon cycles emanating from Augustinian chapters in Tortosa and Organyà, which are among the oldest Romance vernacular texts.23 In the late twelfth ­century, the influence of Saint Ruf waned with the consolidation of the Catalan counties u ­ nder Barcelona and the f­ avor its rulers, now kings of Aragon, accorded to the Cistercians. Augustinian chapters continued to flourish, but few new ones w ­ ere created. Thus, Bellpuig de les Avellanes was unusual in the lateness of its foundation and in its embrace of the Premonstratensian Rule, both attributable to the patronage of the counts of Urgell. In Eu­rope, the Premonstratensians ­were the leading exponents of the ordo novus. In Catalonia, Bellpuig was the only Augustinian h ­ ouse to affiliate itself with Prémontré and its ascetic formula.24 The divergence between old and new ­orders reflects the complicated basis for the Augustinian movement as a w ­ hole, founded as it was on several late antique texts, not all of which can be attributed with certainty to Saint Augustine. The short Ordo monasterii (sometimes known as the Regula secunda or the Ordo officii) may emanate from Saint Augustine’s milieu, if not from his pen specifically. It requires poverty, manual ­labor, and life in common, all of which would be taken as the aspirational bases for the Premonstratensians.25 Saint Norbert of Xanten, a nobleman and relation of the German emperors, established the Order of the Premonstratensians. Along with a few companions, he built a community at Prémontré (diocese of Laon) in 1120 whence the order takes its name. Very quickly Norbert and his disciples created new pious communities in Flanders and the Lower Rhine regions, but the founder himself took up the princely office of archbishop of Magdeburg in 1126, a und das Regularkanonikerstift Santa Eulàlia del Camp im mittelalterlichen Barcelona (1145–1423) (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1996). Santa Anna soon affiliated itself with the Order of the Holy Sepulcher. 22. ​Francisco Javier Pérez-­Envid, “Iglesia, reforma, monacato y canónigos en la Peninsula del siglo XII” (paper delivered at the conference “Els Premonstratesos a l’edat mitjana,” Bellpuig de les Avellanes, October 28, 2010). 23. ​Josep Moran i Ocerinjauregui, “La prédication ancienne en Cata­logne: L’activité canoniale,” in La prédication en Pays d’Oc (XIIe-­début XVe siècle) (Toulouse: Privat, 1997) = Cahiers de Fanjeaix 32 (1997): 17–25. The language of the Tortosa texts is close to Provençal (what Moran calls “Catalanized Provençal”), suggesting the influence of the chapter of Saint Ruf of Avignon, the inspiration for the reform of the cathedral chapter of Tortosa. The Organyà homilies are in what can be considered an early form of Catalan. See Moran i Ocerinjauregui, “Homilies d’Organyà. Edicions i estudis nous,” in Estudis d’història de la llengua catalana (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2004), 73–108. 24. ​Moran, Les homilies de Tortosa, 35. 25. ​ Le Règle de Saint Augustin, ed. Luc Verheijen, vol. 2 (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1967), 148–52.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

113

shocking decision for his followers. They turned the order’s purposes t­ oward both asceticism and institutionalization, away from the spontaneity that Norbert envisaged.26 Although Norbert engaged in itinerant preaching, he interpreted the vita apostolica more as a stationary life of poverty, self-­sufficiency, and community than as an effort to transform the secular world.27 The first statutes, drawn up between 1130 and 1134 ­after Norbert’s departure, emphasize the internal discipline of the abbeys more than interaction with society. Norbert was close to Saint Bernard, and his canons observed a contemplative and ascetic orientation borrowed from the Cistercians. In a book describing the dif­fer­ent ­orders in the church, dating from between 1125 and 1130, the distinctive feature of the Premonstratensians is said to be their geo­g raph­i­cal distance from population centers, unlike other canons but like monks, especially Cistercians.28 The Premonstratensians distinguished themselves, not always amicably, from other observants of the Augustinian Rule by their dress and manner of life. Their habits ­were white and made of wool, like ­those of the Cistercians, denoting plainness since they w ­ ere undyed. Within the Augustinian movement, quarrels arose in the twelfth ­century over linen versus wool, the former being more luxurious and smoother, with the Premonstratensians among the leading advocates of the h ­ umble woolen habit.29 In accord with monastic tradition, they also abstained from meat, observed periods of silence, and engaged in manual l­ abor, demonstrating an austerity greater than that followed by the normal ordo antiquus canons. Along with their renunciatory proclivities, the Premonstratensians retained some of the overall Augustinian mission to improve the lives of ordinary Christians. The par­tic­u­lar pastoral activity of Bellpuig was its three hospitals, which served the sick and ­dying and sheltered pilgrims en route to and from Santiago de Compostela.30 Bellpuig also observed Augustinian customs by permitting a 26. ​Stefan Weinfurter, “Norbert of Xanten in the Judgement of His Contemporaries,” Communicator 20, no. 2 (2002): 25–50. 27. ​Dereine, “Les origines de Prémontré,” 371–75. 28. ​ Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus qui sunt in Ecclesia, ed. Giles Constable and Bernard S. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 56–57. 29. ​Franz Fuchs, “Wolle oder Leinen. Zum Streit um den rechten Habit in der Regularkanonikerbewegung des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Regula Sancti Augustini. Normative Grundlage differenter Verbände im Mittelalter, ed. Gerd Melville and Anne Müller (Paring: Akademie der Augustiner Chor-­Herren von Windesheim, 2002), 219–37. 30. ​Francesc Fité i Llevot, “La presència dels ordes religioso-­militars a Montsec. L’Hospital d’Ares,” in Actes de les Primeres Jornades sobre els ordes religioso-­militars als Països Catalans (Tarragona: Diputació de Tarragona, 1994), 275–82; Fité i Llevot, “Senderes i hospitals del camí de Sant Jaume a Catalunya,” in El camí de Sant Jaume i Catalunya. Actes del Congrés Internacional celebrat a Barcelona, Cervera i Lleida, els dies 16, 17 i 18 d’octubre de 2003 (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2007), 333–50.

11 4 Chap t e r  4

Figure 4.2.  Entrance to the church at Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Photo­graph by the author.

lay audience for its ceremonies. Although the situation and location of the convent allowed for a degree of distance from the world, the canons anticipated a substantial attendance at their church. Typical of Premonstratensian architecture, in contrast to the more self-­contained Cistercian communities, is that the monastery church communicated through a door directly to the outside world rather than being accessible only via the cloister.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

115

Foundation and Expansion of Bellpuig Holding the distinction of being the only Premonstratensian ­house in Catalonia, Bellpuig prospered for a time owing to the desire of the counts of Urgell to offset f­avor accorded to the Cistercians by their more power­ful cousins, the counts of Barcelona.31 Already in the early twelfth ­century, the rulers of Urgell cultivated marriage and po­liti­cal alliances with Castile in order to c­ ounter the influence of the expansionist counts of Barcelona who conquered Tarragona in 1118 and followed this up by 1150 with the annexation of Muslim-­ruled Tortosa in the south and Lleida in the west, the latter very much in a zone of competition with Urgell. Castile and León ­were affected by currents of French piety emanating from Cluny in the eleventh ­century and Prémontré in the twelfth. ­There would eventually be nineteen Premonstratensian h ­ ouses in Castile.32 Count Ermengol VI of Urgell (1102–1153) helped endow some of the first Castilian Premonstratensian chapters at La Vid and Retuerta, and he was buried in the Leonese diocese of Palencia (albeit at a Cistercian monastery).33 The Premonstratensians’ modest presence in Iberia contrasts with their profound influence in western France, the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and Saxony. Their reputation was international, and they reached their widest diffusion (approximately five hundred h ­ ouses) in the mid-­thirteenth ­century.34 In alliance with the noble Guillem II d’Anglesola, Count Ermengol VII (1153–1184) and his wife Dolça authorized in 1167 the creation of a Premonstratensian chapter at the new, struggling community at Bellpuig de les Avellanes. This came ­after an effort underwritten by the Count of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer IV, just ­after the conquests of Lleida and Tortosa in 1149 to establish the Premonstratensians at Vallclara de Montsant (comarca of Priorat). As Caresmar reports, the latter was a reward for Stephen, abbot of the Premonstratensian ­house of Flabemont in Lorraine, who fought as a crusader in the Tortosa campaign and was appointed abbot of Vallclara. This did not lead to any further f­avor ­toward the Premonstratensians, however. Count Ramon Berenguer IV and his successor, King Alfons I, embraced the Cistercian Order as an ally in the settlement of newly seized territories between Tarragona and 31. ​On the counts of Urgell and the Premonstratensians, see Eduardo Corredera y Guiérrez, “Los condes soberanos de Urgel y los Premonstratenses,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 36 (1963): 33–102. 32. ​José Maria Canal Sánchez-­Pagín, “Casamientos de los condes de Urgel en Castilla,” Anuario de estudios medievales 19 (1989): 119–35. 33. ​Simon Barton, “The Count, the Bishop and the Abbot: Armengol VI of Urgel and the Abbey of Valladolid,” En­glish Historical Review 111 (1996): 85–103. 34. ​A graph showing the rise and fall in their numbers is in Leinsle, Die Prämonstratenser, 53.

11 6 Chap t e r  4

Tortosa, putting their energies ­after 1150 into underwriting the new foundations of Poblet and Santes Creus.35 In 1159, Stephen and most of the community returned to Lorraine; and Vallclara, no longer or­ga­nized along Premonstratensian lines, was given to the cathedral of Tortosa.36 One of its former, now homeless, members, Joan d’Organyà, along with a few companions, established a new community at Mount Malet near the pre­sent site of Bellpuig.37 The origins of Bellpuig are hard to disentangle from an accretion of legends, some elaborated at the time, ­others reflecting ­later tensions between the Premonstratensians and other o ­ rders, especially the Hieronymites, who tried to take over Bellpuig. An example of the per­sis­tence of imaginative and fabricated accounts comes from the monastery of Urdax in Navarre, whose abbot at the time of the monastic confiscations of 1820 claimed that his community had been created by Premonstratensians in the ninth c­ entury, even though the order was not founded ­until the twelfth c­ entury.38 Even Caresmar, usually confident of his ability to extract the truth from confusing documentation, acknowledged with regard to the Bellpuig foundation legends, in tanto enim rerum secessu haud facile elucidari potest veritas (in such m ­ atters it is hardly easy to elucidate the truth of what happened).39 In February 1167, Count Ermengol VII and Countess Dolça of Urgell gave to Joan de Organyà the land at Mount Malet where the spiritual community was already settled, along with revenues from vari­ous taxes to provide clothing and the means to hold ser­vices. The brotherhood was to consist of six members, three of whom should be priests, living according to the Premonstratensian version of the Rule of Saint Augustine.40 It is likely that the donation was at the initiative of the countess, ­because Ermengol was away much of the time in the ser­vice of King Ferdinand II of León. In 1167, Ermengol would be pre­sent at the conquest of Alcántara in Estremadura and subsequently would sometimes endorse documents as the king’s maiordomus or as 35. ​Lawrence McCrank, “The Frontier of the Spanish Reconquest and the Land Acquisitions of the Cistercians of Poblet,” Analecta cisterciensia 29 (1973): 57–78. 36. ​Sabaté, “Los Premostratenses,” 143. 37. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 27–39. 38. ​Sabaté, “Los Premostratenses,” 131. 39. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, f. 9r; Caresmar, “De rebus” B, p. 19; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 21. 40. ​The text of the donation is edited by Cebrià Baraut, “Els documents, dels anys 1151–1190, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell,” Urgellia 10 (1990–1991): no. 1,616, 137–38. Baraut used the text preserved in the cartulary of the cathedral of La Seu d’Urgell, the “Liber dotaliorum Ecclesiae Urgellensis,” while Caresmar and Corredera relied on a version now ­housed in AHN Sección Clero, c. 1003, núm. 4. T ­ here are some differences, especially with regard to the nature of the properties given as an initial endowment. Fité, “El monestir premonstratès,” 53–56.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

117

comes Urgellensis dominans Extremadura.41 Count Ermengol did sign the Bellpuig foundation rec­ord along with his wife and son. The bishop of Urgell and Alfons, king of Aragon and Count of Barcelona, also attested to it. Seven months a­ fter this transaction, another Premonstratensian foundation was created three kilo­meters away, the site of what is now Bellpuig de les Avellanes. According to Caresmar, at the time of the new establishment, the site contained vestiges of a rectangular limestone tower.42 The noble Guillem d’Anglesola, lord of Bellpuig, along with his ­sisters Ninve and Sibil·lia, ceded land to William, abbot of the Gascon Premonstratensian abbey of “Casae Dei” (Case-­Dieu), at Sant Nicolau, and “Fontium Amenorum” in the county of Urgell. The latter was to be the site of a monastery, also consisting of six ­brothers. The document then notes that, not surprisingly, Count Ermengol of Urgell objected that this would be to the detriment of his foundation. The conflict was resolved by unifying the two communities at Fontium Amenorum, which was henceforth to be known as “Pulcripodii”—­Bellpuig.43 In accordance with this arrangement, the Count and Countess of Urgell then gave the nearby settlement of Avellanes to the monastery.44 It is thought that “Bellpuig” comes from one of the titles of the lords of Anglesola. In any event, a single Premonstratensian foundation was set up with Joan d’Organyà as prior, u ­ nder the patronage of both the counts of Urgell and Guillem d’Anglesola. The old site was not yet abandoned, and in fact, Joan, by vocation a hermit rather than a community or­ga­nizer, returned to Mount Malet in 1172 to live his remaining years (approximately twenty) as a solitary. He would be venerated locally as a saint.45 Favored by the counts of Urgell as well as by local notables, Bellpuig held lordship over much of the central portion of the modern comarca of La Noguera. From the beginning, Bellpuig was placed ­under comital protection and declared immune from taxation and other customary demands for revenue. In his ­will, Ermengol VII stated his desire to be buried at Bellpuig and left 41. ​Prim Bertran i Roigé, “Donacions de la comtessa Dulça d’Urgell als ordes religiosos (1184– 1210),” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 49–50 (1976–1977): 41–42. 42. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, ff. 61r–68r; Caresmar, “De rebus” B, pp. 127–48; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 60–66. 43. ​Fité, “El monestir premonstratès,” 57–58. 44. ​BPA, Fons antic, Caixa 12, Llibre 30, Jaume Caresmar, “Anales del Real Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas de la Orden de Canonigos Regulares Premonstratesos en el Principado de Cathaluña, su propagación en Abadias y Prioratos dependiendes, sus dotationes, donaciones, privilegios Pontificios y Reales,” 139–42. In “De rebus,” Caresmar has nothing to say about the second foundation by Guillem d’Anglesola. 45. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, ff. 50v–54r; Caresmar, “De rebus” B, pp. 66–68; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 40.

11 8 Chap t e r  4

the village of Bellcaire to the convent. His son and successor, Ermengol VIII, confirmed in 1184 the terms of his f­ ather’s foundation document, including the affiliation with Case-­Dieu. In 1195 King Alfons of Aragon-­Barcelona placed the abbey u ­ nder his protection and exempted it from vari­ous levies.46 King Alfons also donated to Bellpuig the Aragonese ­castle of Almolda, which Bellpuig would retain u ­ ntil 1354.47 The abbey did not succeed in all its spiritual and territorial claims. In the 1170s it attempted to build a church near Solsona (capital of the comarca of Solsonès), but the Augustinian chapter located in that city resisted this attempt. The case was brought to Rome in 1174, and although Bellpuig won the litigation, it never constructed anything in Solsona.48 In the 1230s, Abbot Bernat de Zaportella attempted to take over and reform Santa Maria de Mur, another Augustinian chapter, but this too led to lawsuits that had to be settled by the papacy, which de­cided in ­favor of Mur. It retained the ordo antiquus form of canonical life.49 Caresmar’s Latin chronicle of Bellpuig, De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum, rec­ords exchanges of aristocratic gifts in return for prayers and affiliation. Beginning in 1195 with the ac­cep­tance of the noble Galceran de Pinós as a member of the monastic community, “in life and in death,” prominent families in the region gave land and movable wealth in return for vari­ous forms of spiritual benefit: fellowship in the community, prayers for their souls, or a promise of burial and membership for their sons as canons.50 ­There was no fixed layout for Premonstratensian foundations, though they generally conform to a pattern established by the Cistercians.51 Typically, the church had three naves with an adjoining cloister located to the south and slightly west. Around the cloister ­were the sacristy, where liturgical objects and regalia w ­ ere kept (nearest to the church); the chapter meeting hall; another large room with a fireplace, sometimes referred to as a workroom (where the canons undertook tasks involving writing and making ­things) or as the winter “warming room” (calefectorium); the refectory; a kitchen; and food storage 46. ​ACA, Cancelˑleria, perg. Alfonso I, no. 667 (August 1195), ed. Caresmar, “De rebus” B, 168– 71; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 74, 261–62. 47. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, ff. 76r–78r; Caresmar, “De rebus” B, pp. 170–71; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 74–75. 48. ​Riu, “La canònica de Santa Maria de Solsona,” 241. 49. ​Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, Santa Maria de Mur: Cronologia (Tremp: Garsineu, 2003), 49–51. 50. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, ff. 97r–161v; Caresmar, “De rebus” B, pp. 225–40; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 95–148. See also Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 42–70. 51. ​María Teresa López de Guerreño Sanz, “El particularismo de las fábricas premonstratenses hispanas en la Edad Media. Una revisión necesaria: balance y nuevas aportaciones,” in De Bellpuig a Bellpuig, 17–46.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

119

rooms. Above the cloister was a dormitory. Only ­later would ­there be individual cells. The staircase was usually close to the church and next to the sacristy in order for the canons to pass quickly from their beds to their stations for celebrating the night offices. The intermediate nature of the Premonstratensians, standing between the isolated and contemplative Cistercians and the less rigorous Augustinians of the ordo antiquus, is vis­i­ble artistically. Cistercian ordinances regarding the construction of monasteries ­were repeated in Premonstratensian regulations, but the canons in some re­spects relaxed the severity of their mentors—­for example, decorating the capitals of their cloisters with sculpture while the Cistercians, reacting against the sumptuous or, in their eyes, excessively pagan and imaginative style of Benedictine artistic programs, demanded plain, unornamented capitals. The delicate but austere double columns of Bellpuig on the eastern and western sides of the cloister are adorned with fo­liage and heraldic animals (rampant lions; winged ea­gles), a style somewhere between the plainness of the Cistercians and the more fanciful and elaborate sculptures of Augustinian cloisters following the ordo antiquus, such as L’Estany in the diocese of Vic.52 The Bellpuig decorative style most closely resembles that of the cloister of the Benedictine foundation of Santa Maria de Gualter (comarca of La Noguera) and the facade of Santa Maria d’Almatà in Balaguer. Other distinctive Premonstratensian physical features ­were direct access to the church for the public and, a peculiarity of Hispanic foundations, a room between the kitchen and the refectory called the desiderio, where the canons, awaiting the arrival of the abbot to lead them into the dining hall, recited Luke 22:15 (King James version), which begins, “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.”53 Among the gifts of the counts of Urgell was a sandal reputed to have belonged to the Virgin Mary. Uniquely, except for the case of Christ himself, the Virgin was brought bodily to heaven ­after death, leaving no corporeal relics except for fingernail clippings, hair, and the like. Sacred objects associated with Mary, predominantly items of clothing, ­were of unusual rarity and value. Only the sole and part of the instep of the sandal remained, but this was a rather substantial associative relic. Caresmar believed that the sandal was among the many sacred objects put into circulation by the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and that, soon a­ fter, it was presented to Bellpuig by Count Ermengol VIII and his wife, Countess Elvira, who had reconciled 52. ​Josep Moran i Ocerinjauregui, “Diferències artístiques entre Ordo Antiquus i Ordo Novus en el món canonical agustinià,” Lambard: Estudis d’art medieval 11 (1998–1999): 59–63, 163–64. 53. ​López de Guereño Sanz, “El particularismo,” 37.

12 0 Chap t e r  4

a­ fter a b­ itter separation. This story is first mentioned much ­later, however, in a rec­ord issued in 1504 by King Ferdinand II, which referred to the miracles the relic was performing.54 Caresmar himself witnessed one of the sandal’s protective miracles when in 1744, with the wheat standing in the fields ready to be harvested, a storm threatened, and the relic was hastily taken around in a pro­cession. Although a thick layer of hail fell, the wheat was not damaged, and the lily flowers in the cloister, although surrounded by piles of frozen pellets, ­were similarly intact. Caresmar felt a personal devotion to the sandal, and his place of burial was next to the altar where it was kept.55 Although the sandal was lost in the early twentieth c­ entury, its gilded brass and enamel reliquary casket was recovered in 2007. The style of the casket makes it almost certain that it, and prob­ably the sandal itself, was a gift of Count Pere II of Urgell (r. 1348–1408), whose ambitious artistic patronage and devotion to Bellpuig are the subjects of a recent study.56 On December 17, 1198, in the first year of his pontificate, Pope Innocent III issued a privilege in ­favor of Bellpuig.57 The opening words, Religiosam vitam eligentibus, ­were a standard introduction for letters conferring ­limited rights on monastic foundations but not granting them exemption from episcopal jurisdiction. The abbot of Bellpuig obtained the right to celebrate masses quietly during times of an interdict that would other­wise prohibit church ser­ vices, and the bishop was enjoined not to collect new or additional tithes or fees from the canons. The community remained answerable to the bishop of Urgell, who retained rights of consecration and ordination and whose permission had to be sought before constructing new chapels and oratories. The major benefit of such ­limited privileges is the detailed enumeration of the property that the pope placed u ­ nder his protection. Such a rec­ord would serve as strong proof of the possession of land and rights. Innocent III thus provided through this letter an inventory of what Bellpuig held or claimed thirty years ­after its foundation. Befitting the high regard in which Bellpuig was held by the counts of Urgell and kings of Aragon, its patrimony was quite substantial. The papal letter reflects what the Bellpuig community conceived of as its landed endowment since the Roman curia, obviously unfamiliar with the lo54. ​Caresmar, “De rebus A,” ff. 97r–114r; Caresmar, “De rebus B,” pp. 225–72; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 95–106. 55. ​Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez and Francesc Fité Llevot, “El Comte Pere II d’Urgell i les arts,” Lambard: Estudis d’art medieval 26 (2014–2016): 104. 56. ​Velasco and Fité, “El Comte Pere II d’Urgell i les arts,” 100–114. 57. ​ACA, Butlles Pontificias, lligal 3, no. 2. See Paul Freedman and Damian Smith, “A Privilege of Pope Innocent III for the Premonstratensian House of Bellpuig de les Avellanes,” Römische Historische Mitteilungen 55 (2013): 81–97.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

121

Map 3.  Medieval properties of Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Created by Jordi Bolòs i Masclans.

cal geography of western Catalonia, would reproduce in the text of the privilege what­ever the canons dictated. Innocent III may have been particularly concerned about the situation in the county of Urgell since just ten days before issuing Religiosam vitam eligentibus to Bellpuig he had accepted the resignation of Bishop Bernat de Castellbó of Urgell, who had been unable to cope with the attacks led by the Count of Foix and the bishop’s own ­family of Castellbó. The raids would fi­nally be beaten back by Count Ermengol VIII five years ­later.58 It is pos­si­ble that the pope was asked for the monastic privilege 58. ​ Die Register Innocenz’ III, vol. 1, ed. Othmar Hageneder and Anton Haidacher (Graz: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1964), no. 452, 676–77. The Cistercian chronicler Peter de Vaux-­de-­Cernay describes the cruelty of the Count of Foix and his attacks on the see. See Peter de Vaux-­de-­Cernay, Petri Vallium Sernaii monachi, Hystoria Albigensis, ed. Pascal Guébin and Ernest Lyon, vol. 1 (Paris: Champion, 1926), chaps.

12 2 Chap t e r  4

in person by a Bellpuig canon accompanying the archbishop of Tarragona, who had traveled to Rome seeking papal confirmation of Bishop Bernat’s decision to resign and permission to hold a new election.59 The sites listed in the privilege are mostly within a small radius of the abbey: in its comarca of La Noguera, or to the south in Segrià, or to the east in the comarca of Urgell. Bellpuig also held land in Aragon, beyond the border formed by the Noguera River, in the city of Balaguer to the south, and in Lleida. The privilege also refers to a castellum de Monte Nigro. ­There is such a place near Mount Montseny northeast of Barcelona, but this is not likely to be what was meant as ­there ­were no other Bellpuig properties anywhere near ­there. Almolda in Aragon, given by King Alfons in 1195, was at this time the only ­castle we can identify as belonging to the monastery. Fi­nally, the privilege confirms the church of Santa Maria de Bonrepòs, located to the north, in Pallars Jussà, as belonging to Bellpuig. Additional properties are listed in a fourteenth-­century hand at the end of the document, including Artà in Majorca, which in theory was the most impor­ tant de­pen­dency of Bellpuig. Although Artà had the status of a royal donation and full-­fledged d­ aughter ­house of Les Avellanes, it was a remote colony and effectively autonomous. ­There was never any established exchange of canons or visitation.60 Inexplicably, Bellpuig did not cherish the papal letter as the basis for its status and rights; it seems to have been unknown a­ fter the amendments of the ­fourteenth c­ entury. Caresmar did not mention the letter, and it does not appear in the Bellpuig cartulary. The privilege might have been submitted to the royal court as part of a l­egal dispute b­ ecause its pre­sent location in the royal archive is attested in 1740, long before the dissolution of monastic properties diverted so many books and documents.61 Bellpuig would receive promises of immunity from taxes and confirmations of ­earlier privileges from the kings of Aragon-­Catalonia James I (1262), Peter II (1285), and James II (1318).62 Caresmar noted ­these, as well as a letter from Pope Innocent III in 1213 appointing Abbot Guillem of Bellpuig to a del­e­ga­tion 202–3, 204–6. A l­ater report assessed the damage to the cathedral and its property. See Cebrià Baraut, “L’evolució política de la senyoria d’Andorra des dels orígens fins als Pariatges (segles IX–­XIII),” Urgellia 11 (1992–1993): 290–99. 59. ​ Die Register Innocenz’ III, vol. 1, no. 454, 678–79. 60. ​Amengual i Batle, “Una presència dels canonges premonstratesos,” 99–118. 61. ​In 1740, according to ACA, Memorials, vol. 85, f. 69, it was listed as being kept in “legajo 3, no. 2.” I am grateful to the late Jaume Riera of the ACA for this information. 62. ​Caresmar, “De rebus A,” ff. 139v–40v, 259r–59v; Caresmar, “De rebus B,” pp. 520–24, 641–42; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 183–84, 224–225, 266–267. See also Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 104.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

123

judging a case involving Cistercian monasteries against the cathedral chapter of Lleida in a dispute over burial fees. The pope used this occasion to address the abbot of Bellpuig directly, recommending that he watch over himself and his flock, extirpate vices, and plant virtues so that he might render a decent accounting before God on the Day of Judgment.63 Innocent III may have been trying to fortify Abbot Guillem’s wavering administrative motivation. Four years ­later, despite opposition from certain canons of Bellpuig, Pope Honorius III would allow Guillem to give up his vows and office in order to enter the more demanding Carthusian Order. This, too, we know through Caresmar.64 During the thirteenth ­century, in addition to Artà, Bellpuig received through donation or purchase the ­castles of Tosca and Almadir (both near Bellpuig) and that of Els Arcs (comarca of Baix Camp). In 1224, Guillem d’Anglesola and his wife Sibil·la gave to Bellpuig a hospital they had founded in 1221 in Sant Nicolau de Fondarella on the Plain of Urgell; a year l­ater they added to the gift the rights over a ­castle called Mallabeca in the valley of Àger. In 1250 Ermessenda d’Àger donated to the community another hospital in the town of Àger, and she became one of its servants.65 Bellpuig was not the only beneficiary of the pious ambitions of the counts of Urgell, who between 1140 and 1204 ­were also enthusiastic found­ers of female Cistercian monasteries such as Vallbona, Sant Hilario in Lleida, and Santa Maria de Vallverd. Nevertheless, Bellpuig increased its territory and power consistently in the face of ecclesiastical rivals and the counts’ preoccupations with warfare and internecine turmoil.66 The period of maximum wealth and influence for Bellpuig was ­after the accession of the Cabrera lineage of counts of Urgell, beginning in 1236 with Ponç and ending with the death of Ermengol X, the last of the line, in 1314. Marquesa, s­ ister of Ermengol VIII and wife of Ponç Guerau de Cabrera, is considered in effect a female cofounder of Bellpuig along with Countess Dolça, as she gave money and property sufficient to endow three priests to pray for her soul.67 Count Ponç returned ­water mills unjustly taken from Bellpuig and gave his consent for the abbey to construct more of them. In 1243 he named Abbot Joan the executor of his w ­ ill and left 5,000 morabetins to the abbey. Bellpuig also received f­ avors from the count-­k ings of Barcelona-­Aragon. In 63. ​Caresmar, “De rebus A,” ff. 208r–9v; Caresmar, “De rebus B,” pp. 340–41; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 130. 64. ​Caresmar, “Anales del Real Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas,” 236. 65. ​On Sant Nicolau, see Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, “San Nicolás de Fondarella: Un priorato premonstratense,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 38 (1965): 59–86; Fité, “El monestir premonstratès,” 60–71. 66. ​Sabaté, “Los Premostratenses,” 147. 67. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 67–68.

12 4 Chap t e r  4

1262, for example, King Jaume I released the abbey from obligations to pay tolls and sales taxes and confirmed royal protection.68 Ermengol X (1268–1314) was the most generous donor and the one most ­eager to expand Bellpuig. He designated it the place of burial for members of his ­family, but it would be an exaggeration to apply a term like “necropolis” to a rather modest program undertaken by a count with no direct successor. Nevertheless, the four magnificent limestone tombs and their recumbent figured effigies give it that aura. The parents of Ermengol X, Àlvar I and Cecilia de Foix, w ­ ere buried in a double tomb, while the fourth monument is for the count’s ­brother, Viscount Àlvar of Àger, who died in the Sicilian war in 1299. The tombs are now at the Cloisters Museum in New York, although the ­actual ­human remains have been returned to Bellpuig.69 The tomb sculpture for Viscount Àlvar must have been made shortly a­ fter his death, and it is from this point that we can date the plan to erect a familial burial site and rebuild the abbey church. Count Ermengol X may have ordered the expansion or reconstruction of the northwest side of the cloister. More as­suredly, he is responsible for building the main door to the church, in the Gothic style, flanked by a series of clustered arches whose capitals are decorated with the chessboard arms of the counts of Urgell, the symbol of Bellpuig (a lily superimposed on a mountain), and rampant heraldic animals. New construction was undertaken on the transept chapels and presbytery of the church, the chapter room (whose columns seem to date from this era), the workroom (destroyed in 1966), and the refectory. Ermengol X also built a three-­story rectangular palace on the south side of the monastic complex. This fell into disrepair ­after the disamortization and was removed in 1915 soon a­ fter the Marists took over.70 The church that survives is only part of what was planned in the early ­fourteenth c­ entury; it consists of ­little more than a transept, altar, apse, choir, and presbytery. The nave, or at least what would be considered a full nave, was never completed. The four Gothic tombs w ­ ere located on the south side of the transept. In his w ­ ill, dictated shortly before his death in 1314, Count Ermengol X bequeathed a thousand gold coins for unspecified work on the monastery. This desire to improve the fabric of Bellpuig was not fulfilled by his successor, a member of the House of Barcelona. While the county of Urgell kept its separate po­liti­cal identity for another ­century, the passing of Ermengol X marks 68. ​Fité, “El monestir premonstratès,” 79–80. 69. ​The tombs are discussed in chapter 5. 70. ​Fité, “El monestir premonstratès,” 83–96.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

125

Figure 4.3.  Tomb of Ermengol X, Count of Urgell. The Cloisters Collection, 1928. Accession number 28.95a-xx. The Met Cloisters, Open Access.

the end of its in­de­pen­dence. It took ­until 1350 for the legacies of Count Ermengol to be paid out, and even then, at the insistence of his ­widow, Dolça, and the bishop of Urgell, Bellpuig shared the money with other ecclesiastical foundations and proj­ects such as creating a new convent of Poor Clares (Franciscans) in Balaguer.71 71. ​Francesca Español Bertran, “Els comtes d’Urgell i el seu panteó dinàstic,” in El comtat d’Urgell, ed. Flocel Sabaté et al. (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 1995), 153; Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 123.

12 6 Chap t e r  4

Figure 4.4.  Double tomb of Alvar de Cabrera, Count of Urgell, and his wife, Cecilia de Foix. The Cloisters Collection, 1948. Accession number 48.140.1a-­d. The Met Cloisters, Open Access.

By this time Bellpuig was bereft of its wealth and influence. The arrangement of 1350 describes Bellpuig as being in ruins, more likely referring to uncompleted proj­ects than the ­actual decay of existing buildings.72 A sign of its poverty was that already in 1322 the Catalan monastery was assessed a mere four solidi to support the mother­house of Prémontré in comparison with a tax of thirty solidi as the minimum for other abbeys within its cir­cuit. That same year, Abbot Gallard protested to King James II about royal levies in contravention of privileges and concerning incursions against the monastery’s rights over 72. ​Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, Noticia de los Condes de Urgel (Lleida: Instituto de Estudios Ilerdenses, 1973), 183.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

127

the Aragonese c­ astle of Almolda and its jurisdiction. While the king confirmed its privileges, Bellpuig received no relief with regard to ­either complaint.73 The chapter enjoyed a respite thanks to the patronage of Pere II, Count of Urgell from 1348 (when he was a child) to his death in 1408. Among other ­things, he prob­ably donated the sandal relic. Although Urgell had been dynastically absorbed by the House of Barcelona with the death of Ermengol X, the county had been given to a ju­nior branch. Count Pere II, along with his cultivated wife Margaret of Montferrat, was devoted to the traditions and iconography of their pre­de­ces­sors.74 In conflicts with the townspeople of Balaguer, Bellpuig lost control over its ­water mills, a lucrative aspect of its economy. ­After more than a c­ entury of intermittent litigation, the canons sold the mills to Poblet in 1420 (although in 1441, Bellpuig was still trying to collect money owed in this transaction). With some of the proceeds, the canons bought from King Alfons the Magnanimous the ­castle of Santa Linya and the village of Priva (close to Les Avellanes in the direction of Vilanova de la Sal), so they had not altogether abandoned the exercise of lordship.75 The Black Death of 1348–1349 devastated all of Eu­rope, and Bellpuig did not escape depopulation, l­abor shortage, and economic decline. In 1354, as part of the arrangement to receive some part of the legacy of Ermengol X, Bellpuig sold the c­ astle of Almolda, which was too difficult to control from a distance. Money from that sale paid for repairs to the deteriorating fabric of the monastic complex but did not suffice to fund new construction.76 The late medieval centuries, and indeed the entire long period up to the era of Caresmar, can be described as a time of de­cadence as mea­sured by the decreased number of professed canons, diminished patrimony, and spiritual torpor. In 1425, Bellpuig gave Artà to the Majorcan notable Joan Vivot and his son in return for rights over the much nearer village of Os de Balaguer. This was a practical arrangement on both sides, trading distant properties for more easily administered ones nearby. Bellpuig had never paid much attention to its theoretical ­daughter ­house, but the exchange indicates the reduction of the monastery’s ambitions.77 In his historical survey, Eduardo Corredera calls the years 1314–1348 “The Decline of Bellpuig” and 1348–1444 “Bellpuig’s Road to Ruin.”78 Such a long-­term 73. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 113–14. 74. ​Velasco and Fité, “El Comte Pere II d’Urgell i les arts,” 93–147. 75. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 132–33. 76. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 113–26. 77. ​Amengual i Batle, “Una presència dels canonges premonstratesos,” 113–18; Albert Cassanyes Roig, “Bellpuig després dels premonstratesos: Una possessió en un antic priorat,” in De Bellpuig a Bellpuig, 119–21. 78. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 113, 123.

12 8 Chap t e r  4

eclipse is not unique to Bellpuig, however. In almost ­every history of a specific Catalan (and even Eu­ro­pean) monastery, the ­fourteenth ­century ushers in an era described by such terms as “decline,” “stagnation,” or “de­cadence.” Sometimes this is assimilated to an overall crisis of the late medieval church, rent as it was by unorthodox religious movements (Lollards in ­England and Hussites in Bohemia, for example) and by the ­Great Schism of the papacy (1378–1417). While ­there was no reduction in the intensity of popu­lar piety, a shift in patronage and fashions of devotion did occur. Lay groups such as the female Beguines or urban confraternities received more attention than the traditional monasteries. Even the Mendicant ­Orders ­were perceived as excessively institutionalized and interested in their own material aggrandizement. Popu­lar innovations in religion took place away from the well-­established pious foundations. In terms of the fortunes of Bellpuig, the decline may be most directly related to the end of the in­de­pen­dent county of Urgell. Its last ruler, Count Jaume II (“the Unlucky,” 1408–1413), was a claimant to the Aragonese-­Catalan throne upon the death of King Martin without direct heirs in 1410, but the arbitrated settlement of Caspe (1412) awarded the royal title to the Castilian Trastámara candidate Fernando de Antequera. Jaume attempted a rebellion but was defeated and spent the rest of his life (twenty more years) imprisoned. The annexation of Urgell, followed ­later in the fifteenth ­century by the ­union of Aragon and Castile, meant that Bellpuig was now far from the pious attention of any ruler. Spain was (notoriously) resourceful in resisting the Protestant Reformation through such means as the Inquisition, but at the price of increasing already substantial royal control over the church. This is the context for several of Bellpuig’s strug­gles with royal authority that the impoverished foundation, surprisingly, won. Several kings attempted to take it away from the Premonstratensians and give it to another religious order, or to channel its revenues to secular officeholders dependent on the state. The first mandate to dissolve the connection with the Premonstratensians came in 1469 when King John II in his ­will declared that ­after his death, Bellpuig and the church of Santa Engracia should be given to the Hieronymites, an austere but actively engaged order founded in 1373 in Toledo. While Santa Engracia was turned over to the Hieronymites, Bellpuig successfully resisted.79 Of more import was the institution of the commendatory system of nonresident abbots, appointees with no direct attachment to the institution who received a substantial share of its revenues. This widespread practice of the early modern period made it pos­si­ble for the church to reward power­f ul allies 79. ​Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez, “Sepulcres, altars i relíquies. Els canonges il·lustrats de Bellpuig de les Avellanes i la recerca històrica,” in De Bellpuig a Bellpuig, 155.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

129

but at the obvious cost of promoting negligent supervision and diverting income away from the foundation. At Bellpuig the commendations began in 1479 when Pope Sixtus IV appointed Francesc Blanch, residing in Rome and attached to the papal curia, as abbot. Blanch was not completely unconcerned with the abbey ­under his nominal administration, lamenting on more than one occasion its poverty and the ruined state of its buildings. As an early form of what in the con­temporary nonprofit sector would be termed “Friends of Bellpuig de les Avellanes,” he instituted the Confraternity of the Holy Sandal of the Virgin, a fellowship of lay notables centered on the chapter’s ­great relic. In 1503, u ­ nder Blanch’s successor, Mateu Fita, the confraternity was recognized by King Ferdinand.80 Despite such occasional interventions, few of the commendatory abbots visited Bellpuig, and its dilapidation was such that in 1521 ­there w ­ ere only four canons and an income of a mere fifty escudos. In 1547, a royal order appointing judges in a case involving the convent and a citizen of Balaguer referred to the “notorious poverty” of the monastery.81 During the reign of Philip II, in the latter part of the sixteenth c­ entury, the state tried to further centralize control of the church and prune its dense and neglected branches. The royal administration mistrusted religious o ­ rders whose mother­houses w ­ ere in foreign countries. The Premonstratensians and Cistercians ­were headquartered in France, a frequent e­ nemy of Spain. Along with Navarrese Urdax, Bellpuig was part of the Gascon network, recognizing the authority of Case-­Dieu, now part of France. The first salvo in what would be a series of b­ attles was launched in 1566 when Pope Pius V, u ­ nder pressure from Philip II, ordered the suppression of Franciscan convents and the “reform” of the other international o ­ rders.82 Shortly thereafter, the Spanish Premonstratensians ­were instructed to submit themselves to the Hieronymites, who also followed a version of the Rule of Saint Augustine but had the advantage of being exclusively Spanish. The ability of depopulated and destitute Bellpuig to maintain itself is remarkable. The Hieronymites entered with armed force in December  1566, holding the resisting members of the community in prison ­until the pope reasserted his control over the definition and implementation of reform by issuing a privilege in ­favor of the Spanish Premonstratensians, forcing the release of the captives. Among the ­actual improvements put into effect at Bellpuig was an end to the appointment of commendatory abbots in 1581. Beginning in 1587, resident abbots w ­ ere elected for three-­year terms. Seldom w ­ ere they reap80. ​Caresmar, “De rebus A,” ff. 107v–9v; Caresmar, “De rebus B,” pp. 253–54; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 102. 81. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 136–42. 82. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 143–59.

13 0 Chap t e r  4

pointed immediately, but often, as with Caresmar, they held office multiple times, separated by terms served by ­others.83 The king continued to pressure the papacy to reduce the number and in­de­ pen­dence of ecclesiastical foundations. In 1592, all Augustinian h ­ ouses in Catalonia ­were “secularized” in that they w ­ ere ­either closed or reor­ga­nized ­under diocesan or royal supervision. The Augustinian Order’s presence in the principality was officially terminated, but not in its Premonstratensian manifestation. Philip II tried again in 1597 to give Bellpuig to the Hieronymites, but the pope rebuffed this. The next ruler, Philip III, favored a plan of the bishop of Lleida to suppress Bellpuig and use its revenues to benefit the diocese. Bishop Francesc Virgili, appointed monastic visitor by the papal nuncio, arrested Abbot Bernat Langor and held him in confinement in Balaguer. This, too, came to nothing; the community of Bellpuig had managed to outlast both king and bishop. Yet another royal effort to suppress Bellpuig came at the end of the reign of Philip IV in 1663. The Jesuit Order had for de­cades wanted to establish a community in Balaguer, and now the plan was to fund its endowment by diverting the revenues of Bellpuig. Not that its income (assessed at 813 escudos annually) was so extensive, but if saved up over a few years, the money could launch the new Jesuit h ­ ouse. The Jesuits provided the pope with documentation that pointed out that ­there ­were only six canons, none of whom led a morally exemplary life, that the buildings w ­ ere in ruins, and that Bellpuig was located in what was, in effect, a “desert.” The royal officials promised that the tombs of the counts of Urgell would be h ­ oused in the Jesuit church (and in better and more secure conditions than currently) and that the canons of Bellpuig would be given life pensions. Power­f ul though the forces arrayed against Bellpuig might have seemed, it emerged intact.84 ­After several near-­death experiences, Bellpuig entered a phase that its preeminent historian Corredera refers to as its “golden epoch.” The unfortunate King Charles II designated it a “royal monastery,” a description it would bear through the rest of its history. No document of conferral survives, but beginning in 1682 this sign of special patronage was used, and a­ fter 1692 the king selected an abbot for a three-­year term. The abbot was one of three candidates named by the chapter.85 83. ​Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, “Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes,” in Catalunya Romànica vol. 17 (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1994), 395–96; Ramon Miró Baldrich and Pep Vila Medinyà, “Bellpuig de les Avellanes (segona meitat del segle XVII fins a inicis del segle XIX),” Urtx 18 (2005): 184. 84. ​Antoni Borràs i Feliu, “El monestir de Bellpuig de les Avellanes i la Companyia de Jesús a mitjan segle XVII,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 49–50 (1976–1977): 159–75. 85. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 162; Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, La escuela hisórica avellanena, 2nd ed. (Lleida: Instituto de Estudios Ilerdenses, 1971), 18.



B e l l pui g d e l es Av e l l a n es b e f o r e Car e s m ar ’ s  Era

131

The full glitter of the gilded age was delayed by the devastation of the War of Succession. Most of the canons favored the Austrian archduke. As the war drew closer, a series of masses was funded to implore the protection of the Virgin. The Bourbon victory at Almansa in 1707 gave their side control over Aragon, and this was followed up by a siege of Lleida, the abandonment of Bellpuig, and its sack by French troops. Some of the canons sought refuge at the remote church of Bonrepòs, o ­ thers in villages closer to Bellpuig, and still ­others in Balaguer. A chapter meeting in 1708 took place in Barcelona b­ ecause the convent was wrecked, uninhabitable, and in the hands of the (French) e­ nemy. Not ­until 1715 was it pos­si­ble to return to what was left of the ­actual convent.86 Reconstruction began immediately, thanks to donations from the king, the Discalced Carmelites of Balaguer, and other benefactors. The dormitory, kitchen, refectory, and abbot’s lodging (“palace”) w ­ ere the first sites of restoration. In 1754, the community initiated a lawsuit to recover its rights to w ­ ater from the Mallola spring, which had been diverted by villa­gers at Avellanes when the monastery was abandoned during the Succession War. As mentioned in chapter 1, Caresmar successfully defended the monastery’s access to this ­water on the basis of medieval documentation. The arrival of a reliable ­water supply in 1760 was celebrated by the erection of a monumental fountain topped by a statue of Saint Norbert, the Premonstratensian founder (the statue was destroyed and the Marist ­Fathers put in its place a statue of the Virgin).87 It may be that this and other disputes with neighbors provoked Caresmar’s jaundiced view of rural life. In 1722 and 1723, as a sign of reform, the community agreed to require sober dress (no capes, pointed shoes, fancy hats, or wide ­belts) and reinstituted periods of solitude and silence.88 Nevertheless, t­ here ­were divisions among the canons, sufficiently serious to require the appointment of an apostolic visitor in 1733, the bishop of Jaca in Aragon, who was also designated as a papal nuncio in consultation with the crown. The result of this intervention was an agreement about liturgy and other aspects of ceremonial life.89 At the beginning of nearly a ­century of rebuilding, intellectual distinction, and even fragile prosperity, Bellpuig in Caresmar’s era was a small community of between six and twelve canons, many of them the younger (hence 86. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 169–77. 87. ​Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez and Joan Yeguas Gassó, “Intel·lectualitat i encàrrecs artístics al segle XVIII: Els erudits de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes,” Urtx 25 (2011): 345–47; Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, “Caresmar y Barcelona,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 37 (1964): 116. 88. ​José Trenchs Odena, El monasterio de Bellpuig de les Avellanes desde 1708 a 1730 (Lleida: Instituto de Estudios Ilerdenses, 1976), 11, 14; Corredera, “Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes,” 393. 89. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 217–39.

13 2 Chap t e r  4

noninheriting) sons of well-­established but not noble families. Two lists of eighteenth-­century canons show an almost entirely Catalan fellowship.90 Although officially possessed of royal status, Bellpuig was never the object of patronage, nor was it impor­tant enough to become Castilianized. It was by this time formally recognized that although it was a Premonstratensian foundation, Bellpuig had no institutional dependence on Prémontré in France. At the beginning of Caresmar’s tenure, Bellpuig enjoyed the relative calm of the first Bourbon de­cades and its canons pursued historical research, first of the abbey itself and then the wider world of medieval Catalonia. Caresmar was the most distinguished of a group of erudite canons who advanced historical methodology and applied history to con­temporary issues.

90. ​Trenchs, El monasterio de Bellpuig, 21–23 (for 1708–1730); Miró and Vila Medinyà, “Bellpuig de les Avellanes,” 182–93 (for 1655–1832).

C h a p te r   5

The Circle of Bellpuig and Other Learned Socie­ties

The Bourbon victory in 1714 was followed by a long period of domestic peace characterized by demographic growth, urban expansion, a more vigorous economy, and pro­g ress in arts and letters. The signs of intellectual vitality are not without certain ambiguities—­the new University of Cervera, whose foundation was preceded by the closure of all other Catalan universities, was both an ambitious proj­ect and a sign of subjugation; the Real Academia de Buenas Letras in Barcelona was a learned society ­under royal patronage but in the modern era has often been dismissed as an indolent, if mildly cultivated, circle. Figures and institutions of the era focused on economic and social improvement—­notably, Antoni de Capmany and the Barcelona Junta de Comerç—­have a better reputation, meriting approval and attention from authoritative observers such as Ramon Grau, Ernest Lluch, and Pierre Vilar. The historians of Bellpuig de les Avellanes are more ignored than criticized in con­temporary Catalan historiography that is only marginally concerned with ecclesiastical history. Throughout this book, the discussion is centered on the legacy of the Bellpuig antiquarians and, through them, the relevance of the past, the importance of the medieval era that was the object of their study, and the evolution of Catalan self-­consciousness that t­ oday is so controverted. The intellectual associations created by cultivated persons in the eigh­teenth c­ entury have an interest apart from their ­later implications. Beginning with the School of 133

13 4 Chap t e r  5

Bellpuig, we look at centers of Catalan erudition, their interconnections, and programs.

Formation of the School of Bellpuig As previously noted, Daniel Finestres was the originator of a research program for the study of history at Bellpuig. Finestres entered Bellpuig and the Premonstratensian Order at the age of fifteen.1 He was given leave to study at the University of Cervera, where his ­brother Josep, fourteen years his se­nior, already held a chair in law. When elected abbot in 1728, Finestres was only twenty-­six years old. The leader of a community that had been restored to twelve members, the new abbot continued reconstruction of the tattered fabric of the convent, but divisions within the chapter meant a stalemate in electing a successor, forcing Finestres to continue in a temporary capacity as “president” since no one could be designated to follow him. Apart from factions and clashing personalities, the motive for animosity is unclear. Corredera speculates that it might have been left over from the Hapsburg versus Bourbon antipathy of the war years. The royal court rejected one election, but fi­ nally, ­after Finestres was delegated to attend the court in Madrid and an apostolic mediator was appointed, a new abbot was installed in 1733. Always in fragile health, Daniel Finestres was by this time visibly affected by tuberculosis, but he refused to confine himself to Bellpuig. In addition to Madrid, he visited several places in Catalonia, such as Poblet and Cervera, where his b­ rothers lived. In 1739 Finestres began a form of archaeological investigation by opening one of the four tombs of the f­amily of the Cabrera counts of Urgell, that belonging to Àlvar, viscount of Àger and ­brother of Count Ermengol X (1268–1314), who had died in Sicily in 1299. Inside the sarcophagus was a parchment on which was written a eulogy alluding to the viscount’s heroism in ­battles that took place in Spain, Africa, and Sicily.2 We obtain some idea of the interests of Daniel Finestres as well as of his deteriorating health from letters written by his b­ rother Josep to Gregori Maians. In 1744, Daniel died in Cervera at the ­house of Josep Finestres, who recorded an affecting picture of the canon’s painful but edifying last weeks. In 1. ​The most detailed biography of Daniel Finestres is provided in Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, La escuela histórica avellanense, 2nd  ed. (Lleida: Instituto de Estudios Ilerdenses, 1971), 15–38; Corredera y Gutiérrez, “Al margen de Daniel Finestres (una página de monasteriología catalana del siglo XVIII),” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 46 (1973): 423–30. 2. ​Discussed in Francesca Español Bertran, “Els comtes d’Urgell i el seu panteó dynàstic,” in El comtat d’Urgell, ed. Flocel Sabaté et al. (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 1995), 149–52.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

135

one of his letters, Josep Finestres included a list of the written works and notes left by his ­brother.3 Describing the Bellpuig de les Avellanes historians, Corredera in the 1960s lamented the disappearance of almost all ­these compositions, attributing the loss to the burning of Daniel’s papers out of a fear of contagion a­ fter his death.4 As it turns out, thirty-­six items by Daniel Finestres w ­ ere among the contents of the trunk discovered in 2002 at Vilanova de la Sal.5 Twelve correspond to items on Josep Finestres’s list. Some of Finestres’s manuscripts are preserved apart from what was found in 2002. His “Tractatus de Divini Verbi Incarnatione,” written in 1723, is presently in the Franciscan archive in Barcelona and prob­ably corresponds to a “Tractatus theol. scholasticus” mentioned by Josep Finestres. At that same archive is volume 2 of the Memorias del Monasterio, written by the last archivist of Bellpuig, Francesc Ignasi Ribot, and it contains Finestres’s introduction to a copy of a letter from 1567 in which the bishop of Plasencia, Pedro Ponce de León, remonstrates with the king’s secretary over attempts to “reform” the Premonstratensians in Spain (one of the efforts to annex them to the Hieronymites).6 Conversely, not every­thing in the papers of Daniel Finestres discovered at Vilanova de la Sal is actually by him. A manuscript with the seemingly provocative title El segundo esposo de Maria (Maria’s second husband) is in fact a life of the Blessed Joseph Hermanno, a Premonstratensian. It was written by José Esteban de Noriega (1684–1739), the head of the Premonstratensians in Spain, whom Daniel had befriended in Madrid.7 A collection of sermons in forty-­six folios is prob­ably also by Noriega.8 For our purposes, the most significant item is a collection of twenty-­four fascicles that make up what is titled “Notes per la histora del monastir” and “Historia del monastir.” The collection includes lists of abbots, a brief (five folio) resumé of the abbey’s history, and documents relevant to the priories of Sant Nicolau and Bonrepòs.9 3. ​Ignasi Casanovas, Josep Finestres: Estudis biogràfics (Barcelona: Biblioteca Balmes, 1931), 455–57. 4. ​Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 37–38. 5. ​ACN, Fons ACV200-85, Orde dels canonges regulars premonstratesos de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes, Secció 3.1, Escola de les Avellanes, Pare Daniel Finestres. 6. ​The treatise is APFC, MS 5/C/3-2. MS 5/C/11–15, vol. 2 dating from 1801 of Francesc Ignasi Ribot, “Memories del Monasterio,” containing the letter of Pedro Ponce de León with the brief note by Finestres. 7. ​ACN, Bellpuig de les Avellanes, 3.1 Daniel Finestres, núm. 42/10. This would appear in print as Joseph Estevan de Noriega, El segundo esposo de María: Vida maravillosa del Beato Joseph Hermanno, canonigo regular Premonstratense (Valladolid: Thomàs de Santander, 1764). On the friendship between Finestres and Noriega, see Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 25–29. 8. ​ACN, Bellpuig de les Avellanes, 3.1 Daniel Finestres, núm. 378/13. 9. ​ACN, Bellpuig de les Avellanes, 3.1 Daniel Finestres, núm. 36/10, “Notes per la història del Reial Monestir de Nostra Senyora de Bellpuig de les Avellanes” (103 folios).

13 6 Chap t e r  5

The recovery of Daniel Finestres’s writings shows that he merits his reputation as the first of its historians, if not as the founder of a literal “school of Bellpuig.” Although Caresmar claimed that no one at Bellpuig before him knew how to read medieval documents, Finestres was sufficiently skilled to have accumulated 103 folios of notes for a history of Bellpuig, a collection of liturgical reference works for the cele­bration of offices at Bellpuig, and elaborations of the Premonstratensian Rule.10

Jaume Caresmar In the first de­cade of his vocation, 1742–1752, Caresmar devoted himself to the history of Bellpuig. His first task was to or­ga­nize its archive, and the result was not only a better filing and retrieval system but the putting together of the five-­ volume cartulary. As the cartulary was being finished, on November 5, 1751, to be precise, Caresmar began his Castilian history titled Anales del Real Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas, which survives in a single manuscript.11 Within that same period, Caresmar relaunched the proj­ect to examine the Gothic sepulchers of the counts of Urgell begun by Daniel Finestres. Caresmar thus led a multifaceted campaign to investigate the history of Bellpuig, extoll its religious and institutional heritage, defend its interests, and stabilize its fragile prosperity. Assessing his cartulary, Caresmar hoped it would provide weapons (armas) against t­hose attempting to encroach on or occupy property belonging to Bellpuig.12 ­Here we look at his activities directly related to the reconstruction of the monastery’s history.

The Cartulary As already noted, the cartulary of Bellpuig was among the materials concealed at the time of the 1835 disamortization and discovered in 2002. A posthumous men10. ​ACN, Bellpuig de les Avellanes, 3.1 Daniel Finestres núm. 364/13, “Adnotationes in Martyrologium eiusque suplementum ad usu Ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Pulchripodii acommodatum” (28 folios); núm. 363/13, “Adnotationes in kalendarium Ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Pulchripodii Praemonstratensis” (14 folios); núm. 41/10, “Incipium institutiones patrum premonstratensium ordinis” (12 folios); núm. 35/10, “Elogis de l’ordre premostratenca” (9 folios). 11. ​BPA, Fons antic, Caixa 12, Llibre 30, Jaume Caresmar, “Anales del Real Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas de la Orden de Canonigos Regulares Premonstratesos en el Principado de Cathaluña, su propagación en Abadias y Prioratos dependiendes, sus dotationes, donaciones, privilegios Pontificios y Reales.” Caresmar notes on page [3]: “Incipit feliciter die 5 novembris, anni 1751.” 12. ​ACN, Bellpuig de les Avellanes, Secció 3.2, Jaume Caresmar, Cartulari, vol. 5, ff. 441v–42r.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

137

tion appears in the inventory of Caresmar’s works by Josep Vega i Sentmenat, who refers to “los 4o tomos de Cartorales del Monasterio de las Avellanas.” Vega (1753–1831), a member of the Real Academia de Buenas Letras and a close associate of the Bellpuig canons, functioned as literary executor for Caresmar. The “four volumes of cartularies” does not match the five volumes we now have but must be what was meant.13 In his definitive work on Catalan writers, published in 1836, Fèlix Torres Amat off handedly notes that Caresmar created four cartorales in which ­were arranged documents pertaining to the rights of “his monastery.” Torres Amat thus seems to be relying on Vega i Sentmenat.14 The cartulary was begun in 1746, four years ­after Caresmar entered Bellpuig and two years ­after the death of Daniel Finestres.15 It was a major effort on the part of the community since three other canons assisted, Francesc Amell, Ignasi Malvès, and Josep Pey, whom Caresmar referred to as his “disciples.” The rec­ords copied into the first three volumes constitute what Caresmar called the Cartophylacium, a play on the Latinized Greek term gazophylacium denoting a trea­sure box or chest, thus in effect a trea­sury of charters. This part runs chronologically from 1034 to the end of the sixteenth c­ entury and contains over two thousand folios. Unlike a medieval cartulary, in which transcriptions w ­ ere or­ga­nized by typology and geography, this one is arranged chronologically, much as a modern edition of an institution’s rec­ords would be presented. Additionally, the Cartophylacium includes notes about what was being transcribed (­whether itself a copy or an original), questions about authenticity, and aspects of historical context, all apparently written by Caresmar himself. The typology of documents emphasizes transfers of land as proof of the monastery’s title to properties: donations, privileges, litigation rec­ords, ­wills, and corporate acts of the canons. The last two volumes, t­ hose extraneous to the Cartophylacium, consist of relatively recent letters, rec­ords of judicial pro­cesses, and documents issued by the monastery. The fourth was assembled in (or beginning in) 1756, and its contents date from 1592 to 1699. The last book was not completed ­until 1771, and its documentation runs from 1703 ­until 1771. ­These two books total over thirteen hundred folios. 13. ​BC, MS 729, Jaume Pasqual, “Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta” (SACM), vol. 11, f. 262v. 14. ​Fèlix Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario critico de los escritores catalanes y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura de Cataluña (Barcelona: J. Verdeguer, 1836), 165. 15. ​ACN, Caresmar, Cartulari, vols. 1–5. On the cartulary and its makeup, see Robert Porta i Roigé, “Les fonts per a l’estudi del monestir de les Avellanes,” in De Bellpuig a Bellpuig: Els premonstratesos, de les Avellanes i Artà (Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2020), 222–23.

13 8 Chap t e r  5

Chronicles The title of the 372-­page Anales del Real Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas is slightly misleading as it treats the history of the rulers of Urgell as well as that of the monastery. The Anales begins with an account of the Muslim conquest of almost all of Spain in the eighth c­ entury and the founding of the county of Urgell, one of the Pyrenean redoubts of Christian rule, ­under Charlemagne. Only on page 128 is the collegiate chapter of Bellpuig, created as it was in the ­later twelfth c­ entury, introduced. Thereafter, the narrative follows the sequence of counts of Urgell and abbots of Bellpuig. The Anales was made pos­si­ble by the ordering of sources for the monastery’s history in the Cartophylacium, which is occasionally cited in the margins.16 The history of Bellpuig is situated within the context of the county of Urgell and its rulers. Had Caresmar continued the Anales to discuss the time a­ fter the extinction of the counts of Urgell in the early fifteenth c­ entury, this dual emphasis would have changed, but the manuscript ends abruptly with the year 1363. In ­later years, Caresmar would expand his undertakings, both on his own initiative and at the request of other institutions, cata­loging and copying the contents of vari­ous ecclesiastical archives. A ­ fter he moved to Barcelona in 1769, he largely devoted his time to its cathedral archive, but his interest in Bellpuig remained sufficient to give rise to an extensive and incomplete Latin history of the monastery and the counts of Urgell, titled De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum.17 Longer than the Anales, this too was never finished, at least not the eight books envisaged. In contrast to the Anales, the Latin account centers on the monastery’s history with secular rulers appearing in supporting roles as donors or protectors. It begins with the conquest of Lleida in 1149, the arrival of the first Premonstratensians in Catalonia, and their unsuccessful effort to establish a ­house at Vallclara.18 Apart from a more concentrated focus on Bellpuig (with numerous document transcriptions), it is hard to see why the De rebus seemed a necessary supplement to the Anales; why should Caresmar have expended so much energy 16. ​For example, Caresmar, “Anales del Real Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas,” 149, 186, 189, 202. 17. ​BC, MS 9339, hereafter cited as “De rebus” A and BPA, Caixa 17, Llibre 36, hereafter cited as “De rebus” B, Jaume Caresmar, “De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum in Catalonia, ordinis canonicorum regularium S. Augustini Praemonstratensium.” The former is in three books and goes as far as 1435. “De rebus” B ends in 1314 and was translated by Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez: Historia de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de las Avellanas en el 360 [sic] aniversario del nacimiento de Jaime Caresmar (Balaguer: Romeu, 1977). See appendix 1, nos. 17, 23, and 37. 18. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, ff. 1r–18v; Caresmar, “De rebus” B, pp. 1–20; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 15–21.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

139

on a new history of the convent? De rebus is discursive and opinionated, allowing its author an opportunity for tangential observations, such as denying that the letter of Pope Innocent III to Abbot Guillem reflects badly on the abbot merely ­because it warns him that he ­will have to render to God an account of his stewardship, or Caresmar’s previously quoted sentiments about the unpleasantness of rural life.19 Caresmar speculates on what kinds of foot coverings Jesus and the apostles wore (in connection with the Virgin’s sandal relic), and this leads him to mention controversies within religious ­orders over ­whether to wear shoes (calced) or sandals (discalced).20

The Tomb Sculptures In 1752, Caresmar extended Daniel Finestres’s examination of the contents of the tombs belonging to the ruling ­family of Urgell. The four decorated effigies of recumbent figures are magnificent examples of Gothic stone carving, made at the behest of Count Ermengol X, whose body was interred in the most elaborately ornamented one. His w ­ ill specified Bellpuig as his place of burial and provided money to construct a funeral memorial. Caresmar also describes the ruins of a fifth tomb, placed apart in a chapel dedicated to the sandal of the Virgin Mary. He came to the tentative conclusion that this ­housed the bones of Count Àlvar (ruled 1243–1268), but this cannot be correct since, as we ­will see, this count and his wife, parents of Ermengol X, are accounted for elsewhere. In Caresmar’s time, the stone sculpture of the fifth tomb had already been removed from the monastery during the War of the Spanish Succession, and only the base remained. It is unknown w ­ hether this too formed part of the commemorative program of Ermengol X; in 1746 a new entrance to the shrine of the holy sandal was built, ­doing away with the tomb base.21 Caresmar’s curiosity about the tombs was unusual ­because he was investigating the remains of secular rather than sacred figures. From the early years of Chris­tian­ity, the remains of martyrs and saints w ­ ere venerated. Shrines built to preserve and publicize them w ­ ere reputed to be sites of miraculous interventions such as cures for disease and disability. ­Every church altar possessed relics immured ­under the stones, their sacred presence signifying and actualizing 19. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, ff. 139v–40v, 273v–79r; Caresmar, “De rebus” B, pp. 341, 675; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 135, 234. 20. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, ff. 103v–14r; Caresmar, “De rebus” B, pp. 239–51; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 98–101. 21. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, f. 218r; Caresmar, “De rebus,” B, pp. 547–49; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 190.

14 0 Chap t e r  5

super­natural powers. Stories abounded of the dreadful punishments inflicted on ­those who dared to perjure themselves by swearing falsely on t­hese holy remains. Revered bones might be disinterred and reburied u ­ nder exceptional circumstances, such as when a new church was built. On one famous occasion, the Council of Rheims in 1049, the pope himself presided over the “translation” of the bones of Saint Remigius, the bishop of Rheims who in about AD 500 had baptized Clovis, the first Christian king of the Franks. The skeleton was moved to the newly constructed monastery of Saint Remigius. With the saint’s bones lying on the altar of the new basilica, Pope Leo IX required the bishops and abbots pre­sent at the council to touch the awe-­inspiring relics while swearing that no money had changed hands when they ­were appointed to their offices (the sin of “simony”). At this moment of truth, the bishop of Langres ran away. ­Others could not speak, while ­those who found their voices confessed that their families had made corrupt arrangements and came up with explanations that in some cases earned them forgiveness and in ­others required them to renounce their high offices.22 In less dramatic circumstances it was common to inventory relics, revive saints whose cults might have fallen into obscurity, or see what remained in the coffins of the venerated dead. In the De rebus, Caresmar explains that Joan d’Organyà is locally revered as “Sant Cap” (literally “Saint Head”) b­ ecause long ago the faithful sometimes satisfied their devotion by lifting the stone covering the holy remains and separating the head, presenting it for veneration by an audience.23 Caresmar separates himself from ­these primitive rituals, but without renouncing pious gravedigging.24 Impressive though their tombs w ­ ere, the counts of Urgell ­were not holy figures. Nevertheless, Caresmar saw the fortunes of his abbey as dependent on the piety of t­ hese counts and their exploits against Islam. The Anales dwells on the ­careers of the rulers of Urgell, including during the centuries before they endowed Bellpuig, their courage entitling them to a form of veneration. Caresmar wrote Latin epitaphs for the entombed rulers he identified and would l­ater rewrite t­ hese lines when he reconceived his history of the monastery. 22. ​R. W. Southern, The Making of the ­Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 125–27. 23. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, ff. 50v–52r; Caresmar, “De rebus” B, pp. 111–12; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 53. 24. ​The connection between Caresmar’s interest in hagiography and the investigation of the tombs at Bellpuig is emphasized in Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez, “Sepulcres, altars i relíquies. Els canonges il·lustrats de Bellpuig de les Avellanes i la recerca històrica,” in De Bellpuig a Bellpuig, 169–71.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

141

Frequently at war, the counts of Urgell seldom died peacefully at home. Insofar as t­ here was a favored place for their burial, it was the monastery of Ripoll or the collegiate chapter of Solsona. Ermengol I was killed at Cordoba, the capital of the caliphate, which Christian armies from Catalonia raided in 1010, and was buried at Ripoll. His successor, Ermengol II (1010–1038), never returned from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Ermengol III (1038–1065) died at the siege of Barbastro in Aragon, and his body was taken to Àger. From that time u ­ ntil Ermengol VII, founder of Bellpuig, the counts w ­ ere ­either buried at Solsona or expressed in their w ­ ills a desire to be interred ­there.25 Count Ermengol X fought in Sicily against the Angevins. His ­brother, Àlvar, Viscount of Àger, died in captivity in Catania in 1299. It may have been during the Sicilian campaign that Ermengol as well as the rulers of Aragon-­Catalonia came up with the idea of a monumental dynastic resting place, inspired by the Hohenstaufen tombs in the cathedral of Palermo and the Norman dynasty’s burials at the abbey of Monreale. Or Ermengol X might have been imitating the example of James II of Aragon-­Catalonia, who in 1293 buried his ­father, Peter the Ceremonious, with appropriate pomp at the Cistercian monastery of Santes Creus, where he himself would be interred in 1324. Ermengol’s choice of Bellpuig de les Avellanes for his burial is not in itself remarkable; what was unusual was constructing similar tombs to honor his ­brother and parents.26 The memorial sculptures created at Bellpuig are splendid examples of the fourteenth-­century School of Lleida, whose most accomplished representative is known as the Master of Anglesola.27 ­There are two single tombs and a pair forming one monumental structure. As noted e­ arlier, Caresmar followed the initiative of Daniel Finestres and opened the sarcophagi in 1752 and 1763. He was convinced that the double tomb must contain the bodies of the original patrons of Bellpuig, Ermengol VII and Dolça. The arms of Foix, Dolça’s ­family, suggested this even though Caresmar was aware that Cecilia, ­mother of Ermengol X, also belonged to this lineage. It seemed appropriate to Caresmar for the ­later count to commemorate his twelfth-­century pre­de­ces­sor, although as a member of the Cabrera dynasty, Ermengol X had no blood connection to the monastery’s found­ers.28 Caresmar wrote epitaphs for t­ hose 25. ​Español, “Els comtes d’Urgell i el seu panteó dinàstic,” 152. 26. ​Español, “Els comtes d’Urgell i el seu panteó dinàstic,” 149–52. 27. ​Beth Edelstein, Silvia A. Centeno, and Mark T. Wypyski, “Illuminating a Complex History: The Materials and Techniques of the Tombs of Urgell at the Cloisters,” Studies in Conservation 51, supplement 2 (2006): 204–10. 28. ​Español, “Els comtes d’Urgell i el seu panteó dinàstic,” 159–60; L’art gòtic a Catalunya: Escultura, vol. 1, La configuració de l’estil, ed. Antoni Pladevall i Font (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 2007), 80–86.

14 2 Chap t e r  5

he believed ­were commemorated in the tomb sculpture program: Ermengol VII and Dolça, Ermengol X, and Viscount Àlvar.29 It has since been demonstrated that the twin tombs contain the bodies of the donor’s parents, Count Àlvar of Urgell (1243–1276) and Countess Cecilia of Foix.30 Not every­one thinks that the tombs ­were continuously at Bellpuig de les Avellanes since the ­fourteenth ­century, when they ­were made, and so it is not universally agreed that the religious ­house was proposed as even a tentative necropolis for the counts of Urgell. The part of the community’s church that was supposed to h ­ ouse the tombs, according to the w ­ ill of Ermengol X, was unfinished at his death and construction was abandoned.31 Timothy Husband in 1992 showed reasons for doubting Caresmar’s version of the history of the tombs, including who was buried in them, the degree to which what survives corresponds to the original sculptural plan, and where the tombs had been before Caresmar’s time. Referring to the long and contentious history of w ­ ater rights in the region, Husband credits Caresmar with orienting the story of Bellpuig around the prestige and legitimacy of the counts of Urgell in order to defend its claims. Caresmar correspondingly downplayed the role of Guillem d’Anglesola as cofounder, attaching the chapter’s origins and expansion exclusively to Count Ermengol VII of Urgell and his successors. The association with the counts underscored the extensive secular jurisdiction given to Bellpuig, hence its control of w ­ ater against the attempts of farmers and villa­ gers to appropriate the ­water.32 I believe this exaggerates the retrospective, legitimating value that the counts of Urgell would have had for eighteenth-­century public opinion. The prestige of the tombs might have buttressed a renewed assertion of the canons’ ­legal case, but to have moved and reconstructed the tombs and to have falsified their history in order to make it seem as if they had always been at 29. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, ff. 70v–73v, 279r–79v, 297v–99v; Caresmar, “De rebus” B, pp. 67–71, 732–36; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 271–73. 30. ​Gener Gonzalvo i Bou, Història del panteó dels comtes d’Urgell: Els sepulcres del monestir de Bellpuig de les Avellanes (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 2007), 37–53. Gonzalvo refused to accept the findings of Español, insisting that the double tomb did, as Caresmar believed, belong to Ermengol VII and Dolça. His book reproduces the second Latin and Spanish versions of Caresmar’s memorials from Caresmar, “De rebus” B, pp. 154–156; 285–88; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 268–71. E ­ arlier Caresmar composed dif­fer­ent memorials for them in his Anales (185, 195), given in Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 268–73. 31. ​­Will of Ermengol VII in Diego Monfar y Sors, Historia de los Condes de Urgel (Colección de Documentos Inéditos del Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, vol. 10, part 2) (Barcelona: José Eugenio Monfort, 1853), 414–42; and as appendix 6 in Corredera’s translation Historia de Santa Maria, 259–61. ­Will of Ermengol X, Barcelona, ACA, Canc., Reg. 2.393, ff. 1,037–47. 32. ​Timothy Husband, “ ‘Sancti Nicolai de Fontibus Amoenis’ or ‘Sti. Nicolai et Fontium Amenorum’: The Making of Monastic History,” in The Cloisters: Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary, ed. E. C. Parker (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 354–83.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

143

Bellpuig ascribes too much utilitarian, secular importance to an artistic and religious program.33 With regard to the location of the tombs within the abbey, Caresmar disagreed with what Diego Monfar y Sors, the royal archivist for the Crown of Aragon and author of a history of the counts of Urgell written between 1641 and 1652, had stated a ­century ­earlier. What­ever the plans of Ermengol X and the subsequent movement of the sepulchral monuments, by Monfar’s time, the tombs w ­ ere certainly at Bellpuig, where they would remain ­until 1906.34

Jaume Pasqual In evaluating the importance of the Bellpuig de les Avellanes circle, Caresmar is prominent both in his own right and indirectly through the activities of his contemporaries and successors, notably Jaume Pasqual i Coromines (1736– 1804).35 ­There was not, however, a close personal connection between Caresmar and Pasqual. The latter shared Caresmar’s interests in transcribing documents, relics, and hagiography, but Pasqual was also an omnivorous collector of antique and historic artifacts. He acquired and investigated books and manuscripts (accumulating over 3,000 volumes), as well as coins (about 3,500 of them), stone inscriptions, works of art, and other curiosities. Pasqual assembled ancient and medieval objects at Bellpuig, forming what Josep Vega i Sentmenat called the richest and most complete museum in Catalonia.36 ­After Pasqual’s death in 1804, Josep Martí and ­others among the community turned Pasqual’s rooms into one of the first public museums in Catalonia. At this site, the extensive works and notes of Caresmar, Pasqual, and Martí ­were described by Jaume de Villanueva when he visited in 1808 as being displayed on a set of bookshelves dedicated to authors representing what was, in effect, the School of Bellpuig de les Avellanes.37 According to Vega i Sentmenat, although engaged in a common pursuit, Caresmar and Pasqual affected to be unaware of the other’s existence. No correspondence between them survives, remarkable given that they had l­ittle 33. ​A point made by Edelstein, Centeno, and Wypyski, “Illuminating a Complex History.” 34. ​Caresmar, “De rebus” A, ff. 295r–97r; Caresmar, “De rebus” B, pp. 710–31; Corredera, Historia de Santa Maria, 247–54; Monfar, Historia de los Condes de Urgel, 1:409–11. 35. ​ SACM. On Pasqual and the final phase of the learned circle of Bellpuig de les Avellanes, see Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·leccionista a la Catalunya de la Il·lustracó (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 2011). 36. ​Cited in Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·leccionista, 82–84. 37. ​Jaime Villanueva, Viage literario a las iglesias de España, vol. 12 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1850), 77.

14 4 Chap t e r  5

opportunity to converse ­because Caresmar resided in Barcelona for the last two de­cades of his life while Pasqual was usually engaged in his antiquarian activities at Bellpuig.38 They do not seem to have quarreled, however, and they did collaborate on administrative m ­ atters. During his second abbatial term (1766–1769), Caresmar named Pasqual to serve as his deputy.39 Pasqual composed the epitaph for the stone put up in 1801 to memorialize Caresmar, referring not only to his erudition but to the example and instruction he provided to ­others, caeterorum magister.40 Although Pasqual saw his museum plan through to completion, he resembled Caresmar in having many proj­ects underway si­mul­ta­neously and not finishing all of them. Also similar to Caresmar’s experience, books that ­were completed tended to remain unpublished. Pasqual devoted much of his research to the mountainous regions of Catalonia. He did publish in 1768 a study of the attempt to create the diocese of Roda d’Isàvena in the mountainous northwestern comarca of Pallars.41 In 1782, Pasqual wrote a manuscript on Roman and Visigothic antiquities found in the area of Santa Maria de Meia (northeast of Bellpuig).42 He also wrote two studies of Roman inscriptions that he and another canon of Bellpuig, Josep Pey (1724–1799), had found in their travels in the Pyrenean villages north of the monastery.43 Pey had been one of Caresmar’s helpers on the cartulary proj­ect, and ­after 1782 he was prior of Bonrepòs, a de­pen­dency of Bellpuig. He is an underappreciated member of the circle of antiquaries formed around Caresmar and Pasqual. Pasqual composed a history of the female convent of Vallbona and in addition wrote a long letter about the nunnery to the Marquis of Capmany, both works published posthumously.44 In 1985 t­ here appeared an edition of a short 38. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·leccionista, 39–43. 39. ​Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 61. 40. ​Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario, 177; Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, Páginas de historia catalana: Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes (Barcelona: Institut de Germans Maristes, n.d.), 236. 41. ​Jaume Pasqual, El Antiguo obispado de Pallás en Cataluña sacado de la obscuridad y tinieblas en que estuvo embuelto por muchos siglos: Discurso historico [. . .] (Tremp: Pablo Galifa, 1768). 42. ​“Discurso Histórico ó conjeturas sobre las antiguedades Romanas, i Godas de el Priorato de Santa María de Meyiá.” Copies preserved in two private collections and in a manuscript in the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid. Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·leccionista, 58–60. 43. ​“Inscripcions descubertes y llegidas per mi lo Dr. Jaume Pasqual en un viatge literari de la Conca de Tremp en compañía del Prior de Bonrepós, canonge Pey” is in SACM, vol. 6, ff. 311r–26v; “Diálogo sobre una inscripción romana pocos años hace descubierta cerca de la villa de Isona” is in SACM, vol. 7, ff. 31r–48v. Both are described in Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·leccionista, 58, 93. 44. ​Josep Maria Sans i Travé, El Llibre Verd del pare Jaume Pasqual: Primera història del monestir de Vallbona (Barcelona: Llibres de l’Índex, 2002); Jaume Pasqual, Carta del P. Pascual, , canónigo premostratense de Bellpuig de las Avellanas al M.I.Sr. Marqués de Capmany (Barcelona: Valentin Torras, 1837; repr., Valls: Consell Comarcal de l’Urgell, 1991).

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e ­t i e s

145

description Pasqual made of the festivities at Os de Balaguer, a village close to the monastery, when its new parish church was dedicated in 1769. Written in Catalan, the work has a prologue and four brief sections, one for each day of the cele­bration. It anticipates the interests of nineteenth-­century folklorists in dances, ­music, theatrical repre­sen­ta­tions, athletic contests, and other popu­lar manifestations accompanying the official ecclesiastical ceremonial.45 Rather unkindly, Jaime de Villanueva remarked that Pasqual had an unmea­ sured desire to acquire information without being sufficiently concerned to or­ga­nize it. Rather than focus on one or two areas, Pasqual, according to Villanueva, typified the scholarly vice of “universality” whereby the afflicted individual at his death is surrounded by collections, notes, and precious objects, useless to the world ­unless someone ­else organizes them in a way that the initial collector should have. A ­g reat accumulator of documents, Villanueva admitted, but, in implicit contrast to his own skill at presenting the results of archival and manuscript research, Pasqual’s volumes of transcriptions and notes ­were merely unordered “excerpts, extracts, combinations, e­ tc.”46 Like Daniel Finestres but unlike Caresmar, Pasqual had close connections to the University of Cervera. He studied civil law ­there with Daniel’s eminent ­brother Josep Finestres, receiving a doctorate in 1758 before entering Bellpuig in 1759. He returned to the university in 1761–1762 to obtain a canon law doctorate, thus becoming what was termed a doctor utriusque iuris, an expert in the laws of both the Roman Empire and the church. It was prob­ably Josep Finestres who encouraged Pasqual to become a canon at Bellpuig. By 1771, however, the professor was sufficiently disillusioned with his former student to dismiss him in a letter to Ramon Llàtzer de Dou as a miles gloriosus (the archetypal braggart soldier based on a comedy by Plautus, and a stock figure of the Italian Comedia dell’arte). In another letter two years ­later, Finestres declared that Pasqual’s head was “filled with wind.” Pasqual had offended Finestres by writing an insulting epigram against Gregori Maians, a g­ reat friend and frequent correspondent of the jurist. Both of them disapproved of Pasqual’s seemingly random digging around for Roman epigraphic remains.47 This latter vice, as it was considered, is actually one of Pasqual’s accomplishments in the eyes of posterity as he was among the first Catalan antiquarians to 45. ​Jaume Pasqual, “Relació puntual y verdadera de las solemníssimas festas que ha celebrat la insigna vila de Os est any 1769, en los dias 29 y 30 de setembre y 1 d’octubre ab lo motiu de la dedicació de son magnífich t­ emple nou, composta por lo reverent Doctor Don Jaume Pasqual, canonge de Bellpuig de las Avellanas a instància del magnífich ajuntament de Os y señor president del monastir de les Avellanas,” ed. Manuel Daviu i Fortuny and Àngel Martín i Auberni, La Noguera: Estudis 1 (1985): 71–86. 46. ​Villanueva, Viage literario a las Iglesias de España, 12:90–91. 47. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·leccionista, 135–36.

14 6 Chap t e r  5

go beyond buying and collecting ancient objects and actually undertake archaeological fieldwork. ­Little of Pasqual’s correspondence is extant, but we know that he maintained connections with groups of learned men in Tarragona and the University of Cervera. He was never asked to join any of the ­g rand academies but had contact with members of the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid and the Real Academia de Buenas Letras in Barcelona. His book on the ephemeral diocese in Pallars was presented to the Barcelona Acad­emy in 1785.48 Pasqual was from a well-­off f­amily, and his inherited money allowed him to acquire ­g reat quantities of texts and antiquities. His life was more centered on Bellpuig than was Caresmar’s, although he served only one term as abbot (1789–1792). Pasqual established himself as early as 1760 in separate quarters that he adorned with cabinets and shelves to h ­ ouse his collection. His gift of five hundred pounds aided the repair of the monastery in general and the construction in par­tic­u­lar of his suite, which a­ fter his death would be converted into a museum. The space is now a lecture room.49 As an archivist and copyist Pasqual paid par­tic­u­lar attention to monastic rec­ords. ­Because monasteries suffered more from l­ater depredations than did other church archives or libraries (such as t­ hose of cathedrals), his work has been valuable for reconstructing lost documentation. His greatest accomplishment was the eleven-­ volume Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta (SACM), which transcribes or summarizes hundreds of documents from ecclesiastical archives, many of them ­later destroyed in war or dispersed ­after the disamortization.50 This is particularly the case for monasteries, which w ­ ere dissolved with the disamortization of 1835, while cathedrals w ­ ere not touched. For the ancient Benedictine monastery of Serrateix, for example, twenty-­six out of the forty-­three rec­ords from before the year 1000 in Jordi Bolòs’s edition of the monastery’s documentation are known only through the SACM.51 The female convent of Vallbona lost 90 ­percent of its documentation as a result of the disentailment of 1835 and the revolution of 1862. Like the canons at Bellpuig de les Avellanes, the nuns of Vallbona hid many of their liturgical objects as well as documents in 1862, recovering them in the 1870s, but the written rec­ords had been badly damaged. Our knowledge of Vallbona’s 48. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·leccionista, 107–40, especially 123. 49. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·leccionista, 48–51. 50. ​An initial description of the SACM from shortly a­ fter it entered the Biblioteca de Catalunya is given in “Els manuscrits dels ‘Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta’ del P. Jaume Pasqual,” Butlletí de la Biblioteca de Catalunya 5–6 (1918–1919): 198–207. 51. ​ Diplomatari del monestir de Santa Maria de Serrateix (segles X–­XV), ed. Jordi Bolòs (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2006). See also Manuel Riu i Riu, “Fundació del monestir de Santa Maria de Serrateix,” Urgellia 15 (2002–2005): 175–90.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

147

affairs largely comes from Pasqual’s transcriptions, including that of a now lost fourteenth-­century cartulary known as the Codex of Blanca d’Anglesola. Pasqual put together an account of the history of the foundation and its abbesses that he called the Llibre Verd and presented it to the convent in 1800.52 The tenth volume of SACM contains sermons and material related to Caresmar and his writings, including the cata­logs of Martí and Vega i Sentmenat. Volume 5 consists mostly of transcriptions of French works, particularly the Maurists’ history of Languedoc. The episcopal archives of Vic and Urgell are explored, but most of the transcriptions in the remaining volumes are of monastic rec­ords.

Josep Martí, Gonzalo Saura, and Francesc Ignasi Ribot The closest Caresmar came to a disciple was his fellow canon Josep Martí (1732–1806), who aided his research in Àger and Barcelona and served as an intermediary between Caresmar and Bellpuig when Caresmar lived in Barcelona. Along with Vega i Sentmenat, he would also attempt to order Caresmar’s written legacy.53 Elected in 1795 and again in 1804 to a three-­year term as abbot, Martí is less well known than Gonzalo Saura or Francesc Ignasi Ribot, partly b­ ecause he was in Caresmar’s shadow and also b­ ecause few of his works are extant and nothing he wrote was ever published. The Biblioteca de Catalunya preserves Martí’s cata­log of the books and papers left by Caresmar at his death, the first attempt to deal with Caresmar’s confusing legacy.54 Martí also devoted considerable research to the Pyrenean monastery of Mur, his writings impor­ tant to posterity ­because Mur’s parchments and manuscripts would be destroyed in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.55 52. ​Gener Gonzalvo i Bou, Breu història del monestir de Vallbona (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2002), 17, 49–54; Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i colˑlecionista, 125, 140; Gener Gonzalvo i Bou, introduction to the 1991 reedition of Carta del P. D. Pasqual, canónigo premostratense de Bellpuig de las Avellanas, al M. L. S. Marqués de Capmany (Valls: Consell Comarcal de l’Urgell, 1991), [iv]. 53. ​On Martí, see Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario, 388–91; Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 119–27. 54. ​BC, MS 753, Josep Martí, “Índice de los papeles manuscritos contenidos en los diferentes volúmenes del difundo Dr. D. Jaime Caresmar.” 55. ​BC, MS 150, Josep Martí, “Recopilación y resumen de los instrumentos y papeles que se hallan recónditos en el Archivo de la Iglesia Colegiata de Mur, ordenados por Joseph Martí, canónigo reglar del Real Monasterio de Santa Maria de Bellpuig en 1794.” Corredera’s Santa Maria de Mur, cronologia (Tremp: Garsineu, 2003) chronologically arranges and summarizes t­hese documents, which run from the consecration of 1069 to 1792. The ­g reat papal historian Paul Fridolin Kehr visited Mur

14 8 Chap t e r  5

In his literary encyclopedia, Torres Amat lists manuscripts by Martí that ­were at Bellpuig before the disamortization, but except for his inventory of Caresmar’s works and the Mur material, t­hese have been lost. Among them was a transcription of rec­ords from Santa Anna in Barcelona, a two-­volume history of the Augustinian Order in Catalonia, documents from Ripoll, and a disquisition on the errors of Felix, bishop of Urgell, accused of Adoptionism in 792.56 Although not usually numbered among the erudits of Bellpuig, the canon Gonzalo Saura i de Febrer should be included. He was also an associate member (supernumerary) of the Academia de Buenas Letras. In 1807, Saura wrote a defense of the Catalan language that, in Castilian, praised the antiquity and beauty of Catalan. This work, Discurso sobre la Lengua Catalana, Lemosina o Provenzal, was not published ­until 2009.57 Saura also contributed to one of the acad­emy’s abortive plans for a history of Catalonia, a projected Historia natu­ ral de Catalunya. He presented his chapter on the birds of Catalonia in 1805.58 Fi­nally, Francesc Ignasi Ribot, abbot from 1828 to 1831, wrote an account of the last phase of the convent’s existence. His Memorias del Monasterio was in five volumes, of which four have come down to us.59 Although not a work of vast erudition, it is a valuable document. In his vari­ous accounts of the history of Bellpuig, Eduardo Corredera relied on Ribot for the postmedieval centuries that Caresmar’s chronicles did not reach. Ribot reproduces a few of Caresmar’s and Pasqual’s letters, and he is the main source of information about the crises that would terminate the existence of Bellpuig as a Premonstratensian foundation. During the disamortization of 1820, by order of the Liberal government, Ribot was the only canon permitted to remain as a kind of caretaker while the convent’s movable objects ­were being assessed. An inventory of books, docuand found about two hundred parchments and “viele Skripturen.” Paul Fridolin Kehr, Papsturkunden in Spanien: Vorarbeiten zur Hispania Pontificia, vol. 1, Katalanien (Berlin: Weidmansche Buchhandlung, 1926), 177. Kehr notes (390–91) that what Torres Amat describes as two separate works, “Extracto del Archivo de Mur” and “Tabla de los instrumentos comprendidos en la colección sacada del archivo de la Iglesia colegiata de Mur,” are the same ­thing and identical to BC, MS 150. 56. ​Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario, 790–91; Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 125–26. 57. ​Ramon Miró Baldrich and Pep Vila Medinyà, “La defensa de la llengua catalana de Gonzalo Saura (1807),” Urtx 23 (2009): 413–51, the first publication of Saura’s text. 58. ​Antoni Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres des de la seva fundació l’any 1700 (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 2000), 65; Mireia Campabadal i Bertran, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona en el segle XVIII: L’interès per la història, la llengua i la literatura catalanes (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona and Abadia de Montserrat, 2006), 156. 59. ​Ignasi Ribot, “Memorias del Monasterio,” vols. 1 and 2 are in APFC, 5/C/10 and 5/C/11, and vols. 4 and 5 are in BPA, Fons antic, Caixa 16, Llibre 34 and Caixa 16, Llibre 35.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

149

Figure 5.1.  Facade of the former University of Cervera. Photo­graph by Joan Yeguas Gassó. Used by permission.

ments, and valuable items undertaken at this time permits us to evaluate the foundation’s l­ater losses. Bells from the church tower, a mill, and a garden w ­ ere auctioned off immediately, but the collection of coins and the books w ­ ere protected through the intervention of Prósper de Bofarull, head of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon. With the return of the absolutist government in 1823, Bofarull assured members of the Barcelona Acad­emy that all the coins, manuscripts, and antiquities ­were now back at the archive of Bellpuig. Ribot describes a visit in 1828 by Josep Gil, the interim governor of the province of Lleida, who was shown the museum and “some of its precious antiquities.” As abbot, Ribot was confident enough in the stability of Bellpuig to urge Josep Vega i Sentmenat in 1828 and again in 1831 to retire to the monastery, where, upon his death, he would join his deceased friends from the local erudite circle. While Vega preferred to stay in Cervera in the com­pany of his living friends, he remained solicitous for what he hoped would be the continuation of the intellectually nurturing atmosphere of Bellpuig.60 60. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·leccionista, 83, 120, 149.

15 0 Chap t e r  5

The University of Cervera In theory, the most prominent, if unlikely, center of intellectual activity in eighteenth-­century Catalonia was the University of Cervera. A ­ fter the harrowing War of Succession, the victorious King Philip V closed the University of Barcelona, declaring that it had promoted wickedness when it should have exalted virtue. Six other Catalan institutions of higher learning w ­ ere similarly dissolved, and in 1717 the king named Cervera the site of a new, single university of the vanquished principality.61 The monarch regarded the academic communities of the old Catalan universities as instigators of po­liti­cal subversion, so the centralization of higher education in Cervera, one of the few towns consistently loyal to the Bourbons, fit a punitive as well as patronage agenda. Higher education of a sort was able to continue at religious institutions in the cities, but in a clandestine, if tolerated, fashion.62 The founding of the University of Cervera reflected the oppressive po­liti­ cal agenda of the moment, but it also conformed to a typically absolutist, centralizing, and on-­paper rationalist plan to restructure the somnolent world of higher education using the opportunity provided by the complete defeat of regional interests. According to the decree of its foundation, the university would become “a unique and singular literary center (Teatro) for the Principality,” extending knowledge of the sciences, benefiting the proper upbringing of the young, and reflecting the splendor of the monarchy. It promised to be the equal of the best institutions of learning in Eu­rope with regard to funding, honors, and privileges.63 Uniquely among Spanish universities, Cervera was supported by the monarchy rather than through local subsidies. As of 1730, it was also officially a “pontifical” university, and the papacy authorized it to receive income from canons’ offices in cathedral chapters. Twenty-­four professorial chairs w ­ ere created in 1717, divided among faculties of theology, canon law, (civil) law, medicine, philosophy, and arts (Latin and Greek grammar and rhe­toric). Within theology and 61. ​On the history of the University of Cervera, see Manuel Rubió i Borràs, Historia de la Real y Pontificia Universidad de Cervera, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Joaquín Horta, 1915–1916); Joaquim Prats i Cuevas, La Universitat de Cervera i el reformisme borbònic (Lleida: Pagès, 1993); Ignasi Casanovas, La cultura catalana en el siglo XVIII. Finestres y la Universidad de Cervera (Barcelona: Editorial Balmes, 1953), a Castilian translation of the introduction to Casanovas’s three-­volume Josep Finestres, estudis biogràfics (Barcelona: Balmes, 1932) with the addition of a talk by Casanovas on Catalan culture in the eigh­teenth ­century given at the University of Barcelona, also in 1932; Frederic Vila Bartolí, Reseña histórica, científica y literaria de la Universidad de Cervera (Barcelona: Tipografía Católica Pontificia, 1923); Artemi Folch, La Universitat de Cervera (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1970). 62. ​Joaquim Albareda i Salvadó, “La Catalunya il·lustrada del segle XVIII,” Ausa 18, no.  143 (1999): 522–24. 63. ​Joan Mercader, Els capitans generals (segle XVIII) (Barcelona: Teide, 1957), 141.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

151

philosophy, the dominant Thomist and Suarist schools ­were represented, but the Scotists (disciples of the thirteenth-­century scholastic Duns Scotus) also received a theological chair, to be held by a Franciscan.64 The creation of Cervera was an opportunity for the Jesuits, who had been largely shut out of the traditional universities. Nine of the founding professors ­were members of the order, and such was the importance of the Jesuits that their expulsion from Spain in 1767 e­ ither ruined the pursuit of learning at Cervera or ushered in a period of Enlightenment reform, depending on one’s interpretive stance. A small town that to this day might be fairly described as situated in the m ­ iddle of nowhere, Cervera had the advantage of being at the geo­graph­i­cal center of Catalonia, but then as now, the demographic weight of the nation was tilted to the Mediterranean coast and concentrated in Barcelona, a g­ reat city bereft of its university. The remoteness of Cervera made it difficult to attract students and faculty, and the promised funding was, at best, inconsistent. The king attempted to have the bishopric of Solsona moved to Cervera, but the papacy would not consent. In 1720, the first chancellor, Francesc de Queralt i de Reart, acknowledged that Cervera had barely fifty h ­ ouses and that students found it hard to live ­there in any comfort. A student song included the following lines: Tant si és vila, com ciutat allò que se’n diu Cervera de dins, el meu cor espera sortir-ne ben aviat. (­Whether the place they call Cervera is a city or town, my heart in its depths hopes to leave it real soon).65 ­ nder adverse circumstances, it is surprising what the struggling establishment U accomplished during its 117 years. Historians’ views of the University of Cervera have been divided between disdain and qualified praise. The former opinion was widely diffused in relation to efforts at reestablishing the University of Barcelona. When it fi­nally reopened in 1837, Barcelona’s first rector dismissed Cervera as a miserable, rural establishment, the fruit of oppression. This has remained the consensus of liberal and nationalist Catalan observers. Representative of the Catalan Renaixença, Victor Balaguer attributed to King Phillip an intention to dry up the fountains of knowledge, erect obstacles to public instruction, and suffocate the 64. ​Folch, La Universitat de Cervera, 15–16. The Jesuit Francisco Suarez (1548–1617) was the last g­ reat representative of Scholasticism. His ideas w ­ ere based on ­those of Saint Thomas Aquinas, but with some differences as regards law and metaphysics. Universities in Catholic nations, especially Spain, ­were often bitterly divided between Thomists and Suarists. 65. ​Folch, La Universitat de Cervera, 49.

15 2 Chap t e r  5

voice of patriots in order to halt the tide of liberty.66 In an account of learning in Barcelona during the time of its deprivation (titled “Barcelona without a University”), Ferran Soldev­ila attacked the “servility” and mediocrity of Cervera, a symbol of the Bourbon attempt to suppress the Catalan nation.67 Ernest Lluch wryly remarked that the most impressive t­ hing about the university was its facade (which still stands) with the word Biblioteca carved on the pediment. ­Behind this g­ rand entry­way, t­ here w ­ ere never any a­ ctual books.68 Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó dismisses the University of Cervera as another example of futile anti-­Catalan cultural persecution.69 More favorably inclined, Catholic writers, equally concerned as their secular counter­parts to extoll Catalonia’s history and identity, saw in Cervera a somewhat accidental flowering of intellectual inquiry. In his influential La tradició catalana of 1882, Bishop Josep Torras i Bages of Vic (1846–1916) depicts the university as an impor­tant conservator of classical letters and medieval Catalan tradition, fitting it into his overall view of Catalan culture emerging from and being protected by Chris­tian­ity. Torras i Bages gives par­tic­ul­ ar credit to the Jesuit faculty of Cervera for preserving the best aspects of Catalonia’s heritage. Even if the order’s mission was to teach classical letters, “in our land [the Jesuits] ­were very much oriented ­towards Catalonia and their love of the ancients did not diminish the affection t­ owards Catalan antiquity.”70 For twentieth-­century conservatives, advocates of a religiously infused Catalanism, the “original sin” of Cervera’s foundation as a centralizing instrument of oppression was redeemed by the Jesuits and by the jurist and humanist Josep Finestres, who directed the university ­toward cultural conservation.71 In his detailed studies of Cervera, the Jesuit historian Ignacio Casanovas praised 66. ​Cited in Ricardo García Cárcel, “La Guerra de Sucesión, una guerra poliédrica,” in 1714: Cataluña en la España del siglo XVIII, ed. Antonio Morales Moya (Madrid: Cátedra, 2014), 66. 67. ​Ferran Soldev­ila, Barcelona sense universitat i la restauració de la Universitat de Barcelona (1714– 1837) (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1938). On the historiography of the University of Cervera, see Prats, La Universitat de Cervera, 43–69. 68. ​Ernest Lluch, “La construcció de la imatge de Catalunya a la Il·lustració: L’aportació de l’Escola de les Avellanes,” in Creences i ètnies en una societat plural, ed. Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré (Lleida: Pagès, 2002), 164. This is not exactly true—­a cata­log drawn up in 1831, shortly before Cervera was shuttered and Barcelona restored, lists approximately thirty-­six hundred volumes, mostly in classics, Roman and canon law, and theology. Generalis index librorum qui in Bibliotheca Pont. ac Reg. Cervariensis Universitatis reperiuntur, academici senatus consulto digestus anno MDCCCXXXI (Cervera: Bernardus Pujol, 1831). By way of comparison, Josep de Vega i Sentmenat owned 3,320 books. Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 635. The University of Cervera published works of theology, law, rhe­toric, and other safely antique disciplines during its 125-­year history. 69. ​Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, Repressió borbònica i resistència identitària a la Catalunya del segle XVIII (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2020), 87–89. 70. ​JosepTorras y Bages, La tradició catalana, 3rd ed., in Obres completes de L’Il·lm. Sr. Dr. D. Josep Torras y Bages, vol. 4 (Barcelona: Editorial Ibèrica, 1913), 454. 71. ​Prats, La Universitat de Cervera, 50–55.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

153

the innovative spirit of the university’s professors in the areas of classics, philosophy, and law and regarded the pro­g ress of learning as having been crippled ­after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, resulting in an intellectual vacuum infiltrated by the anti-­Christian ideas of the French Enlightenment. Casanovas devoted his ­career to studying Josep Finestres, who, although a layman, was close to the circle of Jesuit faculty at Cervera. The history of the university, at least of its best years, was to be identified with Finestres.72 Miquel Batllori, one of the leading intellectual historians of the twentieth ­century, agreed with the praise of the Jesuits but posited a diffident rather than enthusiastic ac­cep­tance of new ideas on the part of a progressive segment of faculty belonging to the order.73 Rather than seeing the university as an expression of Bourbon absolutism and Castilian rule, Catholic opinion depicted Cervera as sowing the seeds of the nineteenth-­century Renaixença.74 A compromise position is that of Enric Moreu-­Rey, who remarked that while the university should be considered in retrospect “collectively unsalvageable,” it nevertheless achieved an honorable place in history b­ ecause of a constellation of distinguished individuals.75 In addition to Josep Finestres, ­these include the phi­los­op­ her Mateu Aymerich, the mathematician Tomàs Cerda, the canon law expert Josep Pons, the classicist Llucià Gallissà, and the economist and jurist Ramon Llàtzer de Dou i Bassols. Josep Prats takes seriously the Bourbon and Enlightenment plans to expand knowledge and build a distinguished center of learning at Cervera. He criticizes the Catholic historians’ exaggerations of the virtues of the Jesuits, however, and is more impressed by the favorable effects of the founding of the medical faculty and implementation of better forms of governance and support of the dif­fer­ent faculties, dating ­these improvements precisely from the year of the order’s expulsion.76 The University of Cervera was not directly involved in historical investigation, but neither ­were any Eu­ro­pean universities that generally maintained a neomedieval curriculum based on logic, law, classics, and theology. Technological and philosophical innovations of the period w ­ ere not, for the most part, the product of universities and their faculty. The archaism of Cervera’s program ensured some continuity in the study of law and theology. The most distinguished field was Roman law b­ ecause of Josep Finestres. He could easily 72. ​Casanovas, La cultura catalana en el siglo XVIII, 66. 73. ​Prats, La Universitat de Cervera, 63–65. Prats thinks Batllori overstated the order’s support of progressive ideas, its policies amounting to an intelligent but nevertheless traditional defense of orthodoxy against secular modernity. 74. ​Prats, La Universitat de Cervera, 50–55. 75. ​Enric Moreu-­Rey, “Els nuclis il·lustrats i els principals centres de cultura,” in Història de Catalunya, vol. 4 (Barcelona: Salvat, 1978), 276. 76. ​Prats, La Universitat de Cervera, 249–338.

15 4 Chap t e r  5

have moved to a more prosperous and prominent university, but his c­ areer was so closely identified with Cervera that his biographer and fellow classics scholar Llucià Gallissà remarked that the life of Finestres was essentially the history of that university, a view repeated and elaborated on by Casanovas.77 At Cervera, ­there was no stated program favoring the subject of history in the manner of the Real Academia in Barcelona or the scholars of Bellpuig de les Avellanes. It is more through connections among learned communities, including Cervera, that proj­ects of research and conservation ­were created in the eigh­teenth c­ entury, involving figures such as Finestres and Caresmar. The Cervera faculty devoted themselves to Thomist theology or the Justinianic corpus rather than to specifically Catalan topics, but they obliquely advanced the organ­ization and preservation of sources of Catalan medieval history as seen through their correspondence and interests in what would l­ ater be termed auxiliary sciences of history such as epigraphy. The conservatism of the curriculum at Cervera is not a unique attribute of this foundation. Universities in Castile received the same intermittent interest in reform during the Bourbon era along with a more generalized governmental neglect. To the extent that Spanish universities shook off some of their torpor in the late eigh­teenth ­century, it was due to the general demographic and economic resurgence of Spain—­and in any event, the Napoleonic Wars set them back for several de­cades during the early nineteenth ­century.78 Arguably Cervera did better at traditional subjects that had fallen into desuetude elsewhere, such as Greek or the teaching of Latin as a living and colloquial language, following the program of the distinguished Oxford classicist Richard Bentley, with whom Josep Finestres corresponded.79 The neglect of scientific, historical, and literary subjects was characteristic of all Eu­ro­pean universities of this period. The eighteenth-­century university has a reputation of somnolence, the pursuit of comfort rather than learning, and a curriculum resistant to change, still based on medieval logic and rhe­toric. Writing about students at Oxford over a long time span, Lawrence Stone refers to the eigh­teenth ­century as “The ­Great Depression.” In the 1720s, the writer and adventurer known as the Abbé Prevost (author of Manon Lescaut) typified Oxford dons as “snoozing amidst abundance,” noting that few of the books coming from ­England originated at Oxford.80 77. ​Vila Bartolí, Reseña histórica, 212. 78. ​Richard Kagan, Students and Society in Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 225–30. 79. ​Josep Closa i Farrés, “La tradició europea en la lectura dels clàssics dins la Universitat de Cervera,” in Miscl·lània d’homentage a Enric Moreu-­Rey, vol. 2 (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1988), 58–66. 80. ​Graham Murphy, University Life in Eighteenth-­Century Oxford (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), ix.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

155

This last point is crucial even if not completely accurate: the degree to which the many innovative ideas of the era w ­ ere born outside the established higher education institutions, in salons, academies, informal circles, civic institutions, and even, in the Catholic world, monasteries.81 The importance of the Barcelona Junta de Comerç is an example of a civic institution involved in the diffusion of learning. It sponsored Capmany’s as well as Caresmar’s economic and historical work and advocated for trade advantages, technological pro­gress, and pedagogy in practical and applied subjects. In 1814 the Junta funded the first chair in po­liti­cal economy in Catalonia, held by Eudald Jaumandreu i Triter, an Augustinian canon who took advantage of a law passed during the Liberal regime of 1820–1823 to renounce his order and become a secular priest. He was an advocate of ­free markets and came to be known as the Catalan Adam Smith.82 Similarly in the United States, universities such as Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary ­were less impor­tant as research sponsors than the American Philosophical Society (founded 1743) and the American Acad­emy of Arts and Sciences (1780). The combination of punitive and grandiose plans accompanying the foundation of Cervera had to be adapted to a chronic lack of funding that ultimately rendered futile an attempt to create out of nothing an entirely new and forward-­looking university. It received ­little or no support from entities that ­were supposed to enable its expansion, such as the Council of Castile, or that the government imposed on Catalonia (Royal Audiencia; capitán general). The first thirty years, nevertheless, witnessed a fitful realization of some university reform ideas as did the period 1767–1789. For much of its history, however, Cervera resembled other Spanish universities, such as Salamanca or Valladolid, in the rivalries and corporate tribalism of its faculties and its pedagogic conservatism. It succeeded, modestly, as a center of learning. Among its professors ­were leading intellectual figures, and it served, albeit indirectly, as a complementary institution to Barcelona’s intellectuals and the historians of Bellpuig de les Avellanes. In his biography of Jaume Pasqual, Alberto Velasco notes that without the University of Cervera, the Bellpuig circle would not have possessed the degree of organ­ ization and impact that it in fact had.83

81. ​For German monasteries and learning in the eigh­teenth ­century, see Thomas Wallnig, Critical Monks: The German Benedictines, 1680–1740 (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Ulrich L. Lehner, Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines, 1740–1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 82. ​Pere Molas Ribalta, “Les Acadèmies al segle XVIII,” Butlletí de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona 48 (2001–2002): 89. 83. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·leccionista, 133.

15 6 Chap t e r  5

The Real Academia de Buenas Letras Despite a reputation for amateurism and proclivity for procrastination, the Acad­emy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona played a role in advancing the study of Catalan history and lit­er­at­ ure. Founded by sixteen cultivated citizens of Barcelona in 1700 as the “Acad­emy of the Distrustful” (Academia de los Desconfiados), the society was dissolved in 1703 b­ ecause of internal divisions arising from the royal succession question and was not reestablished u ­ ntil 1729. At that point, one reason advanced for the utility of the acad­emy was the deficiency in higher education resulting from the closure of the University of Barcelona (Cervera, by obvious implication, amounting to an inadequate substitute).84 Although most of the early members had supported the Austrian cause, by 1729 the academicians accommodated themselves to the Bourbons as the Peace of Vienna, signed in 1725, established an alliance between the Hapsburgs and Spain. From 1731 ­until 1734, the president of the acad­emy, an honorary position usually held by an upper-­level aristocrat, was the royal capitán general of the Principality of Catalonia, the Marquis of Risbourg. Most members of the acad­emy became enthusiastic partisans of the new dynasty, as the attainment of a royal license conferred in 1752 demonstrates. In both 1729 and 1752, the acad­emy’s “mission” was declared to be advancing knowledge about the history of Catalonia. While ­earlier statements had advocated that the acad­emy also concern itself with eloquence, poetry, and philosophy (natu­ral, moral, and po­liti­cal), the conferral of royal patronage focused the academicians’ attention on history.85 The original name, Academia de los Desconfiados, encapsulated a philosophy of caution appropriate for a tricky po­liti­cal climate but also served as an intellectual vade mecum. The acad­emy’s seal shows a sailing ship with the motto “Tuta quia diffidens” (Safe, ­because hesitant). The earliest form of the emblem shows an a­ ctual shipwreck; another version drove home the lesson more clearly, 84. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 83. 85. ​Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, “Doscientos años de historia de Cataluña en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 25 (1953): 327, for the year 1729: “por principal objecto la Historia Sagrada y Profana, y con especialidad la de Cathaluña, pero entretexiendo los Assuntos con algunos de las Philosophias Natu­ral, Moral y Política y otros de Eloqüencia y Poësia.” For 1752, see Andrés Avelino Pi y Arimon, Barcelona antigua y moderna ó descripción é historia de esta ciudad desde su fundación hasta nuestros dias, vol. 2 (Barcelona: Imprenta y Libreria Politécnica de Tomás Gorchs, 1854), 186: “habiéndose propuesto la Academia de Buenas Letras, por fin principal de su instituto formar la Historia de Cataluña, aclarando aquellos puntos que han querido controvertir ó suponer, ya el error, ya la malicia, debia ser su primero objeto dirigir el trabajo de sus miembros á la perfeccion de esta obra.” On Spanish monarchs as self-­interested promoters of history, see Richard Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

157

showing two ships, one safely anchored in a harbor and the other storm-­tossed on the open sea. Desconfiados was an inverted tribute to the eminent Italian acad­emy in Pavia, the Accademia degli Affati (Acad­emy of the Trusting).86 Fourteen of the sixteen found­ers of the Barcelona Acad­emy ­were titled noblemen, most of them from recently ennobled families rather than descended from the medieval aristocracy. Subsequently, membership was also drawn from high ecclesiastical officials and urban notables. In the latter half of the eigh­ teenth ­century, ­after royal confirmation, more than half the fellows w ­ ere clergy, but no Jesuit was elected u ­ ntil 1795, an obvious contrast with the domination of that order at the University of Cervera.87 Initially, the academicians met as a salon or tertulia to recite poetry and pre­ sent talks of a witty or speculative rather than erudite nature on topics such as the power of eloquence, the triumph of virtue over envy, w ­ hether hereditary or acquired noble status is preferable, and ­whether the appropriate attribute of the hero is valor or rather prudence. A stated objective of the acad­emy in its early years was to combat excessive and unfocused leisure, a common vice of members of the aristocratic class. In a more positive sense, particularly ­after the refoundations of 1729 and 1752, the association’s purposes, while still including sociability, also ran to the pedagogical and intellectual. Its emblem was now a beehive, symbolizing diligence and constructive activity.88 Intellectuality was linked not so much to notions of pro­g ress and innovation as to reclaiming and preserving the past. Set in the reform-­minded and neoclassical eigh­teenth c­ entury, the Barcelona Acad­emy retained Baroque traits of elaboration, conservatism, eloquence, and esotericism.89 Renowned progressive thinkers such as Antoni de Capmany and Eudald Jaumandreu ­were elected, but their ideas neither originated nor ­were nurtured within the circle of academicians. 86. ​On the early history of the acad­emy, see Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 27– 78; Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 9–23; Ernesto Moliné y Brasés, “La Academia dels Desconfiats,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 9 (1917–1920): 1–10; Marta Muntada, “Els integrants de l’Acadèmia dels Desconfiats (Barcelona, 1700–1703),” Butlletí de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona 48 (2001–2002): 11–84; Pere Molas Ribalta, “Els Acadèmics Desconfiats el 1713,” in Actes del VII Congrés d’Història Moderna de Catalunya “Catalunya entre guerra i pau, 1713–1813,” ed. J. Dantí, X. Gil, and I. Mauro (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2013), 731–48; James S. Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490–1714 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986), 171–80. 87. ​Miguel Pérez Latre and David Asensio Vilaró, “Cultura histórica en Cataluña: El caso de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, entre 1752 y 1799,” Pedralbes: Revista d’història moderna 8 (1988): 232–33. The accomplished historian Juan Francisco Masdeu was elected in 1795. He was born and made his c­ areer in Italy, but he devoted himself to Spanish ecclesiastical history. D’Abadal, “Doscientos años de historia de Cataluña,” 333. 88. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 27–31, 59–70. 89. ​Pérez and Asensio, “Cultura histórica en Cataluña,” 229, 242.

15 8 Chap t e r  5

An in­ter­est­ing exception to the high-­born and ecclesiastical membership was the silk merchant Pere Serra i Postius (1671–1748), elected in 1729 apparently ­because of his extensive library, which he had made accessible to the learned public. A prolific, eclectic, and, it is fair to say even within the standards of the era, credulous writer, Serra composed poetry as well as works on Barcelona, saints, and angels. He compiled lists of Catalan cardinals, cata­ logs of bishops and abbots and Benedictine monasteries, and a dictionary of parish churches with their patron saints.90 His book of 1726 on guardian angels and their deeds in defense of Catalonia is a compendium of miracles based on an exhaustive familiarity with Catalan religious and ecclesiastical historical texts.91 In this work, Serra mentions numerous authors of accounts of historical prodigies, which Torres Amat found to be beneficial when putting together his literary biographical dictionary.92 From the start, the acad­emy was widely viewed as unserious and dilettantish.93 Yet during the few years of its first incarnation, as the Desconfiados, three significant publications appeared: a collection of poetic laments for the late King Charles II, the first edition of the poetry of Francesc Vicent Garcia, the rector of Vallfogona, and an edition of the works of the g­ reat Castilian poet Francisco de Quevedo.94 The impression of bumbling amateurishness lasted into the twentieth ­century, to be supplemented by another unfavorable image of the group as a collection of mandarins with Castilian sympathies. ­After the Spanish Civil War, the acad­emy adapted to the Franco regime and was widely considered insufficiently Catalanophile. Although many of the leading historians of medieval Catalonia belonged to the acad­emy, its orientation was 90. ​Campabadal, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 87–88. On Serra i Postius, see Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario, 598–600; Josep Maria Madurell, “Pedro Serra y Postius,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 29 (1956): 345–400; Madurell, “Más sobre Pedro Serra y Postius,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 46 (1973): 387–421; Kenneth Brown, “Encara més sobre Pere Serra i Postius,” in Actes del Vuitè Col·loqui Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes, vol. 2 (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1989), 267–89. 91. ​Pere Serra i Postius, Prodigios y finezas de los Santos Angeles hechas en el Principado de Cataluña (Barcelona: Jaime Suriá, 1726). 92. ​In Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario, Torres Amat remarks regarding the Prodigios y finezas de los Santos Angeles: “Recopiló en este obrita muchísimas noticias de escritores catalanes de que nos hemos valido al escribir estas memorias” (599). 93. ​The negative and positive estimations of both contemporaries and l­ater historians are described in Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 10–15. 94. ​ Nenias reales y lagrimas obsequiosas que a la immortal memoria del gran Carlos Segundo, Rey de las Españas y Emperador de la Amer­ic­ a, en credito de su imponderable dolor y desempeño de su mayor fineza dedica y consagra la Academia de los Desconfiados (Barcelona: Rafael Figuerò, 1701); Francesc Vicent García, La Armonia del Parnàs, mes numerosa en las poesias varias de l’atlant del cel poetic, lo Dr. Vicent Garcia, rector de la parroquial de Santa Maria de Vallfogona [. . ]. (Barcelona: J. Rubió, 1703); Francisco de Quevedo, Obras de Francisco de Quevedo Villegas [. . .] dedicadas a la muy ilustre Academia de Desconfiados de la excelentíssima ciudad de Barcelona (Barcelona: Jayme Suriá, 1702).

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

159

established by Martí de Riquer i Morera, Count of Dávalos (1914–2013), one of the greatest experts in Catalan and Castilian lit­er­a­ture, a monarchist, and beneficiary of the regime’s largesse. He was elected in 1944 and served as director from 1963 ­until 1996. The reputation of the eighteenth-­century acad­emy for lassitude is not merited as ­there was substantial activity and elaborate plans for education and research. Unlike academies elsewhere, the Barcelona group did not pursue natu­ral science, philosophy, or po­liti­cal thought according to any or­ga­nized campaign. The first volume of its Memorias, issued in 1756, reaffirmed the dictum of 1752: “The principal task of the Acad­emy must be the history of Catalonia.”95 Aligned with this purpose was the desire to investigate and preserve the Catalan language and to compose poetry in Catalan.96 The historical research undertaken favored the ­Middle Ages and included a substantial but not overwhelming interest in Catalan church history.97 Poetry, too, was emphasized beginning with the founding of the Desconfiados, and from the restoration of 1729 on, the Barcelona association paid attention to the historical importance of the Catalan language. In that year the president, Segismon Comes i Codinac, gave an address (in Latin) about the poetry competitions of the medieval past, t­ hose legendary Jocs florals (“floral jousts” or “games”) that would be revived during the flood tide of the nineteenth-­century Renaixença. Augustí de Montiano in 1759 claimed that Catalan was the first Latin-­derived language to emerge from the onslaught of the barbarians and the collapse of classical Latin. Gabriel Casanova in 1793 described the glories of the idioma vulgar, constituting the lengua materna of peasants along with the ­great medieval poets like Ausias March.98 ­These addresses ­were delivered in Castilian. Two communications to the acad­emy indicate a precocious, if not sustained, interest in Arabic history in relation to Spain. Ramon de Dalmases i de Vilana, one of ­those who reestablished the acad­emy in 1729, read in 1730 a discourse on the Islamic practice of computing chronology by reference to 95. ​ Real Academia de Buenas Letras de la Ciudad de Barcelona: Origen, progresso y su primera junta general, baxo la protección de Su Magestad con los papeles que en ella se acordaron (Barcelona: Francisco Surihá, 1756), 17: “La Obra principal de la Académia ha de ser la Historia de Cathaluña” (no. xxiv of the statutes of the organ­ization). On pages 4–5 is quoted the 1729 statement that the acad­emy should be devoted to sacred and profane history, especially of Catalonia. 96. ​On the poems of the academicians, see Mireia Campabadal i Bertran, “Sobre la concepció de la poesia catalana al segle XVIII,” Butlletí de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona 48 (2001–2002): 231–67; Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 109–33. 97. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 123–210; José Vives, “La historia eclesiástica en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 25 (1953): 341–53. 98. ​Antoni Comas, Les excel·lències de la llengua catalana, 2nd  ed. (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2009), 28–29.

16 0 Chap t e r  5

the Hegira.99 It is preserved in one of Caresmar’s volumes of miscellanies now at Bellpuig. In his last lecture to the acad­emy in 1778, Caresmar himself discussed the period of Arab rule over Catalonia, a work that has unfortunately been lost.100 This antedates José Antonio Conde, Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España (1820–1821), generally considered the first modern work on the Arab states that ­were established on the Iberian Peninsula.101 Statutes ­adopted in conjunction with the royal license of 1752 called for the acad­emy to have forty members, but in fact only twenty-­five ­were named.102 At this point, some specific goals ­were identified: a historical dictionary, an epitome of the early seventeenth-­century chronicle of Jeroni Pujades, a new general history of Catalonia, a series of methodological introductions to historical research, and, fi­nally, translating into Castilian the major Catalan chronicles and ­legal collections. The a­ ctual rec­ord does not fulfill ­these ambitions, and as early as 1731 Pere Serra i Postius predicted that the projected authoritative history of Catalonia would never succeed “due to enmity and discord, the age-­old curse of this nation.” While Serra regarded it as feasible, even easy for the acad­emy to work on poetry in Catalan, when it came to history, already two or three proj­ects had been announced, only to be set aside “two days ­later.” Presumably, the conflicts arose over issues relating to the Succession War and responses to its origins and results.103 99. ​BPA, Caixa 15, Llibre 33.16, 375–90, Ramon de Dalmases y de Vilana, “Discurso sobre el computo de la hegira y el modo de ajustar el año de aqualla con los nuestros com probado con las mas celebres hepocas españolas.” It is edited by Pere Baleña i Abadia, “Jaume Caresmar: Un cas inèdit d’arabofília al segle XVIII,” in Miscl·lània d’homenatge a Enric Moreu-­Rey, ed. Albert Manent and Joan Veny, vol. 2 (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1988), 139–50. Ramon de Dalmases also presented to the Barcelona Acad­emy in 1729 a discourse on the entrance of the “Moors” into Catalonia. Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 201. 100. ​Baleña, “Jaume Caresmar,” 136–38; Joaquim Miret i Sans, “Dos siglos de vida académica,” Boletin de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 9 (1917–1920): 108–9. 101. ​José Antonio Conde, Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España, 3 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta que fue de Garcia, 1820–1821). The acad­emy’s interest in the Arab conquest dates from the era of the Desconfiados as it was treated in the unpublished Anales del Principado de Cataluña, written in 1709 by Pau Ignasi Dalmases i Ros, a founder of the acad­emy and ­father of Ramon de Dalmases, cited above as the author of a treatise on dating documents with reference to the Hegira. Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 195–97. Just a­ fter the royal charter of 1752, the acad­emy undertook to concentrate its efforts on the eighth ­century, the time of the Arab conquest of most of Spain. Campabadal, La Real Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 140–44. The papers actually delivered, however, w ­ ere on the Christian remnants of Catalonia rather than on anything having to do with the invaders. 102. ​Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 26–27. 103. ​Eulàlia Miralles, Sobre Jeroni Pujades (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2010), 62: “perquè aquest [i.e., the study of Catalan history] se à tractat fer dos o tres vegadas en nostre Acadèmia y al cap de dos dias, se és desvanescut, per causa de la antiquissíma txata de nostra nació—­vull dir, per desunió.”

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

161

A compendium consisting of observations on the study of history generally and that of Catalonia in par­tic­u­lar appeared in 1756, constituting the first volume of Memorias of the acad­emy. It was intended as a methodological orientation and included essays on manuscripts, printed sources, alphabets, and paleography (Latin and Arabic). Josep Móra i Catà, Marquis of Llo, wrote 575 of its 667 pages. He received assistance from other members of the acad­emy, including Caresmar, but most of the volume is taken up by the marquis’s Observaciones sobre los principios elementales de la Historia, a careful, up-­to-­date work on historical sources and methods. Its first chapter deals with printed chronicles and histories of Catalonia (pp. 100–262), and the second and largest section (pp. 263–667) concerns manuscripts.104 What was published in the first volume of the Memorias was only part of a planned prolegomena to the study of Catalan history. Before he died in 1762, Móra had prepared a substantial treatment of “tradition” (meaning in this context sacred or secular history transmitted orally and only l­ater written down) and an introduction to a section on charters and other original “instruments.” ­These two treatises w ­ ere to constitute a second part of the Observaciones, on the ele­ments of history, and a third was to be devoted to epigraphy, coins, and medals. As it turned out, Móra’s death made it difficult for the acad­emy to complete its set tasks, for he was both the animating and administrative force b­ ehind its vigorous agenda. Financial prob­lems in the late eigh­teenth ­century ­were so severe that for a time the building could not even afford to have a porter to mind its entrance.105 The acad­emy’s archive preserves laments over the impossibility of bringing to term its ambition for a comprehensive history of Catalonia. Bernat de Ribes, for example, confessed that he could not understand why, in 1795, forty-­three years ­after the proj­ect was announced, materials collected for a history of Catalonia had not yet been reduced to any kind of order.106 It would take more than a c­ entury for the next volume of the Memorias to appear. Volume 2 begins with Móra’s historiographic essay dealing with tradition.107 In the de­cades ­after Móra’s death, ­there was still intellectual activity, however. Fellows of the acad­emy presented communications regarding 104. ​ Real Academia de Buenas Letras de la Ciudad de Barcelona. Among Caresmar’s miscellaneous surviving material is a forty-­page collection of notes titled “Para el estudio del Marques de Llío, sobre ciencia histórica, literaria, història universal,” consisting of extracts from authorities on manuscripts, coins, inscriptions, and pious traditions. BPA, Caixa 15, Llibre 32, 27. 105. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 307–8. 106. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 151. 107. ​ Memorias de la Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, vol. 2 (1868). Móra’s “Observaciones sobre los principios elementales de la historia, c. 3: De la Tradición” is on pages 1–50. Tradition is

16 2 Chap t e r  5

inscriptions and numismatics, and one of Caresmar’s lost papers was on medals. None of this was published, however. Part of the reason for the chronic delay was that the acad­emy, although dignified, was impoverished. Its best years financially w ­ ere from the royal license to the death of Móra (1752–1762), but even in supposedly prosperous 1754 the trea­sury held only six pounds. As late as 1790, creditors ­were still demanding payment of expenses in connection with the publication of the 1756 Memorias.108 In terms of the level of activity as mea­sured by the number of meetings, the thirty years a­ fter 1763 constitute a period of decline, acknowledged by entries in the minutes referring to a period of marasmo y de vida bastante pobre (stagnation and a rather impoverished existence) as well as simply to de­cadencia.109 Caresmar was elected to the acad­emy in 1750, but his first pre­sen­ta­tion recorded in the minutes—­his study on abbreviations (appendix 1, no. 7)—­was on May 1, 1754. From 1757 u ­ ntil 1780 he actively attended sessions and offered his learned disquisitions. Appendix 3 lists the sixteen lectures he is known to have given. Four of them are lost and the ­others survive in vari­ous forms, some as summaries in the acad­emy’s archive. ­Those that can be dated (i.e., are listed in the minutes) fall between 1754 and 1777. The b­ itter dispute with Domènec Ignasi Bòria de Llinars over the relics of Saint Eulalia is prob­ably responsible for Caresmar’s unofficial retreat from the acad­emy’s affairs, ­either ­because of the general effect of the scandal or b­ ecause in 1779 Bòria received permission to title himself as academico in publishing one of his attacks on Caresmar.110 An examination of the acad­emy’s archives yields a total of 125 pre­sen­ta­ tions on historical topics from 1752 to 1799, and Antoni Comas gives the titles of over forty lectures related to Catalan history over the same period.111 Some ­were on well-­worked topics such as the martyrdom of Saint Eulalia, while ­others seem dubious: the state of vernacular poetry in Catalonia during the eighth c­ entury or how Count Guifré slew a fierce dragon. Many ­were on serious subjects of church history: the episcopology of Barcelona, the foundation of the monastery of Banyoles, or the establishment of the Augustinian Order in Catalonia. The veracity of historical legends was questioned, such as ­whether the noble Otger Cataló and his nine companions led a revolt against Islam before Charlemagne’s entry (a myth used to explain the etymological defined on p. 1 as “una doctrina o noticia que, comunicada por medio de la voz, passa sucessivamente de uno a otro.” 108. ​Comas, La Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 30. 109. ​Pérez and Asensio, “Cultura histórica en Cataluña,” 230. 110. ​Miret i Sans, “Dos siglos de vida académica,” 109–10. 111. ​Pérez and Asensio, “Cultura histórica en Cataluña,” 227–43; Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 61–65.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

163

origin of “Catalonia” and provide a genealogy of the ­g reat noble families). The answers did not always represent the triumph of source criticism over my­ thol­ogy: Josep Feliu Oliver in 1797, although protesting that he was far from being a credulous man, accepted the story of Otger and the nine barons by reason of the consensus of recent historians, although acknowledging that over the centuries doubts had been raised.112 Some pro­g ress was made in understanding the history of the Catalan language and in regularizing it. Antoni Elies i Robert read a discourse to the academics in 1795 on using authors and documents from the thirteenth to the seventeenth c­ entury to create a definitive Catalan grammar; Antoni Alegret spoke in 1792 about the need for standardizing orthography. Plans for a Catalan dictionary ­were announced several times during the latter half of the eigh­ teenth c­entury. A list of classic Catalan works such as the Ustages or the didactic treatises of Francesc Eiximenis was to be created in order to add to the word lists in already-­existing reference works. In the 1790s, efforts w ­ ere renewed and a commission of members was appointed, but the last we hear about this proj­ect is in 1799.113 In 1803 a dictionary of Latin, Catalan, and Castilian appeared, but this was not at the behest of the acad­emy.114 Another late eighteenth-­century proj­ect was to translate the chronicles of Catalan history and medieval ­legal texts into Castilian, thereby making them known to a wider audience of historians.115 A Castilian version of the fourteenth-­century chronicle of Ramon Muntaner was planned but never completed. An edition of the complete Corónica universal del Principado de Cataluña, by Jeroni Pujades, appeared in 1829–1832, but this was not sponsored by the acad­emy. In 1816, it did manage to publish a Castilian translation of the fourteenth-­century collection of laws for Barcelona known as the Ordinacions d’En Santacília.116 No authoritative or comprehensive works resulted from t­ hese proj­ects. The acad­emy’s archive preserves the manuscript texts of many individual pre­sen­ ta­tions on historical topics, but the difficulty of bringing work to completion 112. ​RABLB, MS 361(formerly lligal 2, núm. 25), Josep Felip Oliver on Otger Cataló, given January 18, 1797, and Josep de Santa Eulàlia on the defense of the empress of Germany in 1804. Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 64. 113. ​Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 89–91. 114. ​Joaquín Esteve et al., Diccionario catalán-­castellano-­latino, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Tecla Pla Viuda, 1803). 115. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 182–87. 116. ​First Catalan edition, Deles consueutts de la ciutat de Barcelona, sobre les servituts deles cases de honors vulgarment dites den Sancta Cilia (Barcelona: Pedro Mulo, 1574). Thereafter seven Catalan editions to 1800. First Castilian edition, Costumbres de la ciudad de Barcelona sobre las servidumbres de los predios urbanos y rústicos, llamadas vulgarmente d’En Santacília (Barcelona: Juan Francisco Piferrer, [1816]).

16 4 Chap t e r   5

and of getting it printed was insuperable, and the result is to give a rather disappointing impression of the acad­emy’s influence. In the nineteenth ­century, the acad­emy abandoned large undertakings and eventually published collections of extended essays (in its Memorias) and learned articles (in the Boletín/ ­ iddle Ages remained a primary area of research, as it does to Butlletí). The M this day, but the history of the church nearly dis­appeared, a reflection of the upheavals brought about by the disamortization of monastic property and a re­orientation of national identity ­toward secular accomplishments.117 We have looked at three circles of learned individuals in eighteenth-­century Catalonia: the chapter of Bellpuig, the University of Cervera, and the Barcelona Acad­emy of Belles-­Lettres, all methodologically conservative groups concerned with exploring established topics such as church history, Roman law, and Catalan culture. They produced works that w ­ ere well known in their time and provided means for ­later generations to examine and reconstruct medieval Catalan history, but their reputations among modern historians do not equal ­those of the Barcelona technical and commercial schools and associations such as the Junta de Comerç (its full Spanish name was the Real Junta Par­tic­ul­ar de Comercio de Barcelona), the College of Surgery (established in 1760), the Naval School (1769), or the Acad­emy of Practical Medicine (1770).118 The Junta de Comerç represented the interests of Barcelona businessmen with regard to tariffs and other regulations but also funded students’ learning of the latest manufacturing techniques in foreign countries. ­There was considerable overlap, however, of personnel and ideas among the dif­fer­ent groups. Caresmar was the leading figure of the Bellpuig historians but was also active in the Barcelona Acad­emy and worked with the Junta de Comerç to produce the 1780 Discurso on the past and ­f uture of Catalonia’s economy. Ramon Llàtzer de Dou, professor of canon law and the last chancellor of the University of Cervera, served as a delegate to the Cortes of Cadíz and presided over some of its sessions. He would go on to write a translation of and commentary on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations that the University of Cervera published.119 In Finestresius vindicatus, which appeared in 1772, Dou

117. ​Vives, “La historia eclesiástica,” 342, 346. 118. ​A list of ­these socie­ties is given by Alberto Velasco Gonzalèz and Joan Yeguas Gassó, “Intel·lectualitat i encàrrecs artístics al segle XVIII: Els erudits de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes,” Urtx 25 (2011): 340. See also Ernest Lluch, La Catalunya vençuda del segle XVIII: Foscors i clarors de l’Il·lustració (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1996), 126–36. 119. ​Ramon Lázaro de Dou y de Bassóls, La riqueza de las naciones, nuevamente explicada con la doctrina de su mismo investigador (Cervera: Imprenta de la Pont. y Real Universidad, Cervera, 1817); Ernest Lluch, El pensament economic a Catalunya (1760–1840) (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1973), 210.

Th e Cir c l e o f B e l l pui g a n d Ot h e r L e ar n e d  S o c i e t ­ i e s

165

defends Josep Finestres, whose expertise in epigraphy had been dismissed by Henrique Flórez in the twenty-­fourth volume of España Sagrada.120 Josep Vega i Sentmenat had connections with almost every­one mentioned in this chapter: friend of and, in effect, literary executor for Caresmar and Pasqual, professor at Cervera, active in the Barcelona Acad­emy, and collaborator with other ecclesiastical and university figures such as the aforementioned Dou and the professor and subsequently canon of Girona, Francesc Xavier Dorca. Sentmenat was a relation of the Baron of Maldà (the author of Calaix de sastre), and he also served as a deputy at the Cortes of Cádiz. The medieval past had dif­fer­ent roles within the institutions devoted to learning. B ­ ecause of its curricular emphasis on classical languages and jurisprudence, the University of Cervera was oriented ­toward Greek and Roman antiquity, and this received added impetus from the prestige of Josep Finestres and his interest in ancient epigraphy. The mission of the Real Academia de Barcelona was to study Catalan history, but this was understood to date from the most remote times. The earliest plan for a history of Catalonia, announced at the point at which the acad­emy received royal recognition (1752), called for a division into four parts: from the origins to the arrival of the Cartha­g inians, the Cartha­g inian era, the Roman Empire, and from the barbarian invasion ­until 700.121 This contrasts with the nineteenth-­century Renaixença outlook that identified Catalonia with its medieval principality and differs also from the tendency of modern historians to date the origins of Catalonia to the tenth ­century, the murky period ­after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. In its literary research and its interest in the Catalan language, the acad­emy of course concentrated on the M ­ iddle Ages and anticipated the Renaixença’s devotion to lyrical poetry and study of Catalonia’s role in medieval Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture. The Bellpuig historians ­were more unusual in their concentration on medieval history, although this is logical given that their research field was essentially Christian history, particularly that of the institutional church. We have seen that Caresmar and Pasqual ­were concerned with epigraphy, coins, cameos, sculpture, and other material legacies of the Graeco-­Roman past. Particularly in his Carta al Barón de la Linde, Caresmar uses his reading of ancient historians as well as medieval evidence to argue for Catalonia’s greater past prosperity. Nevertheless, their compositions and transcriptions show the devotion felt by Caresmar and Pasqual for the ecclesiastical history of the ­Middle Ages. 120. ​Ramon Lázaro de Dou y de Bassóls, Finestresius vindicatus . . . ​adversus clarissimum virum Henricum Florezium (Barcelona: Franciscus Suriá et Burgada, 1772). 121. ​Comas, L’Acadèma de Bones Lletres, 27–28.

16 6 Chap t e r  5

The concerns of the members of the dif­fer­ent circles radiated from a common center of interest in Catalonia’s culture and ways to bring about a revival of learning and the Catalan economy. The Bellpuig canons pursued the role of sacred history and the church, but this concern was not isolated from the con­temporary world and so should not be considered mere antiquarianism. As Casanovas pointed out in his study of Josep Finestres and Cervera, reiterated by Velasco and Yeguas in discussing the Bellpuig scholars, the Enlightenment in Catalonia did not break with the traditions of Catholicism, as distinct from most of the rest of Eu­rope.122 Similarly, the progressive agenda of economic and po­liti­cal thinkers such as Capmany and the members of the Junta de Comerç glorified the medieval pre­ce­dents of Barcelona’s guilds, its municipal liberties, the laws and institutions of the Crown of Aragon, and within it the Catalan Principality rather than considering ­these feudal vestiges or proclaiming an abstract, scientific, or neoclassical definition of pro­g ress on the order of what the French Revolution unveiled.

122. ​Velasco and Yeguas, “Intel·lectualitat i encàrrecs artístics al segle XVIII,” 339. Aspects of the situation within Hapsburg lands are comparable. David Sorkin, “Reform Catholicism and Religious Enlightenment,” Austrian History Yearbook 30 (1999): 187–219.

C h a p te r   6

Caresmar’s Works

Any attempt to cata­ log and describe Jaume Caresmar’s compositions runs up against three prob­lems: his disor­ga­ni­za­tion in executing proj­ects, the failure of commissioning authorities to publish much of what was completed, and the subsequent destruction or dispersal of his manuscripts as a result of neglect, disamortization, and war. It is not always pos­si­ble to determine what constitutes a “work” as opposed to a collection of notes or a preliminary reference compilation. Thus, for example, one of Caresmar’s manuscripts at Bellpuig de les Avellanes consists of 543 pages (ending with page 585, but missing pages 1–42) of untitled transcriptions, excerpts, and notes on ecclesiastical history. Within this book are three studies that can be considered completed texts, including the Dissertació apologètica on the right of clerics below the rank of abbot to wear a pectoral cross.1 ­There are also monastic necrologies, lists of bishops of Solsona and Urgell, and Caresmar’s transcriptions of unpublished works of other historians—an account of the wars following the Sicilian Vespers of 1282 and a disquisition on the eldest ­daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, Queen Isabella of Portugal, by Manuel Mariano Ribera, a member of the Mercedarian Order (1652–1736), asserting that she was born in Barcelona.2 1. ​BPA, Fons de l’Orde dels canonges regulars premonstratesos de Bellpuig de les Avellanes, Caixa 11, Llibre 29. See appendix 1, no. 18. 2. ​Ribera was a member of the Real Academia of Barcelona and made this pre­sen­ta­tion in 1733. Mireia Campabadal i Bertran, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona en el segle XVIII: L’interès 167

16 8 Chap t e r  6

Caresmar was certainly indefatigable, in certain re­spects meticulous, but also impatient and often incapable of neatly ordering his writings. This last impression is intensified by the chaotic fate of his body of work. During the early stages of researching, faced with classifying what remained of Caresmar’s writings, it appeared to me that Caresmar himself was largely to blame for the difficulty of this task. He suffered from a combination of hyperactivity—­a man who could summarize or transcribe fourteen thousand documents from the archive of the Cathedral of Barcelona—­and an inability to finish undertakings such as Cathalonia Sacra (an account of the bishops of the principality), Monasticon Cathalanum (monastic histories and archives), and an Índice Geográfico-­Histórico de Cataluña. Now, however, it is clear to me that the frustration of Caresmar’s scholarly agenda was due as much (or more) to bad luck, the machinations of o ­ thers, and posthumous po­liti­cal upheavals as it was to flaws in his research practices. Particularly tragic was the failure of the sponsoring authorities in Madrid to bring to publication works they had commissioned and that Caresmar had, in fact, completed. Appendix 2 lists twelve works sent to the Real Cámera in Madrid. Two ­were published long ­after Caresmar’s death, six survive fully or partially in manuscripts, and four have been lost altogether. According to Joaquin Traggia (1748– 1802), a polymath and member of the Real Academia de la Historia, the texts Caresmar conveyed to the royal court ­were blocked from publication by ­those who ­were supposed to bring the proj­ects to fruition. In his survey of Catalan archives and libraries, Jaime de Villanueva asserts that an unnamed person in Madrid wanted to receive credit as the author and so prevented publication.3 Fèlix Amat, a Catalan savant, titular archbishop of Palmyra, and confessor to King Charles IV, tried in 1807 to interest the royal minister Pedro Cevallos Guerra in restarting the publication proj­ect, but this was rendered impossible by po­liti­cal turmoil in 1808 that engulfed the court and paved the way for the French occupation and the beginning of the War of In­de­pen­dence.4

per la història, la llengua i la literatura catalanes (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona and Abadia de Montsererat, 2006), 129. 3. ​Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, “Historia del Monasterio de las Avellanas (desde su fundación hasta los abades comendarios)” (doctoral diss., University of Valencia, 1954), 2:359–60. A copy is in the library of the Cloisters Museum in New York. Jaime Villanueva, Viage literario a las iglesias de España, vol. 12 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1850), 88–89. See also Fèlix Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario critico de los escritores catalanes y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura de Cataluña (Barcelona: J. Verdeguer, 1836), 177–81; Marina Garí, Ramon Masdeu, and Manuela Urbina, “Jaume Caresmar. L’home i la seva obra,” Manuscrits 10 (1992): 342, 354–55, 363, 366. 4. ​Jaime Oliver, “Biografia de Jaume Caresmar i Alemany, 1717–1791,” El Ateneo, Revista Mensual del Ateneo Igualadina de la clase obrera 10, nos. 108–109 ( July/August 1894): 1014; Ramon Corts i Blay,

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

169

Apparently, the canons of Bellpuig demanded that if ­these manuscripts ­were not g­ oing to be published, they should be returned, and, ­after considerable delay, Vega i Sentmenat did receive this material, much of which would ­later dis­appear with the dissolution of Bellpuig in 1835.5 Notwithstanding the prob­lems sorting out their contents, many of Caresmar’s unfinished miscellanies and extensive notes can be usefully reduced to smaller units. Thus, Josep Joan Piquer i Jover extracted the material on female Cistercian monasteries from Caresmar’s 656 pages of monastic information for a projected Monasticon Cathalanum or, as the Bellpuig manuscript entitled it, “Monasteriología.”6 Similarly, Caresmar’s unfinished work often made indirect contributions to ­later, more successful proj­ects. He never completed a compilation of a biographical list of Catalan writers (Biblioteca de Escritores Catalanes), for which ninety-­one folios survive in a manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid (see appendix 1, no. 30). In the preface to his bibliography of Catalan writers published in 1836, Fèlix Torres Amat refers to this text, noting that while the learned canon repeated or rearranged entries found in an ­earlier guide to Hispanic writers by Nicolás Antonio, his findings had contributed to Torres Amat’s own descriptive cata­log of writers of Catalan origin.7 ­Under the circumstances, no list of Caresmar’s compositions can be considered definitive. What has been attempted in this chapter and in appendix 1 is to assess what survives rather than starting with lists of Caresmar’s works from inventories undertaken in 1792, 1805, 1867, 1916, or 1927.8 Chapter 8 describes the loss and factitious reassembling of Caresmar’s texts. Appendix 1 gives forty-­five completed or at least extensive studies that survive, of which ten w ­ ere published in Caresmar’s lifetime and seven posthumously (but some of ­these volumes are subdivided into several distinct essays in the midst of notes and miscellanies). Garí, Masdeu, and Urbina identify twenty-­nine lost L’arquebisbe Fèlix Amat (1750–1824) i l’última Il·lustració espanyola (Barcelona: Facultat de Teologia de Catalunya, 1992), 199–200. 5. ​As described in Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario, 161; P[are] Martí [Jaume Bagunyà i Casanovas], “Notas bio-­bibliográficas de Caresmar: Commemorando un centenario (1717–1791),” Estudios Franciscanos 22 (1919): 200–201. 6. ​BPA, Caixa 13, Llibre 31; Josep Joan Piquer i Jover, “Notícies sobre fundacions femenines cistercenques a Catalunya (extrets de la ‘Monasteriologia’ inèdita del P. Caresmar),” in Col·loqui d’història del monaquisme català, vol. 1 (Santes Creus, 1967), 233–62. 7. ​Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario, xv–­xvi. Note the “in pro­cess” nature of the book’s title, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario critico de los escritores catalanes y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura de Cataluña. On Torres Amat and Caresmar, see Ernest Lluch, La Catalunya vençuda del segle XVIII: Foscors i clarors de la il·lustració (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1996), 35. Besides Caresmar, among ­those who made additions to Nicolás Antonio’s compendium was Josep Finestres, the law professor at Cervera. 8. ​The dates refer to inventories by Martí, Vega i Sentmenat, Fidel Fita, Ramon d’Alòs, and Francesc Martorell i Traba. See the introduction to appendix 1.

17 0 Chap t e r  6

works of Caresmar and forty-­seven for which only fragments survive; although in the case of the latter, it is doubtful that most of them ever existed in what could be considered “completed” form.9 At his death, Caresmar left an im­mense collection of finished and unfinished manuscripts and a small number of a­ ctual publications.10 Separate works, supposedly numbering over two hundred, e­ ither ­were already at Bellpuig or had been brought t­here from Barcelona a­ fter Caresmar died. In 1792–1793, Josep Martí created a detailed cata­log of Caresmar’s materials at Bellpuig, comprising 103 unpublished completed and incomplete manuscripts, and he or­ga­nized the vari­ous books, notes, lists, and miscellanies into twenty-­five bound volumes.11 In his Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta, Pasqual copied Martí’s inventory.12 Shortly thereafter, Josep de Vega i Sentmenat examined Caresmar’s written legacy. He initially listed twenty-­five manuscript books but l­ater made a longer register that is also copied into the SACM just before Martí’s list.13 Caresmar’s papers w ­ ere even more disor­ga­nized than ­either of the two postmortem accountings would lead one to believe. Writing in 1805 to the Academia de Buenas Letras, the Bellpuig canon Gonzalo Saura lamented that “los escritos del difunto Caresmar están tan mal ordenados que es un chaos de confusión, y en muchos de ellos preferiría el leer pergaminos que sus escritos” (the writings of the deceased Caresmar are in such disorder that it is a chaos of confusion and in many cases I would prefer reading the original parchments rather than his copies).14 This was in response to a letter from the Barcelona Acad­emy asking if Saura could look for twelve texts of Caresmar’s that had been presented to the members but whose written contents could not be located (listed in appendix 3). The letter from the acad­emy is worth quoting ­because it shows two features that would characterize subsequent efforts to figure out what survives of Caresmar’s production: the author’s idiosyncratic 9. ​Garí, Masdeu, and Urbina, “Jaume Caresmar. L’home i la seva obra,” 341–71. 10. ​Villanueva, Viage literario, 12:88; Antoni Comas, L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres des de la seva fundació l’any 1700 (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona, 2000), 65–66; Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 148–50, 170–89, 230–39, 278–308, 431–35; Josep M. Benítez i Riera, “Historiadors i humanistes en l’epistolari inèdit (1773–1789) de Joan Antoni Maians i Josep Vega,” Pedralbes: Revista d’història moderna 5 (1985): 221–27. 11. ​BC, MS 753, Josep Martí, “Índice de los papeles manuscritos contenidos en los diferentes volúmenes del difunto Dr. D. Jaime Caresmar.” 12. ​Published in Ramon d’Alòs-­Moner, “Cóntribució a la bibliografia del P. Jaume Caresmar,” Butlletí de la Biblioteca de Catalunya 6 (1918–1919), 58–82. 13. ​RB, MS II/2469, José Vega i Sentmenant, “Noticia sucincta de la vita y escritos del Dr. D. Jayme Caresmar,” ff. 250 r–51v, 253v; Vega i Sentmenant, “Cata­logo de las obras MS y impressas ordenado por el Dn. José Vega, regidor de la Barcelona Academia de Buenas Letras,” copied in BC, MS 729, Jaume Pasqual, “Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta,” vol. 11, f. 262v and f. 280r. The list in Pasqual is given in d’Alós, “Cóntribució a la bibliografia del P. Jaume Caresmar,” 54–58. 14. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 170.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

171

organ­ization and the difficulties that libraries and archives experienced in keeping a rec­ord of Caresmar’s contribution. It states: “We ask D. Gonzalo Saura y de Ferrer to have the goodness to see if, among the papers of the deceased canon Caresmar, he can find t­ here ­matters referred to [above] that the said Sr. [Caresmar] worked on for the Acad­emy. In the Acts of the Acad­emy, it is stated that he read ­these works, but nothing has been found with regard to them in the recently-­undertaken revision and ordering of his papers.”15 Jaime Villanueva visited Bellpuig in 1808, just before the beginning of the wars and confiscations that would damage or destroy so many ecclesiastical libraries and archives. He said that Caresmar’s writings ­were collected in eigh­ teen folio books, observing that much of what was left took the form of lists and notes. Villanueva was pleased that all of what Caresmar composed seemed to be available in ­these large, newly bound volumes.16 Nevertheless, some works known to have been written by Caresmar ­were already missing just ­after his death. Saura mentions as lost a treatise on abbreviations in medieval documents (read to the acad­emy in 1754) and one on medals (1777).17 He also refers to Caresmar’s list of rec­ords from the collegiate church of Àger as missing, but it is, in fact, extant.18 It was also difficult to match titles mentioned in e­ arlier sources with existing manuscripts. Caresmar’s often grandiloquent titles ­were shortened in dif­fer­ent forms by cata­logers. In addition, ­there w ­ ere multiple works on the same subject: concerning Àger, for example, or Catalan monastic documents, and also on the history of Bellpuig.

What Caresmar Did Publish Caresmar saw himself as a custodian of the past, preserving and organ­izing its texts by transcription. As a cleric and passionate scholar, he deemed it sufficient to rescue and make accessible the rec­ords of the church without constructing a historical narrative beyond specific institutions such as Bellpuig de 15. ​RABLB, MS 848, December 15, 1804: “Se suplica al Sr. Dn Gonzalo Saura y de Ferrer tenga la bondad de ver si entre los papeles del Sr Canonigo difunto Caresmar, se hallan los referendos asuntos que trabajó para la Academia dicho Señor, pues consta en las Actas haberse leido en ella, y no se han hallado en la revisión y ordenación de sus papeles que acaba de hacerse.” 16. ​Villanueva, Viage literario a las Iglesias de España, 12:86. 17. ​The pre­sen­ta­tion on abbreviations is noted in Joaquim Miret y Sans, “Dos siglos de vida académica,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 9 (1917–1920): 29; the one on medals is on page 108. It is just pos­si­ble that Caresmar’s essay on coins (see appendix 1, no. 22e) is the same as the essay on medals, but unlikely given the clear distinction between medalla and moneda. The discussion of abbreviations may be related to Caresmar’s published chart (appendix 1, no. 7). 18. ​RABLB, 10è lligall, núm. 31, cit. Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 170–71. For the Àger list, see appendix 1, no. 42.

17 2 Chap t e r  6

les Avellanes or the archdiocese of Tarragona, or individuals, such as par­tic­u­ lar saints. Much of his unpublished ­labor was in the form of transcriptions— of the medieval documents in the Archive of the Cathedral of Barcelona, the five-­volume Cartulary of Bellpuig de les Avellanes, or the two volumes describing parchments of the collegiate chapter of Saint Pere d’Àger, for instance. Most of Caresmar’s plans w ­ ere never realized, and only ten short works appeared in print during his lifetime (see appendix 1, section A). Seven w ­ ere devoted to hagiography, broadly defined: three sermons; one tract each on two local saints, Severus and Eulalia; a partial history of outstanding members of the Premonstratensian Order; and a disquisition on an inscription from the church of Sant Medir. Two additional printed items are a t­ able of Latin manuscript abbreviations for the aid of reading ­these texts (appendix 1, no. 7), and Caresmar’s index and summaries for a Barcelona edition of a standard (Latin) canon law textbook by the German scholar Theodor Maria Rupprecht (appendix 1, no. 8).

Hagiographical Works Early in his ­career, Caresmar preached three Castilian panegyric sermons on Saint Thecla, Saint Peter, and the Conception of the Virgin Mary that ­were printed in 1749 and 1750 (appendix 1, nos. 1, 2, 3). The commemoration of Saint Peter was given in the church of the parish of Saint Mary in Igualada, Caresmar’s birthplace. The church had originally also been dedicated to Saint Peter.19 This is the only indication I have found that Caresmar took any interest in his native town. Caresmar also published the first part of a projected set of biographical notices, in Latin, of Premonstratensian canons noted for their virtues and doctrines, including but not ­limited to ­those officially canonized or beatified. This Menologium Premonstratensium (i.e., “Premonstratensian Monthly Calendar”) is or­ga­nized day by day beginning with January 1 according to the death date of the individual.20 In addition to ecclesiastical licenses to print, the Menologium includes certification dated January 24, 1761, by the secretary of the Barcelona Acad­emy that Caresmar received permission to publish the volume. The minutes of the acad­emy show that the meeting at which publication was approved was on January 7, 1761.21 In sixty-­four pages, the Menologium lists out19. ​I thank Professor Flocel Sabaté of the University of Lleida for this information. 20. ​Jaume Caresmar, Menologium Praemonstratense, in quo sancti et beati ac peculiaria festa [. . .] (Barcelona: Theresa Piferrer, 1761) (appendix 1, no. 4). 21. ​Miret y Sans, “Dos siglos de vida académica,” 96.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

173

standing members of the order for the winter quarter of the year, the pars hyemalis, thus January, February, and March (appendix 1, no. 4). If Caresmar finished the cata­log, it has not survived in manuscript, and the fact that no such work is mentioned in the early inventories of Caresmar’s papers suggests that nothing for the ­later months was ever written. Caresmar’s research on Saints Severus and Eulalia proved to be more controversial than his e­ arlier hagiographies. In 1764 he published in Latin a defense of Saint Severus, supposedly the first bishop of Barcelona, martyred during the persecution ordered by Emperor Diocletian.22 Caresmar was responding to the Valencian scholar Gregori Maians (1699–1781), whom we have encountered previously. Maians expressed doubts about Severus in 1742 in an introduction he composed for a book of historical criticism by the seventeenth-­century literary savant Nicolás Antonio (1617–1684) titled Censura de historias fabulosas. Antonio’s work, published long a­ fter his death, exposed the false, purportedly medieval chronicles confected by the Jesuit Román de la Higuera (1538–1611). As Saint Severus appears in a putative fourth-­century chronicle by Flavius Lucius Dextro, one of Higuera’s inventions, Maians observed off handedly that the hy­po­thet­i­cal Barcelona bishop Severus must have been confused with an au­then­tic Severus, bishop of Ravenna.23 Maians elaborated on his reasons for questioning the existence of this suppositious first bishop of Barcelona in a letter to Mateo Aymerich (1715–1799), a Jesuit professor of philosophy at the University of Cervera. The two scholars had been introduced by Josep Finestres, the l­egal historian and polymath at Cervera, and they remained friends despite their contrary opinions over Saint Severus. Aymerich in his episcopology of Barcelona, which appeared in 1757, included Maians’s letter and provided a somewhat half hearted refutation based on the authority of liturgical and popu­lar tradition. If the mission of Saint James the apostle to evangelize Spain was only attested to by sources beginning in the ninth c­ entury, then the fact that Severus is only mentioned centuries a­ fter his alleged martyrdom should not be disqualifying, he argued.24 22. ​Jayme Caresmar, Sanctus Severus Episcopus et martyr, sedi et civitati barcinonensi noviter assertus ac vindicates (Vic: Petrus Morera, 1764) (appendix 1, no. 5). 23. ​Gregorio de Mayans, “Vida de Nicolás Antonio,” in Nicolás Antonio, Censura de historias fabulosas (Valencia: A. Bordàzar de Artàzu, 1742), xxiii: “Yo no sè lo que diría Don Nicolas Antonio. Pero soi de sentir que el San Severo Martir, que la Ciudad de Barcelona celebra por Obispo suyo, es San Severo Obispo de Ravena.” On the false chronicles, see Katrina Olds, Forging the Past: In­ven­ted Histories in Counter-­Reformation Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 24. ​Mateo Aymerich, Nomina et acta Episcoporum Barcinonensium (Barcelona: Joannes Nadal, 1757), 43–59 (Maians’s letter) and 59–106 (Aymerich’s refutation). On Aymerich and Maians, see Josep M. Benítez i Riera, “La relació de Mateu Aymerich amb Gregori Maians,” Revista catalana de teologia 25 (2000): 223–32.

17 4 Chap t e r  6

Caresmar was not satisfied with Aymerich’s defense of Severus and recognized that Maians was correct in rejecting the false chronicles of Dextro/ Higuera. Insofar as legends about Saint Severus ­were based on ­these chronicles, they deserved to be discredited. Maians, Caresmar asserted, had gone too far, however, in denying any real­ity to Saint Severus of Barcelona. Just ­because some of his supposed acts w ­ ere false did not mean the saint never existed or was not martyred. Caresmar mentions a companion martyr to Severus, a farmer known as Saint Emeterius (Sant Medir in Catalan), killed by the Romans along with Severus.25 According to legend (commemorated to this day as a popu­lar festival in Barcelona on March 3), Severus fled Barcelona across the Collserola north of the city and walked by Medir, who was planting fava beans. Severus paused long enough to tell the ­humble farmer not to lie to the Roman authorities if they asked about him. The Roman pursuers did indeed come up the same road and question Medir, who said that he had seen the bishop of Barcelona back when he was planting his beans. Miraculously, the beans had suddenly grown into mature vines, giving the Romans the impression that this encounter must have been months e­ arlier and so irrelevant to their current mission. The remarkable ruse was only temporarily effective, for the Romans did ultimately come back for Medir, first whipping and then beheading him. In his account of Saint Medir, Caresmar describes an inscription over the doorway of the church dedicated to the saint located southeast of Sant Cugat del Vallès. The inscription consisted simply of the date 447, rendered in Gothic script as ANNO DOMINI CCCCXXXXVII. In a short Latin treatise published by the University of Cervera in 1765, a year ­after his treatment of Saint Severus, Caresmar offers reasons to believe that this is an au­then­tic date for the construction of the original church honoring Sant Medir, although admitting that chronology with reference to the birth of Christ is normally thought to have started with the North African Dionysius Exiguus in 530. Caresmar points to some exceptionally early examples of dating from the Incarnation and annexes evidence for an early cult of Sant Medir to his advocacy for the authenticity of Bishop Severus of Barcelona (appendix 1, no. 6). That this was put out by the University of Cervera implies that Josep Finestres, the most knowledgeable epigraphy expert in Catalonia, at least passively approved of Caresmar’s theory. With regard to Saint Severus, Caresmar was, therefore, a defender of hagiographical tradition and of the force of custom as validations for historical surmise. A more a­ dept textual scholar and diplomatist than Aymerich, Cares25. ​Caresmar, Sanctus Severus, 79–89.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

175

mar supported his findings on the basis of the papal legitimation of Severus by Urban II in 1098 and Calixtus II in 1120. That a liturgical cult of Saint Severus of Barcelona is found in documents from Sant Cugat as far back as the tenth ­century and in a mass in honor of the saint from eighth-­century Barcelona gave further credence, according to Caresmar’s standards, to the legitimacy of tradition. Caresmar’s defense of Severus was not compelling, and some doubted it even at the time it was written.26 Subsequent historical consensus has not favored the Barcelona Severus. The authoritative list of bishops by Pius Boniface Gams begins with Pretextatus (ca. 343), and the modern ecclesiastical dictionary of Catalonia cautiously lists Severus as “undocumented.”27 The feast of Saint Severus of Barcelona is November 6, and thus his Acta Sanctorum entry is relatively recent (1910). The Bollandists excerpt from and accept Caresmar’s arguments for the singularity of Severus—­that t­ here was no Barcelona-­Ravenna conflation—­and they note the antiquity of his cult at Barcelona and Sant Cugat. Their opinion is that ­there was a Severus who participated at the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633 whose name and death date of November 6 was inserted among the saints and martyrs commemorated in Barcelona; the histories of his supposed passion ­were in­ven­ted in subsequent centuries.28 ­Later in Caresmar’s ­career, on the basis of a consistent standard of verification, he was critical of legends concerning the patroness of Barcelona, Saint Eulalia, who, like Severus, was supposed to have been martyred during the Diocletianic persecution.29 Caresmar’s report to the bishop of Barcelona in connection with the proposed new liturgical offices for Eulalia’s feast day questioned the authenticity of ten of the thirteen miracles attributed to her. Caresmar had imprudently assumed his advice would not become public, but in 1779 he was attacked in a book titled Nuestra paisana, patrona y titular Eulalia, vindicada en la mayor porcion de las glorias de su pasion y triunfo (Our countrywoman, patroness and protector, Eulalia, vindicated with regard to the major portion of the glories of her passion and triumph). The author, Domènec 26. ​On this controversy, see Luis Perramón, “Una controversia historiográfica del siglo XVIII: Maians—­Aymerich—­Caresmar,” Miscellanea Aqualatensia 1 (1949): 153–58. 27. ​Pius Bonifacius Gams, Series Episcoporum Ecclesiae Catholicae quotquot innotuerunt a Beato Petro Apostolo (Regensburg: Gregorius Josephus Manz, 1873), 16; Diccionari d’història eclesiàstica de Catalunya, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1998), 206. 28. ​ Acta Sanctorum, Novembris, vol. 3 (Brussels, 1910), 237–41, especially 240: “Itaque et omnino dicendum tandem videtur, nullo documento satis certo annotescere, sive qua aetate viverit Severus ille qui apud Barcinonenses hoc die colitur, sive quae ab eo gesta sint, sive quo genere mortis obieriet.” 29. ​Her feast day is February 12, and so the relevant volume of the Acta Sanctorum dates from a ­century before Caresmar was writing. Acta Sanctorum, Februarius, vol. 3 (Antwerp: Alphonsus Greise, 1658), 576–78.

17 6 Chap t e r  6

Ignasi Bòria i de Llinars, was a member of the Dominican Order and a fellow of the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona. As previously indicated, Caresmar’s lack of involvement with the acad­emy in the last de­cade of his life may have had to do with Bòria’s presence. Not content with his first demarche, Bòria followed up with another polemic in 1780, a Discurso apologético-­histrórico against the “disertador catalán,” directly denouncing Caresmar. In 1782, ­under a pseudonym, Caresmar published a defense of his position, but Bòria in his third publication on the ­matter (1786) rebutted ­these arguments.30 Unfortunately for Caresmar, this vituperative discussion, conducted in Castilian rather than in the popularly inaccessible Latin of erudite discourse, became so well known that for his temerity for questioning Saint Eulalia’s miracles, Caresmar attracted the wrath and derision of the urban common ­people. Suddenly, he was the subject of scurrilous verses and caricatures and the target of street demonstrations calling for his death.31 One set of popu­lar couplets mocked Caresmar’s “cara de malalt” (unhealthy complexion) that had launched so many disputes and warned that u ­ nless he retracted his writings, he would be regarded as an animal.32 Equally unfortunate was Bòria’s status as a fellow member of the acad­emy, to which he was elected in 1743 and in whose affairs he was quite active. Caresmar and Bòria ­were supposed to be collaborating on the long-­delayed and never accomplished history of Catalonia, with Caresmar in charge of the period AD 1 to 300 and Bòria the time span immediately following, 300–409. In 1790, they ­were both appointed to the committee attempting to draw up the acad­emy’s comprehensive Catalan dictionary, another unfulfilled proj­ect.33 The acad­emy retains a paper with some contemptuous verses by Bòria (or at least in his handwriting) that may have been among ­those shouted in the street at 30. ​Domingo Ignacio Boria y de Llinás, Nuestra paysana, patrona y tutelar Eulalia, vindicada en la mayor porción de las glorias de su pasión y triunfo (Barcelona: Bernardo Pla, 1779); Agustín Sala [Jaume Caresmar], Censura sobre algunos hechos del Martirio de Santa Eulalia Barcelonesa [. . .] (Madrid: Joachín Ibarra, 1782); Joseph Padrós y Riera [Boria y de Llinás], Justa repulsa del argumento negativo y equivocaciones en que cimentaba la defensa de su censura que dio a luz el M. R. P. Mro. Fr. Agustín Sala [. . .] (Madrid: Hilario Santos Alonso, 1786). This latter work refers on its title page to Boria y de Llinás, Discurso apologético-­histórico contra el Disertador Catalán, which apparently was published in Barcelona in 1780, but I have not found a copy of this book. 31. ​Joan Mercader, Historiadors i erudits a Catalunya i a València en el segle XVIII: Caresmar i l’escola de les Avellanes; Mayans, el solitari d’Oliva (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1966), 22–28; Ernest Lluch, “La construcció de la imatge de Catalunya a la l·lustració: L’aportació de l’Escola de les Avellanes,” in Creences i ètnies en una societat plural, ed. Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré (Lleida: Pagès, 2002), 154. See also Ramon Grau i Fernàndez and Marina López, “Lectures d’historiografia catalana, III. Sobre les proves documentals,” L’Avenç 147 (April 1991): 60–65. 32. ​Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, Història de la literatura catalana, vol. 5 (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1985), 178. 33. ​Campabadal, La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 99–102, 230, 386.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

177

this time, verses that conclude by recommending that Caresmar return to his convent since he is merely an empty hazelnut shell (a play on the word avellana [hazelnut] and Bellpuig de les Avellanes).34 Bishop Gavino de Valladares of Barcelona defended Caresmar and suspended Bòria’s license to preach and hear confessions, but the cathedral canons ­were intent on punishing Caresmar for what they considered sacrilege. In 1789, the canons barred him from the archive where he had virtually immured himself and labored for sixteen years. Caresmar’s last work, unpublished, was a final defense of his position with regard to Santa Eulalia, whose glorious martyrdom, he protested, he had never denied.35 The apparent contradiction between accepting hagiographic tradition with regard to Severus and rejecting it in considering Eulalia was resolved, in Caresmar’s opinion, by how far back the accounts of miracles could be traced. Severus’s accomplishments ­were attested by contemporaries, while many of Eulalia’s marvels appear only centuries ­after her death and purport, falsely, to be from her era. Many of them, Caresmar found, had first been reported by Pere Gil, a Jesuit who wrote in the early seventeenth c­ entury. Caresmar’s critical, textual attitude owed much to his historiographic position between the credulity of Baroque annalists who accepted layers of facts and stories, on the one hand, and the newer severe and analytical critique and verification of sources, on the other.36

The Carta al Barón de la Linde ­ arlier I cited the short description of Catalonia’s past prosperity and pre­sent E impoverishment written by Caresmar in 1780 and known to posterity as the “Letter to the Baron de la Linde.”37 The recipient was Manuel de Terán, the 34. ​Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, “Doscientos años de historia de Cataluña en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 25 (1953): 331. 35. ​ADB, Procoessos de beatificació i canonització, Eulàlia, Santa, núm 1, “Santa Eulalia de Barcelona, virgen y mártir, patrona y tutelar de la misma ciudad, nuevamente vindicada e illustrada.” 22 folios, ca. 1790. Listed in appendix 1, no. 32. 36. ​Ramon Grau i Fernàndez, “Les batalles de la historiografia crítica,” in Historia de la cultura catalana, vol. 3, ed. Pere Gabriel (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1996), 176–77. 37. ​ Carta del Dr. D. Jayme Caresmár, canónigo premostrantense del monasterio de nuestra Señora de Bellpuig de las Avellanas, dirgida al muy ilustre. Sr. D. Manuel de Teran, baron de la Linde, intendente general interino del egército y principado de Cataluña en la cual se prueba ser Cataluña en lo antiguo más poblada, rica y abundante que hoy (Barcelona: José Torner, 1821; rev. ed., Barcelona: Asociación de Bibliófils de Barcelona, 1959; repr., Igualada: Centre d’Estudis Comarcals, 1979). In 1821, this appeared as a book and was also serialized in twenty-­one issues of the weekly Periódico universal de ciencias, lit­er­a­ture y artes (January 6–­May 26). See appendix 1, no. 11.

17 8 Chap t e r  6

governor (intendente) of Catalonia. The Carta differs from Caresmar’s other writings, devoted as they are to the texts, transcriptions, and details, not to say minutiae, of church history. Although focused on the historical background to con­temporary secular issues, the treatise grew out of Caresmar’s research on medieval and ancient history, the basis for an argument that Catalonia had been richer and more populous before a precipitous decline that began, as Caresmar states in the opening paragraph of his preamble, in the fifteenth ­century.38 The Carta did not arise out of a long-­standing dedication to po­liti­cal or economic reform. Caresmar had been and remained an ancient and medieval historian rather than a policy-­or agenda-­maker, but he was allied with Enlightenment thinkers on Catalonia’s pro­g ress who based their t­heses on understanding its historical accomplishments and frustrations. I have described Caresmar’s collaboration with Antoni de Capmany, who tried to implement po­liti­cal, fiscal, and regulatory transformations to improve Catalonia, and through Catalonia, the rest of Spain. The Carta reflects Enlightenment interest in the ­factors that made countries rich or poor and the efforts of peninsular thinkers to lift Spain into prosperity. A historical treatise, to be sure, the Carta was nevertheless written in ser­vice of a movement to modernize the centralized state by recognizing the productivity and potential of Catalonia and its industrious population. In this sense, it invokes history in order to supersede the m ­ istakes of the past. As previously discussed, the Carta al Barón de la Linde formed part of a larger work on the Catalan po­liti­cal economy dating from 1780, the Discurso sobre la agricultura, comericio e industria del principado de Cataluña, put together in response to a request by the baron in his capacity as intendente. In his historical section, Caresmar surveys the towns and regions of Catalonia, all of which ­were busier and more densely populated, he asserts, before 1400. He estimates that at pre­sent (1780), at least one-­fourth of the towns and settlements that previously existed have been abandoned.39 In the intensely cultivated agricultural lands around Barcelona (what was referred to as the city’s territorium), the population was lower than it had been even ­after the cataclysmic Black Death of 1348, which Caresmar believed had caused a 10 ­percent decline in the number of Barcelona’s inhabitants (in fact, it was on the order of 40 ­percent).40 38. ​This is on page 5 of the Barcelona, 1959 edition of Juan Reglá. (henceforth Carta). In the edition of the entire Discurso sobre la argicultrua, comercio e industria del Principado de Cataluña, edited by Ernest Lluch (Barcelona, 1997), it is on page 121 (Discurso). In what follows, the 1959 edition and the Discurso are cited b­ ecause the Discurso is easier to find. 39. ​ Carta, 5; Discurso, 121. 40. ​ Carta, 69–70; Discurso, 163–64.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

179

We are less interested in Caresmar’s accuracy than in his use of history for con­temporary arguments and reform recommendations. He was certainly not alone in seeing population density and growth as the key to prosperity.41 He also reflected common opinion lamenting what seemed to be an overall decline in Spain’s wealth in the centuries since its empire had been established. Generations of economic thinkers had called attention to this, and shortly ­after Caresmar’s death, the intellectually astute politician Gaspar Melchior de Jovellanos (1744–1811) mourned the lost glory of the nation’s once-­teeming cities with their many factories and workshops. Writing in 1795, this renowned liberal official, in and out of f­ avor during the tumultuous years between the last years of the reign of Charles III and the Napoleonic period, saw the prob­lem as caused not by the repression of Catalonia but by a more general tyranny beginning with the Hapsburgs. The Castilian comunero revolt of 1520–1521, suppressed by Charles I (Emperor Charles V), was, according to Jovellanos, “the last sigh of Castilian liberty.” The impoverishment of Spain could also be blamed on the church, not only b­ ecause of the authority wielded by the Inquisition but also ­because of inefficient control of vast territories. The destitute “skele­tons” of the nation’s cities ­were now peopled by churches, convents, and hospitals, which flourished amid the destitution that they caused.42 Obviously, Caresmar did not share this anti-­ecclesiastical position. Between the aftermath of the Black Death and the census undertaken in 1717 at the beginning of the Bourbon era, Catalonia’s population had scarcely changed. This apparent stagnation does not take into account substantial fluctuations, especially declines throughout the fifteenth c­ entury and during the pestilence and rebellion of the mid-­seventeenth ­century.43 By the time Caresmar wrote the Carta, however, demographic growth had become rapid and sustained. The population of Barcelona tripled during the eigh­teenth ­century to around one hundred thousand (compared with twice that many for Madrid). Catalonia represented a mere 8 ­percent of the population of Spain, a l­ ittle less than Galicia, but the acceleration of the birthrate, increase in life expectancy, and migration to Catalonia that would be so spectacular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries w ­ ere already underway in the eigh­teenth.44

41. ​Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 63–67. 42. ​Richard Herr, The Eigh­teenth ­Century Revolution in Spain (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1958), 31. 43. ​Jordi Nadal, “La població,” in Història de Catalunya, ed. Joquim Nadal i Farreras and Philippe Wolff (Barcelona: Oikos-­Tau, 1983), 65–94; A. Moreno et al., “Las crisis demográficas en Cataluña, siglos XIV al XVII: Algunas reflexiones,” Contrastes: Revista de historia moderna 2 (1986): 15–38. 44. ​Joan Mercader, Els capitans generals (segle XVIII) (Barcelona: Teide, 1957), 110–12.

18 0 Chap t e r  6

The unifying concept of the Carta reflects French ideas that a nation’s wealth is based on the l­abor of the population, not on the possession of gold, silver, or colonies. The denser the habitation, the greater the prosperity. The Catalan seizure of Muslim territories to the south and west, as well as its Mediterranean conquests, was pos­si­ble ­because of a substantial and growing population.45 More than was the case for Capmany and other Enlightenment po­liti­cal economists, Caresmar mea­sured economic well-­being by the settlement and exploitation of the countryside. The geo­graph­i­cal survey of Catalonia that forms the bulk of the Carta’s contents is devoted to showing the desertion of settlements where ­there had once been intensive Roman or medieval cultivation, particularly of olive groves and vineyards. The work is thus centered on small towns and rural territories, complementing Capmany’s cele­bration of Barcelona. The Carta begins by attributing the depopulation of Catalonia to the devastating civil wars of the late fifteenth ­century, but also to the expulsion of the eco­nom­ically productive population of Jews in 1492 and of Moriscos (nominal Islamic converts to Chris­tian­ity) in 1609.46 ­Later, discussing Barcelona, Caresmar elaborates on the ­causes of a precipitous decline, now dated from 1410 when the ruling House of Barcelona was extinguished with the death of the childless King Martin: “Murió también o se extinguió no poco la gloria, la opulencia y la grandeza de Barcelona” (­there died at the same time, or was not a l­ittle extinguished, the glory, greatness, and opulence of Barcelona).47 Catalonia was henceforth ­under the “foreign rule” (dominio forastero) of a Castilian and then an Austrian dynasty. The ensuing de­cadence meant that from the early sixteenth to the early eigh­teenth c­ entury Catalonia was desolate and miserable. Only with the glorious advent of the Bourbons, notably the current King Charles III, did t­ hings improve, though Caresmar’s praise of a French dynasty is at least partly a pro forma gesture to ­those in power.48 It is notable what f­actors Caresmar did not blame for Catalonia’s decline. While the Black Death was a serious setback, Barcelona soon recovered its former “esplendor y opulencia.” The “Moorish” occupation was also of minor significance. When Charlemagne’s son Louis, the f­uture emperor Louis the Pious, seized Barcelona in 801, the city’s flourishing condition was undimmed.49 The survival of pre-­Islamic place-­names and the paucity of Arab names indicate the minimal effect of the Moorish conquest. In this context, Caresmar 45. ​“Todo esto no podia hacerse sin que abundare Cataluña de poblaciones . . . ​con su laboriosidad, diligencia e industria.,” Carta, 111; Discurso, 192. 46. ​ Carta, 5; Discurso, 121. 47. ​ Carta, 70; Discurso, 164. 48. ​ Carta, 70–71; Discurso, 164–65. 49. ​ Carta, 62–63; Discurso, 157–58.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

181

cites from the cartulary of Bellpuig, which he himself had assembled more than twenty years ­earlier, a donation in 1148 by Count Ramon Berenguer to a foreign cleric who had come to aid the conquest of Tortosa, a city ­under Islamic rule for over four hundred years. Caresmar’s inference was that Tortosa u ­ nder Muslim rule had remained rich and impor­tant.50 Caresmar offers evidence for the postmedieval abandonment of rural spaces. At that time the mountainous areas began to lose population. Historians now place this decline even e­ arlier and see it as an indication of outward migration rather than an insufficient birthrate.51 Beginning in the ninth ­century, the newly conquered and more fertile territories drew settlers from the crowded Pyrenean valleys, and in modern times the promise of employment in industrial cities has played a similar role. Caresmar was correct to the extent that rec­ords of church consecrations in the ninth and tenth centuries show a density of settlement and population in the Pyrenees that would never be equaled. For the more level lands south of the mountains—­for example, the plain of Urgell from Balaguer to Tàrrega—­Caresmar refers to once-­flourishing but no longer extant w ­ ater mills, textile factories, and vineyards. The Jews of Agramunt, now a desolate place, provided the kings of Aragon with a fortune in taxes.52 In his own time, Caresmar remarks, the foundation of the University of Cervera, with all its students and the demand for food and lodging, had failed to lift that once-­prosperous town out of its “mediocridad.”53 The absence of industry meant that demand for local wine, oil, and bread did not increase prosperity. ­Great cities of the ancient world such as Empúries on the northern coast (now in ruins) ­were praised in Greek and Roman sources. Caresmar claimed Empúries was still flourishing in Visigothic times and expanded ­under the rule of the “Moorish conquistadors.” Ancient and early medieval Empúries had more inhabitants than the current entire population of its region, l’Emporadà (Spanish, Ampurdán).54 Caresmar devotes considerable attention to Barcelona, a city that would seem to contradict his pessimism. How could one believe that its late eighteenth-­century inhabitants numbered fewer than in the past? Caresmar answers that the city once occupied a larger area and that even outside the walls it was densely populated in the Roman era. The ecclesiastical historian Enrique Flórez, to whose enterprise España Sagrada Caresmar contributed, erred, he 50. ​ Carta, 17–18; Discurso, 130. 51. ​Pierre Bonnassie, La Cata­logne du milieu du Xe à la fin du XIe siècle: Croissance et mutations d’un société, vol. 1 (Toulouse: Université Touloouse-­Le Mirail, 1975), 73–130. 52. ​ Carta, 14; Discurso, 126. 53. ​ Carta, 105; Discurso, 189–90. 54. ​ Carta, 40–42; Discurso, 140–42.

18 2 Chap t e r  6

said, in citing the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela as evidence for the modest size of twelfth-­century Barcelona. Benjamin was referring only to the oldest part, and besides, in his account, Benjamin goes on to underline the city’s commercial importance. What about expansive eighteenth-­century industries such as choco­late or printing? ­These, Caresmar asserts, have simply replaced once teeming fields of employment such as parchment making and manuscript illumination. ­Women, Caresmar notes, had formerly worked outside the home, involved in leathermaking, making clothing, and the production of luxury food such as honey and dried fruit.55 As regards his own time, Caresmar’s arguments about a long-­term population decline are incorrect. It is not so much that he overemphasized the historical loss of population, which had indeed fallen disastrously in the fifteenth ­century and recovered very slowly, but that he exaggerated the demographic strength of Catalonia in the Roman and early medieval centuries and failed to appreciate recent population expansion. The census of 1786, ordered by the Count of Floridablanca, the power­f ul royal first secretary, was intended to prove that, contrary to foreign and domestic deprecation of its economy and potential, Spain was far from deserted. In the years since the previous census of 1768, the number of inhabitants had increased by 1.5 million.56 The Carta, nevertheless, is recognized as a key text in the application of historical research to con­temporary questions of po­liti­cal economy, and it strengthened the perennial argument that the fortunes of Catalonia ­were, at best, held back, when not actively ruined, by the po­liti­cal domination of Castile.

Church History Turning now to Caresmar’s surviving works that appeared posthumously or ­were never published at all, I or­ga­nize them by subject categories. The broadest of ­these is church history, which incorporates an im­mense quantity of Caresmar’s surviving notes, lists, and brief accounts of specific institutions, councils, and ecclesiastical personnel. Mention has been made of his extensive notes for a never-­completed Monasticon Cathalanum preserved in a Bellpuig manuscript that includes information on eighty-­six ecclesiastical foundations.57 A four-­hundred-­page manuscript, also at Bellpuig, contains transcriptions, notices, and excerpts of rec­ords concerning the founding of Augustinian chap55. ​ Carta, 58–69; Discurso, 154–65. 56. ​Herr, Eigh­teenth ­Century Revolution, 227. 57. ​BPA, Caixa 13, Llibre 21.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

183

ters in Catalonia.58 The contents of just the first hundred pages of this manuscript provide a sense of how Caresmar collected information and the importance he gave to transcribing original documents for never-­accomplished but marvelously ambitious proj­ects: pp. 1–2 Creation of a program of common life (vita canonica) for the cathedral of Tarragona (November 3, 1154) pp. 3–9 Constitutions for the cathedral of Lleida (1148) pp. 9–10 Charter of brotherhood between churches of Tarragona and Escornalbou ( June 26, 1198) pp. 11–12 Charter of brotherhood given to Ermengol, Count of Urgell, by Gombal, bishop of Lleida, and his chapter of canons ( July 1193) pp. 13–30 blank pp. 31–50 Establishment of the vita canonica for the cathedral of Barcelona by Bishop Aetius (1009); cathedral of Urgell, by Bishop Hermengaudus (1010); cathedral of Girona, Bishop Petrus (November 20, 1019) pp. 51–53 Privilege issued by Pope Adrian IV for the cathedral of Tortosa (Benevento, March 20, 1156) pp. 53–55 Legislation of Gaufred, bishop of Tortosa (undated, 1151–1165) pp. 55–57 Charter of alliance between churches of Tarragona and Tortosa ( June 28, 1158) pp. 57–59 Endowment of the cathedral of Tortosa (August 5, 1151) pp. 60–62 blank pp. 63–64 Resolutions of the chapter of Barcelona cathedral concerning altars (August 25, 1174) pp. 64–66 Judgment by interrogation of witnesses in a case concerning property owner­ship before the Islamic sack and destruction of Barcelona in 985 (994 or 995) pp. 67–70 blank pp. 70–76 Reconciliation agreement (concordia) between Abbot Bernat of Cardona and his canons (February 9, 1307) and other documents referring to the chapter of Cardona pp. 71–76 blank pp. 87–89 Changes to the organ­ization of the cathedral chapter of Urgell (August 2, 1299) p. 90 blank pp. 91–92 Donation of the city of Tarragona to (Archbishop) Oleguer by Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona (February 1, 1117) 58. ​BPA, Caixa 19, Llibre 40 (appendix 1, no. 25).

18 4 Chap t e r  6

pp. 93–95 Privilege of Emperor Louis the Pious for Sisebut, bishop of Urgell (March 12, 824) pp. 96–98 blank pp. 99–100 Donation to the church of Puigpardines by Berenguer, bishop of Girona (September 4, 1131) Early modern scholars often collected sets of notes, excerpts, and lists in preparation for large proj­ects or that w ­ ere placed in personal repositories. Figures of the eighteenth-­century Republic of Letters, such as Winckelmann and Montesquieu, developed means of selecting passages from their reading that w ­ ere worth formal retention and stockpiling the resulting notes, which ­were retained even a­ fter the work they ­were in aid of was published.59 Caresmar’s collection of information was focused on archival transcriptions to be used for church history, and he was less interested in proj­ects of universal knowledge or philosophical system building than many of his contemporaries. It is sometimes difficult to tell how his arrangement of information was tied to specific plans, an impression reinforced by the confused state of his manuscripts in light of their posthumous transfers, rebinding, and partial destruction. Nevertheless, by what­ever means, he did manage to come up with sustained arguments and collections of information.

Tarragona’s Ecclesiastical Primacy An example of a well-­organized work of ecclesiastical history with a clear thesis and purpose is Caresmar’s defense of the claims of Tarragona to ecclesiastical preference. The Castilian Historia de la controvertida primacia eclesiastica entre la Metropoli de Toledo y la de Tarragona, published long a­ fter the death of its author, is a treatise on the rights of Tarragona against Toledo’s claims to ecclesiastical primacy over Iberian dioceses (appendix 1, no. 14). The manuscript is in the Biblioteca Pública of Tarragona, and its edition was undertaken by the Capuchin ­Father Martí (whose name before entering the order was Jaume Bagunyà i Casanovas) in honor of the bicentennial of Caresmar’s birth. Between May–­June 1922 and January–­February 1924, it appeared in eleven installments of the Butlletí Arqueològic (issued by the Royal Archaeological Soci59. ​Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 62–115; essays in Lire, copier, écrire. Les biliothèques manuscrites et leurs usages au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Élisabeth Décultot (Paris: CNRS, 2003); and with par­tic­u­lar reference to religious culture and ecclesiastical history, essays collected in Bruno Neveu, Érudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994).

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

185

ety in Tarragona) and was published in book form in 1924 with the Catalan title Història de la primacia de la Seu de Tarragona.60 This book deals with a much-­debated question of pre­ce­dence among the churches of Spain. In the High M ­ iddle Ages, Toledo, Tarragona, Santiago de Compostela, and Braga w ­ ere metropolitan sees. Their endless quarrels reflected rivalry among Iberian secular rulers and dif­fer­ent interpretations of what it meant to restore the governance of the church to its pre-­Islamic condition. Unlike Tarragona, neither Santiago de Compostela nor Toledo had any ancient Roman prerogative. Santiago was irrelevant before the M ­ iddle Ages when it became the leading pilgrimage site ­after Rome. Toledo, as the capital of the Visigothic kingdom, had held preeminence before the Arab and Berber invasion of 711, and its archbishop would be recognized repeatedly by medieval popes as the ecclesiastical primate of Spain. Braga was, in effect, the ecclesiastical capital of Portugal, and, like Santiago, it claimed separation from other jurisdictions rather than primacy over all ­others. The strug­gle between Tarragona and Toledo took on dif­fer­ent forms as the Muslim parts of Spain fell to the Christian rulers. In the tenth c­ entury, clerics of Montserrat and Vic had attempted to restore in exile the see of Tarragona, and in the last de­cade of the eleventh ­century, the bishop of Vic took the title of archbishop of Tarragona in preparation for a military campaign that ultimately did not succeed. Toledo was captured by Christian forces ­under the king of Castile-­Leon in 1085, and Tarragona was won by the Count of Barcelona in 1118. Defending the claims of Tarragona, Caresmar identifies as his main opponent García Loaysa (1534–1599), named archbishop of Toledo less than a year before his death, but long before that a fervent partisan of its primacy. Loaysa’s collection of Hispanic councils, published in 1593, contains a polemical subsection, “De primate ecclesiae Toletanae,” whose points Caresmar refutes.61 Caresmar describes the strug­gles between the two metropolitans at the time of the twelfth-­century reconquests of Tarragona, Tortosa, and Lleida. The papacy (“poorly informed,” according to Caresmar) usually supported Toledo as shown by letters of Popes Innocent II, Lucius III, Hadrian IV, Alexander III, and Urban III between 1139 and 1187. Caresmar admits that Rome 60. ​Fr. Martí de Barcelona (Jaume Baganyà i Casanovas), “Manuscrit inèdit del Pare Caresmar sobre l’història de la primacia de la Seu de Tarragona,” Butlletí arqueològic no. 7 (May–­June 1922):153–163; 8 (July–­August 1922): 187–90; 9 (September–­October 1922): 201–5; 10 (November–­December 1922): 229– 32; 11 (January–­February  1923): 7–10; 12 (March–­April  1923): 37–42; 13 (May–­June  1923): 62–67; 14 (July–­August  1923): 80–84; 15 (September–­October1923): 109–15; 16 (November–­December  1923): 137–45; 17 (January–­February 1924): 161–69; Jaume Caresmar, Història de la primacia de la Seu de Tarragona, ed. Fr. Martí de Barcelona (Tarragona: Torres i Virgili, 1924). 61. ​Garsia Loaisa, Collectio conciliorum Hispaniae (Madrid: Pedrus Madrigal, 1593).

18 6 Chap t e r  6

issued a “deluge of bulls and writings favorable to Toledo” but praises Tarragona for consistently and heroically resisting its rival’s pretensions, defending itself with the aid of an occasional papal ruling in its ­favor—­from Anastasius IV (1153–1154), for example—­but even more on the basis of antiquity and intrinsic virtue.62 The issue was again joined during the rule of Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada as archbishop of Toledo (1209–1247). This included discussions at the Fourth Lateran Council (1214) and disputes over newly conquered Valencia, which fell to the army of James I in 1238. Ximénez de Rada is one of the g­ reat historians of Spain, and his De rebus Hispaniae is oriented around Spanish unity, the Visigothic model, and the superiority of Toledo.63 The conquest of Valencia occasioned a species of intense historical research on both sides to back up positions in the jurisdictional conflict.64 Tarragona’s fundamental argument, as Caresmar repeats and elaborates, was that it held a literal primacy as the first site of conversion to Chris­tian­ity and the creation of ecclesiastical offices. Saint Paul himself, Caresmar asserts, prob­ably landed in Tarragona to begin a (biblically unattested) mission to Spain.65 Tarragona had been the capital of a Roman province, the Tarraconensis, when Toledo was merely a minor fortress. Among its ecclesiastical found­ ers, Tarragona claimed the martyred Saint Fructuosus (d. 259) along with his deacons Augurius and Eulogius. Above all, Tarragona’s primacy was not dependent on po­liti­cal vicissitudes but was rather an incontestable fact of ecclesiastical history. As the capital of the Visigothic kingdom, Toledo had been the center for the administration of the church ­after 589 when King Reccared converted from Arian to Catholic Chris­tian­ity. Even e­ arlier, as far back as 400, the First Council of Toledo met to condemn the Priscillianist heresy. Reccared called together the Third Council of Toledo in 589, and between that time and the Muslim overthrow of the Visigothic kingdom in 711, eigh­teen church councils met 62. ​Martí, “Manuscrit inèdit,” Butlletí arqueològic, no.  14 ( July–­August  1923): 81–84 and no.  15 (September–­October 1923), 109 = Caresmar, Història de la primacia, 133–42. 63. ​ Roderici Ximeni de Rada Historia de rebus Hispaniae, sive Historia gothica, ed. Juan Fernández Valverde, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis vol. 72 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1987). It is significant that its alternate title was “Gothic History.” 64. ​Lawrence McCrank, “Seeing History Differently: Toledo vs. Tarragona in the Reconstruction of the Hispanic Church,” Butlletí arqueològic, 5th ser., 36–37 (2014–2015): 147–98. 65. ​Martí, “Manuscrit inèdit,” Butlletí arqueològic, no. 7 (May–­June 1922), 155 = Caresmar, Història de la primacia, 10–11. The belief that Saint Paul reached Spain comes from Saint Jerome’s commentary on Isaiah. In introducing the volume of España Sagrada dedicated to Tarragona, Enrique Flórez asserts that it is logical to assume that Saint Paul arrived at Tarragona by ship, and refutes the notion that Saint Paul based himself in Narbonne. España Sagrada, vol. 25 (Madrid: Antonio de Sancha, 1770; reedited, Guadarrama: Revista Agustiniana, 2007), 12–14 in the 2007 edition.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

187

t­here and enacted legislation, some eventually incorporated into canon law via the collection known as the Hispana. However ­g rand a figure he cut during the brief time between 589 and 711, the archbishop of Toledo, Caresmar states, depended on Gothic hegemony, which ended with the Islamic conquest.66 Tarragona, on the other hand, even though it was commonly thought to have been deserted for centuries and subject to Moorish rule, never lost its ecclesiastical status. This status was not tied to the f­ avor of secular rulers but rather rested on immutable facts of sacred history.67 Much of Caresmar’s account is taken up with symbolic per­for­mance and words: Toledo’s assertions of the right to have the cross carried in front of its archbishop even within other Iberian metropolitan jurisdictions, or the significance of Tarragona’s intitulation as “metropolitan of metropolitans” and “metropolitan of all the Spains.” At the end of the treatise, Caresmar acknowledges that in his own time ­there is no real effective primate, but at least Tarragona has never conceded anything to Toledo and the latter has not had its pre­ce­ dence universally recognized.68 It is tempting but anachronistic to see Caresmar’s defense of Tarragona as advocacy of Catalan rights in Bourbon Spain. He might lament Catalonia’s decline and attribute it to misrule dating from the beginning of Castilian hegemony, but Caresmar was also subsidized for many of his studies by the royal court, and, notwithstanding the Carta al Barón de la Linde, his orientation was more t­ oward the Catalan church than a purely secular understanding of Catalan identity. For him, as with an e­ arlier generation of Baroque historians, Catalonia’s piety demonstrated its primacy. This was partly b­ ecause it was the first Iberian region to convert to Chris­tian­ity, but owing also to Catalonia’s habitual and ongoing devotion. The putative early ties to Rome would form part of a durable notion of Catalonia as “Eu­ro­pean,” which, as discussed briefly in chapter 2, is a theme in Catalan discourse that started during the Enlightenment. Toledo (and in a ­later, secular sense Madrid) could be seen as epitomizing Spanish backwardness, while Tarragona (or Barcelona) represented cosmopolitan openness, 66. ​Martí “Manuscrit inèdit,” Butlletí arqueològic, no.  8 ( July–­August  1922), 190 = Caresmar, Història de la primacia, 50–52. 67. ​Martí, “Manuscrit inèdit,” Butlletí arqueològic, no. 9 (September–­October 1922), 201 = Caresmar, Història de la primacia, 55. “No aconteció asi con la primacia de Tarragona en la pérdida general de España . . . ​tenia màs alto origen y màs sólido principio.” Tarragona’s primacy exists “no por concession de nadie, sino por sus nativos derechos, él desde los primeros siglos de la Iglesia.” “Manuscrit inèdit,” 202 = Histôria de la primacia, 58. 68. ​Martí, “Manuscrit inèdit,” Butlletí arqueològic, no. 17 ( January–­February 1924), 165 = Caresmar, Història de la primacia, 200–201.

18 8 Chap t e r  6

­ hether to third-­century Chris­tian­ity or nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century w demo­cratic and secular modernity. In a way, therefore, Caresmar’s energetic defense of Tarragona’s primacy depends on a set of claims about the virtues of Catalonia, regardless of formal legislation, the determinations of the po­ liti­cally power­ful, or other extrinsic ­factors. That the see of Toledo in the eigh­ teenth c­ entury was so impor­tant that the Bourbon kings appointed members of their own f­ amily to preside over it was beside the point in terms of Caresmar’s historical argument.69 For posterity, an in­ter­est­ing aspect of this study is Caresmar’s account of Cesarius, founder of Santa Cecilia de Montserrat, who took the title “archbishop of Tarragona” sometime between 955 and 959 and held it u ­ ntil his death in 979.70 In the appendix to the Historia de la primacia, Caresmar edits five documents from the archive of Montserrat, rec­ords subsequently destroyed during the war with Napoleon. In a letter to John XIII in 970, Cesarius informed the pope that he had been elected and consecrated by a council of bishops from León and Santiago (Galicia) presided over by King Sancho I of León. Although ­there is no evidence he obtained the support of the Count of Barcelona, Cesarius was prob­ably taking advantage of a brief reoccupation of Tarragona in 957 by Count Borrell II. Despite objections to his status made by the archbishop of Narbonne, who held jurisdiction over former suffragans of occupied Tarragona, Cesarius proposed to come to Rome to receive the symbol of his office, the pallium, from the pope.71 Lawrence McCrank and J. M. Martí Bonet have regarded the story as a fabrication based on their doubts about the existence of this council, further asserting that even if it did take place, it could not legitimately have elected the archbishop for a distant see. Errors and stylistic anachronisms of the document, moreover, demonstrated that it was falsified.72 Current opinion, however, is that the letter is genuine, that its flaws, in fact, authenticate it, and that Caresmar’s transcriptions of Montserrat parchments (the originals having been destroyed during the Napoleonic War) show Cesarius using the archiepiscopal 69. ​Antonio Domínguez Ortíz, Carlos III y la España de la Illustración (Madrid: Alianza, 2005), 147. 70. ​Martí, “Manuscrit inèdit,” Butlletí arqueològic, no. 10 (November–­December 1922), 229–31 = Caresmar, Història de la primacia, 70–74. The Montserrat documents are edited in “Manuscrit inèdit,” Butlletí arqueològic, no. 17 ( January–­February 1924), 167–69 = Història de la primacia, 217–26. 71. ​The document is in ABEV, Episcopologi I, no. 78, a ­later copy. 72. ​J. M. Martí Bonet, “Las pretensions metropolitans de Cesáreo, abad de Santa Cecília de Montserrat,” Anthología Annua 21 (1974): 157–82; Lawrence McCrank, “Restoration and Reconquest in Medieval Catalonia: The Church and the Principality of Tarragona, 971–1177” (doctoral diss., University of ­Virginia, 1974), 78–94. Ramon d’Abadal, although regarding the episode as a dubious escapade, accepted the authenticity of the Vic letter. Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, “L’abat Cesari, fundador de Santa Cecília de Montserrat i pretès arquebisbe de Tarragona,” in Dels Visigots als Catalans, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1974), 25–55.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

189

title elsewhere, in routine land acquisitions, sales, and exchanges in 960, 971, 973, and 979.73 This quixotic venture is connected with another intrigue, the claim of Bishop Ató of Vic to the archiepiscopal title. Ató, whose pontificate lasted from 957 to 971, aspired to have Vic replace Tarragona, at least while the metropolitan see remained in Muslim hands. Thus, instead of claiming possession of Tarragona, he named himself “Archbishop of Vic.”74 Ató appears to have been the choice of Count Borrell II, who brought the archiepiscopal claimant to Rome in 970. They ­were accompanied by the monk Gerbert of Aurillac (the ­future pope Sylvester II), whom the bishop of Vic had instructed in mathe­matics. In 971, Ató received from Pope John XIII a privilege confirming him as archbishop of Vic and conferring on him the pallium. Additional papal letters on papyrus ­were sent to ecclesiastical and secular rulers of what would become Catalonia and southern France, including the archbishop of Narbonne, who had the most to lose. Rather than awaiting a reconquest of Tarragona, this plan envisaged a new ecclesiastical jurisdiction separate from Narbonne’s metropolitan control over the dioceses of Girona, Vic, Elne, Barcelona, and Urgell. This proved unsustainable as within eight months of obtaining the impressive papal documents Ató was assassinated, according to a necrology at Vic, which entitles him “archbishop.” Notices at Girona and Ripoll refer to him simply as “bishop,” and his successor made no claim greater than that. Presumably, Ató died at the instigation of the see of Narbonne.

Bernat Boïl, the First Apostolic Vicar to the New World An exceptional nonhagiographical biography among Caresmar’s works is his Notícias del Venerable P. Fr. Bernardo Boyl, a life of the first cleric to be appointed as apostolic vicar to the Indies, accompanying Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. Boïl (the spelling of his name varies) is also supposed to have celebrated in Santo Domingo the first mass in the New World, at least 73. ​Thomas Deswarte, “Saint Jacque refusé en Cata­logne. La lettre de l’labbé Césaire de Montserrat au Pape Jean XIII (970),” in Guerre, pouvoirs et idéologies dans l’Espagne chrétienne aux alentours de l’an mil, ed. Thomas Deswarte and Phillippe Sénac (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 143–61. Caresmar presented t­hese documents in an appendix. “Manuscrit inèdit,” Butlletí arqueològic, no.  17 ( January–­ February 1924), 167–69 = Història de la primacia, 217–26. 74. ​Ramon Ordeig i Mata, “Ató, bisbe i arquebisbe de Vic (957–971), antic arxiprest-­ardiaca de Girona,” Studia Vicensia 1 (1989): 61–97, revised in Ordeig, Ató de Vic, mestre de Gerbert d’Orlhac (papa Silvestre II) (Vic: Arxiu Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic, 2009), 11–40, especially 33–40.

19 0 Chap t e r  6

the first in a stationary location (as opposed to using a portable altar).75 A Catalan, Boïl was a Benedictine monk at Montserrat before his journey, and upon his return in 1494, he was named abbot of Saint Miquel de Cuixà, an abbey in the part of Catalonia that would be ceded to France in 1659. In connection with the bicentennial of Caresmar’s birth, Anselm Albareda transcribed Caresmar’s account for the historical journal published by the abbey of Montserrat.76 Although Boïl’s fame rests on his precocious exposure to the Ca­rib­bean, Caresmar was equally concerned with his c­ areer at Montserrat and Cuixà. Boïl supported King Ferdinand’s attempt to wrest Montserrat away from control by a foreign commendatory abbot, Giulio della Rovere, the ­future pope Julius II. The king succeeded in returning Montserrat’s administration and revenues to the local clergy ­under his control. Caresmar was concerned to refute theories or assumptions about Boïl and his ­career, denying that he had ever joined the Franciscan order of minims and asserting that he remained a Benedictine monk. He had neither quarreled with Columbus nor denounced him to the royal court. Without offering a clear explanation of Boïl’s rather brief visit to the New World when the terms of his papal nomination suggest a longer term of ser­vice, Caresmar describes the disor­ga­nized and dangerous conditions of the first Spanish settlements and gives the impression that Boïl gave up ­because ­there was no possibility of undertaking effective missionary work or ministering to the needs of the faithful.

Histories of Bellpuig Caresmar wrote two books on the history of Bellpuig—­one in Castilian and one in Latin. They w ­ ere composed twenty years apart, and neither was completed. The Anales del Real Monasterio de Bellpuig de les Avellanes de la Orden del Canonigos Regulares Premostratenses en el Principado de Cataluña was written in the 1750s in conjunction with Caresmar’s reordering of the archive, the l­abor on the cartulary, and his investigations of the tombs of the counts of Urgell. The Latin work, De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum, was presented to the Barcelona Acad­emy in 1773.77 Eduardo Corredera published 75. ​Modern accounts of Boil’s life include Jaime Collell, Fray Bernal Boyl, primer apóstol de Amer­i­ca (Vic: L. Anglada, 1929); Carlos Dobal, El primer apóstol del Nuevo Mundo: Biografia de Fray Bernardo Boyl, Vicario Apostólico en América y celebrante de la primera missa (Santiago, Dominican Republic: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1991). 76. ​Anselm Albareda, “Notícias del venerable P. Fr. Bernardo Boyl por D. Jaime Caresmar,” Analecta Montserratensia 2 (1918): 345–73. 77. ​Miret y Sans, “Dos siglos de vida académica,” 105.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

191

a Spanish translation in 1976.78 Caresmar’s two works overlap considerably, but the De rebus is more closely centered on the monastery, whereas the Anales concerns the counts of Urgell as much as Bellpuig. ­Running to 372 pages, a ­little more than half the size of De rebus, the Anales begins with the Arab-­Berber invasions of the eighth ­century, long before the foundation of the chapter. It is incomplete in its pre­sent form as it breaks off midsentence in 1363. Work started in late 1751 and went on a­ fter 1752 when Caresmar finished the Cartophylacium since the cartulary is cited in the Anales.79 De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis is a long treatise focused, as its title implies, on the history of the abbey, but it also follows the c­ areers of the counts of Urgell, starting with the cofounder of Bellpuig, Count Ermengol VII. It is or­ga­nized chronologically by the terms of the abbots of Bellpuig and concludes in 1435 with the death of Abbot Francesc de Correano.80 Vega i Sentmenat cited this book as the “Historia Bellipodiensis Monasterii,” and Eduardo Corredera referred to it simply as the “Historia.” In Josep Martí’s inventory, reference is made to “La historia del Real Monasterio de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de las Avellanas,” written in Latin and proceeding chronologically up to the year 1440. According to Martí, this was originally in six fascicles (cuadernos) but ­later copied in a better hand into twenty cuadernos. Vega i Sentmenat agreed that it was in twenty quarto format cuadernos and ended in 1440.81 Writing in 1836, Torres Amat lists De rebus among Caresmar’s unpublished works, but he was unsure where this and other such books ­were located a­ fter the dissolution of monastic properties and libraries.82 An incomplete copy of De rebus preserved at Bellpuig has 736 quarto pages. It breaks off at book 2, chapter 17, with the end of the rule of Count Ermengol X of Urgell in 1314, a logical place to pause since, as we have seen, the count’s death marked the close of a period of expansion of Bellpuig and the beginning of its decline. This was the version that Corredera translated into Castilian.83 78. ​Jaume Caresmar, Historia de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de las Avellanas. En el 360 [sic] aniversario del nacimiento de Jaime Caresmar, trans. Eduardo Corredera (Balaguer: Romeu, 1977) (appendix 1, no. 17). 79. ​BPA, Caixa 12, Llibre 30, “Anales del Real Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas de la Orden de Canonigos Regulares Premonstratesos en el Principado de Cathaluña, su propagación en Abadias y Prioratos dependiendes, sus dotationes, donaciones, privilegios Pontificios y Reales [. . .].” Citations to the Cartophylacium are on pages 186, 189, 202. 80. ​BPA, Caixa 17, Llibre 36, “De rebus ecclesiae sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum” (appendix 1, nos. 23, 37). 81. ​Martí, “Índice,” ff. 28r–28v; José de Vega y Sentmenat, “Cata­logo de las obras MS y impresos,” in Pasqual, “Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta,” f. 262v and f. 280r. 82. ​Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario, 151. 83. ​Translated and also altered in the sense that Corredera took out Caresmar’s excerpts and transcriptions of documents that intersperse his text. Some of them are placed at the end of Corredera’s version as appendixes.

19 2 Chap t e r  6

A more extensive text of De rebus has come to light as a result of the donation of books and manuscripts collected by erudite members of the Dou, Moner, and Alòs families.84 Ramon d’Alòs-­Moner i de Dou (1885–1939) was among the scholars who cata­loged Caresmar’s works (see appendix 1). The contents of the library have been divided among four public institutions, with the Biblioteca de Catalunya receiving manuscripts related to the three families, among which is the autograph of Caresmar’s De rebus in three books, 397 folios. Conforming more or less with what Vega i Sentmenat stated, it ends with the year 1435. This therefore contains chapters 18 to 21 of book 2 and all twenty-­five chapters of book 3 that are missing from the Bellpuig copy. The full title indicates that Caresmar intended for ­there to be eight books, which prob­ably would have taken the story up to Caresmar’s own time. But if the other five books ­were ever written, which is doubtful, they have not yet turned up.85 The Alòs-­Moner manuscript is divided into twenty fascicles, corresponding to Josep Martí’s description. While the Bellpuig manuscript was executed as a finished copy, the last section of the Alòs-­Moner example contains many corrections, marginal annotations, and crossed-­out passages in Caresmar’s hand. It prob­ably came into the Alòs-­Moner library through Ramon Llàtzer de Dou i Bassols (1742–1832), a correspondent of Caresmar’s mentioned in the previous chapter, on learned circles of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. Dou was a canon and Roman law expert, a student, a professor, and fi­nally chancellor at the University of Cervera. A prominent member of the liberal clergy, he was the first president of the Congress of Deputies at the Cortes of Cádiz that sought to create a constitutional regime. He may have received the book from Vega i Sentmenat. ­There are, therefore, three substantial works or­ga­nized by Caresmar on the history of Bellpuig: the Castilian Anales, begun in 1751; the copies of original documents in the Cartophylacium, completed in 1752; and the Latin De rebus, presented to the Real Academia in 1773. The Cartophylacium stayed at Bellpuig ­until 1835 and has only (relatively) recently been rediscovered. The Anales, ­after a series of transfers and narrow escapes, is now back in the library at Bellpuig. The longer version of De rebus, as just stated, was in the possession of the Dou ­family and was ­later integrated into the Alòs-­Moner collection. The partial De rebus resided in the parish library of Vilanova de la Sal from the 1890s, at the latest, u ­ ntil the 1980s, when it was taken back to Bellpuig. At that time, most of the other material from the parish library was moved to La Seu d’Urgell. Both 84. ​The formation of the collection and its significance are discussed by Anna Guadayol, “Un recorregut par­tic­ul­ar per la història de la cultura a Catalunya: Els papers de la família Alòs-­Moner,” Estudis Romànics 36 (2014): 439–46. 85. ​BC, MS 9339.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

193

the Cartophylacium and the abridged De rebus ­were for a long time at Vilanova de la Sal—­one more or less accessible, and the other hidden and forgotten.

Àger The synthetic institutional histories just described represent a relatively small part of Caresmar’s ­actual l­abor and output. He expended much more time on transcriptions of documents. The largest proj­ects ­were the Bellpuig Cartophylacium and two other multiyear efforts described h ­ ere: a cata­log and transcription of rec­ords from the Augustinian collegiate chapter at Àger, and a similar effort for the gigantic parchment collection of the cathedral of Barcelona. As with all of Caresmar’s studies of church history, it is hard to distinguish incomplete projects from notes and miscellanies, but Àger and Barcelona w ­ ere official commissions for which Caresmar’s efforts, although never published, at least survive. Caresmar might be considered unlucky from the point of view of posterity in his choice of what to copy. Through no fault of his own, of course, he devoted his energies to collections that have come through almost intact through the vicissitudes of the past two hundred years. This is the case for documents from Àger and the cathedral of Barcelona. Despite the destruction of the church of Àger and its library ­after the disamortization and the wanderings of its archival rec­ords, most of the approximately twenty-­five hundred documents that Caresmar cata­loged, and in some cases transcribed, survive, the majority divided among the Biblioteca de Catalunya, the Cathedral of Lleida, and the Arxiu Històric “Jaume Caresmar” in the village of Àger.86 Other Àger rec­ords are at the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, the cathedral of Tarragona (Arxiu Històric Arxidiocesà), the Cathedral of Barcelona, and the National Archive in Madrid.87 Founded in the mid-­eleventh ­century by the enterprising noble Arnau Mir de Tost, Àger obtained privileges from Popes Nicholas II and Alexander II in 1060 and 1063, respectively, removing it from episcopal jurisdiction.88 Caresmar 86. ​On Caresmar and Àger, see Francesc Fité i Llevot, Reculls d’història de la vall d’Àger, periode antic i medieval (Àger: Centre d’Estudis del Vall d’Àger, 1985), 251–317; Col·lecció diplomàtica de Sant Pere d’Àger fins 1198 ed. Ramon Chesé Lapeña, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2011), 23–31; Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, El archivo de Ager y Caresmar (Balaguer: Romeu, 1978); Corredera y Gutiérrez, “Al margen de Caresmar (Caresmar en Ager),” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 47 (1974): 11–26. 87. ​Introduction to Chesé, Colˑlecció diplomàtica de Sant Pere d’Àger, 1:21–44. 88. ​On Sant Pere d’Àger, see Fité i Llevot, Reculls d’història de la vall d’Àger, 85–196, 251–318; Johannes Josef Bauer, “Sankt Peter zu Ager. Zur Kanonikerbewegung und Kirchenreform in der zweiten Hälfte des XI. Jahrhunderts,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 19 (1962): 99– 114; Paul Freedman, “Jurisdictional Disputes over the Monastery of Sant Pere d’Àger (Catalonia) in

19 4 Chap t e r  6

would devote the years 1776 to 1780 to arranging and transcribing parchments from it, most of them dating from the late eleventh to the early ­fourteenth ­century. Caresmar’s work was requested by Francesc Esteve i Ferrer, the archpriest of Àger, and subsidized by the Real Cámara in Madrid.89 ­Because ­there was no appropriate place at Àger to work with such a large amount of documentation, Caresmar was allowed to pursue this proj­ect at Bellpuig, the rec­ ords being sent to him periodically. Two works ­were produced: a Compendi (compendium) of all the documents at Àger and a Resumen (resumé) of their contents. The first, completed in 1766, is in the nature of a register; the second, finished by 1770, is a similar but shorter list of the single-­sheet rec­ords and includes transcriptions and brief comments for t­ hose Caresmar considered to be impor­tant. The title and notes to the Compendi are in Catalan, while the Resumen title and commentary are in Castilian.90 Caresmar refers to and copied a particularly significant parchment once located at Àger, the original papal order Vox in excelso, issued from the ecumenical Council of Vienne on March 22, 1312, suppressing the Order of the Templars. Although Caresmar’s notarized copy is preserved at the Spanish state archive at Simancas, where Caresmar sent it for safekeeping, the a­ ctual document that the abbot of Àger brought back from Vienne is missing. Finding this parchment would be an accomplishment, ­because although of tremendous historical importance, Vox in excelso was issued in a private consistory and not registered by the papal Curia. Its text is preserved in very few copies from the time it was issued as compared with the more widely circulated bulls implementing the suppression of the Templars, Ad providam Christi (May 2, 1312) and Considerantes dudum (May 6, 1312), which denounced the wicked acts of the Templars, distributed their property, and laid out the judicial pro­cess for condemning them.91 Light of New Papal Documents,” in Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, ed. Peter Landau and Jörg Müller (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1997), 725–56. 89. ​Corredera, “Al margen de Caresmar,” 15–26; Corredera, El archivo de Ager y Caresmar, 31–41. Esteve himself compiled a mini-­cartulary of the Àger archpriest’s benefice. Àger, Arxiu Històric Jaume Caresmar, ms. Ref. 53, dated 1756–1758 “Llibre en ques conten tots los beneficis del Arxiprestat ô Diocesis d’Ager [. . .].” 90. ​BC, MS 941, and Àger, Arxiu Històric Jaume Caresmar REF 55, “Compendi de tots els intruments antichs i moderns que’s troban en lo arxiu de la molt Insigne Iglesia Colegiata de St. Pere de Ager”; Àger, Arxiu Històric Jaume Caresmar, REF 54, and AHN, Códices L. 795, “Resumen del Archivo de la Insigne Iglesia Colegial de San Pedro de Ager en Cataluña.” See appendix 1, nos. 36, 42. 91. ​Elizabeth  A.  R. Brown and Alan Forey, “Vox in excelso and the Suppression of the Knights Templar: The Bull, Its History, and a New Edition,” Mediaeval Studies 80 (2018): 1–58. Ad providam Christi (May 2, 1312) and Considerantes dudum (May 6, 1312) gave most of the Templar property and rights to the Knights Hospitaller and established how the Templars w ­ ere to be judged.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

195

In a pre­sen­ta­tion to the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona in 1768, Caresmar described the importance beyond the local history of Àger of several items from its archive, including Vox in excelso, and he reiterated this in 1774 in the essay on the authentication of documents that appeared in print in 1790 shortly before his death.92 One of the Àger documents (the original of which is extant) contains what Caresmar regarded as conciliar ordinances of the Council of Clermont in 1095, at which Pope Urban II launched what came to be the First Crusade.93 Both the Clermont decrees and Vox in excelso seem to have been copied into a lost “Noticias de Ager,” which may have been the same as “Sobre lo contenido en los instrumentos antiguos de la Iglesia Colegial de Ager,” one of the books sent to Madrid for publication that never appeared and is now missing.94

Rec­ords from the Cathedral of Barcelona From 1771 to 1789 Caresmar transcribed or noted over fourteen thousand documents from the Cathedral of Barcelona, which are preserved in eight massive volumes.95 The archive, located above the cathedral cloister, belongs to the chapter of canons and is distinct not only conceptually but spatially from the episcopal or, as it is now termed, diocesan archive, h ­ oused in the episcopal palace just south of the cathedral. As was his usual organ­izing princi­ple, Caresmar attempted to arrange the capitular documents chronologically, thus as an aid to historians, replacing an ­earlier collocation into bundles, folders, cabinets, or drawers according to a geo­g raph­i­cal scheme appropriate institutionally for finding rec­ords related to litigation over a par­tic­u­lar place. Caresmar’s intention was to make a register 92. ​Jaume Caresmar, “Autenticidad de las escrituras contenidas en los Archivos, asi públicos como privados, y en especial de los Archivos de las Iglesias,” in Seminario erudito, que comprehende varias obras ineditas [ . . .], vol. 28, ed. Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor (Madrid: Blas Roman,1790): 69– 71 (appendix 1, no. 10). 93. ​Now BC, Arxiu, perg. 4039, ed. Chesé, Colˑlecció Diplomàtica de Sant Pere d’Àger, vol. 2 (2011), appendix B 4, 1018–1019, including a note by Caresmar (in his Resumen of documents from Àger [appendix 1, no. 42) of its importance. While it is not provably an enactment at Clermont, it is an early example of an impor­tant canon law text, possibly by Pope Urban II, known as “Duae inquit,” “Duae leges,” “Duae sunt,” or simply “Duae,” which states the seemingly radical proposition that private law (the law of the individual heart) can be superior to public law enacted by the church. See Robert Somerville, “Canon Law, Inspired Law, and Papal Authority,” in Netocot David: Jubilee Volume for David Weiss Halivni ( Jerusalem: Omot Press, 2004), 127. 94. ​Garí, Masdeu, and Urbina, “Jaume Caresmar: L’home i la seva obra,” no. 5. 95. ​ACB, “Col·lecció de documentos de l’Arxiu de la Catedral de Barcelona” (appendix 1, no. 34).

19 6 Chap t e r  6

of ­these documents, a listing with short explanatory notes, but in some cases, he made a partial or full transcription or abridgment. Articles in the short-­lived journal Scrinium, published in the 1950s by the Barcelona cathedral, transcribe some of the earliest rec­ords, from the ninth and tenth centuries. Three are edited along with Caresmar’s explanatory notes.96 Caresmar got rid of e­ arlier classification systems without effectively replacing them. He seems to have registered thousands of documents from one location before discovering another cache elsewhere—­the archive had several parts, mysteriously, at least to the uninitiated, described as “the central armoire of the middle-­staircase” or “room number three of the Charity division.” Caresmar worked at a furious pace but only clumsily fit his changes of mind into what he had already composed. Just by looking at the dates of what the eight volumes contain, one can see how what began as a well-­ordered march through the documentation was not always very helpfully revised. The first of Caresmar’s folio volumes contains rec­ords dating from 800 to 1233, the second from 1234 to 1771. Thereafter the dates overlap according to no discernible system:97 3 1232–1477 4 1480–1768 5 986–1231 6 1356–1667 7 1202–1355 8 1274–1668 The distinguished and long-­serving (more than fifty years) archivists of the Barcelona Cathedral, Àngel Fàbrega (1921–2017) and Josep Baucells (1932– 2021), deemed Caresmar’s transcriptions only moderately useful despite the extraordinary amount of material covered. In Baucells’s opinion, Caresmar “copied, digested, abbreviated, and transcribed nonstop; having no time to revise the documents in a series or to describe them as a group.”98 Caresmar’s peculiar method of working, his se­lection of what to copy, his description of a parchment’s location, and his difficult handwriting would make the task of ­future archivists more onerous. From 1900 ­until the Civil War, the archivist 96. ​“Documentos del siglo IX,” Scrinium 2 (April–­August 1951): 39–41; 3 (September–­December 1951): 63–64; “Documentos del siglo X,” Scrinium 8–10 (1953): 14–15. The articles are unsigned but prob­ably written by the canon-­archivist Josep Oliveras i Caminal. 97. ​José Sanabre, El Archivo de la Catedral de Barcelona (Barcelona: Pulcra, 1948), 64. 98. ​Josep Baucells i Reig, El Baix Llobregat i la Pia Almoina de la Seu de Barcelona: Inventari dels pergamins (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1984), 20.

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

197

Josep Mas i Domènech (1860–1942) was more successful in making it pos­si­ble to understand the cathedral’s holdings, classifying documents into four series of “Diversorum,” and facilitating retrieval of the documents through a series of index cards, the compilation of which was certainly as laborious as what Caresmar had undertaken. The cards ­were arranged chronologically within each category of Diversorum, but the older classification was generally followed with regard to where the originals ­were actually stored.99 The 1936–1939 Civil War did not destroy the collection but further disor­ga­ nized it, with some rec­ords staying in the cathedral, while o ­ thers ­were moved to avoid damage from bombardment. In 1948, Josep Sanabre was able to publish a thorough description of its holdings, but it was left to Fàbrega and Baucells, beginning in 1965, to give the archive a modern organ­ization.100 They published complete transcriptions of 2,069 documents, arranged chronologically from AD 844 to 1100 and presented in six volumes.101 For the Barcelona cathedral, Caresmar also created a list of the oldest printed books and manuscripts within the library/archive. His Vetusti codices manuscripti contains descriptions of 129 medieval manuscripts. Francesc Martorell i Trabal published this in 1927 on the basis of a Caresmar manuscript then in the Franciscan library in Balaguer and now kept at Bellpuig de les Avellanes. The title Vetusti codices manuscripti seems to have come from Josep Antonio Manegat, a priest who described himself as originally from Puigcerdà in Pyrenean Catalonia but residing in Madrid, and he claimed to be the author of the work. In the manuscript, an indignant marginal note (in Latin) denounces this plagiarism, restores credit to Caresmar, and expresses bewilderment and chagrin that a priest could act in such a fashion.102 The third work to come out of Caresmar’s activity within the Barcelona capitular archive was a list of early printed books. Another unsigned article in Scrinium, again prob­ably by Josep Oliveras i Caminal, reproduces Caresmar’s 99. ​For Mas, see Enric Moreu-­Rey, Els treballs històrics de mossèn Josep Mas i Domenech (Barcelona: Fundació Salvador Vives Casajuana, 1980). 100. ​For Caresmar in relation to the archive, see Sanabre, El Archivo de la Catedral de Barcelona, 59–68; Diplomatari de la Catedral de Barcelona, vol. 1, ed. Àngel Fàbrega i Grau (Barcelona: Arxiu Capitular de la Catedral de Barcelona, 1995), 13–14; Baucells, El Baix Llobregat i la Pia Almoina, 36–37. 101. ​ Diplomatari de la Catedral de Barcelona, comprising documents up to 1000; Diplomatari de l’Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, segle XI, ed. Josep Baucells i Reig et  al., 5 vols. (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2006). 102. ​“Turpiter mentitur plagiarius iste. Nihil a se digestum est in hac opella, nullusque l­abor impensus. Tota enim ejus elucubratio, estudio ac labori nostri Doctoris Jacobi Caresmar debetur; qui cum Codices Bibliothecae Ecclesiae Cathedralis Barcinonensis percurreret atque discuteret hunc accuratissimum indicem textuit. Miror quidem virum sacerdotali caractere insignitum tam audac[i]ter in caelo peccare potuisse dum putavit Deo fore gratum sacrificium ex aere alieno oblatum.” Francesc Martorell i Trabal, “Manuscrits dels PP. Caresmar, Pasqual i Martí a la Biblioteca del Convent de Franciscans de Balaguer,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans 12 (1927): 225 (appendix 1, no. 15).

19 8 Chap t e r  6

cata­log of 160 books, including sixty printed before 1501. The rest, with two exceptions, date from the sixteenth ­century. An appendix to Caresmar’s list organizes the books by subject, author, and place of publication. Five books noted by Caresmar ­were missing when the article was written.103 ­Because of the Santa Eulalia fracas, Caresmar was prevented from continuing his work on the Barcelona cathedral archive parchments ­after 1789. As compensation for being barred from the canons’ archive, Bishop Gavino de Valladares asked him to transcribe the rec­ords of the Mensa Episcopal in the bishop’s archive (now the Arxiu Diocesà). This series is divided into twenty-­ two sections (títols) arranged to some extent by subject m ­ atter, but for the most part by the geography of the bishop’s lands, rights, and revenues. Before his death just two years a­ fter beginning this undertaking, Caresmar was able to complete in five volumes his transcriptions of the first four títols, dealing with episcopal jurisdiction, the episcopal palace and its administration, and properties in Barcelona and in its surrounding territorium.104

Caresmar as Contributor to ­Grand Proj­ects In addition to published and other completed works, Caresmar made significant collaborative contributions to learning. His chapter for the 1780 Discurso sobre la agricultura, comercio e industria del Principado de Cataluña, which ­later appeared separately as the Carta al Barón de la Linde, is a notable example. He also provided historical information for one of the most impor­tant scholarly works of the Catalan Enlightenment, the Memorias históricas sobre la marina, comercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona, published in four volumes between 1779 and 1792 ­under the direction of Antoni de Capmany.105 Caresmar also worked on España Sagrada, the history of the Spanish church put together in twenty-­nine volumes by the Augustinian Enrique Flórez (1702– 1773) and continued ­after his death. España Sagrada is or­ga­nized by diocese, and each book contains a history, episcopology, and appendixes of transcribed 103. ​“Cata­logus incunabilium aliorumque librorum a P. Caresmar confectus” = “El catálogo de libros ipresos de Caresmar,” Scrinium 8–10 (1953): 38–63 (on pages 59–63 are the supplemental lists of subjects, authors, and publication locations) (appendix 1, no. 16). 104. ​ADB, Mensa Episcopal, Caresmar, vols. 1–5 (appendix 1, no. 3). See José Sanabre, El Archivo Diocesano de Barcelona (Barcelona: Fidel Rodríguez, 1947), 20–22; Maria Pardo i Sabartés, Mensa Episcopal de Barcelona (878–1299) (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1994), 17–20. 105. ​Antonio de Capmany y de Montpalau, Memorias históricas sobre la marina, comercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona, 4 vols. (Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1779–1792; repr., Barcelona: Cámera Oficial de Comercio y Navigación de Barcelona, 1961–1963).

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

199

original rec­ords.106 Caresmar’s research was particularly vital for the last volumes prepared u ­ nder Flórez’s supervision—28 and 29, devoted to the dioceses of Vic and Barcelona, respectively—­but he also made substantial contributions to volume 43, dedicated to the bishopric of Girona. In 1764 Caresmar visited Vic, and in 1771 the church ­there asked him to select rec­ords to send to Flórez, who remarked that originally he had not thought t­here was sufficient material from Vic to merit a book to itself, but that thanks to Caresmar, the true wealth of its archival holdings was revealed. The continuator of Flórez, José de la Canal, noted that he had used an episcopology of Girona composed by Caresmar.107 Appendix 57 in this volume is Caresmar’s letter to Francesc Xavier Dorca (1736–1896), a professor at Cervera but for most of his ­career a cathedral canon of Girona. The letter begins with questions about the foundation date of the monastery of Santa Maria de Riudaura in the diocese of Girona. In the course of this discussion, Caresmar describes the vicissitudes of the Carolingian-­appointed counts of Septimania, Gothia, and the Spanish March during the gestation of Catalonia in the late ninth and early tenth centuries.108 Caresmar notes with pride his accomplishment in recognizing that although the counties of Osona and Manresa appear as geo­graph­i­cally distinct in surviving rec­ords, t­ here was never a separate ruler holding only the title “count of Manresa” and that anyone who held the title of count of Osona was also count of Manresa.109 Dorca furnished Caresmar with a brief summary of the canons of the cathedral of Girona and their common life, beginning with the ninth ­century, shortly ­after the Carolingian conquest of the city.110 Caresmar was highly regarded by ­those associated with España Sagrada.111 Flórez, in a letter dated February 13, 1773, refers to Caresmar’s desire to lift 106. ​Enrique Flórez et al., España Sagrada. Theatro geographico-­historico de la Iglesia de España. The first volume was published in Madrid in 1747. Flórez died in 1773, but the proj­ect continued, and the total number of volumes reached forty-­seven by 1830. The series has been finished, and the older volumes have been reprinted and updated (Guadarrama: Revista Agustiniana, 2000–2012). 107. ​ España Sagrada, vol. 43 (Madrid: Miguel Francisco Rodríguez, 1819), xx. 108. ​ España Sagrada, 43:521–36 (appendix 1, no. 12). 109. ​ España Sagrada, 43:525. On the distinction between the counties, see Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Catalunya Carolingia, vol. 4, Els Comtats d’Osona i Manresa, part 1 (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1999), 21. Ordeig finds the first mention of the county of Manresa in a rec­ord from 908. 110. ​BPA, Caixa 19, Llibre 40, “Sobre la vida canonica en la Iglesia Gerundense” (“Noticias remitidas para el canonigo Dr. Dn. Francisco Dorca”). 111. ​“Este fue el R. P. Doctor Don Jaime Caresmar, mencionado en el Tomo pre­ce­dente con eologio, aunque desigual à su merito: el qual anduvo tan diligente, y aun tan excesivo en el cumplimiento de esta comision, que no solo del Archivo de la Santa Iglesia, sino del Real, de la Ciudad, y de otros diferentes, remitió tantos instrumentos que apenas cabia en éste Tomo.” España Sagrada, vol. 29 (Madrid: Antonio de Sancha, 1775) [iv].

20 0 Chap t e r  6

out of ignorance the study of “sacred antiquity”—­that is, the history of the church.112 In introducing volume 28, devoted to Vic and published in 1774 shortly ­after the death of Flórez, the editors called Caresmar “this extraordinarily hardworking and celebrated man” whose contribution to the history of Catalonia they likened to a trea­sure of precious metals.113 The prologue to the Barcelona section of España Sagrada (volume 29) refers the reader to the praise of Caresmar from the previous volume, devoted to Vic, and it characterizes even that encomium as unequal to his merit and notes the importance ascribed to his ­labor by the Spanish church and royal court. Caresmar also contributed to what since 1862 has been called the Collection Moreau in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The series, in no less than 1,834 volumes, contains copies of documents made shortly before the French Revolution began a pro­cess of destruction and dispersal of archival rec­ords. This ambitious proj­ect of centralization and preservation was initiated by Charles Moreau, a high official of the Royal Ministry of Finance, and included not only France but neighboring countries in which the French crown was considered to have interests or claims, including Catalonia. Moreau commissioned Caresmar, who visited Paris in 1785, to make and transmit copies of Catalan archival rec­ords.114 Between 1786 and 1788 Caresmar furnished transcriptions of 166 documents to an intermediary in Perpignan, François de Fossa, a professor of law and fellow member of the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, delegated by Moreau to collect rec­ords from Roussillon and Catalonia. The way the Moreau Collection is or­ga­nized makes it difficult to reconstruct Caresmar’s specific contributions, but t­ hese are preserved as a single unit in the Archives of the Department of the Pyrenées-­Orientales in Perpignan. Section 12 J 26 contains in chronological order (nos. 1–157) transcriptions from AD 776–1283. The rest are more recent (­fourteenth to seventeenth ­century) materials. The texts are in Caresmar’s hand, and Fossa commented on them, indicating ­whether they appeared in other published collections or what they demonstrated in terms of historical events and their ­later implications.115 112. ​“Y sacar del poder de la ignorancia, y del desprecio alguna parte del gran Teatro de la sacra antiguedad, que está Escondido.” España Sagrada, vol. 28 (Madrid: Antonio de Sancha, 1774), xv. 113. ​“Este laboriosímo y celebre varón, más por lo que tiene trabajado y dispuesto para darlo a la luz, que por lo que tiene publicado, es hoy el depósito rico mineral donde se halla todo cuanto bueno hay de saber del principado de Cataluña,” España Sagrada, vol. 28, xiv. I am grateful to Ramon Ordeig i Mata of the Arxiu i Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic for the information about Caresmar’s visit. 114. ​On the Moreau material, see Henri Omont, Inventaire des manuscrits de la Collection Moreau (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1891). On the conception and execution of the proj­ect, see Léopold Victor Delisle, Le cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Impériale, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1868), 557–75. Corredera, “Historia del Monasterio de las Avellanas,” 2:355 mentions Caresmar’s visit to Paris. 115. ​Perpignan, Archives Departementales des Pyrenées-­Orientales, 12 J 26. In 1963 Jean-­Gabriel Gigot made a typewritten inventory of the archives. I am grateful to Professor Aymat Catafou of the

Car es m ar ’ s W o r ks

201

Caresmar’s writings have been somewhat arbitrarily classified in this chapter. Amid the proliferation of uncompleted works and miscellaneous and sometimes damaged manuscripts, it is clear that his primary interest was ecclesiastical history. His efforts resulted in synthetic works such as the two histories of Bellpuig; other manifestations ­were transcriptions and cata­logs of archival documents (Àger and Barcelona), and Caresmar also left an im­mense quantity of notes and lists. It would take a considerable effort to go through this to extract useful and coherent pieces, but it would be in­ter­est­ing to see what Caresmar’s furious activity preserved that would other­wise be lost. Even with regard to collections that seem to have survived with few losses, Caresmar fills in gaps resulting from the disappearance of documents since his death in 1791. For example, in a study of Pere Albert, the thirteenth-­century codifier of Catalan feudal laws and a canon of the cathedral of Barcelona, Elisabet Ferran i Planas used Caresmar’s transcriptions to reconstruct the ­career of her protagonist. Her appendix contains editions of forty-­five documents taken from Caresmar’s Índex of the cathedral, the originals having perished.116 From Àger, 90 ­percent of the original rec­ords are extant, but twenty of the documents from before 1198 are known only through Caresmar.117 Four rec­ords from before 1000 collected in the monumental Catalunya Carolíngia are retained only through Caresmar’s transcriptions. They all involve Montserrat, copied from that monastery’s archive before it was destroyed by Napoleon’s troops in 1811–1812, and are transcribed in Caresmar’s study of the primacy of Tarragona.118 I have also indicated the significance of two papal documents from the Àger archive: the fragment associated with Pope Urban II and the Council of Clermont, and the lost transcription of Vox in excelso, which nevertheless survives via copies and translations from Caresmar. The foregoing has not considered ­every significant treatise of Caresmar’s, leaving out, for example, his account of the charitable foundation known as Université de Perpignan for giving me a copy of this inventory. Volume 348 of the Collection Moreau concerns Roussillon and Catalonia as well as Soissons. Omont, Inventaire, 18. Fossa and Caresmar are listed as contributors to the Moreau proj­ect. Xavier Charmes, Le Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques (histoire et documents), vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1886), 410. On Caresmar, Fossa, and the Perpignan archives, see Catalunya Carolingia, vol. 6, part 1, ed. Pere Ponsich and Ramon Ordeig i Mata (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2006), 61 (appendix 1, no. 45). 116. ​Elisabet Ferran i Planas, El jurista Pere Albert i les Commemoracions (Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2006), 273, 374–406. 117. ​According to Chesé, Col·lecció diplomàtica de Sant Pere d’Àger, 1:45, twenty rec­ords dating before 1198 are known only through copies made by Caresmar (nos. 32, 47, 54, 61, 133, 173, 195, 238, 294, 302, 340, 391, 399, 474, 482, 522, 541, 571, 639, 642). 118. ​ Catalunya Carolingia, vol. 7, El Comtat de Barcelona, ed. Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig Ustrell, 3 parts (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2019), no. 360, part 1, 390–91 (from AD 955); no. 419, part 1, 429–30 (960); no. 614, part 2, 580–81 (973); and no. 708, part 2, 639–40 (979).

20 2 Chap t e r  6

the Pia Almoina, run by the cathedral of Barcelona (appendix 1, no. 18a), or his history of the city of Manresa (appendix 1, no. 31). His treatise on the authenticity of archival rec­ords (appendix 1, no. 10) appeared as an article in the influential, if short-­lived (1787–1791), Seminario erudito, which anthologized essays by Spanish writers on lit­er­a­ture, economics, history, and the church.119 It is difficult to rank the importance of Caresmar’s works, and in certain re­spects their relative significance has changed over time. Before Catalan ecclesiastical archives became more open to consultation, and especially before the appearance of editions of archival documents, scholars w ­ ere more dependent on transcriptions by pre­de­ces­sors such as Caresmar and Pasqual. This is particularly true for foreign historians from the 1950s through the 1970s who, rather than building their ­career around a single collection, wanted to consult rec­ords from dif­fer­ent archives for work on the social or church history of medieval Catalonia.120 The volume of recently edited archival documents (see chapter 8) makes recourse to eighteenth-­or early nineteenth-­century transcriptions less impor­ tant. Caresmar’s impact is felt most of all in the letter to the Barón de la Linde. While its specific arguments about Catalonia’s demography are unsupported by ­later knowledge, Caresmar helped to shape an attitude ­toward Catalonia’s accomplishments and potential versus its unfortunate and involuntary subordination to Castile, a conclusion significant in both Enlightenment and Liberal Catalonia with repercussions to the issue of con­temporary Catalan separatism. It is notable, but hardly surprising, that during Caresmar’s lifetime, the Carta and the Discurso, of which the former composed a part, remained unpublished and only informally circulated.

119. ​Herr, Eigh­teenth ­Century Revolution, 191–93. 120. ​See, for example, Johannes Josef Bauer, “Die ‘vita canonica’ an den katalanischen Kollegiatskirchen im 10 und 11. Jahrhundert,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 21 (1963): 54–82; Bauer, “Rechtsverhältnisse der katalanischen Klöster in ihren Klosterverbänden (9.–12. Jahrhundert),” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 23 (1967): 1–130; Odilo Engels, “Episkopat und Kanonie im mittelalterlichen Katalonien,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 21 (1963): 83–135; Engels, Schutzgedanke und Landesherrschaft im östlichen Pyrenäenraum (9.–13. Jahrhundert) (Münster: Aschendorff, 1970); Bonnassie, La Cata­logne du milieu du Xe à la fin du XIe siècle.

C h a p te r   7

Disamortization, War, and Neglect

For the two final chapters, we leave Caresmar’s own time to consider what happened to libraries, archives, and the medieval documentation of Catalonia a­ fter his death in 1791. Part of the purpose of this book is to understand what medieval rec­ords have been saved, which rec­ ords have been lost, and why. The historians of Bellpuig de les Avellanes are impor­tant in their own right as figures in the history of Catalan self-­awareness, but they also played a role in preserving historical memory through their efforts to or­ga­nize and transcribe medieval documents. They could not have anticipated the dissolution of Catholic corporate life (monasteries and chapters of canons) or the catastrophic wars of 1808–1814 and 1936–1939. Their copying was for the sake of rescuing archives from neglect and disor­ga­ni­za­tion (as at Àger) or to create more con­ve­nient and accessible means of retrieval (as with the Bellpuig cartulary). Ecclesiastical intellectuals in the eigh­teenth ­century used archival documents to elucidate the institutional history of dioceses and monastic foundations. The accomplishments of Flórez for España Sagrada and of Villanueva for Viage literario are the most durable evidence of this motive. The organizers of ­these proj­ ects did not see themselves as taking precautions against extensive destruction; they worried about institutional neglect and what was already perceived as growing secularization. Lacking the explicit ideology of Catholic Catalan nationalism that would characterize the cultural and po­liti­cal movements of the 203

20 4 Chap t e r  7

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Caresmar and his associates nevertheless regarded church history as an expression of Catalan history. The vicissitudes of the metropolitanate of Tarragona or of the monastery of Bellpuig ­were considered manifestations of what it is not anachronistic to regard as the history of the patria. Dwelling on the loss of documentation may seem strange since among medievalists Catalonia is famous for the extraordinary amount of material its archives preserve, especially from the ninth to the twelfth ­century, a wealth of parchments greater than anywhere e­ lse in Eu­rope. In 1975, Pierre Bonnassie estimated that for this period about 15,000 rec­ords survive (e.g., land sales, ­wills, donations to the church, loans, oaths of loyalty, feudal agreements), and this figure remains valid to this day.1 When completed, Catalunya Carolingia, the proj­ect to edit all Catalan rec­ords datable to before the year 1000, w ­ ill include approximately 5,000 documents. For comparison, P. H. Sawyer’s Anglo-­ Saxon Charters lists 1,875 rec­ords for E ­ ngland up to 1066, and most are from the 2 eleventh ­century. More than 40 ­percent of the early Catalan rec­ords are original parchments. The proportions vary greatly among the dif­fer­ent original Catalan counties: only 5 ­percent of the documentation for Roussillon or Pallars survives in its original form; the figure rises to one-­quarter for Urgell and Barcelona and two-­ thirds for Osona. For the region of Urgell, Cebrià Baraut edited 2,008 documents from before 1100, including an astonishing 51 from the ninth ­century.3 From the Vic archives, the pre-1100 number is 1,683. The royal archive preserves 565 up to 1100, and another secular archive, that of the dukes of Cardona, whose contents ­were unknown to historians ­until recently, has 298.4 1. ​Pierre Bonnassie, La Cata­logne du milieu du Xe à la fin du XIe siècle: Croissance et mutations d’une société, vol. 1 (Toulouse: Université Toulouse-­Le Mirail, 1975), 22. I am grateful to Adam Kosto at Columbia University and José Miguel Adrade de Cernades of the University of Santiago de Compostela for conveying to me their estimates of surviving documentation. 2. ​Catalunya Carolingia, ed. Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals et al., 8 volumes in 17 parts to date (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1952–2020). On the number of projected documents and comparisons with other collections, see Adam J. Kosto, “Laymen, Clerics, and Documentary Practices in the Early ­Middle Ages: The Example of Catalonia,” Speculum 80 (2005): 52–53. 3. ​Cebrià Baraut, “Els documents dels segles IX–­XII conservats a l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell,” Urgellia 2 (1979): 7–145; 3 (1980): 7–166; 4 (1981): 7–186; 5 (1982): 7–158; 6 (1983): 7–243; 7 (1984–1985): 7–218; 8 (1986–1987): 7–149; 9 (1988–1989): 7–312 and 403–570; 10 (1990–1991): 7–349; 11 (1992–1993): 7–160. 4. ​Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic, ed. Eduard Junyent i Subirà and Ramon Ordeig i Mata, 11 parts (Vic: Patronat d’Estudis Ausonencs, 1980–2010); El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los siglos IX–­X: Estudio crítico de sus fondos, ed. Frederico Udina Martorell (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1951); Els pergamins de l’Arxiu Comtal de Barcelona, de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer I, ed. Gaspar Feliu et  al., 3 vols. (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1999); Els pergamins de l’Arxiu Comtal de Barcelona, de Ramon Berenguer II a Ramon Berenguer IV, ed. Ignasi Baiges et al., 4 vols. (Barcelona: Fun-

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

205

This plethora of single parchments, so dif­fer­ent from formulaic documents such as ­those found in German Traditionsbücher, which rec­ord transactions that follow brief templates, gives the Catalan texts a quirky individuality. In his study of writing in Catalonia before 1200, Michel Zimmermann deals with topics such as the varied wording to state the ­mental competence of testators in preambles to w ­ ills, the intrusion of the pre-­Catalan vernacular in Latin texts, the lurid penalties for violating an agreement, including in which subdivision of hell the transgressor ­will spend eternity and with which companions—­ Judas? Dathan and Abiron?5 Catalonia’s documentary riches notwithstanding, a considerable number of manuscripts and archival rec­ords that existed in Caresmar’s time, especially ­those held by monasteries, have been dispersed or destroyed. We begin with the experience of Bellpuig and the damage to its collections in the nineteenth c­ entury. The remainder of the chapter places this disaster in the context of the wars, riots, confiscations, and general neglect of cultural patrimony that characterized the period from 1808 ­until 1939, between the French occupation of Spain and the end of the Civil War.

The End of Premonstratensian Bellpuig Having been temporarily abandoned during the Succession War, Bellpuig experienced three other emergencies that caused it to be evacuated: in 1810 ­because of the French conquests of Balaguer and Lleida, in 1820 when the Liberal regime issued its disamortization ­orders, and in 1835 just before the official acts closing the monasteries of Spain and seizing their properties. The last confiscation was, of course, permanent, at least as regards the Premonstratensians. The fact that the canons w ­ ere able to reconstitute their community twice in the early nineteenth c­ entury explains the hope that the disamortization in 1835 might also have been succeeded by a ­future return, hence the effort to hide away the historical rec­ords of the foundation. The first direct effects of the French invasion of 1808 ­were demands for money on the part of the local junta, the remnant of the Spanish government. It was determined in early 1809 that Bellpuig de les Avellanes should transfer to the authorities half of its silver liturgical objects and decorations, which it did “not without sadness on the part of many,” according to the last chronicler of Bellpuig, dació Noguera, 2010); Col·lecció diplomàtica de l’Archivo Ducal de Cardona (965–1230), ed. Francesc Rodríguez Bernal (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2016). 5. ​Michel Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Cata­logne (IXe–­XIIe siècle), vol. 1 (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2003), 262, 386–410, 425–62.

20 6 Chap t e r  7

Ignasi Ribot.6 The French advance resulted in the capture of Balaguer, and on the same day that the provincial capital fell (April 4, 1810), the canons of Bellpuig left the convent, fearful of the French army and the likelihood of mayhem and plundering. It was prob­ably while the French held Bellpuig that the tomb of Ermengol X was damaged. The heads of many of the mourners w ­ ere knocked off, prob­ably by bored rather than ideologically motivated soldiers, along with a ­whole section of the surroundings of the ­actual sarcophagus and effigy.7 During the Napoleonic period, the canons maintained contact with each other and held ad hoc meetings in villages of the comarca, so at least a semblance of the community was maintained. Balaguer was retaken by Spanish government forces in June  1813, and the canons of Bellpuig returned to Vilanova de la Sal and then gradually reestablished themselves at the monastery during the fall of 1813 and the winter of 1813–1814.8 The confiscation of monastic property in 1820 was more severe in its impact. In accordance with the decree of October 1, 1820, Bellpuig de les Avellanes was closed, and its monks w ­ ere expelled—­except for Ignasi Ribot, who was allowed to remain for another five months as a transitional representative. The canons, numbering fifteen, again remained in the region. Despite a long history of land and ­water disputes, considerable local support was given to the refugee canons, and some of the normal rent and other revenue was still rendered notwithstanding the confiscations.9 Nevertheless, the central government was sufficiently or­ga­nized to implement the seizure and sale of the convent’s property. A relatively careful inventory of books, documents, and movable objects undertaken at this time allows us to evaluate the foundation’s ­later losses. Bells from the church tower, a mill, and a garden w ­ ere auctioned off immediately; coins and other antiquities assembled by Pasqual and his team at the end of the eigh­teenth and beginning of the nineteenth ­century ­were sold by the public authorities.10 Once again, the canons returned to Bellpuig. The monastery was already threatened before official o ­ rders of dissolution and confiscation w ­ ere issued in the summer and fall of 1835. In April 1834, a representative of the regional governor (the capitán general) demanded 500 duros for the fight against the Carlist 6. ​BPA, Fons antic, Caixa 16, Llibre 34, Ignasi Ribot, “Memorias del Monasterio,” vol. 4, f. 208. 7. ​This is the theory of Lucretia Kargere, an expert on medieval stone restoration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (whose Cloisters division ­houses the tomb sculptures). I am grateful to her for discussing her research with me. 8. ​Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, Páginas de historia catalana: Santa María de Bellpuig de les Avellanes (Barcelona: Institut de Germans Maristes Catalunya, n.d.), 241–45. 9. ​Cayetano Barraquer y Roviralta, Los religiosos en Cataluña durante la primera mitad del siglo XIX, vol. 1 (Barcelona: F. J. Altés y Alabart, 1915), 819–21. 10. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 251–55.

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

207

“faction.” The Carlist Wars, whose course is outlined l­ater in this chapter, w ­ ere nominally over the royal succession and convulsed rural Catalonia. At Bellpuig in February 1835, a Carlist band showed up to extort money in their turn, along with dinner. At vari­ous times that winter, the government commanders of Àger and Balaguer questioned the abbot about aid given to the Carlists. The community of Bellpuig was dissolved (it was hoped temporarily) in early August 1835 in response to the burning of churches and convents in Reus, Barcelona, and Saragossa ­earlier that summer. As had happened before, the abbot provided a small stipend to be paid periodically to support the canons, and they agreed to remain in the area of Bellpuig and to gather in order to celebrate memorial masses in honor of the found­ers and benefactors. Relics of Saints Justin and Theodore and the impor­tant vestiges of John of Organyà and the Holy Sandal ­were entrusted to Guillem Escaró, rector of Vilanova de la Sal, and we now know that he also saw to the hiding of the books and documents rediscovered in 2002.11 What the monks and the rector of Vilanova selected to be cached is partly logical and partly puzzling. The ­g reat cartulary supervised by Caresmar was of course fundamental to any pos­si­ble ­future reestablishment of the convent’s rights, and saving a few dozen single parchments from the ­Middle Ages would bolster such claims. The reason for including books previously owned by Josep Finestres is slightly less obvious. Naturally in an emergency, what one attempts to salvage is not always what would have been set aside with more forethought, but the canons did have time to plan the safeguarding of materials ­because the community broke up two months before the disamortization order closing the monasteries was promulgated. It may be that the intention was to safeguard the papers of Caresmar, Pasqual, and Martí as well, but as it turned out, ­there was time to rescue only the books and manuscripts associated with the first of the learned eighteenth-­century canons. The state sold Bellpuig in 1840. Over the previous five years, its movable objects and fittings had been taken for safekeeping by the former canons, moved to neighboring churches, robbed, or simply neglected. State supervision was haplessly inefficient, but by 1850 many of the books had been placed in the Jesuit h ­ ouse in Balaguer or in a new public library in Lleida. As was the case in 1820, it is hard to tell how much of the chapter’s property was stolen as opposed to being distributed to trusted private persons regarded as friendly to the institution. The disappearance, this time permanently, of the Premonstratensian community does not seem to have dramatically altered the everyday life of the 11. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 269–76.

20 8 Chap t e r  7

region. The first lay owner of Bellpuig was Manuel de Oviedo (1812–1852), the son of a wealthy bourgeois f­amily of Cádiz who had profited from trade with the Spanish colonies in Amer­i­ca. His ­career profile typified that of investors in the spoils of dissolving the monasteries, men who leveraged their commercial, military, and po­liti­cal contacts and who ­were pre­sent in Madrid, where the auctions of properties took place. Oviedo was initially a military officer and then a functionary within the ministry of the trea­sury. He was elected as a deputy to the Cortes in 1845 and 1850, and his experience with western Catalonia through appointment to offices in Lleida acquainted him with Bellpuig. Oviedo and his wife w ­ ere devout and belonged to a category of Catholic conservatives who, while deploring anticlericalism, ­were nonetheless willing to profit from the sale of confiscated church properties. ­There was a plan to sell Bellpuig in 1884 at a price 552 times greater than what the state had received in 1843, indicative of what a poor return the government obtained.12 ­After Manuel Oviedo’s death, his niece, Antonia de Oviedo, lived off and on at Bellpuig between 1852 and 1864. With Josep Maria Benet Serra, a former missionary in Australia and bishop of “Daulia” (Perth), she founded an order of nuns dedicated to helping ­women forced into sex trafficking, the Oblate ­Sisters of the Most Holy Redeemer (Hermanas Oblatas del Santíssimo Redentor).13 Writing to Bishop Serra, Antonia de Oviedo describes the festa major in honor of the patron saint of Os de Balaguer, an account that resembles what Jaume Pasqual composed about the same annual event almost a hundred years ­earlier. Strangely enough, Antonia’s letter is written in Catalan even though she had no familial identification with Catalonia. She had been a foreign language tutor to the royal princesses and so presumably found learning Catalan easy and sufficiently in­ter­est­ing to compose in it. This festival coincided with the realization of the plans to create the new Oblate ­Sisters.14 Bellpuig remained in the hands of the ­widow of Manuel de Oviedo, Dolores Ruiz Chavero, who in 1855 took as her second husband Manuel de la Pezuela, a well-­connected aristocrat. They encouraged Antonia in her pious enterprises but ­were attracted to a plan to turn most of the former monastery over to the order of La Trappe while they continued to live in the abbot’s palace, one of the construction proj­ects undertaken a­ fter the Succession War and so relatively modern. The Trappist period was brief, 1884–1890, as Dolo12. ​Artemi Folch, Aspectes de la desamortització (segle XIX) (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1978), 38–39. 13. ​Pere Fullana Puigserver, “L’antic monestir de Bellpuig de les Avellanes (1836–1898): Manuel de Oviedo, Dolores Ruiz i Antonia de Oviedo,” in De Bellpuig a Bellpuig. Els premonstratesos, de les Avellanes a Artà (Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2019), 187–205. 14. ​Fullana, “L’antic monestir de Bellpuig de les Avellanes,” 203–5.

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

209

res Ruiz quarreled with the monks and the community moved to Madrid. With her death, the property was sold in 1894 to José Manrique de Lara y Martínez and again in 1906 to Agustín Santesmases i Pujol, who died shortly thereafter. A banker from Lleida, Santesmases survived long enough to sell the tombs of the counts of Urgell to an antique dealer in Vitoria for 15,000 pesetas, roughly equivalent to $70,000 US ­today. Joseph Demotte, a Pa­ri­sian dealer, bought the sculptures, and they w ­ ere acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and installed at the Cloisters, its division of medieval art, in a pro­ cess that lasted from 1928 to 1948.15 Santesmases left the monastery to his m ­ other. In 1910 it was bought by the Marist ­Fathers, a teaching order. The Marists had fled Barcelona during the summer of 1908 a­ fter the week of anticlerical riots and church burnings known as the Semana Trágica (see “The Semana Trágica” below). At Bellpuig they created a novitiate, or training acad­emy.16 It remains a Marist establishment, and the order has converted the older, historic parts into a ­hotel.

Absolutism, Liberalism, and Anticlericalism The most significant ­factor in the dispersal and destruction of ecclesiastical rec­ ords and manuscripts was disamortization, whose effects, coupled with subsequent neglect, w ­ ere more widespread than the damage inflicted by war. An awkward word, “disamortization” (Spanish, desamortización; Catalan, desamortització) refers to the state seizure of land held in perpetuity by a corporation, in par­tic­u­lar the Catholic Church. In En­glish one can also employ the equally inelegant “disentailment,” but this is better known as referring to the breaking of restrictions over inherited aristocratic properties (entail). “Dissolution” is also appropriate, as in the Dissolution of the En­glish Monasteries during the reign of King Henry VIII, but this term has a specific resonance among historians ­because it is associated with a state-­imposed shift i­n England from Catholicism to a form of Protestantism. Its use in this context would be jarring. Confiscatory legislation was intended to break the hold of the “dead hand” of the church (the “mort” in “desamortización”), whose hitherto inalienable possession meant that the ecclesiastical lands ­were removed from the market. The ­Great Disamortization of 1835–1836 took place ­under the short-­lived but 15. ​Timothy Husband, “ ‘Sancti Nicolai de Fontibus Amoenis’ or ‘Sti. Nicolai et Fontium Amenorum’: The Making of Monastic History,” in The Cloisters: Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary, ed. E. C. Parker (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 354–83. 16. ​Corredera, Páginas de historia catalana, 273–84; José Miguel Merino de Cáceres, “Expolios de arte religioso,” Descubrir el arte 34 (2001): 112–15.

21 0 Chap t e r  7

nevertheless effective leadership of the first minister, the Count of Toreno and his successor Juan Álvarez Mendizábal.17 The official order of suppression for monasteries and canonries with fewer than twelve persons was issued on August 4, 1835, and a general closure of the remaining foundations was ordered on October 30.18 Unlike previous seizures of church property, the legislation was not revoked, and this is why the Bellpuig materials hidden in 1835 ­were forgotten. The disamortization of 1835–1836 closed hundreds of monasteries and collegiate churches, dispersing their property, including books, archival rec­ords, and art. Although Spain never had a significant Protestant movement or, ­until the twentieth c­ entury, a secularizing attempt to suppress the church altogether, beginning in the early nineteenth ­century it experienced power­f ul anticlerical sentiment and ideological and po­liti­cal pressures to dispossess the church of its wealth. Our interest is focused on the indirect consequence of the disamortization, specifically on archives and libraries rather than on the strug­gles for and against the secular power of the Spanish church, but nevertheless, the po­ liti­cal context of the dispersion of documents has to be considered. In nations that went over to the Protestant Reformation, the suppression of monasteries and mendicant ­orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans brought into circulation an im­mense amount of landed property. The En­glish dissolution in 1536 closed something on the order of nine hundred religious establishments. Their former properties went to the Crown, which sold off most of them to fund the usual uncontrollable state bud­get. While only temporarily suppressing the Catholic Church, the French Revolution abolished the privileges of the clergy and permanently dissolved almost all of the nation’s monasteries. In this instance, not only w ­ ere regular clergy such as monks and 17. ​Accounts of the desamortización include Germán Rueda Hernanz et al., La desamortización en la Península Ibérica (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 1993); Rueda, La desamortización en España: Un balance (1766–1924) (Madrid: Arco, 1997); Francisco Simón Segura, La desamortización española del siglo XIX (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 1973); Manuel Revuelta González, La exclaustración, 1833–1840, 2nd  ed. (Madrid: CEU Ediciones, 2010); for Catalonia, Cayetano Barraquer y Roviralta, Los religiosos en Cataluña, 4 vols. (Barcelona: F. J. Altés y Alabart, 1915–1917); Javier Antón Pelayo, “The Secularization of Spanish Religious Libraries (1767–1836): The Catalan Case,” in How the Secularization of Religious Houses Transformed the Libraries of Eu­rope, 16–19th  Centuries, ed. Cristina Dondi, Dorit Raines, and Richard Sharpe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), 99–124. This latter work is based on the author’s “La desamortización de las bibliotecas conventuales en Cataluña durante la crisi del Antiguo Régimen,” Memoria y Ciuvilzación. Revista de historia 21 (2018): 611–51.For the general context of church and state, see Vicente Cárcel Ortí, Politica eclesial de los gobiernos liberales españoles, 1830–1840 (Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra, 1975); Jesús Longares Alonso, La ideología religiosa del liberalismo español, 1808–1843 (Córdoba: Real Academia de Córdoba, 1979); Enrique  A. Sanabria, Republicanism and Anticlerical Nationalism in Spain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 18. ​Folch, Aspectes de la desamortització, 45–51.

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

211

friars affected, but the cathedrals and the wealth that supported bishops and canons w ­ ere also secularized. Prior to the G ­ reat Disamortization, Spanish confiscations of the late eigh­ teenth and early nineteenth centuries exempted cathedrals, parish churches, and any religious establishment judged to be serving the public. Beginning with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, disamortization was a result of the confluence of several forces: fiscal needs of both the absolute monarchy and the liberal state; identification of the church, or at least of monasticism, as an oppressive survival of a previous age of superstition; and liberal economic enthusiasm for the circulation of money and property. Not only ­were church endowments not part of the land market, but they w ­ ere also perceived as inefficiently exploited. The Jesuit expulsion was something of a dress rehearsal for ­later confiscations. Of the 147 Spanish Jesuit communities and schools, twelve ­were in Catalonia. Their churches ­were turned over to cathedral chapters, their residences ­were used as seminaries to train priests, and their schools ­were given to other ­orders. The church retained physical buildings, but Jesuit land and most movable properties ­were auctioned off to benefit the government. The disposal of books and manuscripts was considerably more efficient than would be the case a­ fter f­ uture disamortizations and most ended up in cathedral or seminary libraries.19 State, and ultimately private, appropriation of monasteries was a consistent goal of progressive reformers. Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, the influential and long-­serving minister of Charles III, was the anonymous author of a treatise issued by the royal printing office on the right of the civil authority to prevent the church from obtaining excessive amounts of inalienable land. The Tratado de la regalía de amortización was published in 1765, just before the suppression of the Jesuits.20 “Liberals,” as they ­were known within the vocabulary and divisions of nineteenth-­century politics, wanted to reduce the personnel, worldly wealth, and superstitious trappings of the church. Basing their ideology on Enlightenment secularism and on the cap­i­tal­ist economics of the market, Liberals sought to bring Spain into closer contact with Eu­rope and modernity, with what their ecclesiastical enemies denounced as atheism and materialism. Eu­rope meant, in this context, rationality and the industrial revolution. With their jaundiced view of the church, the Liberals resembled ­those who justified enlightened absolutism in the eigh­teenth ­century, but they w ­ ere constitutionalist advocates of 19. ​Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Carlos III y la España de la Ilustración (Madrid: Alianza, 2005), 135– 41; Antón Pelayo, “The Secularization of Spanish Libraries,” 102–04. 20. ​Richard Herr, The Eigh­teenth ­Century Revolution in Spain (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1958), 18.

21 2 Chap t e r  7

a ­limited monarchy, a widened franchise, and a government that would promote economic growth. Liberalism did not automatically mean secularism, and while its doctrines ­were influenced by the French Revolution, the anticlerical and anti-­ecclesiastical sentiment of that upheaval was not at first of g­ reat interest. The growth of anticlericalism in Spain began ­later, in the years leading up to the 1835 disamortization. The church stood in the way of pro­g ress, it was asserted, by reason of its attachment to tradition, suppression of dissent (the Inquisition), and opposition to economic and social reform. It was sitting on vast, carelessly exploited properties for the benefit of legions of somnolent rentiers. A distinction was made between the parish clergy who responded to the spiritual needs of the populace, on the one hand, and monks, friars, and other recipients of church revenues who performed no tasks of any public utility, on the other. Disamortization started before 1835, but b­ ecause of the shifts in control among vari­ous parties and interests, the impact of the early actions was temporary. During the reign of Charles IV (1788–1808), the state occasionally attempted to appropriate ecclesiastical property.21 The period of French occupation saw an intensification of this effort. In 1809, Napoleon’s ­brother Joseph Bonaparte, the appointed king of Spain, ordered the suppression of monasteries and other pious communities along with the seizure of their assets, but ­there was not enough time to confiscate anything more than a relatively small number of books (eighteen-­to twenty-­thousand) before the French forces had to withdraw.22 More immediately, some libraries and archives w ­ ere damaged in the course of the war: Montserrat was burned by French troops in 1811, its entire library and archive lost; much of the ecclesiastical archive of Tarragona was destroyed in 1811 and 1813. The government of Joseph Napoleon was secular by nature and impelled to an anticlerical policy by the prominent role of ecclesiastics in resisting French forces at, for example, Saragossa and Girona. The Napoleonic disamortization proved to be militarily counterproductive as dispersing the clergy into the countryside made them all the more effective as crusade preachers against the godless occupiers.23 The departure of the French armies in 1813 and the fall of the three-­year Liberal government in 1823 meant the repeal of confiscatory legislation. More 21. ​Marta Friera Álvarez, La desamortización de la propiedad de la tierra en el tránsito del antiguo régimen al liberalismo: La desamortización de Carlos IV (Gijon: Caja Rural de Asturias 2007). 22. ​Joan Mercader, “La desamortización en la España de José Bonaparte,” Hispania 32 (1972): 587–616; Barraquer, Los religiosos en Cataluña, 1:25–498; Antón Pelayo, “The Secularization of Spanish Religious Libraries,” 105–06. 23. ​William J. Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 1750–1874 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 85–91.

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

213

consequential in terms of both ambition and permanence was the dissolution of monasteries and the seizure of their property ordered in 1835 by Toreno and Mendizábal. On the eve of the disamortizations, the church owned vast tracts of land that w ­ ere not, it is fair to say, being intensively exploited. Although a radical in his time, Voltaire summed up the views of many, especially a hundred years ­later, that the resources supporting monasteries, filled with men living off the rest of the society, should be redirected to hospitals, schools, factories, and local government centers.24 In the opinion of nineteenth-­century Liberals, many of whom would be buyers and sellers of the confiscated church properties, land that the church obtained from pious donations, royal grants, or other benefactions went to waste. Inefficient, corrupt, and traditionalist, the church, it was argued, had scant orga­nizational motive or ability to maximize the productivity of ­these parcels. Peasants ­were paying small, traditional dues, new agricultural technology was not being a­ dopted, and some land was left vacant—­all of this provoking the kind of market-­based ire against stability or small-­scale enterprises that has since become familiar and ubiquitous. Dues from peasant tenants provided much of the revenue of individual establishments such as Bellpuig, but ecclesiastical landlords w ­ ere not participating in a dynamic land market; they w ­ ere simply collecting rent without adding value. ­These justifications acted together: monasticism was both a survival of a superstitious age and a drag on the economy, the monks living off the disor­ ga­nized and inefficient ­labor of impoverished peasants. Their prayers w ­ ere no longer deemed useful to society. Sitting placidly on untapped wealth, monasteries ­were holding back efforts to reform and expand the Spanish economy. A typical satire from the period before 1835, Salvador Miñano Bedoya’s Po­liti­ cal Laments for a Poor ­Little Idler Accustomed to Live at Someone Else’s Expense sums up a prevailing attitude by its title. Priests collecting tithes w ­ ere bad enough, but at least they said mass, performed baptisms, and heard confessions, while monks and friars ­were completely useless, providing no public ser­vice in return for their comfortable maintenance.25 Although a faithful ally of the monarchy, the ancien régime church stood in the way of the consolidation and modernization of the Spanish royal government. 24. ​Flocel Sabaté, “Medieval Documentation and Archives in Catalonia ­after the 19th ­Century Upheavals,” in Identity and Loss of Historical Memory: The Destruction of Archives, ed. Igor Filippov and Flocel Sabaté (Bern: Peter Lang, 2017), 217. Published in Catalan as a short book: La dissort de la documentació medieval catalana (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2019). 25. ​Sanabria, Republicanism and Anticlerical Nationalism, 21. ­These arguments against the monasteries ­were hardly new and bear a close resemblance to t­ hose made at the time of the En­glish Dissolution—­for example, by Simon Fish, who in 1529 refers to “this greedy sort of sturdy, idle, holy thieves.” Simon Fish, A Supplication for the Beggars (London, 1878). I am grateful to Spencer Weinreich for this observation.

21 4 Chap t e r  7

Absolute in theory, the king’s power was l­imited in its practical exercise by difficulties of communication and enforcement in a mountainous landscape with a poor, largely rural population. Some Spanish rulers, notably Charles III (r. 1759– 1788), attempted to reform the stagnant economy and institutions of the country. None of the Bourbon kings, however, proposed to share power according to the demo­cratic theories that w ­ ere discussed among intellectuals of the Enlightenment, nor did they evince any interest in older ideas of privilege, autonomy, or exemption accorded in the M ­ iddle Ages to entities such as towns, guilds, military ­orders, and regional parliaments. The councils, tribunals, and laws of Catalonia had endured ­after the unification of Castile and Aragon at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and had stood fatally in the way of the plans of Philip IV and his minister Olivares at the time of the Catalan uprisings of 1640.26 The Catalan revolt followed de­cades of wrangling over desperate efforts by the king to extract money for his wars from the Catalans, who protected themselves from government levies and exactions, exercising ancient privileges allowing them to deliberate over, delay, and reject such efforts. That they w ­ ere ultimately driven to insurrection and that the uprising was crushed did not yet lead to the abolition of their corporate rights. Although Catalan support of the losing Austrian (Hapsburg) side in the Succession War was not linked to demands for greater autonomy—­Pierre Vilar remarked that at no time before or since did Catalonia more closely identify its interests with overall Spanish affairs—­the Bourbon victory did result in the abolition of traditional Catalan po­liti­cal liberties and institutions.27 The church, however, remained a­ fter 1714 an obstacle to the consolidation of royal power, not through any kind of po­liti­cal opposition but rather b­ ecause of its partial immunity from secular jurisdiction, the sway or at least influence of a foreign power (the papacy), and its substantial property holdings. An investigation of church archives undertaken by the monarchy in 1749–1756 was intended to take back into state control what­ever had been illegitimately or merely temporarily alienated. In some re­spects a historical proj­ect, the archival commission’s work, even before it was completed, encouraged the final negotiation of a concordat between the Spanish state and the papacy in 1753 by which the bishops w ­ ere more strictly controlled by the king as was the appointment of all other holders of church income (benefices).28 26. ​J. H. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain, 1598–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). 27. ​Pierre Vilar, La Cata­logne dans l’Espagne moderne: Recherches sur les fondaments économiques des structures nationales, vol. 1 (Paris: S. E. V. P. E. N, 1962), 670. 28. ​María Gloria Aparicio Valero, Regalismo borbónico e historia crítica. Las comisiones de archivos: Su recopilación documental (1749–1756) (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 2013). The activity of the

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

215

The concordat did not represent a radical change; it was more a recognition of real­ity, ­because the Spanish monarchs had always been able to exert exceptional sway over the church authorities, even at the height of the papal monarchy of the ­Middle Ages. The Spanish rulers had, ­after all, expanded the faith, pushing back the medieval Islamic frontier between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries and then extending the spirit of this “Reconquista” to the New World. Their accomplishments afforded them spiritual prestige convertible into po­liti­ cal power over the church.29 The check to the ­actual exercise of secular authority and appropriation of ecclesiastical income was due to inefficiency more than to legally enforced immunity. All this notwithstanding, the church retained possession of considerable amounts of land a­ fter 1753, a tempting target for the modern state administration, what­ever the personal piety of its rulers, whose ideology of centering power in the royal administration and whose desire for an efficient economy caused the royal circle to regard ecclesiastical privileges as archaic eco­nom­ically and unjustifiable po­liti­cally.30 The course of Spanish po­liti­cal ideology and government instability from 1808 to 1939 was the outgrowth of disruptions begun by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and perpetuated by social divisions: the residual sway of the church, the rights of workers and peasants, the growing power of an industrial elite, and the chronic weakness of national governments. In the context of early nineteenth-­century politics, the agenda and strug­gle ­were set by the opposition between Liberal and absolutist/traditional ideologies. Liberalism in Spain might mean a program of economic modernization and ­limited democracy, but the question of just how ­limited created divisions within the Liberals, many of whom wanted to rule as more of an oligarchy of the propertied classes than as a democracy subject to the demands of masses of disaffected workers. The tactical division is reflected in the fear of the populace felt by the upper classes and the leaders’ desire to mollify as well as manipulate opinion. The Liberal movement was supported by a commercial and manufacturing elite that wanted to take over church land and encourage cap­it­al­ist development but also keep order against revolutionary demands unleashed by their own attacks on absolutism. T ­ hese moderates (Moderados) ­were opposed by progressives (Progresistas), who w ­ ere confident of their archival commissioners in Catalonia is discussed on pages 535–62. On the concordat, see Isidro Martín, “En el segundo centenario del concordato español de 1753,” Revista Española de derecho canónico 8 (1953): 745–58. 29. ​Peter Linehan, The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth ­Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Domínguez Ortiz, Carlos III y la España de la Ilustración, 145. 30. ​Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 67–82.

21 6 Chap t e r  7

ability to leverage working-­class discontent to bring about calibrated radical change. Neither Liberal group was much interested in dethroning Catholicism’s official position as the established church and sole ­legal religion, but both tendencies ­were influenced by the German idealist phi­los­o­pher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832), who regarded God as an essence containing the universe, a pantheistic form of mono­the­ism. Through Spanish translations of Krause and his disciples, el Krausismo became even more popu­lar in Spain and Latin Amer­i­ca than in Germany. It gave Liberalism a rationale to oppose the claims of any par­tic­u­lar institution to channel the sacred.31 The Liberals formed their constitutional agenda during the Cortes (representative assembly) that met in the southern port city of Cádiz from 1810 to 1814 and ruled the part of Spain not occupied by Napoleon’s troops. Although its provisions ­were derogated by the return to power of the absolutist (or would-be absolutist) Ferdinand VII in 1814, the program of Cádiz served as the model for successive attempts to create a constitutional monarchy or republic. The Cortes took away the king’s power to act in­de­pen­dently in violation of the constitution that this meeting drew up. The parliamentary assembly would be elected by indirect but universal male suffrage and would function as a legislative power separated from the monarchy. Over the strenuous objection of the ecclesiastical representatives, the Cortes in 1813 abolished the Inquisition. A committee on the reform of the regular clergy (i.e., ­those who lived by a rule specific to their order, like monks or friars) prepared legislation that would have radically decreased the number of male monasteries to 60 and female convents to 350.32 ­These proposals ­were never put into effect as Napoleon’s defeat resulted in a return to royal absolutism. Nevertheless, the abortive plans of the Cortes of Cádiz, in contrast to mere tinkering by the ancien régime, envisaged for the first time mass closure of religious communities and the confiscation of their wealth for the benefit of the state, not necessarily to be spent on a reformed church. Along with many other announced intentions of the Liberal interlude of 1810–1814, this set an agenda for the f­ uture. King Ferdinand VII returned to power, determined to restore e­ very aspect of the prerevolutionary order, including the Inquisition, mendicant ­orders, and monasteries. “Religion has triumphed over impiety,” a preacher in Seville exulted; a Carmelite friar expressed thanks to the monarch: “We owe every­thing 31. ​Juan López-­Morillas, The Krausist Movement and Ideological Change in Spain, 1854–1874, trans. Frances M. López-­Morillas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 32. ​Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society, 101.

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

217

to Ferdinand. . . . ​Long live the King for the greater brilliance and splendor of the Catholic religion!”33 The reactionary king and his officials might pre­sent themselves as the protectors of the sacred heritage of Spain, but their financial needs encouraged them to appropriate church revenues. A special tax to be paid over six years was levied on the clergy in 1817. Notwithstanding this financial hy­poc­risy, what­ever past Liberal (in eighteenth-­ century parlance “Jansenist”) tendencies ­there might have been within the church, its leadership was at this point firmly in the camp of the monarch, its fortunes tied to resisting any form of secular democ­ratization. Even more than during the Enlightenment, nineteenth-­century modernizing forces identified the church with a benighted medieval past and with recent absolutism. A military coup by officers unhappy about the loss of the American colonies and the prospect of wasting more resources in futile New World expeditions brought about what is called the Liberal Triennial (1820–1823). The new government compelled King Ferdinand VII to acquiesce to a reworked constitution based on that of Cádiz, and among the regime’s first acts was the abolition of the Inquisition, followed by another expulsion of the Jesuits (who had been readmitted in 1814) and the sale of their property to aid public finances.34 Between 1820 and 1822 the Cortes decreed the suppression of all monasteries and priories, apart from eight deemed to be religiously and historically significant. Benedictine Montserrat and Cistercian Poblet w ­ ere the two Catalan foundations included in this small dossier of exceptions. The ecclesiastical properties that the state sold before the Liberals ­were overthrown in 1823 realized 700 million reales.35 The first violent anticlerical uprisings took place during the Liberal Triennial.36 The Franciscan h ­ ouse in Horta, now part of Barcelona, was burned by mobs angry at rumors that the friars w ­ ere hiding weapons and giving information to royalist agents. Villa­gers with a long history of grievances against the lordship of Poblet pillaged the officially sal­vaged but effectively abandoned monastery and burned the choir. The cathedral church of Solsona was plundered by a civilian mob in June 1823. The troops in charge of enforcing the confiscations w ­ ere even more violent. When Raimundo Strauch, the bishop 33. ​Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society, 110–11. 34. ​Manuel Revuelta González, “La supresión de la Compañia de Jesús en España en 1820,” Razón y Fe 182, nos. 170–171 (1970): 103–20. On the ecclesiastical policies of the Liberal Triennial, see Manuel Revuelta González, Política religiosa de los liberales del siglo XIX: Trienio constitucional (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1973); Antón Pelayo, “The Secularization of Spanish Religious Libraries,” 107–11. 35. ​Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society, 130. 36. ​Revuelta González, Política religiosa de los liberales, 53–120. On the effect of the Liberal Triennial on monasteries, see Barraquer, Los religosos en Cataluña, 1:499–1231.

21 8 Chap t e r   7

of Vic, was arrested for his supposedly absolutist views and executed in 1823, his body was left on the road for two days. Soldiers killed fifty priests from the diocese of Barcelona. ­These incidents w ­ ere dramatic evidence of anticlerical sentiment in Catalonia and undermined the position of liberal clergy who had supported reforms and the program of the Cortes of Cádiz. The greatest and now tragic figure of this modernizing movement within the church, the Catalan Fèlix Amat, bishop of Osma, reluctantly welcomed the second restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1823.37 Early that year, French forces invaded Spain with the tacit support of the Rus­sian czar, the Prus­sian king, and Prince Metternich, ruler of Austria. This “Holy Alliance” was determined to crush flare-­ups of revolutionary fervor. ­Under the Duke of Angoulême, an army calling itself the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis easily defeated the Liberal government, and King Ferdinand VII once again regained the throne. He renounced his ac­cep­tance of the constitutional regime of 1820 and reversed the monastic confiscations. In some cases, the repeal of disamortization extended to archival and library materials (if they had not already been dispersed or destroyed). For lands seized during the Liberal Triennial, restitution was only partial, and much of what the state had sold to private persons was irretrievable. The church was severely weakened in wealth and personnel. The decline in the number of clergy and ecclesiastical economic resources continued from 1823 to 1833, the last de­cade of traditionalist Spain. On the eve of the disamortization of 1835, t­ here w ­ ere between 2,500 and 3,000 Spanish religious communities, in which resided 30,900 monks, nuns, and other regular clergy. Before the beginning of the advent of the Liberals in 1820, ­there had been something like 34,000 regular clerics; the 1787 census counted about 50,000.38 In 1787 in Catalonia, 6,637 ­people (including servants) lived in 152 male monasteries and 39 female h ­ ouses. The largest density of religious communities was in Barcelona, where t­ here ­were 20 male convents (with 786 friars) and 18 female convents (378 nuns).39

37. ​Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society, 126–28. 38. ​Juan Sáez Marín, Datos sobre la Iglesia española contemporánea, 1768–1868 (Madrid: Editorial Nacional, 1975), 200; Revuelta González, La exclaustración (1833–1840), 14–22. On the position of Catalan and Aragonese Benedictine monasteries before and during the ­Great Disamortization, see Ernesto Zaragoza Pascual, “Estado de los monasterios benedictinos catalanes y aragoneses en 1835,” Studia monastica 34 (1992): 79–138; Montserrat Moli, “Les desamortitzacions a l’Alt Urgell,” Urgellia 20 (2019– 2021): 739–70. 39. ​Josep Iglésies, “La població monacal catalana l’any 1787 segons el cens de Floridablanca,” in II Col·loqui d’història del monaquisme català, San Joan de les Abadesses 1970, vol. 1 (Poblet: Abadia de Poblet,

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

219

Carlism The oscillation between Liberal and reactionary governments heightened tensions around the role of the church as the supporter of absolutism, inquisition, and all the practices of the ancien régime. For our purposes, the importance of the three Carlist wars (1833–1840, 1846–1849, 1872–1876) is their damaging effect on churches and their archives and libraries, directly as a result of prolonged warfare, but also indirectly as incitement for the fury of the urban population against the clergy who supported the rebellion.40 The destruction of churches (for example, the collegiate church of Àger, already turned into a military fortification and wrecked during the first Carlist insurrection) was stimulated by disamortization and the lethargy and incompetence of the moderate ele­ments of the government in suppressing the Carlists. Carlism amounted to more than simply dynastic factionalism. Even though Ferdinand VII seemed to have triumphed in 1823, Liberal opposition had not dis­appeared, and at the same time the reactionary ele­ments of both the church and the nobility mistrusted him as vacillating. The traditionalists demanded the restoration of the Inquisition, something Ferdinand put off without ever openly rejecting. The “Ultra” ele­ments regarded the king as a weak and unreliable compromiser and turned to his b­ rother Prince Charles/Carlos, the f­uture leader of the Carlist movement, a stubborn and overweening advocate for the restoration of church privileges and the extirpation of Liberalism. In Catalonia, the traditionalist movement in the rural, mountainous areas proclaimed its devotion to crown and church, but more generally its adherents opposed the disruptions of modernity. In a pattern that should not be so unfamiliar, the poor and working classes ­were divided by urban and rural as much as by what would seem to be class interests. The common e­ nemy of revolutionary radicals and reactionary Carlists was a bourgeoisie intent on monetizing l­abor and land, but ideas of how to oppose the corrosive influence of money, although both violent, differed. On the one hand, t­ here was 1970), 244–62; Ernesto Zaragoza Pascual, “Documentació inèdita oficial ran de la crema de convents de Barcelona els dies 25 i 26 de juliol de 1835,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 80 (2007): 141–56. 40. ​On the Carlist wars, see Jordi Canal, El Carlismo: Dos siglos de contrarrevolución en España (Madrid: Alianza, 2000); Antonio M. Moral Roncal, Las guerras carlistas (Madrid: Silex, 2006); José Carlos Clemente, Las guerras carlistas (Barcelona: Península, 1982). On the first war, see Carlos Canales, Primera guerra carlista (Madrid: Grupo Medusa, 2000); Mark Lawrence, Spain’s First Carlist War, 1833–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). On Carlism in Catalonia, see Josep Mundet Gifre, La primera guerra carlina a Catalunya: Història militar i política (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1990); Carlisme: Sis estudis fonamentals, ed. Jordi Canal et al. (Barcelona: L’Avenç, 1993); Pere Anguera, Déu, rei i fam. El primer carlisme a Catalunya (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1995); Manuel Santirso Rodríguez, Revolució liberal i guerra civil a Catalunya (1833–1840) (Lleida: Pagès, 1999); Robert Vallverdú i Martí, La Guerra dels Matiners a Catalunya (1846–1849): Una crisi econòmica i una revolta popu­lar (Barcelona: Abadia de Montseerrat, 2002).

22 0 Chap t e r  7

rustic Carlism, whose proponents ­were ultratraditionalists, and on the other, ­there ­were demo­cratic revolutionary workers in industry, especially textiles, whose egalitarian militancy took its cues from Eu­ro­pean syndicalism. Carlism might seem to have appealed to Catalan peasants b­ ecause of some naive faith in ecclesiastical and royal authority, but it was actually born of a more aggressive desperation at the erosion of peasant communities and their economic viability. Once they gained control over certain localities, Carlist peasants quickly discarded deference to the church and s­ topped paying tithes. They w ­ ere not so much opposed to disamortization as angered by the failure of the Liberal Triennial’s policies to benefit them since the seized monastic lands ­were auctioned off to bourgeois proprietors and speculators. Although it is not part of my mission to explain at length the origins of this peculiar and per­sis­tent movement, Carlism is best understood as an outgrowth of the failure of the Liberal agenda, of its partial and ultimately oligarchical reforms g­ oing back to the Cortes of Cádiz that whittled away at absolutism and seigneurial rights, but for the benefit of capitalism. Eventually, the grandees of the countryside, the ­great landlords, would give up their antique (“feudal”) rights in f­avor of modern private proprietorship, creating an undifferentiated upper class united against the interests of workers and peasants and no longer dependent on an effective monarchy.41 In Spanish politics ­there was not a ­simple binary division between a monolithic Liberal and Conservative bloc. In the complicated po­liti­cal maneuverings of the 1830s and 1840s, the Liberal Moderados considered themselves cautiously reasonable, as their designation implies, and their priority was to keep down the revolutionary ardor of the lower ­orders. The progressives ­were willing to use anticlericalism to stir up the public and deflect attention from an agenda of cap­it­ al­ist expansion similar to that of the moderates. The first Carlist war strengthened the Liberal belief that the church was a reactionary force impeding secular advancement. The death of Ferdinand VII left his infant ­daughter Isabella II as queen with her m ­ other Maria Cristina as regent. Contesting the right of a w ­ oman to inherit the royal title, Ferdinand’s ­brother Charles claimed the throne as Charles V. His partisans, the Carlists, ­were opposed by the pro-­government Cristinos, named ­after the regent Maria Cristina, fourth wife of Ferdinand VII. The Carlists presented themselves as legitimists, not only dynastically but as defenders of religion and the monarchy against the Liberals’ demands for demo­cratic and secularizing reform first articulated during the Napoleonic upheaval and the Cortes of Cádiz. Given the impoverishment of the Carlist ter41. ​Josep Fontana, La crisis del antiguo régimen, 1808–1833 (Barcelona: Crítica, 1979), 46–49.

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

221

ritories and the disparity between the size of its army and that of the government, it is surprising how long the rebellion went on.42 What government spokesmen initially dismissed as mere “factionalism” resisted eradication and at times threatened to take over major cities like Bilbao and even Madrid. Replete with atrocities, deprivation, and considerable civilian loss, the war caused the deaths of around one hundred thousand ­people and the dislocation of Spanish rural society over the long term. Equally surprising is the inability of the government to extirpate Carlism even a­ fter the apparent capitulation in 1840. The second Carlist war of 1846– 1849 was ­limited to Catalonia while the third (1872–1876) was more widespread. Despite three official defeats, the movement would remain intact, capable of offering significant support to Franco and the Nationalist forces in 1936–1939.43 One of the reasons for the inconsistent and incompetent prosecution of the war on the side of the Cristino Regency government was the fear of the populace, whose militance was increased by the openly hierarchical program of the Carlists, their atrocities and reported atrocities, and the support they received from the church. The Progresistas advocated the radical secularizing parts of the Liberal program and wanted to wage the Carlist war vigorously. The Moderados, however, feared the radical populace as much as they did the Carlist rebellion. Neither did the Carlists form a unified or ideological easy-­to-­describe movement representing a return to royal absolutism and church jurisdiction. The centers of Carlism in the first war w ­ ere Navarre and the Basque country, regions historically opposed to absolutism and not particularly dominated by cathedrals or monastic establishments. ­Here Carlism was perceived as a defense of a traditional socioeconomic system in which small-­scale agriculture benefited peasants in territories where landlords and clergy w ­ ere not absentee or privileged with a radically dif­fer­ent way of life. The Basques and Navarrese feared both the Liberal and Bourbon programs of uniformity that would put an end to their regional customary privileges.44 The other two centers of Carlism—­the northern mountains of Catalonia and the equally rugged and even poorer border between Aragon and Valencia, especially the Maestrazgo—­conformed more to an alliance of seigneurial 42. ​Josep Fontana, La revolució liberal a Catalunya (Vic: Eumo, 2003), 22. The government had a permanently active force of two hundred thousand and the Carlists never fielded more than seventy thousand or eighty thousand troops. 43. ​On the ­later Carlist movement in Catalonia, see Pere Anguera, El Carlisme a Catalunya (1827– 1936) (Barcelona: Empúries, 1999), 49–127. 44. ​John F. Coverdale, The Basque Phase of Spain’s First Carlist War (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1984), 294–308.

22 2 Chap t e r  7

and ecclesiastical tradition. ­These areas shared a sense of dispossession as the countryside was already being abandoned. The growth of cities, disinvestment in traditional forms of land tenure, and erosion of protections over common property destroyed a world that a poor, inefficient but stable system had previously guaranteed. A constitutional and ideological strug­gle formed, therefore—­a background to the disamortization of 1835—­and it was brought forward into increasingly violent anticlericalism by the reactionary subversion of Carlism. Part of the justification for the 1835 disamortization was the need to raise additional funds to fight the Carlists. Beyond this immediate crisis, religious antipathy could be used as a po­liti­cal weapon. Spain suffered a cholera epidemic from 1832 to 1834, and a mea­sure of the separation between the warring groups is that Carlist preachers attributed the disease to God’s wrath at Spain’s embrace of atheism, while the pestilence was used as an occasion for vio­lence on the left in July 1834. That summer, as cholera raged through Madrid, rumors swirled accusing the Jesuits of poisoning the w ­ ater supply and creating the epidemic. The result was attacks not only on Jesuits (who ­were yet again expelled) but on other ­orders as well, and seventy-­eight members of the clergy ­were murdered. The renewal of violent popu­lar anticlericalism was fanned by Liberal agents and speeches. Many of the Catholic religious o ­ rders embraced Carlism. What­ever the ­actual ideas and conduct of the clergy, the Liberals blamed the poor showing of the Cristino army on the church treacherously allied with and inspiring Carlism. From the point of view of moderate Liberal leaders, denunciation of the church was better than attacks on factories, estates, and other secular properties, a diversion of popu­lar anger, and also an opportunity for economic aggrandizement.

The Disamortization of 1835 Urban anticlerical vio­lence broke out throughout Catalonia in the summer of 1835, with especially murderous attacks in Reus, a rapidly industrializing city, on July 22. Riots in Barcelona began on July 25, 1835. A bullfight in the working-­ class port neighborhood of Barceloneta turned violent a­ fter the bulls proved too timid to give much sport. The disorder turned into an anticlerical demonstration. The church could hardly be blamed for the dispirited bulls, but anticlericalism was now an instinct, an endemic resentment, perhaps in this case aided by a symbolic association of the celibate clergy with a lack of virility. On the other hand, a component of antipathy ­toward the clerics through the

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

223

ages was their failure to live up to the vows of celibacy and their supposed lustful escapades. What­ever the motives for rage, the result of two days of rioting was the burning and complete destruction of five of the forty-­three religious ­houses in the city and the deaths of thirteen clerics.45 As a popu­lar Catalan song recalled: Van sortir set toros, tots van ser dolents. Això fou la causa de cremar els convents! (Seven bulls came out; all ­were bad. That was the reason why the convents ­were burned.)46 Reaction to this destruction on the part of the well-­off and governing classes was one of phlegmatic indifference. The implicit Liberal consensus was that anticlerical vio­lence was an unfortunate but, in some sense, useful outlet for popu­lar rage. Eventually the burned convents ­were replaced by civic proj­ects such as the Liceu opera ­house on the Ramblas, where the Discalced Trinitarian ­house had stood; the Boqueria market near the Liceu, the site of the Discalced Trinitarians; and the Santa Caterina market, replacing a destroyed Dominican convent. Threats that the mob made to factories, on the other hand, ­were regarded as serious and frightening. The burning of the Bonaplata cotton mill in the summer of 1835 was considerably more troubling than the ordeals of rural monasteries or urban convents.47 The first official part of the disamortization was enacted in October 1835, but before this date, anticlerical sentiment and collateral damage from the first Carlist war ruined the greatest Catalan monastery, Ripoll, and destroyed its archive. Burial place for many of the counts of Barcelona and possessor of one of the greatest libraries and archives of Catalonia, Ripoll was burned and pillaged in August 1835 by six hundred troops supporting the Liberal regime who accused the monks of collaboration with the Carlists. The monastery’s library had already sustained some notable losses: the eleventh-­century Bible of Sant Pere de Rodes had been plundered by French troops during the Revolt of the Catalans and bought by King Louis XV (it remains in Paris). The Napoleonic Wars also had deleterious effects, among other losses was the index to Ripoll’s hundreds of manuscripts. In addition to the main archive, the monastery possessed as many as fifteen other separate repositories 45. ​Zaragoza Pascual, “Documentació inèdita oficial,” 141–56. 46. ​Jordi Albertí i Oriol, El silenci de les campanes: De l’anticlericalisme del segle XIX a la persecució religiosa durant la guerra civil a Catalunya (Barcelona: Proa, 2007), 48. 47. ​Fontana, La revolució liberal, 39–43.

22 4 Chap t e r  7

belonging to vari­ous offices and benefices, each with its own key and run by a dif­fer­ent member of the community, as the monastery’s last archivist Roc d’Olzinelles (1784–1835) lamented.48 Olzinelles had or­ga­nized the archives, and in 1816, José de la Canal, continuator of España Sagrada ­after the death of its first director, Henrique Flórez, found ­things in good order. During the Liberal regime of 1820–1823, Ripoll’s archives and library w ­ ere transferred to the Archive of the Crown of Aragon. Three hundred eigh­teen manuscript codices and twenty boxes of archival material w ­ ere brought to Barcelona in four carts on a journey lasting six days. With the overthrow of the Liberal regime by the French invasion, the material was ordered to be returned to Ripoll, but the archivist of the Crown of Aragon, Pròsper de Bofarull, persuaded the monastic community to allow the manuscripts to be kept at the church of Sant Pau del Camp in Barcelona in order for them to be rebound. This was fortunate b­ ecause they ­were still ­there in August 1835.49 Most of the archival material, on the other hand, was incinerated, including six cartularies. Seven boxes of parchments and papers w ­ ere gathered up in the ruins and sent to the Archive of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona. Roc d’Olzinelles hid in the town of Ripoll for three days and then escaped across the French border to the village of Osseja, where he died two months l­ater. He never recovered from the shock of the fire, the murders and pillaging that accompanied it, or the destruction of the monastery’s archive.50 The disamortization order of October 1835 closed all but a few historically impor­tant monasteries. This was relatively easy to put into effect in Catalonia ­because, as happened at Bellpuig, the arson and murders of the summer caused most of the regular clergy to flee and so their convents ­were empty.51 Female religious ­houses with more than twenty residents ­were exempted from the disamortization. Some other exceptions to the order of closure and confiscation included major establishments such as the Escorial Palace with its Hieronymite friars and Cistercian Poblet in Catalonia. Their reprieve was short, however, as decrees in February and March 1836 closed all of the male religious communities, this time with the exceptions only of h ­ ouses maintained by teaching and missionary ­orders. Once again, the property of the suppressed 48. ​Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Diplomatari del Monestir de Ripoll (segles IX–­X), vol. 1 (Vic: Arxiu Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic, 2015), 28. On Roc d’Olzinelles, see Fèlix Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crítico de los escritores catalans, y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura de Cataluña (Barcelona: J. Verdeguer, 1836), 452–54. 49. ​On the destruction of Ripoll, see Barraquer, Los religiosos en Cataluñya, vol. 3 (Barcelona: F. J. Altés y Alabart, 1915), 197–211; José María Pellicer y Pagés, Santa María del Monasterio de Ripoll (Mataró: Feliciano Horta, 1888), 254–63. 50. ​Ordeig, Diplomatari del monestir de Ripoll, 1:35–36. 51. ​Folch, Aspectes de la desamortització, 17–19.

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

225

institutions was to be put up for sale to benefit the state. By 1839, fifteen thousand separate tracts of land had been sold at auction.52 Although the confiscated monasteries held much of Catalonia’s artistic patrimony, few contemporaries ­were preoccupied with what, with reference to the twentieth c­ entury, Jordi Albertí i Oriol refers to as “the silence of the bells” (el silenci de les campanes), the destruction of churches, and the suppression of worship.53 For the nineteenth c­ entury, parish churches ­were unaffected and even the most radical advocates of disamortization had no plans to bring about a fully secular order. As they saw it, the elimination of monasteries was an overdue break with of the feudal past that would benefit the state trea­sury and the economy. The fact that the state did not actually gain all that much was simply a part of ­doing business in that era.

­After the ­Great Disamortization The o ­ rders of dissolution w ­ ere accompanied by justifications that denounced the monasteries as spiritually “useless and unnecessary,” their vast, dilapidated properties prejudicial to the kingdom and “the public con­ve­nience.” The confiscations would “increase the resources of the state and open new sources of wealth.”54 The financial rationale was extended to seizures of the property of the secular clergy in 1841. Even though the Liberals praised the work of the parish priests as opposed to the parasitism of the monastic and mendicant ­orders, the exigencies of state finances and the disparity between the wealth of the bishops and canons and the poverty of the ordinary priests induced the Cortes to expand expropriation without much opposition. It has been estimated that as of 1844 when the fall of General Espartero replaced the radical policies of the Progresistas with the temporizing of the Moderados, 62 ­percent of the wealth of the secular clergy had been sold. This would have no direct impact on cathedral or other nonmonastic ecclesiastical archives and libraries, but it is a sign of the weakening of the church and the diminution of its resources.55 Both Liberal factions agreed on disamortization, and this was, in effect, a litmus test of adherence to an agenda of pro­g ress versus attachment to the ancien régime. Beginning in the 1840s, however, the Moderados attempted a rapprochement with the church, which they regarded as a stabilizing force 52. ​Simón Segura, La desamortización, 110. 53. ​Albertí, El silenci de les campanes, 17–56. 54. ​Callahan, Church, Politics and Society, 160. 55. ​Simón Segura, La desamortización, 163.

22 6 Chap t e r  7

against radicalism.56 They w ­ ere happy to allow it to continue to supervise education, and the Moderados reiterated that Spain was a Catholic nation.57 As long as the Moderados ruled, between 1844 and the revolution of 1868, arrangements between the state and the church, while leaving ele­ments of the latter unsatisfied, ­were sufficiently ameliorated so that the papacy was mollified. A concordat between Spain and the curia of Pope Pius IX in 1851 meant that the pope accepted the sale of church property and state control over the appointment of bishops. The Spanish authorities agreed to pay for the maintenance of the secular clergy and the upkeep of parish and cathedral churches. Catholicism would remain the only legally recognized religion, and promises ­were made about readmitting o ­ rders of monks and friars. By 1860 t­ here was a rather small number of regular (i.e., monastic) male clergy, 1,683 for all of Spain, apparently.58 Another revolution in 1868 drove out Queen Isabella, briefly replacing her with Amadeo, a member of the Italian House of Savoy (rulers of the new Kingdom of Italy). But a­ fter he proved unsatisfactory, the Progresista wing found the nerve to proclaim an ­actual republic. The familiar anti-­clerical Progresista agenda was revived: the Jesuits ­were expelled, and other ­orders ­were suppressed, including nuns, even ­those involved in teaching and nursing. More radical was recognition of the legitimacy of other faiths, in effect the disestablishment of Catholicism. This had an effect on marriage, which could now be performed as a civil rather than religious ceremony. Some attacks on the clergy took place, although not as violent as in 1835. In radical cities like Cádiz, streets commemorating saints and bishops ­were renamed ­after Voltaire, Garibaldi, Lincoln, and Juárez.59 The situation was further confused by the eruption of the third Carlist war in 1872. The republic lasted for only a year, from 1873 to 1874, and was replaced by a restoration of the Bourbons and a relatively durable regime of conservatives established by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who would serve six terms as prime minister before being assassinated in 1897. The church in this era benefited from shedding the expenses and responsibilities of the ancien régime network of monasteries and the princely power previously enjoyed by its bishops. ­There was an upsurge in piety, quite marked in Catalonia, and more attention was given to parishes, religious education, and the publication of 56. ​Nancy Rosenblatt, “Church and State in Spain: A Study of Moderate Liberal Politics in 1845,” Catholic Historical Review 62 (1976): 589–603. 57. ​Josep Maria Fradera, Cultura nacional en una societat dividida: Patriotisme i cultura a Catalunya (1838–1868) (Barcelona: Curial, 1992), 269–71. 58. ​Callahan, Church, Politics and Society, 194. 59. ​Callahan, Church, Politics and Society, 265.

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

227

devotional works. The finances of the church rested on more reliable sources from private devout donors than the skimpy, intermittent money stream of the government. The church did not see its situation as advantageous, however, bemoaning the greed, rationalism, and atheism rampant in the modern world. A few fringe ele­ments aside, however, the church did not join the lost cause of traditionalism represented by Carlism. In the late nineteenth ­century, fervent piety and clerical activity produced many Catalan saints, educators, and distinguished bishops. Priests and bishops ­were supported financially by the state, but at the parish level inadequately. Monastic and other religious o ­ rders ­were allowed to be reestablished, but the state refused to pay anything to aid them. The church increasingly relied on urban elites, whose wealth grew exponentially despite the po­liti­cal trou­bles of the period. Catalonia in the de­cades between 1870 and 1930 witnessed si­ mul­ta­neously po­liti­cal chaos, a romantic and cultural revival, and yet on a mass scale, a per­sis­tent indifference to the material vestiges of the past. The Catalan cultural revival was advanced by representatives and allies of the Catholic Church. The epitome of conservative Catalan nationalism was Bishop Torras i Bages’s La tradició catalana, published in 1882, which condemned the liberal, secular order for uniformity, industrialization, and the consequent undermining of rural Catholic tradition.60 The church agenda joined the defense of Catalonia with the protection and revival of traditional ­family life and the Catholic faith. This viewpoint was reflected in cele­brations of the thousand-­year anniversary of the foundation of Montserrat in 1881 and the restoration of Ripoll, which began in 1886. The late nineteenth ­century also saw the birth and spread of excursionisme, a cultural and athletic form of tourism that adapted the physical fitness youth movements of Britain and Germany to the cultural landscape of Catalonia, whose mountains ­were (and still are) full of deserted villages, churches, and ­castles, vestiges of the density of ninth-­and tenth-­century populations before the Christian conquest of the more fertile pre-­Pyrenean plains.61 The paradox is that this period of renewed national and religious consciousness coincided with such acts of cultural vandalism as the stripping of the tombs of the Cabrera counts of Urgell from Bellpuig, the sale of the frescoes of the abbey church of Mur to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (in 1921), and the continued despoliation of medieval documentation.

60. ​Josep Torras y Bages, La tradició catalana, 3rd ed., in Obres completes de Il·lm. Sr. Dr. D. Josep Torras y Bages, vol. 4 (Barcelona: Editorial Ibérica, 1913). 61. ​Francesc Roma i Casanovas, L’excursionisme a Catalunya 1876–1939 (Barcelona: Bubok, 2009), 1–67.

22 8 Chap t e r  7

The Semana Trágica Even having deprived the church of much of its wealth to their own benefit, moderate Liberals ­were not seeking to abolish religion and they generally practiced Catholicism, but the more radical forces regarded the church as the leading proponent and bulwark of reaction and social injustice. ­Every popu­ lar uprising against the ­owners of factories, landlords, the military, or the state involved attacks on the church. The so-­called Semana Trágica (Tragic Week) of 1909 in Barcelona is the most dramatic example of anti-­ecclesiastical furor between the Bourbon restoration of 1874 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.62 As had happened with the 1820 uprising, this was a response to military conscription and plans to fight a foreign war—in this case, in Morocco. Protests against the military campaign quickly turned into vio­lence against Barcelona’s churches, convents, and other religious communities. A general strike was called beginning on July 26. Agitation was directed against po­liti­cal and business leaders, but the only buildings destroyed in popu­lar demonstrations w ­ ere churches. On August 2, the general strike ended. Before that, for the first time, all ecclesiastical buildings, rather than just monastic or other communities of regular clergy, ­were targets. Of the fifty-­eight parish churches in Barcelona, fourteen w ­ ere burned, along with thirty convents and thirty-­ three religious schools.63 The intensified interaction of re­sis­tance to military conscription with popu­ lar revolution arose from the aftermath of the Spanish-­American War of 1898, whose immediate effect was the loss of almost all vestiges of Spain’s overseas empire, specifically Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Agitation against the church was advanced as a form of national regeneration ­after the humiliation of 1898, a program that attracted not just workers but modernizing ele­ ments of the Castilian and Catalan bourgeoisie who w ­ ere not attached to the agenda of Catalan identity linked to its medieval and Catholic past.64 As Alejan62. ​The classic English-­language work on the Semana Trágica is Joan Connelly Ullman, The Tragic Week: A Study of Anti-­clericalism in Spain, 1875–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Sanabria, Republicanism and Anticlerical Nationalism, takes issue with Ullman’s assertion that anticlericalism was a way for liberal republicans to channel aggression away from the r­ eally power­f ul po­liti­cal and economic interests, arguing that antipathy to the church was not a sideshow but rather a key part of the socially radical form of nationalism. The relation between anticlerical and nationalistic sentiment has been examined by José Álvarez Junco, “Los intelectuales: Anticlericalismo y republicanismo,” in Los orígenes culturales de la II Republica, ed. José Luis García Delgado (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España, 1993), 101–26. On the intellectual background and implications of radical laicism, see Dolors Marín, La Semana trágica: Barcelona en llamas, la revuelta popu­lar y la Escuela Moderna (Barcelona: Esfera de los Libros, 2009). 63. ​Alberti, El silenci de les campanes, 46. 64. ​Sanabria, Republicanism and Anticlerical Nationalism, 152.

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

229

dro Lerroux, the charismatic leader of the Radical Republican Party, put it, a “de­cadent and miserable civilization” could be purified only by a fire that would destroy its ­temples.65 Lerroux was not actually pre­sent in Barcelona at the outbreak of the events of the Tragic Week, which was led, insofar as t­ here w ­ ere any vis­i­ble leaders, by members of anarchist groups. The military seems not to have intervened to prevent or put out fires, however, and the Radical Republicans, while blaming the anarchists, ­were hardly discomfited by vio­lence targeted at what they had already identified as a chief obstacle to the advancement of the nation. ­After the Semana Trágica, violent opposition to the church and a willingness to take direct action against its property informed the progressive agenda, as would become clear in the 1930s. The church had become the symbol and manifestation of reaction. The churches ruined in 1909 ­were, for the most part, not ­those with large libraries or archives containing medieval material. Many ­were teaching institutions or religious communities established in the early modern centuries of Hapsburg and Bourbon rule. Neither ­were riots particularly destructive outside Barcelona, although convents w ­ ere burned in Manresa, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Granollers, Badalona, and Sabadell.

The Spanish Civil War The uprising against the Spanish Republic by ele­ments of the army ­under General Francisco Franco began on July 17, 1936, and, of course, proved to be more cataclysmic than any of the vio­lence of the nineteenth c­ entury. In Catalonia, the response of much of the rural as well as urban population to Franco’s coup was a mobilization in support of the threatened (and ultimately doomed) republic, accompanied by attacks on clerics, churches, and other individuals and institutions regarded as treasonous and in collaboration with the counterrevolution. In Republican Spain, almost 7,000 members of the clergy ­were murdered—12 bishops, 283 nuns, 4,184 priests, and 2,365 monks. The attacks w ­ ere particularly violent in Catalonia; for example, 65.8 ­percent of all the priests in the diocese of Lleida ­were assassinated.66 Among ecclesiastical libraries, the cathedral of Cuenca in Castile suffered the worst loss from fire: ten thousand books and manuscripts.67 In Catalonia, 65. ​Alberti, El silenci de les campanes, 41–42. 66. ​Julio de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution, National Tradition and Revolution: On Atrocities Against the Clergy during the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of Con­temporary History 33 (1998): 355. 67. ​Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 269.

23 0 Chap t e r  7

the regional government actively and heroically sought to protect its artistic and documentary patrimony from destruction at the hands of the revolutionary populace and l­ ater from the effects of war, but only two ecclesiastical sites in Barcelona—­its cathedral and the monastery of Pedralbes—­were actually cordoned off. About seven thousand religious buildings in Catalonia w ­ ere sacked and entirely or partially destroyed. O ­ thers ­were put to use as stables, garages, hospitals, markets, or ware­houses.68 In Barcelona, seventeen parish churches ­were burned along with an additional twenty-­four outside the city but within the diocese of Barcelona.69 Parish, municipal, and notarial archives suffered the most damage. Local archives recorded property transactions such as land sales and other proofs of title and so ­were seen as pillars of the bourgeois regime of land exploitation. Notarial archives preserving transactions often ­going back as far as the thirteenth ­century ­were burned, for example, at Falset (comarca of Priorat), Gandesa (Terra Alta), Granollers (Vallès Oriental), and Puigcerdà (Cerdanya).70 Parish archives held not only rec­ords of births, deaths, and marriages but also ­wills and property transactions, including ­those of the earliest centuries of Christian rule, since the parish functioned as a local repository for documentation. Only 15 ­percent of parish archives in the diocese of Barcelona survived the war intact; 45  ­percent ­were completely wiped out.71 Within the province of Tarragona, forty-­six parish archives w ­ ere totally destroyed.72 In the diocese of Vic, twenty-­nine parish archives w ­ ere burned, forty-­four w ­ ere pillaged, and seventy-­five ­were damaged. The ecclesiastical furnishings destroyed included 57 reliquaries, 47 organs, and 358 altars and altar frontals.73 The murder of clergy and the destruction of churches and their contents ­were publicized by Nationalist forces to justify the notion that General Franco was leading a “crusade” against atheism and communism. Given the Franco regime’s propaganda, it is understandable that for con­temporary observers and subsequent historians sympathetic to the Spanish Republic, the damage to churches was unimportant or a by-­product of the just indignation of the populace. In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell describes the heady atmosphere 68. ​Oriol Casellas i Domènech, “El Bisbat de Vic durant la Guerra Civil,” Ausa 28, núm. 181–182 (2018): 717–18. 69. ​Josep M. Martí Bonet, El martiri dels t­emples a la diòcesi de Barcelona (1936–1939) (Barcelona: Arxiu Diocesà de Barcelona, 2008), 81–96. 70. ​Sabaté, “Medieval Documentation and Archives in Catalonia,” 246. 71. ​Martí Bonet, El martiri dels t­ emples, 95–96. 72. ​Josep M. T. Grau and Manel Güell, “La crònica negra de la destrucció d’arxius a la demarcació de Tarragona,” Lligall 18 (2001): 65–120. 73. ​Caselles i Domènech, “El Bisbat de Vic durant la Guerra Civil,” 715.

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

231

of Barcelona when he arrived in December 1936, a city actually being ruled by the ­people: “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the ­saddle.” ­There was no tipping; even shoe shiners used the informal form of address “tu” or even more fraternal “comrade.” Orwell refers to churches “­here and ­there” being demolished, but this receives no more attention than the omnipresence of the red-­and-­black anarchist flag.74 The reaction of the general public seems to have been more indifference than excitement.75 Attacks on churches, their decoration, archives, and personnel ceased a­ fter the summer of 1936. The Catalan Generalitat undertook to protect what remained of the ecclesiastical art and documentation of the nation and created concentrations of archival materials threatened with further destruction. An “Arxiu Històric General de Catalunya” assembled rec­ords from Barcelona and its surrounding territory. Similar centralized repositories ­were established at Girona, Tarragona, Reus, Tortosa, Vic, Manresa, Lleida, and Tremp. Two additional “Arxius de Protecció” ­were set up at the abandoned monastery of Poblet and at a large h ­ ouse in Viladrau (Osona). The historian Agustí Duran i Sanpere (1887–1975), appointed head of the Archival Section of the “Servei de Patrimoni Històric, Artístic i Científic” of the Generalitat, was responsible for moving im­mense piles of documents to safe places and then dealing with the consequences of bombardment and the eventual victory of the Nationalist forces.76 Some ecclesiastical archives, as at Barcelona, ­were moved into ­these centers. Elsewhere, as at Vic, the documents w ­ ere allowed to stay in church buildings. Placed in charge of Vic, Josep Maria Font Rius (1915–2018), who would ­later become a g­ reat historian of medieval law and institutions, found in the summer of 1937 in the partially burned archive of the bishop (Arxiu de la Mensa Episcopal) many parchments that had curled up into stiff cylinders from the flames, scorched on their outsides so that, as he recollected, they resembled baked cannelloni. U ­ nder his direction, materials from the cathedral and other archives of the region ­were stored in the episcopal palace adjoining the cloister, and l­ater in rooms below the ecclesiastical complex.77

74. ​George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), 4. 75. ​Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 270. 76. ​Jaume Enric Zamora i Escalà, “El salvament dels arxius catalans durant la Guerra Civil espanyola (1936–1939),” Lligall 16 (2000): 85–151 (primarily an account of Duran i Sanpere’s activities). 77. ​Jaume Enric Zamora i Escalà, “Josep Maria Font i Rius i el salvament dels arxius de Vic durant la Guerra Civil Espanyola,” Ausa 17, no. 138 (1997): 279.

23 2 Chap t e r  7

Neglect Destructive though they w ­ ere, wars and po­liti­cal uprisings w ­ ere not the only reasons for the loss and dispersal of books and rec­ords. U ­ nder the rubric of neglect figure losses from misappropriation as well as accident. Negligence or inattention can accompany or succeed events such as war or confiscation, but some loss of documentation was, in fact, the result of what seems like pure indifference. The rec­ords of the monasteries of Poblet, Santes Creus, and Escaladei ­were taken in 1838 to Tarragona, the capital of the province. The director of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona, Pròsper de Bofarull, had already sal­vaged a considerable amount of monastic documentation, including what remains of Ripoll’s manuscripts, but he was not able to have t­ hese rec­ords transferred. Part of the difficulty was their sheer quantity, making it impossible, given the resources available, to separate out ­those rec­ords potentially relevant for determining current land claims, bound­aries, and revenues from ­those of purely historical interest. This was a universal prob­lem but one exacerbated by the size of ­these par­tic­u­lar holdings. Every­one agreed that historical material should go to some kind of permanent repository, but scanty revenue and expertise, and above all lack of resolve or attention by the authorities, made for scenes such as the piling up for years of the Cistercian and Carthusian monasteries’ rec­ords in the central courtyard of the customs ­house of Tarragona.78 Neglect made pos­si­ble the theft of medieval rec­ords. Some, such as illuminated manuscripts, had a high and obvious value. Long before the confiscations of the nineteenth ­century, power­ful collectors like the Count-­Duke Olivares or the French scholar-­administrators Pierre de Marca and Étienne Baluze appropriated manuscripts for themselves or for libraries outside Catalonia.79 Even before 1835, ­there was a substantial trade in Spanish manuscripts and books with London as the point of collection and sale.80 Often the Spanish intermediaries ­were experts in bibliography with Liberal sympathies, including Jaime de Villanueva, who applied the results of his “literary voyages” to Catalan ecclesiastical archives and libraries to help implement the disamortization of the Liberal Triennial and died in 1824 while residing in London. 78. ​Eduard Toda i Güell, La destrucció de Poblet, 1800–1900 (Sant Boi de Llobregat: Pompeu Vidal, 1935). 79. ​Mathias M. Tischler, “From Disorder to Order: The Scientific Challenge of Early Medieval Catalonia for Twenty-­First ­Century Medieval Studies,” in Disorder: Expressions of an Amorphous Phenomenon in ­Human History. Essays in Honour of Gert Melville (Münster: Aschendorff, 2020), 98–100. 80. ​For what follows, see Joan Josep Pons López, “Fons libraris i documentals secularitzats durant les desamortitzacions del segle XIX a Catalunya: Creació del sistema bibliotecari, pèrdua, comerç i col·lecionisme del llibre” (master’s thesis, University of Barcelona, Facultat de Biblioteconomia i Documentació, 2018), 100–116.

Di sa m o rt i z at i o n , War , a n d N eg l ec t

233

Bartolomé José Galliardo was another radical bibliophile, author of a cata­log of rare Spanish books, who dealt in antiquarian books from London. En­glish collectors also relied on Vicente Salvá Pérez, who opened bookstores in Paris and London in the aftermath of the restoration of absolutism in 1823, supplying books to the British Museum and to En­glish dealers such as Bernard Quaritch. The disamortization of 1835 thus quickened the flow of books and manuscripts to other countries. The upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also displaced and moved written materials that ­were often rather ordinary. Georgetown University has a collection of 289 Catalan rec­ords dated from 1261 to 1690 involving land and ecclesiastical administration. Most of them concern transactions in Montorroell, the site of a ­castle that belonged to the lords of Lluçà, a ­little to the north of Vic (Osona). The parchments come from the archive of an urban f­ amily of notables called Sala. The collection was acquired by the confessor to the Carlist claimant in the third Carlist war and supposedly bequeathed to Herman Scheuch, the American consul in Barcelona from 1874 to 1892. Herman’s son Frederick Scheuch, a professor of modern languages at the University of Montana, gave the documents to that university’s library, although he withheld at least sixteen, which he traded with another collector for unspecified “other antiquities,” and t­ hese ­were acquired by the Smithsonian Museum. The University of Montana did nothing with the documents, and Lewis G. Evans, grand­son of Herman Scheuch, reclaimed them to donate to Georgetown in 1957, which also forgot about them u ­ ntil an undergraduate student, Joseph Gwara Jr., discovered and described them in the early 1980s.81 Forgetfulness and informal appropriation w ­ ere common in Spain ­until rather recently. It was not unusual for scholars to take manuscripts and archival documents home to study at their con­ve­nience. The leading expert on Santes Creus, Eufemià Fort i Cogull (1908–1979), and the demographic historian Josep Iglésias i Fort (1902–1986) had at the time of their deaths considerable numbers of archival rec­ords in their personal possession.82 Parchments from Sant Llorenç del Munt entered the Archive of the Crown of Aragon in a relatively orderly fashion in 1845. At some point in the late nineteenth or early twentieth c­ entury, however, some seem to have been taken out of the archive—78 of them ended up at the British Library, 44 at Montserrat, 163 at the Biblioteca de Catalunya (another donation made by Miret i Sans), 12 in 81. ​Joseph Gwara Jr., The Sala F­ amily Archives: A Handlist of Medieval and Early Modern Catalonian Charters (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1984). According to Gwara, the documents ­were bequeathed to Scheuch by F ­ ather Louis, the confessor to Don Carlos, the pretender, but it seems more likely that they ­were sold to the American. 82. ​Grau and Güell, “La crònica negra de la destrucció d’arxius,” 65.

23 4 Chap t e r  7

the Library of the Acad­emy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, and an undetermined number in the private Schøyen Collection. This is prob­ably not the result of theft but rather that the archive allowed certain prominent or favored historians to take documents home and their heirs sold them to antiquarian dealers as part of the library of the deceased.83 Neglect made the effects of the disamortizations more disastrous, leading to the selling off of artworks and architectural ele­ments of churches that have enriched the collections of northern Eu­ro­pean and American art museums. Indifference also would encourage the loss and dispersal of books, manuscripts, and archival documents, and this forms the subject of the next chapter.

83. ​Javier Robles Montesinos, “La dispersió del fons documental del monestir de Sant Llorenç del Munt: Un intent d’assaig interpratiu,” in VIII Trobada d’Estudiosos de Sant Llorenç del Munt i l’Obac (Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona, 2014), 108; Pere Puig i Ustrell, introduction to his edition of El monestir de Sant Llorenç del Munt sobre Terrassa: Diplomatari dels segles X i XI (Barcelona: Fundaciö Noguera, 1995), 232–55.

C h a p te r   8

Wanderings and Destruction of Libraries and Archives

The previous chapter outlined the disasters that afflicted ecclesiastical archives and libraries, providing the context for this chapter, which describes the fate of rec­ords, manuscripts, and books that w ­ ere lost, destroyed, or moved about in the wake of t­ hese upheavals. One estimate, that between 40 and 75 ­percent of books held by religious communities on the eve of the 1835 disamortization have been lost, is telling, albeit inexact.1 How many volumes this might represent can be deduced from another study that posits that Spain’s monastic libraries held six million books at the opening of the fateful year 1835.2 An inventory of books confiscated from twenty-­ two religious communities in Barcelona numbers 133,854 volumes.3 Many items w ­ ere considered of l­ittle value, devoted as they w ­ ere to religious subjects. At Àger, parchment pages from manuscripts ­were used to make tambourines, and the lead seals of papal documents w ­ ere given to c­ hildren 1. ​Joan Josep Pons López, “Fons libraris i documentals secularitzats durant les desamortitzacions del segle XIX a Catalunya: Creació del sistema bibliotecari, pèrdua, comerç i col·lecionisme del llibre” (master’s thesis, University of Barcelona, Facultat de Biblioteconomia i Documentació, 2018), 9, 124. 2. ​Genaro Luís García López and Leticia Martín Gómez, “Situación de las bibliotecas conventuales y monacales españolas hasta la supresión de las comunidades religiosas,” Documentación de las Ciencias de la Información 35 (2012): 203. 3. ​Javier Antón Pelayo, “The Secularization of Spanish Religious Libraries (1767–1836): The Catalan Case, in How the Secularization of Religious Houses Transformed the Libraries of Eu­rope, ed. Cristina Dondi, Dorit Raines, and Richard Sharpe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), 115. 235

23 6 Chap t e r  8

for their games.4 The appropriate title of a study of the aftermath of the 1835 disamortization is “Books Used in Stores as Wrapping Paper.”5 The confiscations also put into circulation hundreds of thousands of books of no ­great individual value, but not so devoid of worth as to be discarded or converted to frivolous or industrial use. Even for monastic books saved by other libraries, their provenance has rarely been examined. Exceptionally, the Arxiu Provincial dels Franciscans de Catalunya in Barcelona has gone to the trou­ble of determining on the basis of bookplates and ex libris notations that 182 of its printed books and 15 manuscripts are from Bellpuig de les Avellanes, including among the latter one of Caresmar’s miscellanies (appendix 1, no. 38). The 1835 disamortization was followed by reiterated plans to salvage the cultural patrimony of monasteries, but the absence of state funding, disor­ga­ ni­za­tion, preoccupation with other crises, and lack of interest prevented t­ hese plans from being effectively implemented. Local commissions set up in 1837 ­were supposed to ensure an orderly transfer of property. The state would receive works of art, books, and archival documents. In order to facilitate this pro­cess, public authorities w ­ ere instructed to take possession of monasteries’ movable property and draw up inventories of “archives, libraries, paintings and other items impor­tant for the sciences and arts.” In most cases, however, the books and documents ­were ­either immediately dispersed or stayed in their former locations to be pilfered, appropriated, or simply neglected. That the commissions ­were to be financially supported by auctioning off duplicate, damaged, or unimportant books and manuscripts was an encouragement to corrupt misappropriation.6 A royal decree of 1844 replaced the hapless local civil disamortization commissions with a centralized agency. Provincial del­e­ga­tions w ­ ere charged with protecting art, books, and archives taken from dissolved historical and artistic monuments. This, too, was in­effec­tive, and in 1856 the task of guarding and transferring objects of cultural value was placed ­under the direction of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, founded in 1752 as a national institute for the arts. The acad­emy succeeded to the extent of com4. ​­These details are in Ramon Chesé Lapeña’s dissertation (but not in his edition of the Àger parchments). Ramon Chesé Lapeña, “Colección diplomática de S. Pedro de Ager (1010–1198)” (doctoral thesis, University of Saragossa, 1972), 14–15. 5. ​Genaro Luís García López and Leticia Martín Gómez, Libros para envolver en las boticas: Bibliotecas y política bibliotecaria en España durante la década moderada (Mérida: Editorial Regional de Extremadura, 2015). 6. ​Antonio Caballero García, “Desamortización y patrimonio documental: Un ejemplo de tratamiento de archivos en el siglo XIX,” Signos: Revista de historia de la cultura escrita 15 (2005): 77–117; Antón Pelayo, “The Secularization of Spanish Religious Libraries,” 114–17.

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

237

ing up with inventories based on the efforts of the previous commissions. From them, we can estimate the size of libraries before the disamortization and the movement of books and documents in the first de­cades ­after the confiscations.7 On the basis of this information, the average monastic library held 2,000 books before the 1835 disamortization.8 At 3,330 volumes, Bellpuig was above the norm, although not dramatically so.9 Only in 1856 was a detailed plan drawn up for how to inventory cultural artifacts seized from monasteries, but its implementation was haphazard.10 At vari­ous times and in dif­fer­ent places, specific institutions w ­ ere identified or created to receive the confiscated objects. The restoration of the University of Barcelona (which had been dissolved ­after the Succession War) came just ­after the 1835 disamortization. The new university library received thousands of manuscripts from the four provinces (Lleida, Tarragona, Barcelona, and Girona) conforming to the former Catalan principality. The Archive of the Crown of Aragon (ACA) was to be given the historical rec­ords, and its section “Monacals/Ordes Religiosos i Militars” consists largely of ­these materials, although two of the richest monastic archives, ­those of Poblet and Santes Creus, ­were eventually deposited in Madrid instead, first in the Real Academia de la Historia and then in the newly created National Archive. Provincial public libraries ­were established in Lleida (1842) and Tarragona (1846) as part of the educational program of the moderate Liberal government, and they w ­ ere supposed to receive books from disestablished monasteries.11 Before the Lleida public library was created, confiscated books ­were stored at the provincial office of the central government Trea­sury Department, where four thousand of them ­were classified as damaged while ­others may simply have been lost or stolen.12 Public libraries ­were aligned with the progressive goals of popu­lar education rather than the preservation of obsolete texts. They did not welcome refugee volumes of religious content, except for a few that might have ­actual value on the antiquarian book market. The rest of the hundreds of treatises on canon law, liturgy, hagiography, and other Latin discussions of ecclesiastical themes hardly 7. ​ Inventario de los legajos de las Comisiones Provinciales y de la Comisión Central de Monumentos Histórico-­Artísticos, rev. ed. (Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 2016). 8. ​García López and Martín Gómez, “Situación de las bibliotecas,” 202. 9. ​Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·lectionista a la Catalunya de la Il·lustració (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 2011), 150. 10. ​ Manual completo de desamortización civil y eclesiástica (Madrid: Imprenta de la Revista de Legislación, 1856). 11. ​Described by Antón Pelayo, “The Secularization of Spanish Religious Libraries,” 117–20. 12. ​Carme Solsona, La desamortització eclesiàstica a la província de Lleida (1838–1851) (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 1999).

23 8 Chap t e r  8

fit in with the interests of secular society or with the intentions of ­those most interested in creating libraries for the populace.13 In December 1835, the Sociedad Económica of Santiago de Compostela, having established a public library, was given 4,436 books from suppressed convents and determined that only 156 possessed any intellectual value, and even many of t­ hese w ­ ere in poor condition. A total of 1,296 w ­ ere to be thrown out, as they w ­ ere “insignificantes a las ciencias y a las artes,” and 2,984 ­were deemed incomplete, disbound, or “podridos” (rotten).14 What follows pays par­tic­u­lar attention to Bellpuig. The monastery suffered an almost complete loss of its library and archive, but over the past eighty years, through luck and heroic per­sis­tence, it has recaptured some of its materials. The definitive account of the damage to Catalonia’s churches and their art, written in the aftermath of nineteenth-­century expropriations, is by Cayetano Barraquer, a canon of Barcelona Cathedral. His four-­volume Los religosos en Cataluña durante la primera mitad del siglo XIX deals with the pro­cess of disamortization and its aftereffects. Inventories of the losses of ecclesiastical buildings and patrimony due to the Civil War a ­century ­later form the basis for Jordi Albertí’s work on the persecution of the clergy throughout Catalonia and Josep M. Martí Bonet’s account of the destruction of churches in Barcelona and its diocese.15 Not as much has been done to list specifically what manuscripts, printed books, or archival constituents have been lost. While Spain experienced its share of fires, confiscations, invasions, and other disruptions before 1808, that date marks the beginning of the modern decimation of libraries and archives as a result of the f­ actors described in the previous chapter. A sense of the scale of loss can be obtained by considering the 844 manuscripts mentioned by Jaime Villanueva in his cir­cuit of Catalan, Valencian, and Majorcan ecclesiastical archives on the eve of the Napoleonic occupation and subsequent uprisings. Only a bit more than half (441) can now be located.16 In the late nineteenth and twentieth centu13. ​In The Library: A Fragile History (New York: Basic Books, 2021), Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen point out the indifference of nineteenth-­century collectors and newly established public libraries to what they regarded as the detritus of a superstitious past. Apart from illuminated manuscripts or other books of artistic value, ecclesiastical material, voluminous and seemingly irrelevant, was regarded as a burden to be managed or tossed away. This was in fact a perennial prob­lem: the careful accumulation of ­g reat collections that subsequent generations rejected (as with the Reformation) or simply disdained. 14. ​García López and Martín Gómez, “Situación de las bibliotecas,” 200–201. 15. ​Cayetano Barraquer y Roviralta, Los religiosos en Cataluña durante la primera mitad del siglo XIX, 4 vols. (Barcelona: F. J. Altés y Alabart, 1915–1918); Jordi Albertí i Oriol, El silenci de les campanes: De l’anticlericalisme del segle XIX a la persecució religiosa durant la guerra civil a Catalunya (Barcelona: Proa, 2007); Josep  M. Martí Bonet, El martiri dels ­temples a la diòcesi de Barcelona (1936–1939) (Barcelona: Arxiu Diocesà de Barcelona, 2008). 16. ​Ignasi M. Puig i Ferreté and M. Assumpta Giner Molina, Índex codcològic del “Viage literario” de Jaume Villanuava (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1998), 153–70.

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

239

ries, a few monasteries, such as Montserrat and Poblet, ­were restored, and they established new libraries and archives. ­Little or nothing of what ­these contained was original but rather, as with new foundations like the Catalan national library, the Biblioteca de Catalunya, they ­were recipients of private libraries assembled during what can be regarded as both the golden age of collecting and the long aftermath of looting. A passion for collecting rescued what other­wise would have been entirely dispersed, thrown out, or broken up for uses such as glue manufacture or bookbinding. Early in the twentieth c­ entury, the historian Joaquim Miret i Sans, for example, purchased approximately twenty-­five hundred archival parchments that had been taken from the former Augustinian chapters at Organyà, Àger, Vilabertran, and Mur. The sellers ­were locally prominent figures such as a l­awyer named Mir i Casses in La Seu d’Urgell, from whom Miret bought the Mur rec­ords, or the parish priest of Organyà. Miret gave most of what he gathered to the Institut d’Estudis Catalans between 1913 and 1919, and ­these are now in the Biblioteca de Catalunya.17 It would take a book or series of books on the order of what Barraquer accomplished to assess the fate of Catalan medieval texts, their destruction, or their restoration. H ­ ere we look at the overall Catalan experience, the fate of certain monastic collections, and the specific events involving Bellpuig and Caresmar’s writings, collectively demonstrating the random, contingent, and complicated trajectories of dispersal and restoration.

Designated Recipients University of Barcelona, CRAI Biblioteca de Reserva One result of the Liberal triumph immediately following the disamortization was the reestablishment of the University of Barcelona in 1837. As previously described, Barcelona, along with ­every other institution of higher education in Catalonia, had been dissolved a­ fter the Succession War in ­favor of the new University of Cervera. The restored university library in Barcelona was among the beneficiaries of disamortization. Its rare books collection, what is now called the CRAI Biblioteca de Reserva (CRAI = Centre de Recursos per a l’Aprenatge i l’Investigaciò [Resource Center for Training and Research]), consists of 2,150 manuscripts, 1,240 incunabula, over 11,000 printed books, and 890 parchment documents, 90 ­percent of which come from disamortized monasteries. 17. ​Philip D. Rasico, Cafè i Quilombo: Els diaris de viatge de Joaquim Miret i Sans (1900–1918) (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2001), 22; Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, Joaquim Miret i Sans, semblança biogràfica (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2003), 13–14.

24 0 Chap t e r  8

This collection, originally the Barcelona “Provincial and University Library,” was opened in 1838 as a combined academic and public institution but was available for consultation only in the mornings b­ ecause t­ here was no artificial light and the win­dows faced east. The university was supposed to receive 133,855 manuscripts and early printed books from the disamortization; 60,000 books of both types actually arrived and ­were cata­loged.18 The University of Barcelona was specifically designated to ­house documents taken from confiscated convents in the city: ­those of the Dominicans of Santa Caterina, the Biblioteca Mariana of the Franciscans, the Augustinian convent, and the Discalced Carmelite h ­ ouse of San Josep. From Santa Caterina alone, the university library has twenty-­two thousand volumes.19 It also obtained books and archival rec­ords from the ancient Benedictine monastery of Sant Pere de Casserres, located north of Vic and attached to the Cluniac network. Smaller numbers of books come from five other ecclesiastical foundations in the city and from the disbanded library of the University of Cervera, and fifty-­four manuscripts are from the cathedral of Girona—­their transfer to the university is unexplained.20 Some of ­these may have been intended to form a corpus for the study of paleography.

Real Academia de la Historia Another designated recipient was the historical acad­emy in Madrid, the Real Academia de la Historia. In 1850, the minister of finance ordered that all “papeles y documentos históricos” from the monasteries being held by public entities be transferred to the acad­emy in order to prevent their destruction (or ­really to halt their further destruction). The prob­lem was how to define “historical” for, as we have seen, the state wanted to keep rec­ords relevant to current claims and owner­ship while protecting ­those of antiquarian value. The impossibility of undertaking this task of separation—­because of a lack of both funds and expertise—­was part of the reason for the indiscriminate piling up of rec­ords in vari­ous state offices. The acad­emy did an adequate job of retaining the archival rec­ords in its basement but did nothing to inventory them or make them available. Its vast 18. ​Pons López, “Fons libraris,” 65–66. Most of the printed books w ­ ere not considered rare and so ­were integrated into the regular library, hence the discrepancy with what is currently in the Reserva section. 19. ​Pons López, “Fons libraris,” 76. 20. ​Francisco Miquel Rosell, Inventario general de manuscritos de la Biblioteca Universitaria de Barcelona, vol. 1 (Madrid: Dirección General de Enseñanza Universitaria, 1958), xvi–­xxiii. A digitized version of pre-1835 cata­logs from many of ­these foundations is available at https://­bipadi​.­ub​.­edu​/­digital​ /­collection​/­p21046coll1​/­search.

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

241

labyrinthine storage facilities in a former palace on the Calle León became famous, mythically so, as a repository of unfindable rec­ords. Victor Balaguer, a member of the historical acad­emy, described the scene as a “revuelto mar de papeles” (a mixed-up sea of papers).21

Archivo Histórico Nacional To be fair, the amount of documentation taken from dissolved monasteries was enormous. In Catalonia, only the provinces of Tarragona and Lleida sent clerical archives to Madrid, t­ hose of Girona and Barcelona being designated for the ACA. Even for this partial devolution, the historical acad­emy proved incapable of organ­izing an uninvited disamortization windfall. ­There was already an im­mense archive of government documents from Castille and the Spanish monarchy at the c­ astle of Simancas, not far from Valladolid. In the wake of the disamortization and with the growth of historical knowledge and interest, the need became obvious for a more readily accessible archive or­ga­nized to facilitate scholarship rather than just serving as an im­ mense government filing cabinet. The Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) was created in 1866 so that documents “accumulando desde el principio de nuestra gloriosa reconquista” (accumulated since our glorious reconquest) could be put into order. ­These, it was acknowledged, had been affected by the disamortizations, “la honda perturbación y el desconcieto inevitable en tan radicales medidas” (the deep perturbation and confusion inevitable as a result of such radical mea­sures).22 No money, however, was directed to fund this impressive-­sounding archive, which shared the same building with the Real Academia de la Historia. In 1896, the AHN moved to the new Palace of Libraries and Museums as an annex of the National Library. It started to classify its holdings but opted for a rather arbitrary typology that, for example, separated documents with seals into a separate category. Only in 1953 did the AHN obtain a dedicated building complex. The disamortized properties ­were ordered in a “Clero” section. From the three ­g reat monasteries of the Province of Tarragona (Poblet, Santes Creus, Scala Dei) the AHN has 17,885 parchments, far more than any other Spanish province (Valencia is a distant second with 5,140).

21. ​Flocel Sabaté, “Medieval Documentation and Archives in Catalonia ­after the 19th ­Century Upheavals,” in Identity and Loss of Historical Memory: The Destruction of Archives, ed. Igor Filippov and Flocel Sabaté (Bern: Peter Lang, 2017), 231. 22. ​Sabaté, “Medieval Documentation and Archives in Catalonia,” 231.

24 2 Chap t e r  8

Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó In contrast with other public officials, Pròsper de Bofarull i Mascaró (1777– 1858), the head of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, immediately and actively exerted himself to save the documentary patrimony of the confiscated monasteries. The section of the ACA formerly known as “Monacals” and now as “Ordes Religiosos i Militars” testifies to his success, although, as with Poblet and Santes Creus, some monastic holdings ultimately went to Madrid, while in other cases, only part of a monastic archive was deposited at the ACA. The ACA has about 1,500 parchments from the Benedictine foundation of Sant Benet de Bages, for example, while Montserrat has 2,275 parchments from Sant Benet via a private donation. The ACA also received manuscripts from Ripoll and from Sant Cugat, including the im­mense cartulary of the latter monastery. Sant Cugat’s parchments, like t­ hose of Sant Benet de Bages, are divided between the ACA (about 1,000) and Montserrat (507).23 Despite Bofarull’s efforts, the state trea­sury offices held on to much of the confiscated monastic and mendicant archives. A royal order in 1919 ordered the transfer of what remained in t­ hese offices in the provinces of Barcelona and Girona to the ACA, but only in the 1960s ­were relatively modern documents released. Much of the archival material held by the University of Barcelona was placed in the ACA in 1943. At the pre­sent time, the ACA “Clero” section of the Ordes Religiosos i Militars has rec­ords from over thirty religious ­houses just in the city of Barcelona. The quantity of documentation ranges greatly: six hundred volumes and sixty-­three folders of parchments and papers from the Mercedarian h ­ ouse of Santa Eulàlia but very ­little from two Capuchin h ­ ouses or from two of the three Franciscan friaries.24 So massive was the influx of rec­ords, around 20,000 parchments alone, that many have remained uncata­loged for well over a ­century. For example, only since 1994 have the 2,613 parchments, 90 rec­ord books, and 72 folders from the Carthusian ­house of Montalegre (comarca of Marseme) become available to researchers. This includes material first sent a­ fter 1835 to the University of Barcelona library (which retains the manuscripts) and the Barcelona office of the state trea­sury.25 23. ​Ramon Planes i Albets, Laureà Páaroles i Sabaté, and Pere Puig i Ustrell, El Archivo de la Corona de Aragón: Un nuevo perfil para el Archivo Real de Barcelona (2003), https://­www​.­almendron​.­com​ /­tribuna​/­wp​-­content​/­uploads​/­2015​/­07​/­ACA​-­CAST​.­pdf. 24. ​Alberto Torra Pérez, “Fondos documentales de los conventos de Barcelona en el Archivo de la Corona de Aragón,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 7 (2002): 507–22. 25. ​Introduction by Xavier Pérez i Gómez to his edition Diplomatari de la cartoixa de Montalegre (segles X–­XII) (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1998), 9–17.

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

243

Montalegre is a telling example of both the difficulties of rectifying the results of the disamortization and the admirable tenacity of scholars in trying to resolve its disruptive legacy. Montalegre was founded in 1415, absorbing two ­earlier Carthusian foundations, Sant Pol de Mar (founded in the tenth c­ entury) and the castle-­monastery of Vallparadís de Terrassa (dating from around 1110). The Sant Pol rec­ords ­were given to the ACA in 1919 and the Vallparadís material in 1941. Some parchments are in the Barcelona municipal archive, many are still at Montalegre (which was reestablished in 1901), and some are in private hands.

Biblioteca de Catalunya From its foundation in the early twentieth ­century, the Biblioteca de Catalunya has functioned as a de facto national library, but po­liti­cal circumstances have not always formally allowed it that status. In 1907, the Institute of Catalan Studies began to plan the establishment of a scholarly research library open to the public, and this was realized beginning in 1914. The Reserve section has rare books, and its subsection, the Historical Archive unit, contains documents, notably twenty-­five thousand parchments. This is all the more impressive given that every­thing in the library was acquired by purchase or donation rather than the institution being built on an already-­existing official or ecclesiastical foundation.26 ­Because of the changes in Catalonia’s status in relation to the Spanish state, the Biblioteca de Catalunya at dif­fer­ent times has been ­under the jurisdiction of the city of Barcelona, the provincial Diputación, or the autonomous government of the Generalitat, but always with the significant involvement of collectors and scholars in administration and benefaction. During the Franco regime, it functioned as a large public library of no par­tic­u­lar official standing, an imposing place to work on school assignments. From its postwar reopening in 1940 u ­ ntil 1973 it was called the Biblioteca Central, the very word “Catalunya” being banished. Only in 1981, with its name recuperated, ­were publishers in Catalonia required to deposit copies of their books ­there, an effective index of national library status. Several thousand medieval parchments w ­ ere donated by Joaquim Miret i Sans, who, as previously noted, preserved a large part of the archives of Àger, Vilabertran, and Organyà and portions of dozens of other ecclesiastical foundations. Other acquisitions have been listed in the publications of the library.27 26. ​Manuel Jorba, “The Biblioteca de Catalunya, National Library of Catalonia,” Item: Revista de biblioteconomia i documentació, special issue, IFLA’9 (1993): 5–11. 27. ​Reis Fontanals, “Arxiu Històric de la Biblioteca de Catalunya,” in Guia del arxius històrics de Catalunya, vol. 6 (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1995), 59–88.

24 4 Chap t e r  8

Montserrat Like the Biblioteca de Catalunya, the abbey of Montserrat was not an official recipient of disamortized books and manuscripts but rather the beneficiary of donations that included books traceable to dissolved monasteries, a penitential home for the restoration of plundered books and manuscripts. The major shrine of Catalonia, Montserrat was reestablished in 1844 and rebuilt, an exception to the ban on monastic communities. It had been destroyed in 1811 along with its entire archive and library. In 1917 the library held only 72 manuscripts, while the 2010 cata­log supplement reaches 1,487 Western (i.e., not Arabic, Syriac, or Hebrew) manuscripts.28 Among the most significant collections acquired by Montserrat w ­ ere 12,000 printed books belonging to the Majorcan Count of Aimanes (1928) and an impor­tant group of manuscripts formerly the property of the Marquis of Monsalud (1946). A number of books from the University of Cervera library ended up at Montserrat.29 It also received vari­ous donations including the aforementioned 2,275 parchments from Sant Benet de Bages, which was a de­pen­dency of Montserrat from the sixteenth c­ entury ­until the 1835 disamortization. Montserrat also has papers and parchments relating to the coordinators of Benedictine monasteries in the metropolitan jurisdictions of Tarragona and Saragossa (effectively Catalonia and Aragon) and medieval parchments from Sant Llorenç del Munt and Sant Cugat del Vallès.30

Par­tic­u­lar Examples of Dislocation and Reconstitution Looking at specific cases of dislocation gives a fuller picture, complementing an account of where the manuscripts, books, and archives from dissolved monasteries ended up. Each journey is unique—­some fraught with catastrophic losses, ­others merely stories of displacement. ­There are very few examples of monastic archives and libraries that are still in their place of origin, the female foundations of Sant Daniel in Girona and Vallbona (comarca of Urgell) among the exceptions. 28. ​Alexandre Olivar, Catàleg dels manuscrits de la Biblioteca del Monestir de Montserrat, segon suplement: Manuscrits 1379 a 1487 (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2010). 29. ​Alexandre Olivar, Catàleg dels manuscrits de la Biblioteca del Monestir de Montserrat (Montserrat: Abadia de Montserrat, 1977), xiv–­xix. 30. ​Marc Taxonera i Comas, “Arxiu de l’abadia de Montserrat,” in Guia del arxius històrics de Catalunya, vol. 7 (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1998), 171–76.

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

245

Ripoll Within a broad scene of disruption and loss, the fates of specific monastic archives and libraries differed, even among divisions of the same institution. For the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll, many of the manuscript books survived while the entire archive was destroyed.31 As discussed in the previous chapter, Ripoll, established in 879, was burned over three days in August 1835. Of its manuscripts, 230 ­were in Barcelona, where they had been moved during the previous disamortization of the Liberal Triennial of 1820–1823. Seventy liturgical manuscripts restored to the monastery in 1824 w ­ ere destroyed in 1835.32 When Jaime Villanueva visited Ripoll he examined 305 manuscripts and specifically mentions 38; of ­these, 20 written before 1300 survive.33 Some of the trea­sures of Ripoll’s library, including an extraordinary eleventh-­century manuscript known as the Roda Bible, had been taken to Paris by Pierre de Marca in the mid-­seventeenth ­century—­a flagrant example of cultural theft, but fortunate for posterity as ­these are all extant. Another Bible from the same period, known as the Ripoll Bible, is now in the Vatican.34 The library and scriptorium of Ripoll ­were among the most impor­tant in tenth-­ and eleventh-­century Eu­rope. The monastery’s library held 66 manuscripts according to an inventory undertaken at the death of Abbot Witsicle in 979, rising to 121 when his successor Se­niorfré died in 1021, and 246 at the death of Oliba in 1046.35 Ripoll produced, copied, and preserved outstanding examples of liturgical books (especially ­music), poetry, Latin classics, and patristic texts. Among the most significant of its surviving manuscripts is an example of the first recension of Gratian’s Decretum.36 The last archivist of Ripoll, Roq d’Olzinelles made registers and copies of archival documents that are now divided between the Episcopal Archive of Vic and the Biblioteca de Catalunya.37 Torres Amat, whose definitive dictionary of 31. ​On Ripoll and its manuscripts, see Rudolf Beer, Die Handschriften des Klosters Santa Maria de Ripoll, 2 vols. (Vienna: A Hölder, 1907–1908). 32. ​Ramon Ordeig i Mata, El monestir de Ripoll en temps dels seus primers abats (anys 879–1008) (Vic: Arxiu Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic, 2014), 7. 33. ​Puig i Ferreté and Giner Molina, Índex codicològic, 235. 34. ​Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms lat. 6; Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms lat. 5729; Andreina Contessa, “Le Biblie dell’abbate Oliba de Ripoll: Testo biblico e rinascita spirituale nella Cata­logna dell’XI secolo,” Estudios biblicos 61 (2003): 27–64. 35. ​Eduard Junyent, El monestir de Santa Maria de Ripoll (Barcelona: Russet, 1975), 232. 36. ​ACA, Ripoll ms 78. On its significance, see Anders Winroth, The Making of Gratian’s “Decretum,” 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26–28. Unfortunately, only half of the text of Gratian, up to Causa 12, is contained in this manuscript. ­There was presumably a second volume, which is now lost. 37. ​ABEV, lligalls 2057–2061; Barcelona, BC, MSS 428 and 430.

24 6 Chap t e r  8

Catalan authors appeared in 1836, a year a­ fter Olzinelles’s death, refers to him as “the Catalan Mabillon,” a designation also, as we have seen, applied to Caresmar. Writing in that same year, Pròsper de Bofarull referred to Olzinelles as “[el] desdichado Mabillon catalán” (the unlucky Catalan Mabillon).38 Torres Amat laments that despite his erudition, Olzinelles was excessively self-­effacing and so wrote l­ittle in the way of synthetic work. Addressing the “friends of the immortal Olzinelles,” Torres Amat described the day of his death as one of mourning for Spain and of disgrace for its lit­er­a­ture but gave thanks that the rec­ords that Olzinelles had accumulated ­were now in the hands of his learned friends.39 ­These materials make it pos­si­ble to bring to light some of the archival holdings of Ripoll. A sign of the difficulty of this proj­ect and the lasting impact of the disamortization is that it took 180 years to put together an a­ ctual edition and register. Ramon Ordeig i Mata heroically and carefully reconstructed the entire text or summarized the contents of 1,239 parchments from Ripoll, almost none of them surviving in original or cartulary form.40 One more sign of the fragility of our knowledge of the past is that Olzinelles’s notes ­were themselves partially destroyed when in 1936 the cathedral of Vic and much of the episcopal palace ­were burned along with part of the bishop’s archive. One Olzinelles volume of 282 pages dealing with the early Catalan counts was entirely lost, and some of his other notes ­were annihilated or survived with singed edges.41

Poblet Founded in 1150, the Cistercian monastery of Poblet was the largest and for centuries one of the most prominent monastic communities in Catalonia. Located near the mountains of Prades north of Tarragona, it was the preferred burial place for the late-­medieval kings of Aragon-­Catalonia. Poblet had a long history of bad relations with its tenants ­going back to the M ­ iddle Ages. It suffered during the Napoleonic period, being sacked by French troops in 1809 and confiscated in 1811. During the Liberal Triennial, the abbatial palace and many 38. ​Fèlix Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crítico de los escritores catalans y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura (Barcelona: J. Verdeguer, 1836), 455; Próspero de Bofarull y Mascaró, Los condes de Barcelona vindicados y cronología y geneaología de los Reyes de España considerados como soberanos independientes de su marca, vol. 1 (Barcelona: J. Oliveres y Monmany, 1836), 7. 39. ​Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario, 456. 40. ​Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Diplomatari del monestir de Ripoll, 3 vols. (Vic: Arxiu Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic, 2015–2017). 41. ​Ordeig, Diplomatari del monestir de Ripoll, 1:33–35.

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

247

of the outbuildings ­were pillaged by the local populace.42 Eight wagonloads of documents w ­ ere taken from Poblet in 1822 and brought to the ACA in Barcelona, but t­ hese archival materials ­were returned by 1824.43 Like Ripoll, it had multiple libraries—­one administered by the choir for liturgical books primarily, a rare manuscripts library, a collection of printed books, and a collection given by Pere Antoni d’Aragó in the seventeenth ­century. This last one alone occupied thirty cabinets.44 At the time of the 1835 exclaustration, t­ here ­were fifty monks, eleven conversi (laymen who took vows of affiliation), and eleven novices. When the buildings ­were abandoned, something like 250 recent rec­ords of rents and titles to land w ­ ere taken for safekeeping to the h ­ ouses of the b­ rother of one of the monastery’s administrators, but almost all of Poblet’s documentation was seized in 1836 by Jacint Pla, a local merchant of poor reputation nicknamed Xafarucs (the Gossip), who kept them in an abandoned ballroom. In 1838, the Poblet material, along with that of other dissolved ecclesiastical communities in the Province of Tarragona, was transferred to the Trea­sury Department in Tarragona and then, as noted e­ arlier, was left in an open courtyard of the Customs House, where it was exposed to pilfering and rain damage.45 It took ­until 1852, following a harsh report by Juan Antonio Disdier, a corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Historia, for anything to be done. Once the majority of the rec­ords (at least twenty thousand items in twenty-­ one large boxes) ­were fi­nally transferred to Madrid in 1852, they languished in the cellar of the Real Academia de la Historia u ­ ntil 1886, when the Poblet material was moved to the recently established AHN. So vast was this documentation and so ill equipped was the National Archive to h ­ andle it that not ­until 1948 ­were the approximately fifteen thousand parchments at the AHN cata­loged.46 Even at that, the AHN did not obtain the totality of Poblet’s rec­ords. Some had been left ­behind in the Finance Ministry in Tarragona at the time of the transfer to Madrid, and in 1918 the director of the ACA received 117 packets 42. ​Ernesto Zaragoza Pascual, “Danys ocasionats al monestir de Poblet durant el Trieni Constitucional,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensis 81 (2008): 169–84. 43. ​Gener Gonzalvo i Bou, “The Dissolution of Catalan Monasteries and the Fate of Their Archives: The Example of Poblet,” Mediterranean Studies 9 (2000): 184. 44. ​Pons López, “Fons libraris,” 73–75. 45. ​Eduard Toda i Güell, La destrucció de Poblet, 1800–1900 (Sant Boi de Llobregat: Pompeu Vidal, 1935); Josep M. Grau and Manel Güell, “La crònica negra de la destrucció d’arxius a la demarcació de Tarragona,” Lligall 18 (2001): 71. 46. ​Gonzalvo i Bou, “Dissolution of Catalan Monasteries,” 183–201; Sabaté, “Medieval Documentation and Archives in Catalonia,” 225.

24 8 Chap t e r  8

of rec­ords determined to no longer be of use to the ministry. An additional twenty-­two packets containing documents g­ oing back to the fifteenth c­ entury ­were sent to Barcelona in 1930 as the offices in Tarragona discovered yet more unaccounted-­for rec­ords. A ­g reat number of parchments and papers had simply been misappropriated when they lay out in disorder in the government offices in Tarragona. Their retrieval was one of the tasks undertaken by Eduard Toda i Guëll (1855– 1941), a wealthy diplomat and businessman, who dedicated himself to saving the physical, artistic, and documentary remains of Poblet.47 He befriended the Catalan historian Victor Balaguer, who was a fellow of the historical acad­emy in Madrid. ­Under Balaguer’s protection, Toda tried to have the Poblet rec­ords moved back to Catalonia but without success. Balaguer himself wrote The Ruins of Poblet, an effort to call attention to one of the g­ reat monuments of medieval Catalonia and its sorry condition.48 Toda eventually bought, gathered, and received as donations some sixteen thousand documents from Poblet, keeping them in his ­house at Escornalbou and binding them in eighty large volumes. Most of this material was relatively modern. Toda and his associates succeeded in restoring the fabric of Poblet, and on the one-­hundredth anniversary of the g­ reat disamortization, they opened a restored archive. This survived the Civil War, and the Cistercian community was re-­founded at Poblet in 1940. Much of the pro­gress in understanding the institutional history of Poblet, editing its documents, and describing its territorial lordship is owed to Agustí Altisent (1923–2004), a Cistercian monk at the monastery.49 About four hundred parchments, dating from 1095 to 1759, are now in the Poblet archive.50 The scattering of rec­ords from Poblet is such that substantial numbers of its documents are still in public and personal collections. Victor Balaguer collected some that are at pre­sent in the Biblioteca Museu Victor Balaguer at Vilanova i la Geltrú. The Tarragona Provincial Library has a Poblet cartulary from the thirteenth ­century.51 A collection of material from Poblet is in the archive of the archbishops of Tarragona (Arxiu Històric Arxidiocesà de Tar47. ​See Gener Gonzalvo i Bou, Eduard Toda i Guëll (1855–1941), i el salvament del monestir de Poblet a través del seu epistolari (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2005). 48. ​Victor Balaguer, Las ruinas de Poblet (Madrid: M. Tello, 1885). 49. ​Agustí Altisent, Història de Poblet (Poblet: Abadia de Poblet, 1974); Diplomatari de Santa Maria de Poblet, ed. Agustí Altisent, vol. 1 (960–1177) (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1993). 50. ​Josep Torné i Cubells, Catàleg dels pergamins de l’­actual Arxiu del Monestir de Poblet (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2010). 51. ​Known as the “Cartulari Menor” or “Llibre Blanc de Poblet,” it was edited u ­ nder the supervision of Eduard Toda. Cartulari de Poblet: Edció del manuscrit de Tarragona, ed. Eduard Toda i Güell (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1938).

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

249

ragona), prob­ably dating back to the era of the disamortization but or­ga­nized ­after the establishment of this archive in 1921. In the 1990s, an anonymous donor gave the cathedral of Lleida about a hundred parchments originally from Poblet.52

Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles The documentation for the Benedictine monastery of Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles in the Pyrenees provides an example of the unpredictable effects of the Civil War. Located on the road to Andorra, just north of La Seu d’Urgell, Tavèrnoles is perhaps the oldest monastery in Catalonia, one of the few whose foundation antedates the Islamic conquest of most of the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 720. It a­ dopted the Benedictine Rule in 799 or 800.53 The most impor­tant of what w ­ ere originally three cartularies was created between 1200 and 1210 and consists of about 125 documents, the first of which is from 835.54 When the monastery was dissolved in 1593, the cartulary was moved to the library of the Tridentine Seminary in La Seu d’Urgell along with an eighteenth-­century manuscript book that copied privileges given by papal and secular authorities, referred to as a Liber Bullarum. A number of original parchments ­were also transferred. The seminary was plundered in 1936 at the outbreak of the Civil War. Many of the parchments, including the Liber Bullarum, ­were destroyed or dispersed. The cartulary of Tavèrnoles was put out on the street with other “useless” material to be disposed of as trash. A builder passing by plucked it from the pile ­because, he ­later said, its pages had many stamps, indicating it must be valuable (­these ­were, in fact, merely inked rubber stamps made by Pere Pujol, a twentieth-­century canon of the cathedral of Urgell, as an aid to figuring out the complicated pagination of the book). At the end of the war, the cartulary was placed in the cathedral archive of La Seu d’Urgell along with 118 surviving parchments. The contents of the Liber

52. ​Gonzalvo, “Dissolution of Catalan Monasteries,” 195–201; Pere Puig i Ustrell, Els pergamins documentals: Naturalesa, tractament arxivístic i contingut diplomàtic (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1995), 197. 53. ​On the history of the monastery, see Cebrià Baraut, “El monestir de Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles i els orígens del monaquisme benedictí al comtat d’Urgell,” Studia monastica 22 (1980): 243–59; Mathias Delcor, “Un monastère aux portes de la Seu d’Urgell, Sant Sadurní de Tabernoles: Historie et archéologie,” Cahiers de Saint-­Michel-­de-­Cuxa 17 (1986): 34–60. 54. ​What remains of this cartulary was edited in 1961. El cartulario de Tavernoles, ed. Josefina Soler García (Castellón de la Plana: Socieded Castellonense de Cultura, 1961). An edition of all the Tavèrnoles documentation before 1300 was presented by Cebrià Baraut, “Diplomatari del monestir de Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles (segles IX–­XIII),” Urgellia 12 (1994–1995): 72–351. Baraut includes a detailed discussion of the monastery’s patrimony (7–42).

25 0 Chap t e r  8

Bullarum can be reconstructed through the copy made in Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta of the Bellpuig canon Jaume Pasqual.55

Bellpuig Again It is obvious that the disappearance of Bellpuig’s manuscripts and the peculiar preservation of its archive follow a pattern of randomness, circumstance, and accident. H ­ ere we include the major portable artworks of the canonry, the tomb entablatures, and sculptures constructed by Count Ermengol X of Urgell, as well as documents.

Fate of the Tombs of the Counts of Urgell In 1906 the owner of Bellpuig, Agustí Santemases i Pujol, a banker from Lleida, sold the funerary sculptures to an antiquities dealer named Luis Ruiz, and they ­were taken out of their places in the convent. Responding to an uproar in the press, Ruiz offered to return the sculptures, provided he was compensated for what he had spent to acquire them. This was not forthcoming, so collectors in France and the United States ­were able to purchase the tombs. In 1928, John D. Rocke­fel­ler Jr. presented the tomb of Count Ermengol X to the Cloisters in New York.56 The museum purchased the other three sarcophagi in 1948 from a dealer in Paris. Relocation to New York has given the tombs the status in Catalonia of a misappropriated trea­sure, resembling the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles in relation to Greece. Although the tombs w ­ ere legally purchased, unlike the Elgin Marbles, and so in fact not plundered, the loss is a wound to national solidarity and identity. Gener Gonzalvo’s fervid account of the “pantheon of the counts of Urgell” gratuitously sees the display at the Cloisters Museum as “a true sign of American financial power and a strange manner of valuing the remote past of Western Eu­rope . . . ​a scandalous shame.”57

55. ​BC, MS 729, Jaume Pasqual, “Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta,” vol. 9, ff. 81r– 154v. On the events of 1936 and ­after, see El cartulario de Tavernoles, 9–10; Baraut, “Diplomatari del monestir de Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles,” 65–70. 56. ​James J. Rorimer, “A ­Fourteenth ­Century Catalan Tomb at the Cloisters and Related Monuments,” Art Bulletin 13 (1931): 409–37; James Rorimer, “Four Tombs from les Avellanes and Other Gothic Sculptures,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 8, no. 8 (1950): 228–41. 57. ​Gener Gonzalvo i Bou, Història del panteó dels comtes d’Urgell: Els sepulcres del monestir de Bellpuig de les Avellanes (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 2007), 68.

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

251

The Library of Bellpuig Just before the beginning of the war against Napoleon, Josep Martí or­ga­nized the Bellpuig library so that the rooms previously occupied by Jaume Pasqual ­were converted into two sections: one holding books from the regular library, and the other containing materials collected or written by Caresmar, Pasqual, and other members of the Bellpuig group.58 Martí died in 1806. Two years ­later, in the course of his cir­cuit of Catalan ecclesiastical collections, Jaime de Villanueva described the library and museum in two rooms set up by Pasqual and modified by Martí. Some codices w ­ ere lost during the Napoleonic Wars, and t­ here ­were stories about thefts of books while the canons ­were in exile.59 The advent of the Liberal government in 1820 posed a greater threat to Bellpuig than had the war. At the order of the central government, the canon Francesc Ignasi Ribot made an inventory of the museum and library. Ribot stated that t­here w ­ ere 3,330 printed books in the library, thirty-­two antiguas, and fifty-­four manuscripts along with thirteen boxes of antiquities and specimens of natu­ral history.60 The numismatic collection consisted of coins of small value in thirty-­four drawers or boxes, the gold and silver coins having been moved to Lleida for safekeeping along with the manuscripts.61 Just before the toppling of the Liberal government by the Holy Alliance in 1823, the Royal Acad­emy of History in Madrid commissioned Pròsper de Bofarull, the director of the ACA, to make an inventory of the library at Bellpuig. He found that ­there had been no recent losses.62 ­After the restoration, Bofarull reported to the historical acad­emy in October 1824 that the numismatic collection and manuscripts had been returned to Bellpuig, specifying among the latter the works of Caresmar, Pasqual, and Martí.63 In response to the 1835 disamortization, Guillem Escaró, rector of the parish church of Vilanova de la Sal, collected some of what remained of the library of 58. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·lectionista, 51–52. 59. ​Cayetano Barraquer y Roviralta, Las casas religiosos en Cataluña durante el primer tercio del siglo XIX [not to be confused with the same author’s Los religiosos en Cataluña], vol. 3 (Barcelona: F. J. Altés y Alabart,1906), 151. Barraquer spoke with an el­derly ­woman who recalled a story in which a man had been killed as he drove a cartload of books away from Bellpuig in 1810, but it was unclear ­whether this was a theft or an attempt to rescue the books. 60. ​Robert Porta, contribution to a panel discussion “La biblioteca dels canonges premonstratesos del Monestir de les Avellanes: història i situació a­ ctual,” at the conference “La creació de la memòria monàstica al llarg dels segles,” Bellpuig de les Avellanes, July 11, 2017. 61. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i colˑlecionista, 150. 62. ​Porta et al., “La biblioteca dels canonges premonstratesos.” 63. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i colˑlecionista, 148–50.

25 2 Chap t e r  8

Les Avellanes. Certain rec­ords of Bellpuig, notably account books, w ­ ere openly kept at Vilanova de la Sal and consulted by historians such as Cayetano Barraquer for his exhaustive study of nineteenth-­century disamortizations published in 1915–1917.64 Other materials w ­ ere hidden, and t­hese ­were what was discovered in 2002. The Bellpuig organ was sold at auction in 1845 and installed at the parish church of Maldà (comarca of Urgell).65 Some effort was made to save the art, altars, and liturgical objects. In the course of preparing the convent for the Trappists, Dolores Ruiz y Chavero, the ­widow of the first purchaser of Bellpuig, gave the main altarpiece and some choir seats to the parish church of nearby Os de Balaguer (which was burned in 1936). Another altar and a statue of Saint Norbert, founder of the Premonstratensian Order, w ­ ere taken to Vilanova de la Sal.66 The canons who ­were forced to abandon Bellpuig in 1835 carried with them a number of movable precious objects. Some of ­these they sold off gradually to support themselves. ­Others ­were placed in the care of the diocese of Urgell. In 1846, the ex-­canons pleaded with church authorities, up to the pope himself, to be permitted to sell liturgical objects and other movables that they had managed to salvage from the convent. They ­were allowed to dispose of what­ ever they possessed, except for sacred vessels and other ­things used in the mass.67 By 1858 t­ here w ­ ere only three surviving canons out of the thirteen from the time of the disamortization. A polychrome statue of the Virgin and child remained at Bellpuig ­until the beginning of the twentieth ­century, when it was sold to an American, Charles Deering, who placed it in a ­house he owned in Sitges. Deering was an art collector and Hispanophile whose mansion Vizcaya (a name for the Basque Country of the same derivation as the Bay of Biscay) is among the grandest of all the South Florida palaces. He gave the statue to Josep Vilar, whose heirs sold it to the Catalan government, the Generalitat, in 2011 for 120,000 euros, and it is now in the Museu Diocesà i Comarcal in Lleida.68 In 2015, that same museum obtained a decorated box that had h ­ oused the sandal relic of the Virgin Mary, given to Bellpuig by Count Ermengol VIII (1158–1208). The relic is gone, but the early fifteenth-­century box, lost in the Spanish Civil War, was acquired at auction by the Generalitat and given to the 64. ​Barraquer, Los religiosos en Cataluña durante la primera mitad del siglo XIX, vol. 1 (Barcelona: F. J. Altéy Alabart, 1915), :141, 819. 65. ​Ramon Miró Baldrich and Pep Vila Medinyà, “Bellpuig de les Avellanes (segona meitat del segle XVII fins a inicis del XIX),” Urtx 18 (2005): 178. 66. ​Barraquer, Los religiosos en Cataluña, 3:423. 67. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·lecionista, 155. 68. ​“La Mare de Déu de Bellpuig de les Avellanes se incorpora a la exposición permanente del Museu de Lleida,” La Vanguardia, May 6, 2014, https://­www​.­lavanguardia​.­com​/­local​/­lleida​/­20140605​ /­54408719390​/­mare​-­deu​-­bellpuig​-­avellanes​-­museu​-­lleida​.­html.

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

253

Lleida museum. It is from a Barcelona workshop, one of about fifty such boxes that survive, and shows scenes related to courtly love. It was not so uncommon for containers made originally for jewelry to have been repurposed for relics. The Lleida coffer conforms to a detailed description given by Caresmar.69 The sandal itself had been rescued in 1835 by Guillem Escaró. It seems to have retained its aura and has been the object of local devotion for de­cades thereafter. At some point during the episcopacy of Josep Caixal, bishop of Urgell between 1853 and 1879, it was placed in the Tridentine Seminary of La Seu d’Urgell, where it still was in 1915. Along with the aforementioned material from Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles, it was destroyed in 1936 during the first days of the Spanish Civil War.70 In the 1880s, the remaining gold and silver coins of Bellpuig (having been returned to the convent ­after 1823) ­were sold by the last surviving Bellpuig Premonstratensian, Domènec Marcet, to a well-­ known collector, Manuel Vidal-­Quadras i Ramon. Born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, Vidal-­Quadras assembled a collection of 14,000 coins, including no less than 232 Visigothic gold pieces. He was well connected to institutions of culture and associated with the journal Memorial Numismatica Español, founded in Barcelona in 1866. The municipal authorities of Barcelona attempted to buy the collection from Vidal-­ Quadras’s heirs a­ fter his death in 1895, but negotiations w ­ ere unsuccessful and at some point shortly a­ fter 1900, the coins w ­ ere sold to a dealer in Amsterdam. Some of what was in Pasqual’s collection may be at the Hispanic Society of Amer­i­ca in New York; the ­others left some traces in sales but are now scattered in private collections.71 Most of the manuscripts that ­were once in the library of Bellpuig are lost. From his visit in 1808, Villanueva listed twelve medieval manuscripts, miscellaneous historical and genealogical rec­ords, a collection of material related to civil and ecclesiastical antiquities of Lleida, and two incunabula.72 It is a mark of the destruction that began just ­after Villanueva’s visit that only one of the medieval codices he mentioned is known to be extant, a Castilian translation of Pere Moles’s Regiment de l’home, dated 1377, now in Montserrat as MS 849.73 69. ​“Presentación de la arqueta amatoria procedente del monasterio de las Avellanas,” in the information newsletter of the Museu de Lleida, 2015, http://­museudelleida​.­cat​/­es​/­presentacio​-­de​-­larqueta​ -­amatoria​-­procedent​-­del​-­monestir​-­de​-­Bellpuig​-­de​-­les​-­avellanes​/­; Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez and Francesc Fité Llevot, “El Comte Pere II d’Urgell i les arts,” Lambard. Estudis d’art medieval 26 (2014–2016): 100–14. 70. ​Velasco and Fité, “El Comte Pere II d’Urgell i les arts,” 105. 71. ​Barraquer, Los religiosos en Cataluña, 3:424; Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·lecionista, 156–61. 72. ​Jaime Villanueva, Viage literario a las Iglesias de España, vol. 12 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1850), 92–97. 73. ​Puig i Ferreté and Giner Molina, Índex codicològic, 43–46, 157; Olivar, Catàleg dels manuscrits, 218–19.

25 4 Chap t e r  8

Jaume Pasqual’s monumental collection of materials for the ecclesiastical history of Catalonia, Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta, was saved a­ fter the 1835 exclaustration by one of the canons. The just-­mentioned ­Father Marcet gave this to a ­lawyer named Pau Valls i Bonet, ­either in lieu of payment or as a gift. Valls was involved in efforts to prevent the dispersal of Pasqual’s coin collection, so ­there is prob­ably a connection and an effort at preservation and salvage. Pau Valls’s son, Timoteu Valls, donated the volumes to the Biblioteca de Catalunya in 1919.74 Fourteen manuscripts from Bellpuig that w ­ ere not mentioned by Villanueva, including one by Caresmar, are now in the Franciscan archive in Barcelona. A late thirteenth-­or early fourteenth-­century liturgical manuscript from Bellpuig is at the Cathedral of Vic, as is a book manuscript containing histories of the counts of Empúries and Peralada and the viscounts of Roussillon by Joseph Taverner y de Ardena along with materials for a history of the church of Solsona.75 The fate of the printed books from the Bellpuig library is even more complicated. A greater percentage of books than manuscripts w ­ ere preserved, not by intention but by benign neglect due to their inferior monetary value. T ­ oday about fifteen hundred volumes from Bellpuig de les Avellanes can be traced by examining bookplates and spine labels.76 Eighty-­three belonging to Caresmar and seventy-­three of Pasqual’s have been identified.77 By 1843, when Bellpuig was auctioned off to Manuel Oviedo, t­ here ­were no books left. The despoliation of the library happened in stages, beginning with initiatives by the dispersed monks themselves to place books in churches or in the ­houses of neighbors in whom they had confidence, in hopes of a ­f uture restoration. In his assessment of the losses experienced by churches in the nineteenth c­ entury, Barraquer mentions conversations indicating that residents of Avellanes and Vilanova de la Sal and their environs possessed printed books and manuscripts from the monastery and that recently (ca. 1915) a 74. ​Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, Páginas de historia catalana: Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes (Barcelona: Institut de Germans Maristes Catalunya, n.d.), 275; Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i col·lecionista, 153–54. 75. ​On the Franciscan holdings, I am grateful to Arcelli Rosillo, director of the APFC. The Vic manuscripts are ABEV, MS 93, “Psalterium, hymnarium et orationes breviarii de tempore,” Bellpuig owner­ship stamp on f. 2r and MS 292, untitled, with Pasqual’s book stamp and handwriting. I thank Miquel Gros, Ramon Ordeig, and Rafael Ginebra i Molins of the ABEV for this information. According to Barraquer, Los religiosos en Cataluña, 3:427, the liturgical manuscript was among the materials taken from Balaguer a­ fter the disendowment of 1835 to the Jesuits in Balaguer, so presumably it was among the Bellpuig books transferred to the Franciscans of Vic in 1928. 76. ​Porta et al., “La biblioteca dels canonges premonstratesos”; Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i colˑlecionista, 152–53. 77. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i colˑlecionista, 153.

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

255

l­awyer in Lleida had auctioned off books in Barcelona, many of them originally from Bellpuig. Books seem to have been collected haphazardly in Balaguer, some torn apart to be used as wrapping material. Many ­were ­either dispersed locally, in some improvised protective arrangement in the ways just described, or simply taken. It is impossible to tell the difference retrospectively. A con­temporary account says that a­ fter the 1835 disamortization, twenty-­three crates of books ­were transported by a mule team from Bellpuig to the ­house of a well-­off inhabitant of La Portella, a village with its own ancient religious ­house in the comarca of Segrià, and this might have been e­ ither opportunistic appropriation or altruistically arranged to keep part of the library intact.78 In 2013, the proprietors of a masia (a cross between a farm and a villa typical of the western Mediterranean) called Casa Carrobé in Santa Linya (just northeast of the monastery) gave back forty-­seven books to Les Avellanes that had apparently been obtained just ­after 1835. ­There had been a considerably larger number of books at Casa Carrobé before the Spanish Civil War, during which the h ­ ouse was sacked and its contents confiscated.79 Books that had not been pilfered, mostly eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­ century treatises on religious practice, theology, and law, took two dif­fer­ent paths. One group was cata­loged in 1842 and sent to public repositories in Lleida, and the other was given to church authorities in Balaguer. Both groups ­were subject to vicissitudes, the second book collection more so, b­ ecause of the changing fortunes and administration of the vari­ous religious o ­ rders that held ­these books at vari­ous times—­Jesuits, Franciscans, cathedral chapters. In 1842 the Royal Acad­emy of San Fernando, protector of arts and monuments, made an inventory of 831 books still at Bellpuig in preparation for their transport to secular cultural institutions in Lleida. This is what is referred to above as the first group. ­These ­were deposited in the Biblioteca Provincial of Lleida, set up in 1848. ­Today ­there are 616 printed books from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth c­ entury in what is now the Biblioteca Pública de Lleida.80 Uncata­loged printed books from Bellpuig are also held by the diocesan seminary (Biblioteca del Seminari de Lleida) and the Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs. The latter, established in 1942, is a regional institution that preserves historical and cultural documentation and publishes a learned journal, Ilerda. In Lleida 78. ​Barraquer, Los religiosos en Cataluña, 3:427. 79. ​Robert Porta i Roigé, “La casa Carrobé de Santa Linya retorna documents a l’Arxiu del Monestir de Bellpuig de les Avellanes,” in Butlleti digital del Monestir de les Avellanes, October  22, 2013, https://­monestiravellanes​.­wordpress​.­com​/­2013​/­10​/­22​/­la​-­casa​-­carrobe​-­de​-­santa​-­linya​-­retorna​ -­documents​-­a​-­larxiu​-­del​-­monestir​-­de​-­bellpuig​-­de​-­les​-­avellanes​/­. 80. ​Porta et  al., “La biblioteca dels canonges premonstratesos.” Gemma Morlans Giné of the Biblioteca Pública de Lleida was kind enough to send me a list of the books cata­loged.

25 6 Chap t e r  8

during the Second Republic and the Civil War, antiquarian books from vari­ ous places, including Bellpuig, ­were deposited in a cultural museum that had previously been a church, in order to save them from destruction in the wake of anticlerical manifestations. A ­ fter the Nationalist victory in 1939, t­ hese books ­were placed in the newly founded Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs (known at the time by its Spanish title, Instituto de Estudios Ilerdensas). This collection of about four hundred books from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth ­century contains thirty-­five books published by the University of Cervera, thirty-­six that belonged to the Cervera library, and nineteen with the Bellpuig ex libris, including four with Caresmar’s signature.81 The second group of books, numbering eight hundred to one thousand, was sent to the Dominican convent in Balaguer, south of Bellpuig. The confiscations of 1835 affected monasteries but not mendicant or charitable ­orders; however, t­ hese w ­ ere not exempt from po­liti­cal vicissitudes. In 1849, the Spanish government took over the Dominican ­house in Balaguer and gave it to the city, whose administration in turn conceded it to the bishop of Urgell. The books stayed ­there even as the building served as a hospital during the cholera epidemic of 1857. In 1862, the Jesuit Order, suppressed from 1835 u ­ ntil 1852, took over the former Dominican convent. This is somewhat ironic with regard to Bellpuig as the Jesuits had tried in the seventeenth c­ entury to appropriate revenues belonging to Bellpuig in order to benefit their planned headquarters in Balaguer.82 In any event, Jesuit owner­ship of the library was brief. The revolution of 1868 established a new Liberal regime that again expelled the Jesuits. The books w ­ ere now given to the Franciscans, still in Balaguer.83 A reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the Franciscan Province of Catalonia in 1928 was supposed to centralize material from convents in Balaguer, Vila-­real, and Vic.84 Most of Caresmar’s papers ­were moved to Vic, but the vast majority of the books from Bellpuig remained with the Balaguer Franciscans. With the outbreak of the Civil War in July  1936 and subsequent attacks on churches, much of the Franciscan collection deposited at Vic was saved except the manuscripts of Caresmar, Pasqual, and Martí. ­These had been placed in the keeping of a local farmer, 81. ​My thanks to Sílvia Farrús Prat of the Biblioteca de l’Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs for allowing me to examine this collection. 82. ​Antoni Borràs i Feliu, “El monestir de Bellpuig de les Avellanes i la Companyia de Jesús a mitjan del segle XVII,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 49/50 (1976–1977): 159–75. 83. ​Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, “Historia del Monasterio de las Avellanas (desde su fundación hasta los abades comendatarios)” (doctoral diss., University of Valencia, 1954), 1:7–8. 84. ​Although according to Antoni Borràs i Feliu, Caresmar’s and Pasqual’s book collections ­were sent to the Franciscan convent in Vila-­real in 1881. Antoni Borràs i Feliu, “Obres de les bibliotheques personals de Jaume Caresmar i Jaume Pasqual conservades a la Biblioteca Borja,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 71 (1998): 148.

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

257

who unfortunately kept them concealed in stacks of wheat still in the fields before bringing them inside when the immediate threat had subsided. The paper sustained ­water and mold damage that obscured some texts and obliterated a few o ­ thers. ­After the Civil War, the sal­vaged remains ­were temporarily deposited at the cathedral of Vic and then in 1960 sent back to Bellpuig.85 They are the basis of a major set of manuscript works by Caresmar (appendix 1, nos. 18–25). Most of the books that remained with the Franciscans in Balaguer ­after 1928 do not seem to have been substantially damaged during the Civil War, but they ­were dispersed in the 1960s. The Biblioteca Borja, a Jesuit library in Sant Cugat del Vallès, bought 289 printed books, including 89 that had belonged to Caresmar and 115 that Pasqual had collected.86 Another part of the Franciscan library, including the Bellpuig material, was bought by Miquel Tarragona, a resident of Balaguer; and among some 800 books, 34 volumes formerly belonging to Bellpuig have been identified.87 At the Franciscan archive in Barcelona, as noted ­earlier, t­here are 182 books and fifteen manuscripts from Bellpuig.88 A book from Bellpuig belonging to Jaume Pasqual is in the library of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and Alberto Velasco has tracked down five more in private hands.89 Seventy printed books have been returned to Bellpuig, and fourteen (the books discovered in 2002) are kept in the regional archive of La Noguera in Balaguer. A small number are divided among other institutions, including the cathedral of Vic, the abbey of Montserrat, and the ecclesiastical archive of Urgell. How the books ended up where they are is only partially known.90

The Dispersion and Disappearance of Caresmar’s Works As described in chapter 6, what remains of Caresmar’s unpublished work is extensive, but it is dispersed and hard to identify despite attempts over the years 85. ​José Sanabre believed that the farmer, afraid of keeping religious works in the ideological climate of 1936, burned all of Caresmar’s books. José Sanabre, El Archivo de la Catedral de Barcelona (Barcelona: Pulcra 1948), 67. But the more complicated a­ ctual events w ­ ere described to me by archivists at ABEV (Miquel Gros and Rafel Ginebra) and at BPA (Robert Porta). 86. ​Borrás i Feliu, “Obres de les biblioteques personals”; also a pre­sen­ta­tion by Miquel Carbonell, librarian of the Biblioteca Borja, given at the conference “La creació de la memòria monàstica al llarg dels segles,” Bellpuig de les Avellanes, July 2017. 87. ​Information furnished by Robert Porta, archivist at Bellpuig de les Avellanes. 88. ​Communication given by Araceli Rosillo at the conference “La creació de la memòria monàstica al llarg dels segles,” Bellpuig de les Avellanes, July 2017. 89. ​Velasco, Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i colˑlecionista, 153. 90. ​Porta et al., “La biblioteca dels canonges.”

25 8 Chap t e r  8

to come up with a cata­log. He left a few substantial manuscript inventories of documents, notably the compendium of the rec­ords of the chapter of Àger, the listing of the manuscripts and incunabula of the Cathedral of Barcelona, and his effort at organ­izing and registering the parchments of the Cathedral of Barcelona. Caresmar’s unpublished works took dif­fer­ent paths. In the immediate aftermath of the disentailment of 1835, his manuscripts w ­ ere among ­those taken to what was first the Dominican, then the Jesuit, and fi­nally the Franciscan headquarters in Balaguer. Three volumes containing a total of eight of Caresmar’s works ­were in the possession of an ex-­canon of Bellpuig, Joaquim Ponsa, in 1865 and w ­ ere acquired by Domènec Marcet, the last Bellpuig cleric. According to Barraquer, writing in 1915, ­these books are described in correspondence in 1865 between Marcet and Josep Cortés, a priest in the area. Marcet’s heir was a cultivated person, but underage. His administrators or tutors seem to have sold or other­wise dispersed Caresmar’s books. On the other hand, in 1918, the Capuchin ­Father Martí briefly described the contents of two of ­these volumes, which then belonged to a private individual, a friend whom he did not name. Among the contents of ­these manuscripts, now lost, ­were the following works originally sent to Madrid but now irrecoverable: the Descubrimiento del sepulcro de Santa Eulalia; Prologo al Código de Ripoll, and Caresmar’s introduction to the reformation of the archive at Àger, Rázon de la obra: Arreglo del archivo de Ager.91 In July 1867, the indefatigable Fidel Fita drew up a list of Caresmar’s texts preserved in the Jesuit library at Balaguer, including correspondence, at least fifty miscellaneous short works, lists, reference aids, and longer treatises and collections of materials on Àger, manuscripts of the Cathedral of Barcelona, and the Anales del Real Monasterio de las Avellanas. Fita’s inventory is not among his papers at the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, nor does it figure among his over seven hundred contributions to the Boletín of that acad­emy. It is known only through an appendix to the discourse of Antonio Elías de Molins upon his entry as a fellow of the Real Academia de Barcelona in 1903.92 91. ​Barraquer, Los religiosos en Cataluña, 3:424–25; P. Martí, “Notas bio-­bibliográficas de Caresmar: Commemorando un centenario (1717–1791),” Estudios Franciscanos 22 (1919): 200–201. The “Prologo al Código de Ripoll” might perhaps be the same as or related to the “Códice de los concilios de Ripoll” mentioned by the Bellpuig canon Josep Martí as among the finished works sent to Madrid. Corredera, “Historia del Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas,” 1:309. 92. ​[Antonio Elías de Molins], Discursos leídos en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona en la recepción pública de D. Antonio Elías de Molins el día 8 de febrero de 1903 (Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 1903), 32–36, based on a cata­log drawn up by Fita that Elías de Molins saw at the RAH (p. 32). No such cata­log is cited in Juan Manuel Abascal Palazón, Fidel Fita, 1835–1918: Su legado documental en la Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1998), nor

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

259

In 1925, Paul Fridolin Kehr undertook an exhaustive research survey of Catalan archives to find originals or copies of papal letters from before 1198. Aided by his local in­for­mant, Josep Rius i Serra, and his German colleague Peter Rassow, Kehr mapped out at least some passageways of what he appropriately termed the Catalan “archival labyrinth,” and his guide remains useful to this day. At Balaguer, Kehr and his associates found over nine hundred pages of Caresmar’s writings and transcriptions in a volume titled Instrumenta varia. The quantity was more than they had expected but was of less importance for their proj­ect than they had hoped.93 Shortly thereafter, in 1927, Francesc Martorell i Trabal undertook an assessment of the manuscripts of Caresmar, Pasqual, and Martí in Balaguer. He mentions two works that Fita had apparently seen in Balaguer but that by 1927 ­were missing, one of them being the Anales.94 Where this was at this time is a mystery—­perhaps the Anales had already found its way back to Bellpuig. The other history of Bellpuig, De rebus, cannot be traced from the time of Vega i Sentmenat’s inventory of 1792 ­until 1894, when it was at Vilanova de la Sal. It does not seem to have traveled very far, but its survival is nevertheless fortuitous.95 In addition to the Anales and De rebus, the library of Bellpuig has eight manuscript volumes written by Caresmar or related to his research. Four are collections of miscellaneous notes, transcriptions, lists, and excerpts as sketched out by Corredera in his book La escuela histórica avellanense.96 ­These w ­ ere put together from the remains of what had been in Vic on the eve of the Civil War, but their current content is a somewhat random assortment of quires once bound completely differently (although not necessarily more coherently). One of t­hese manuscript books, described by Corredera as Volume A, now classified as Caixa 11, Llibre 29, consists of 585 pages of material from Sant Cugat, Banyoles, Solsona, and Barcelona, along with Caresmar’s essay on the right of abbots to bear the pectoral cross, and material relating to church history. is it in the dossiers of Fita’s papers, RAH, MSS 9-7580–9-7594. Abascal Palazón mentions Fita’s stay in Balaguer in the fall of 1867 (p. 20). The Bellpuig Anales is cited by Elías de Molins on pages 33–34. 93. ​Paul Fridolin Kehr, Papsturkunden in Spanien: Vorarbeiten zur Hispania Pontificia, vol. 1, Katalanien (Berlin: Weidmansche Buchhandlung, 1926), 182: “Das Material P. Caresmars ist am Ende doch nicht so umfangreich gewesen als man wohl früher geglaubt hat.” 94. ​Francesc Martorell i Trabal, “Manuscrits dels PP. Caresmar, Pasqual i Martí a la Biblioteca del Convent de Franciscans de Balaguer,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans 12 (1927): 179–81. 95. ​It was at Vilanova de la Sal according to Jaime Oliver, “Biografia de Jaume Caresmar i Alemany, 1717–1791,” El Ateneo, nos. 108–109 ( July and August 1894): 1017; Ramon d’Alós-­Moner, “Contribució a la bibliografia del P. Jaume Caresmar,” Butlletí de la Biblioteca de Catalunya 3 (1916): 29; Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, La escuela histórica avellanense, 2nd ed. (Lleida: Instituto de Estudios Ilerdenses, 1971), 92. 96. ​Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, 93–99.

26 0 Chap t e r  8

Volume B in Corredera’s organ­ization of the materials, now Caixa 13, Llibre 31, consists of 756 pages of transcriptions, notes, and lists of abbots and other rec­ ords from over one hundred monasteries in Catalonia and Aragon.97 Part of what Corredera describes as Volume C is currently combined with Volume D (Caixa 14, Llibre 32) to form a 370-­page register and transcription of documents in the ACA and cata­logs of the manuscripts of Ripoll and of the Cathedral of Barcelona. The first thirty-­four pages of Corredera’s Volume C seem to be missing. Volume E (Caixa 15, Llibre 33), with 664 pages, is a collection of printed material from the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries along with studies of chronology, dating, and manuscript authenticity, but nothing by Caresmar himself. Fi­nally, ­there is a manuscript consisting of 288 pages of material on chapters of canons, a book that was received at Bellpuig since Corredera’s time (Caixa 19, Llibre 40). Unlike the ­others, it bears no signs of ­water damage and so was presumably not previously at Vic. The contents of Caresmar’s surviving miscellanies are hard to relate to what Martorell i Trabal described as still at Balaguer in 1927.98 Thanks to Corredera’s notes, it is pos­si­ble to compare the works of Caresmar now at Bellpuig with the cata­log Vega i Sentmenat accomplished shortly ­after Caresmar’s death. Of the over two hundred works listed by Vega i Sentmenat, around forty can be identified in Corredera’s description. The prob­lem of coming up with a coherent cata­log of Caresmar’s surviving works is compounded, however, by his habit of including compositions by other scholars in his notes, and so some of the quires actually have l­ittle or nothing at all by him. T ­ here is an essay on the capital letters that introduce papal bulls by “Mossen Mercader,” and a set of indications by the Italian scholar Muratori for identifying forged documents. The text of Pope Martin IV’s deposition of King Pere II in 1283 is a copy made by Pasqual.99 In a way, it is a shame but also appropriate to end this chapter, and indeed, the major part of this entire book, with such confusion. Part of the challenge, pleas­ur­able as well as frustrating, of working on medieval sources for Catalonia is their decentralization, dispersal, partial cata­loging, and the promise of new rec­ords turning up so many centuries ­after they ­were enacted. In recent

97. ​On this volume, see Felio A. Villarrubias, “Nota sobre un manuscrito existente en el monasterio de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanas,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 57–58 (1984–1985): 279–96. 98. ​Josep Martí i Mayor, “Arxiu dels Franciscans de Catalunya,” in Guia dels arxius històrics de Catalunya, vol. 7 (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1998), 118; Jaume Enric Zamora i Escala, “Josep Maria Font i Rius i el salvament dels arxius de Vic durant la Guerra Civil Espanyola,” Ausa 17, no. 138 (1997): 300. 99. ​BPA, Arxiu del Monestir de Bellpuig, Caixa 15, Llibre 33, 397–405, 461–65; vol. A, 219–41.

Wa n d e ri n g s a n d D est ru c t i o n o f Librari e s a n d A r c hi v e s

261

years, substantial pro­gress has been achieved in putting back together and presenting in permanent form the disrupted documentation of the M ­ iddle Ages. To give a sense of what has been accomplished, as of 1986 the series Catalunya Carolíngia, announced in 1920 to edit all rec­ords dated before 1000, had managed to publish only about 450 of ­these. Now over 4,000 documents are in print and the series ­will be completed in the near ­future, a tribute to the exemplary standards of editors in recent de­cades.100 Medieval documents from the following monasteries and collegiate foundations ­were published from 1980 to 2000: Poblet (diocese of Tarragona), Santa Anna (Barcelona), Sant Climent de Codinet (Urgell), Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles (Urgell), Sant Feliu de Guíxols (Girona), Santa Maria de Roses (Girona), Sant Daniel (Girona), Santa Maria de Roca Rossa (Girona), Amer (Girona), Lavaix (Urgell), Gerri (Urgell), Sant Llorenç del Munt (Barcelona), Sant Llorenç de Morunys (Solsona), and Santa Maria de Cervià (Girona).101 Since 2000, transcribed documents from the following have appeared: Montalegre (Barcelona), Sant Pere and Santa Maria d’Ègara (Barcelona), Santa Maria de Besalú (Girona), Santes Creus (Tarragona), Casserres (Vic), La Portella (Solsona), Àger (Urgell), Sant Pere de Galligants (Girona), Cuixà (Elne), Ripoll (Vic), Santa Maria de les Franqueses (Urgell), Vilabertran (Girona), Sant Pau del Camp (Barcelona), Santa Maria d’Organyà (Urgell), Santa Maria de Guissona (Urgell), and Santa Cecília d’Elins (Urgell). All this means that the transcriptions made by Pierre de Marca in the seventeenth c­ entury or the Bellpuig historians in the eigh­teenth are less impor­ tant for historians in our time than they ­were in the past. They form part of a long pro­cess of making medieval documentation accessible, a significant intellectual and social accomplishment in the pre­sent age that has so much information available accompanied by widespread ignorance of and indifference to the past.

100. ​ Catalunya Carolingia, ed. Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals et al., 8 vols. in 17 parts to date (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1952–2020). On this proj­ect, see Gaspar Feliu, “La Catalunya Carolíngia,” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics 31 (2020): 79–93; Jaume de Puig i Oliver, “Catalunya Carolingia: Cent anys,” Arxiu de textos catalans antics 32 (2017–2019): 719–50. 101. ​Pierre Bonnassie, “Les documents catalans des IXe–­XIIe siècles: Éditions récentes et publications en cours,” Le Moyen Age 105 (1999): 149–60.

​Conclusion Medieval Catalonia and the Modern Centuries

I began writing this book with the intention of describing Jaume Caresmar as a dedicated, if eccentric, protagonist in the exploration of Catalonia’s medieval history in the eigh­teenth ­century. The focus was to be how the M ­ iddle Ages has been manipulated by successive generations to fit their agendas, and that remains one aspect of this work. In the course of the proj­ect, I have also found impor­tant the image of Caresmar’s era itself in Catalan historiography. Hence, t­ here are three layers to the story of the Bellpuig historians: the M ­ iddle Ages, the Bourbon ascendancy, and modern reifications of Catalonia’s po­liti­cal and cultural identity. This involves how historians study the ­Middle Ages—­the archival and historiographic contributions of the scholarly circles of the eigh­teenth ­century—­but also how con­ temporary observers deal with the period of Bourbon rule over Catalonia, specifically the paradox that what is often presented as the nadir of Catalan culture coincided with the reception of Enlightenment ideas and the first acceleration of the modern Catalan economy. During the ­Middle Ages, the Crown of Aragon was a power­ful Mediterranean confederation, and the commercial and military strength of the city of Barcelona rivaled that of Genoa and Venice. The research program of the Bellpuig historians was intended to revive the memory of Catalonia’s past glories, when, as Caresmar argues in the Carta al Barón de la Linde, the principality was more prosperous than in modern times. The efforts of t­hese eighteenth-­ 26 2

MED I EVA L C ATA LON I A A ND T H E MODE R N CENT U R I ES

263

century historians possess more than simply antiquarian interest, touching as they do on the vicissitudes of Catalan identity in the face of Castilian domination. The fraught relationship between Catalonia and a Castilianized central government, a feature of the War of the Spanish Succession and the subsequent era of absolutism, remains to the pre­sent moment urgent and contentious. Much of this book, therefore, deals with the eigh­teenth ­century, both in itself and comparatively; the view of the medieval epoch from its perspective; and the implications of the Bourbon hegemony for con­temporary history. Since Caresmar’s era, efforts to assimilate Catalonia into a centralized Spain have been met with advocacy of cultural pluralism within the Spanish state, although recently, many in Catalonia have abandoned this idea in ­favor of a demand for an in­de­pen­dent polity. Catalan nationalist movements evoke past constitutional and cultural accomplishments and the strug­gle against a Castilian-­dominated unified Spain. Bourbon centralization has therefore been retrospectively likened to twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century attempts at cultural homogenization. Efforts to ignore or repress culture impose ignorance and forgetfulness. Conversely, the preservation of distinction entails the retention of historical memory. The work to save and or­ga­nize the rec­ords of medieval Catalonia preoccupied Caresmar and the Bellpuig historians, along with other Catalan intellectuals such as t­ hose affiliated with the Real Academia in Barcelona. This work was motivated by a desire to preserve, and instruct the educated classes in, a history that was perceived as in danger of being forgotten. Among Catalan intellectuals, the po­liti­cal attitudes t­oward the Bourbon regime differed, as did the use of the Catalan language and a sense of the place of Catalonia within Spain, but the proj­ects of Catalan historians had a common inspiration. The effect was to establish the groundwork for a l­ater and more widely diffused interest in the ­Middle Ages, one linked to the assertion of Catalan culture in opposition to Castilianization. Such a connection to modern concerns has the advantage of underlining that the study of medieval sources and history was not an antiquarian pursuit or not just an antiquarian pursuit. One can see particularly in Antoni de Capmany’s modernizing agenda that the power of Catalonia in the M ­ iddle Ages, the past importance of the Catalan language, and the constitutional organ­ ization of the Crown of Aragon all influenced the identity of Catalonia and the strug­gle undertaken by the Cortes of Cádiz to create a modern, liberal government. The defeat of the liberal experiment in 1814 did not mean the irrelevance of the Catalan ­Middle Ages since that era came to inspire revivals of piety, architecture, leisure activities, and national propaganda beginning with, but not confined to, the literary Renaixença.

26 4 ​CONCL U SI ON

In contrast with the outlook of the nineteenth c­ entury, the M ­ iddle Ages now has a diminished relevance in the Catalan imagination, while the Bourbon period is the object of tendentious discussion. Contrasting interpretations of the eigh­teenth c­ entury reflect the breakdown of the formerly generalized belief that Catalonia could prosper within a demo­cratic Spanish state, a consensus that characterized the transition to democracy a­ fter the death of Franco (1975) and lasted into the early years of the pre­sent ­century. Two works, composed against the background of the assertive in­de­pen­dence movement, demonstrate the po­liti­cal implications of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. In Repressió borbònica i resistència identitària a la Catalunya del segles XVIII (Bourbon repression and identity-­based re­sis­tance in eighteenth-­century Catalonia), Jaume Sobrequès i Callicó likens the efforts of the Franco regime to erase (sorer) the use of the Catalan language as well as the rights of the Catalan populace to ­earlier attempts by the Bourbon rulers and their minions. Just as ­after 1939 Catalan re­sis­tance to Castilian assimilation appeared to be feeble but turned out to be durable and easily restored a­ fter 1975, so too a­ fter 1714, when eight hundred years of sovereignty or autonomy ­were wiped out by Philip V and Nueva Planta, the identity of Catalonia persisted: attacked, hidden, but ineradicable.1 Catalan uniqueness endured not only ­because of Madrid’s inefficiency but also ­because of re­sis­tance to coerced assimilation born out of the fixed nature of Catalan identity and its distinction from “Spain.” Repressió borbònica was published jointly by the Catalan government (the Generalitat) and the Center for Con­temporary History and forms the third volume in the series “El fet identitari català al llarg de la història” (The real­ity of Catalan identity over the course of history). While not a policy statement, the book’s conclusions may be taken as an official, or at least established, view: that within the central government’s consistent opposition to Catalan distinctiveness (fet identitari) ­there have been particularly acute attempts at cultural extirpation—by the Bourbon kings, by the dictators Primo de Rivera (1923– 1930) and Francisco Franco (1939–1975), and by recent right-­wing nationalist leaders. Catalonia’s distinctiveness has survived not ­because of changing attitudes of the Spanish State, favorable or unfavorable, but b­ ecause Catalans have consistently refused to abandon their culture. Actions against Catalonia ­were not merely by-­products of centralization or absolutist uniformity and efficiency but represent deliberate campaigns to wipe out (anorrear) the identity of the Catalan p­ eople. Thus, attributed ben1. ​Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, Repressió borbònica i resistència identitària a la Catalunya del segle XVIII (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2020), 9–15. Josep M. Torras i Ribé, Misèria, poder i corrupció a la Catalunya borbònica (1714–1808) (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2020) is another recent treatment of the theme of Bourbon oppression.

MED I EVA L C ATA LON I A A ND T H E MODE R N CENT U R I ES

265

efits of the Bourbon regime, such as the University of Cervera or economic reforms, are not to be interpreted as a divergence from an agenda of cultural annihilation. T ­ hose in power who have been praised for their enlightened attitude, such as King Charles III or the Marquis de Risbourg (capitán general 1725–1746), are to be considered merely what Sobrequès calls “decaffeinated” implementers of repression.2 In the words of one of the chapter titles, the period 1714–1808 amounts to “a hundred years of aggression and the reaffirmation of identity” (cent anys d’agressió i reaffirmació identitària). Roberto Fernández, a historian and the former rector of the University of Lleida, represents what Sobrequès contemptuously refers to as the “negocionista” tendency, offering an irenic view of Catalonia’s role within a polity of pluralist “Spains,” hence a more optimistic account of Catalonia during the eigh­teenth ­century. Cataluña y el absolutisomo borbónico, written in Spanish, describes how Catalan historians and literati have treated the Bourbon period, but it is also a personal statement by an author (born in 1954) who grew up ­under Franco and whose early education was blighted by a mandatory, false, pseudo-­patriotic history of Spain that at least had the benefit of teaching him the dangers of distorting the past for pre­sent po­liti­cal gain. This is happening again, he asserts, as Catalan intellectuals pre­sent Catalonia as inevitably and consistently the victim of Castilian-­controlled Spain. Distorted historical accounts in the ser­vice of national assertion come with the risk, as Hegel remarked and as Fernández endorses, that the population ­will never be happy or ­free.3 The eigh­teenth ­century serves as a point of reference for two hundred years of history manipulated by po­liti­cal agendas. Fernández identifies a turning point in the latter half of the nineteenth ­century when a paradigm of grievance rather than reconciliation took over (el paradigma de la Cataluña agraviada). Up ­until this point, Catalan historians intent on improvement—­Enlightenment figures such as Capmany but also Romantics like Victor Balaguer—­believed that a prosperous Catalonia could transform Spain, that its example would serve as the vanguard for the introduction of Eu­ro­pean modernization and liberty. The modern orthodoxy has shifted, according to Fernández, to a historiography of resentment, insistent not only on the “fact” of Catalan national distinction but on the consistent real­ity of Castilian intransigence. Not all historians, to be sure, have accepted this dichotomy. Fernández pre­ sents two of the greatest twentieth-­century figures, Jaume Vicens Vives and 2. ​Sobrequés i Callicó, Repressió borbònica, 154–55. 3. ​Roberto Fernández, Cataluña y el absolutismo borbónico: Historia y política (Barcelona: Universitat de Lleida, 2014), 14–16.

26 6 ​CONCL U SI ON

Pierre Vilar, as aware of Catalonia’s uniqueness but states that they regarded 1714 as a point of departure for reconstruction and at least potential cooperation with a progressive Spain. Vicens quite explic­itly (opposing Ferran Soldev­ ila) denied that the Succession War and its aftermath represented an attempt to impose a single Spanish identity on defeated Catalonia.4 Fernández was only six years old when Vicens died in 1960, but as with all historians of his generation, he was directly influenced by Pierre Vilar, whose Catalan Festschrift Fernández edited. Vilar, a Marxist historian sympathetic to and impressed by Catalonia but not wrapped up in its grievances, offered a materialist, evidentiary, but not narrowly positivistic account of the eigh­teenth ­century that, without denying (in fact celebrating) the per­sis­tence of Catalan identity, depicted the country’s rapid economic pro­g ress as taking place irrespective of po­liti­cal ideology or configuration. The end of an autonomous Catalan state in 1715 did not mean the end of the Catalan nation.5 From his own estimation of historiography and in deference to Vicens’s instructions and example, Fernández has derived a version of history that rejects permanent, paradigmatic constructs such as Catalonia versus Castile. ­There are, as Vicens argued, multiple Catalonias and multiple Spains, not all of the latter inevitably dominated by an absolutist, centralizing agenda.

The ­Middle Ages Historians of Catalonia are compelled to acknowledge the importance of the ­Middle Ages, but they do so with differing levels of enthusiasm. Such is the nature of academic specialization that few medievalists venture beyond 1500, and a similar limitation is chronologically reversed for modernists who are themselves further subdivided. Vicens Vives was exceptional as both a medieval historian and the author of modern economic histories. He frequently speculated on the forces that had created the Catalonia of his era and what he hoped might be its condition in the ­f uture.6 Around 1900, the medieval period of Catalonia’s history was favored by conservative nationalist historians, including t­ hose closely affiliated with the church. Unlike the outlook of e­ arlier, secular observers such as Capmany or the found­ ers of Catalan nationalism, for whom Catalonia’s geopo­liti­cal prominence constituted its medieval legacy, that of ecclesiastical writers such as the bishops of 4. ​Fernández, Cataluña y el absolutismo borbónico, 360–61. 5. ​Fernández, Cataluña y el absolutismo borbónico, 370–87. 6. ​­There is an im­mense lit­er­a­ture on this fascinating figure. See particularly Josep Maria Muñoz, Jaume Vicens i Vives: Una biografia intel·lectual (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1997).

MED I EVA L C ATA LON I A A ND T H E MODE R N CENT U R I ES

267

Vic Josep Morgades (1826–1901) and his successor Josep Torras i Bages (1846– 1916) was to exalt Catalonia’s Catholic spirituality, vis­i­ble in its Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture as well as the piety of cultural figures such as Ramon Llull and Francesc Eiximenis. Opposing what he regarded as reckless and excessively worldly nationalism, Torras i Bages extolled the uniqueness of Catalonia, understood in terms of its exemplification of a universal message. In the late nineteenth c­ entury, an alliance between Catholic piety and a form of Catalan nationalism was manifested by the restoration of Ripoll and the exaltation of the abbey of Montserrat to the status of a national shrine. Montserrat’s Castilian anthem Firme la Voz was replaced by the Catalan El Virolai.7 ­There was hardly anything unusual or particularly Catalan in turning to the ­Middle Ages to inspire a revival of piety, authenticity, or national/regional self-­ awareness. For the En­glish Romantics as well as socialists like William Morris, the medieval centuries represented the ­people’s spirit and upstanding nature before the corruptions of industrialization and the cruel advent of what passed for reason and individualism. Within Catalonia, however, the early twentieth ­century saw a split between a Catholic conservative nationalism and a secular, even revolutionary tendency. The former combined Catholic piety with Catalan cultural patriotism. The Civil War and violent Republican anticlericalism split the conservative nationalists, many of whom preferred what they regarded as the lesser of two evils, the forces of General Franco. During the long Franco regime, the Catalan church was divided. Its carefully controlled hierarchy was acquiescent when not enthusiastic, but increasingly, especially ­after the election of Pope John in 1958, Catholic youth groups, the monastery of Montserrat, and other ecclesiastical organ­izations and centers became associated with the defense of Catalonia’s language and culture. Montserrat was the site of the first Catalanist mass demonstration in 1947, and beginning in 1958, it published Serra d’Or, one of very few (and the only mass circulated) magazines in Catalan.8 In the 1980s, the Convergència i Unió party ­under the leadership of Jordi Pujol restored a Catholic, bourgeois cultural policy centered on the medieval background of Catalonia’s identity. In a 2001 interview with the historical journal L’Avenç, Pujol described con­temporary Catalonia as the product of (King) Jaume I, industrialization, and immigration (meaning at this time immigration from southern and central Spain).9 The basic substratum was formed at 7. ​Giovanni C. Cattini, “The Advent and Politicisation of Distinct Catalan Identities (1860–1898),” in Historical Analy­sis of the Catalan Identity, ed. Flocel Sabaté (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), 282–88. 8. ​Hank Johnston, Tales of Nationalism: Catalonia, 1939–1979 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 54–64. 9. ​Jordi Pujol, interview by Josep Muñoz i Lloret, L’Avenç 256 (2001).

26 8 ​CONCL U SI ON

the height of Catalonia’s expansion u ­ nder Jaume I (1213–1276). U ­ nder Convergència, the Generalitat provided funding for research, for the commemoration of medieval events, and for the restoration of sites from the period 800–1500. For example, as noted ­earlier in chapter 2, the Catalan government in the late 1980s embarked on a proj­ect of marking the supposed millennium of Catalonia. The M ­ iddle Ages, according to the official view, saw the realization of the Catalan fet nacional, the period of its po­liti­cal and institutional efflorescence and its Catholic artistic accomplishments. By the end of the twentieth ­century, Catalan nationalism was no longer dependent on a version of medieval history. Catalan virtue was demonstrated by the embrace of rationality, modernity, and pro­g ress (in explicit or implied contrast to Castile), not just by a glorified ­Middle Ages.10 In the 1990s, the socialist municipal government of Barcelona regarded nostalgia for the ­Middle Ages as inappropriate, or at least beside the point, preferring to emphasize the creativity of Catalonia and subsidizing architectural innovations, public art spaces, per­for­mances, and expressions of popu­lar culture, all with roots in something considerably newer than the medieval past. That same de­cade also saw an acceleration of Barcelona’s international appeal as a tourist destination, its reputation powered by nonmedieval f­ actors from Gaudí to molecular gastronomy.11 It was pos­si­ble to hold an ecumenical or at least omnivorous point of view with regard to Catalonia’s cultural identity, one that encompassed attention to its hundreds of Romanesque churches, to Montserrat, and to Gaudí’s Church of the Sagrada Familia as religious shrines, tourist attractions, and national symbols. This use of the past for the promotion of tourism as well as national identity persists, but the in­de­pen­dence movement does not rely on arguments about Catalonia’s power and par­tic­u­lar identity in the ­Middle Ages. The year 1714 and the dossier of modern grievances have become more impor­tant, partly a reflection of a general decline in the teaching of medieval history in schools and the weakening influence of the church, once the ­g reat proponent of medieval Catalonia. The grievances (the growth of Madrid at the expense of Barcelona, the centralization of communications, media, culture, and po­ liti­cal power, and the subversion and annulment of autonomy) outweigh what was previously an assertion of cultural virtue and superiority. According to 10. ​Vicente Cacho Viu, El nacionalismo catalán como f­actor de modernización (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1998). 11. ​Michael Vargas, “The Past as an Actor in Barcelona’s Con­temporary Metropolitics,” Journal of Catalan Studies 17 (2014): 114–43. More generally for Catalonia but specifically about the ­Middle Ages, see Michael Vargas, Constructing Catalan Identity: Memory, Imagination and the Medieval (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

MED I EVA L C ATA LON I A A ND T H E MODE R N CENT U R I ES

269

this view, while the survival of Catalan culture and distinction is not in doubt (and this is a central thesis of Repressió borbònica), the continuation of Castilian po­liti­cal hegemony is intolerable. Despite this par­tic­u­lar waning of the M ­ iddle Ages, one cannot think about Catalonia and its culture while excluding its medieval legacy. The period 1000– 1500 formed the basis for the Romantic school of history, represented by the picturesque stories told by Victor Balaguer or Pau Piferrer, but the notion of a Catalan tradition g­ oing back to its medieval formation was also part of the positivist program of late nineteenth-­century nationalist intellectuals such as Valentí Almirall (author of Lo catalanisme) and the representatives of what was called noucentisme (“noucents” meaning the 1900s, or twentieth c­ entury, thus “twentieth-­centuryism”). This latter movement furthered Catalan national distinctiveness while criticizing the lyrical my­thol­ogy of nineteenth-­century Romanticism. While retaining a certain spiritual ele­ment of Catalan identity, noucentisme was allied to a modernizing and more universal—or at least more European—­spirit.12 This did not displace the significance ascribed to the M ­ iddle Ages, which remained, according to the historian of Catalan expansion Antoni Rubio i Lluch, the “period of nationhood” (període nacional).13 The noucentistes shared what Jaume Aurell calls a “moderate nationalism,” one that advocated a pragmatic, “possibilist” politics of federalism rather than in­de­pen­dence. They regarded Catalonia as progressive and forward-­looking, as evidenced by its economic precocity, mistrust of autocracy, and the hardworking character of its inhabitants. The noucentist movement is identified both chronologically and ideologically with the first modern autonomous Catalan government, the Manucomunicat, established in 1914 and terminated with the seizure of power in 1923 by the dictator Primo de Rivera.14 Po­liti­cal calculations did not prevent twentieth-­century writers from denouncing the vio­lence, lust for domination, and refusal of enlightenment supposedly characteristic of Castile, in contrast to Catalonia’s practical, progressive, Eu­ro­pean values. The history of Spain since the High ­Middle Ages could be seen as a series of insults and repressions directed against Catalonia, beginning with the dynastic Compromise of Caspe (1412), which ushered in the Castilian Trastámaras, the ­union of Castile and Aragon ­under the latter’s hegemony, the failed centralizing ambitions of the Count-­Duke Olivares and 12. ​­These historiographic tendencies are discussed by Jaume Aurell, “La formación del imaginario histórico del nacionalismo catalán, de la Renaixença al Noucentisme (1830–1930),” Historia contemporánea 22 (2001): 257–88; Enric Pujol i Casademont, “Noucentisme historiogràfic,” in Tendències de la historiografia catalana, ed. Antoni Simon (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2009), 351–63. 13. ​Pujol i Casademont, “Nocentisme historiogràfic,” 360. 14. ​Pujol i Casademont, “Nocentisme historiogràfic,” 351–52.

27 0 ​CONCL U SI ON

the Revolt of the Catalans, and, of course, the Bourbon triumph. This would inform not just nationalist post-­noucentist historians such as Soldev­ila but Vicens Vives himself, notwithstanding his range and theoretical, comparative orientation. To say that Catalonia’s medieval legacy has been interpreted in relation to po­liti­cal and ideological considerations is hardly a novel observation. What is perhaps more in­ter­est­ing and not immediately obvious is the importance of the eigh­teenth c­ entury in shaping perceptions of Catalonia’s medieval past as opposed to the well-­known role of the nineteenth-­century Renaixença. The vari­ous schools of Catalan history since 1830 reflect what was already a series of approaches to the history and situation of Catalonia with regard to Spain made before the nationalist movement of the late nineteenth c­ entury—by Caresmar, Capmany, and other historians in the eigh­teenth c­ entury. Writing in the era of absolutism, their investigations of church history and the ­Middle Ages reiterated the continuity of Catalan distinctiveness without the use of terms that have con­temporary importance, such as “identity.” ­These intellectuals did not describe their research in terms of a field or period called “medieval history” or “the ­Middle Ages.” Even though three centuries ­earlier the Italian Re­nais­sance had defined itself against a Gothic past, a long and superstitious “­middle” period between classical antiquity and their own glorious time, the M ­ iddle Ages became a widely diffused notion only with the growth of Romanticism and nationalism. Sir Walter Scott may not have in­ven­ted the ­Middle Ages, but his influence on ideas of past chivalry, piety, and picturesque vio­lence extended to all of Eu­rope and much of Amer­i­ca. The Catalan Renaixença, somewhat confusingly (given the general meaning of Re­ nais­sance), was a Romantically inspired revival of thirteenth-­to fifteenth-­ century Catalan literary culture. For Caresmar and the Bellpuig circle, but also for secular observers such as Capmany, certain medieval accomplishments ­were laudable, but the centuries before 1500 w ­ ere a single entity with only chronological as opposed to cultural distinctions. When the Barcelona Acad­emy divided the investigation of Catalan history into segments and assigned members responsible for them, they considered “Catalonia” to have existed long before the Romans arrived, and their first plan went only as far as AD 700, a time historians since the nineteenth c­ entury have considered at least 150 years before the birth of Catalonia and four centuries before the words “Catalan” or “Catalonia” are first found.15 Catalonia was defined territorially in the eigh­teenth ­century rather than as an idea or polity born u ­ nder specific circumstances at a specific time. 15. ​See chapter 5.

MED I EVA L C ATA LON I A A ND T H E MODE R N CENT U R I ES

271

In a way, this timelessness has been more durable as applied to Spain. Two of the greatest scholars of the twentieth c­ entury, Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869– 1968) and Claudio Sánchez-­Albornoz (1893–1984), posited an unchanging Spanish character, the outlook of a homo hispanus who has existed, if not since time immemorial, at least since Seneca in the first c­ entury AD. The Stoic resilience and sternness of this phi­los­op­ her, born in Roman Córdoba, ­were identified with the Spanish outlook by Ángel Ganivet (1865–1898) in his 1897 Idearium español and repeated in historical works such as Sánchez-­Albornoz’s España, un enigma histórico in 1956.16 According to Menéndez Pidal, writing in 1947, “A Spaniard . . . ​ carries within himself a par­tic­u­lar instinctive and elemental stoicism: he is an innate senequist [i.e., follower of Seneca]. Certainly, much is owed to him, and in turn Seneca, purifier of Stoicism, owes much to the fact that he was born in a Spanish ­family.”17 Instead of tacitly joining all of Spain to Castilian character, Ganivet stated explic­itly that if Seneca had been born a­ fter the ­Middle Ages, perhaps he would not have come from Andalusia but rather from Castile.18 No one, to my knowledge, has tried to annex a figure of the ancient world to the Catalan national character. If historians of the Bourbon era considered it worth explicating the history of Catalonia during the Cartha­g inian period, that did not mean that an ineffable and ineradicable Catalan personality existed then. It was the ­Middle Ages, ­under what­ever name or guise, that was taken to have created and epitomized essential Catalanness. This is implied in Caresmar’s notion of decline, of a falling off in Catalonia’s prosperity in stages beginning with the Compromise of Caspe. L ­ ater historians might add steps to the pro­cess of decay, but what­ever the relative weight given to t­hese events or ­factors, the end of the medieval period was, if not the end of Catalan liberties, the beginning of their curtailment, and with it, the reduction of Catalonia’s economy and the influence of its language. The “negocianista” position might recommend restoring an essentially Austriacist pre-1714 state of affairs, while the continuity of Catalan re­sis­tance since Nova Planta might indicate to the agravios school the ineradicable culture of Catalonia, but both parties agree as to the formative role of the M ­ iddle Ages. Caresmar and the Bellpuig circle come before the Romantic revival of the ­ ere, however, e­ager to rediscover and make essentialist Volksgeist. They w known the sources for the medieval and ancient history of the region. They saw Catalonia’s past in terms of a singular set of advantages and geo­g raph­ic­ al 16. ​Oliver Baldwin, “A Spaniard in Essence: Seneca and the Spanish Volksgeist,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 28 (2021): 335–52. 17. ​Cited in Baldwin, “Spaniard in Essence,” 344, from the introduction to Historia de España, edited by Menéndez Pidal. 18. ​Baldwin, “Spaniard in Essence,” 338.

27 2 ​CONCL U SI ON

considerations but tied to larger entities: the Roman Empire and the church. The Bellpuig historians are not to be understood as reviving a national memory but fitting their par­tic­u­lar culture into the master narratives of classical, ecclesiastical, and Eu­ro­pean history. They ­were uninterested in the creation of stories about Catalan virtue, in the manner of ­either the past (the Baroque historiography of fabulous heroism) or the ­f uture (the Romantic folkloric or myths of empire). They tried, not always successfully, to distinguish between the accretion of legends and a core of au­then­tic tradition. The virtues of Catalonia w ­ ere not unique attributes of a national character but the manifestations of widely agreed-­upon Eu­ro­pean traits. Their revered saints w ­ ere Catalan, but their sanctity was according to a not particularly or certainly not uniquely Catalan beneficence. Our interest in the Bellpuig scholars is their role in preserving, organ­izing, and drawing attention to historical sources. Their activities provoke consideration of the uses made of Catalonia’s medieval history, the per­sis­tence of Catalan culture, and how ­people have thought about Catalonia’s position with regard to Spain. In his account of the Spanish Civil War, Pierre Vilar identified the four g­ reat prob­lems of Spain in the early twentieth c­ entury: the agrarian situation of im­mense estates worked by oppressed tenant farmers, po­liti­cal instability caused by military coups, controversies involving the role of the church, and the question of Catalonia. As was pointed out in 2021 in the Catalan historical magazine L’Avenç, among ­these prob­lems more than eighty years ­after the close of the Civil War, only the last remains unresolved, and the situation of Catalonia with regard to Spain is more difficult than ever.19 All this serves as the background and ­future implications of Caresmar’s dedication, eccentricity, and frustrations. By way of expanding circles—­Caresmar’s Bellpuig colleagues, other centers of learning, the nature of their proj­ects, and the uses of the M ­ iddle Ages in creating a Catalan sense of the past—we might arrive at a sense of the context of the pre­sent crises, but also pre­sent opportunities. The discovery of the hidden Bellpuig documents says more about Catalan history than reconstructing the vicissitudes of a single monastery. It allows by implication glimpses into an over one-­thousand-­year evolution of Catalan history and what it has meant to be Catalan at dif­fer­ent historical stages.

19. ​[Josep Muñoz i Lloret?], “El quart problema,” L’Avenç 481 ( July–­August 2021), 5.

Appendix 1

Surviving Works of Caresmar

The word “works” is problematic as much of what Caresmar wrote consisted of lists, extracts, citations, and preliminary notes. The description that follows cites compendiums of such brief and miscellaneous materials only when they have been grouped together in volumes, as is particularly the case with Bellpuig de les Avellanes manuscripts. Other­wise, only completed essays, transcriptions, cata­logs, and other materials that might be considered books or articles are presented; notes, lists, or proj­ect outlines are not included. Efforts to classify what Caresmar wrote are based on inventories made a­ fter his death by Josep de Vega i Sentmenat (RB, MS II/2469, ff. 250r–251v, 253v and also in Jaume Pasqual’s “Sacra Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta,” BC, MS 729, vol. 11, ff. 262v and 280r) and Josep Martí (BC, MS 753), published by Ramon d’Alòs as the second part of his “Contribució a la bibliografia del P. Jaume Caresmar,” in vol. 5 (1918–1919) of the Butlletí de la Biblioteca de Catalunya. In his biographical dictionary of Catalan writers, published in 1836, Fèlix Torres Amat relied on Vega and Martí for a list of Caresmar’s writings. An inaugural lecture to the Barcelona Acad­emy in 1903 by Antonio Elías de Molins presented Caresmar’s compositions using Torres Amat’s as well as Fidel Fita’s 1867 compilation of Caresmar’s manuscripts in the Jesuit library in Balaguer, the recipient of much of what had been at Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Fita’s visit took place just before the Jesuits ­were expelled. Elías de Molins’s 273

27 4

A pp e n d i x 1

lecture is impor­tant ­because Fita’s work, supposed to be in the library of the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, can no longer be found. Ramon d’Alòs in 1918–1919 tried to match Vega i Sentmentat’s descriptions with the lists made by Elías de Molins. E ­ arlier (in 1916), Alòs presented a description of ten previously unremarked Caresmar manuscripts—­unremarked in that when Alòs wrote, ­these manuscripts ­were not in the Franciscan library in Balaguer (housing what was previously held by the Jesuits before their expulsion), nor did they figure in the index drawn up by Fita as modified by Elías de Molins. A manuscript of the Carta al Barón de la Linde was then owned by Alòs, now BC 9363 (no. 11 below). Caresmar’s communications to the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona are included in Joaquim Miret y Sans, “Dos siglos de vida academica,” which appeared in the Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona in 1917. In 1927 Francesc Martorell i Trabal published the result of his visit to Balaguer, describing Caresmar’s surviving works in the Franciscan Library along with t­ hose of Pasqual and Martí. Several of Eduardo Corredera’s studies from the 1950s to the 1980s describe Caresmar’s surviving manuscripts that had been returned to Bellpuig ­after the Spanish Civil War. In an article published in 1992, Marina Garí and her collaborators cata­loged Caresmar’s works by comparing what Vega i Sentmenat and Martí had described with what they ­were able to locate. Despite ­these attempts to impose order, the vicissitudes of time and the nature of Caresmar’s compilation practices make it impossible to reconcile the dif­fer­ent postmortem inventories. Thus, I set out h ­ ere what can be found t­ oday and, when it is clear, how it corresponds with previous efforts. References use the following numbering system: (1) the cata­log made by Vega i Sentmenat (copied by Pasqual) and used by Ramon d’Alòs-­Moner, “Contribució a la bibliografia del P. Jaume Caresmar,” (part 2), Butlletí de la Biblioteca de Catalunya 5 (1918–1919): 52–82; (2) numbers assigned by Antonio Elías de Molins, Discursos leídos en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona en la recepción pública de D. Antonio Elías de Molins el día 8 de febrero de 1903 (Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 1903); and (3) the list in Marina Garí, Ramon Masdeu, and Manuela Urbina, “Jaume Caresmar. L’home i la seva obra,” Manuscrits 10 (1992): 340–71. Other references are to page numbers and so indicated.



A pp e n d i x 1

275

A. Works of Jaume Caresmar Published during His Lifetime 1. La primada entre los santos: Sermón panegyrico que en alabanza de la gloriosa virgen y prothomartyr Santa Thecla [. . .] predicó Iayme Caresmar (Tarragona: Joseph Barber, 1749). Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs 1; Elías de Molins 5; Garí et al., 67. 2. Sermón panegyrico que en alabanza del Príncipe de los apóstoles San Pedro, patron de la muy Rda. comunidad de clérigos de la parroquial iglesia de la villa de Igualada predicó el muy reverendo P. D. Iayme Caresmár el dia 29 de junio del presente año 1749 [. . .] (Barcelona: Herederos de Bartholomé y Maria Angela Giralt, n.d., ca. 1749). Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs 3; Elías de Molins 4; Garí et al., 66. 3. Sermón panegyrico que en alabança de la Concepcion de Maria Santissima predicó D. Jayme Caresmàr [. . .] el dia 8 de diciembre de 1749 en la catedral de Barcelona [. . .] (Barcelona: Herederos de Bartholomé y Maria Angela Giralt, n.d., ca. 1750). Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs 2; Elías de Molins 6; Garí et al., 65 (the latter erroneously thought it was no longer extant). 4. Menologium Praemonstratense, in quo sancti, et beati, ac pecularia festa, necnon plurimi ex professoribus utriusque sexus sanctimonia, & virtutem meritis insignes, Ordinis Canonicorum Regularium Sancti Augustinie, Praemonstratensis instituti [. . .] Pars hyemalis, a Kal. Januarii, ad pridie Kal. Aprilis (Barcelona: Theresa Piferrer, 1761). No date of publication is given, but ­there are two imprimaturs dated December 1760 and a certification from the Barcelona Acad­emy dated January 24, 1761. The first part of a planned series of brief notices about Premonstratensians, the Menologium was presented at the Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona in 1761. It contains biographies of Premonstratensian saints, beatified persons, and other members of the order who w ­ ere distinguished for their virtues. It is or­ga­nized according to the anniversaries of the birth or demise of the individual. Only the months of January, February, and March are included. Cit. Vega i Sentmenat 2/Alòs 4; Elías de Molins 9; Garí et al., no. 41. 5. Sanctus Severus Episcopus et Martyr, sedi et civitati barcinonensi noviter assertus et vindicatus (Vic: Petrus Morera, 1764). Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs 5; Elías de Molins 7; Garí et al., 62. 6. Dissertatio historica-­cronologica de inscriptione lapidis Ecclesiae Sancti Meterii, Martyris barcinonensis (Cervera: Typis Academicis, 1765). Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs 6; Elías de Molins 2; Garí et al., 50.

27 6

A pp e n d i x 1

7. “Abreviaturas que facilitan la inteligencia de otras usadas en los manuscritos ê instrumentos señaladamente de Cathaluña desde el siglo VIII al XIV,” in Real Academia de Buenas Letras de la Ciudad de Barcelona; origen, progreso y su primera junta general, baxo la protección de Su Magestad con los papeles que en ella se acordaron (Barcelona: Francisco Suriá, 1756) = retrospectively Memorias de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, vol. 1. Text is in the form of a chart folded and attached to the endpaper along with some supplementary notes (pp. 665–67). Unattributed ­here, but the minutes of the Real Academia in Barcelona refer to a “dissertation” on abbreviations as having been composed and presented by Caresmar on May 1, 1754. Miret y Sans, p. 29. Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs 7; Elías de Molins 14. 8. Theodor M. Rupprecht, Notae historicae in universum ius canonicum rationibus consentaneis adsertae, questionibus historico-­critico-­dogmatico-­ scholasticis illustratae, munitae, atque in usum cupidae Legum Sacratiorum iuventutis praecipue directae [. . .] accurati studio concinnata a Jacobo Caresmar [. . .] (Barcelona: Francisco Suriá, 1772). In two volumes, to which Caresmar contributed an index and a three-­part outline (“Oeconomia opusculi”). Cit. Garí et al., 72. 9. Censura sobre algunos hechos del martirio de Santa Eulalia Barcelonesa [. . .] (Madrid: Joachín Ibarra, 1782). Caresmar’s defense of his critique of the miracles attributed to Santa Eulalia against the attacks of Domènec Ignasi Bòria’s Nuestra paisana, patrona y titular Eulalia, vindicada en la mayor porción de las glorias de su pasion y triunfo (Barcelona: Bernardo Pla, 1779) and Discurso apologético-­histórico contra el Disertador Catalán (Barcelona, 1780; I know of no extant copy). The Censura was published ­under the pseudonym “Agustín Sala,” a suppositious member of the Augustinian Order. Cit. Garí et al., 25. 10. “Autenticidad de las escrituras contenidas en los Archivos, así públicos como privados, y en especial de los Archivos de las Iglesias,” in Seminario erudito, que comprehende varias obras inéditas, criticas, morales, instructivas, políticas, históricas, satíricas, y jocosas de nuestros mejores autores antiquos y modernos, vol. 28, ed. Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor (Madrid: Blas Roman, 1790), 52–71 (pp. 52–54 pre­sent an introduction by Valladares de Sotomayor). Written in 1774. Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs 8; Elías de Molins 10; Garí et al., 58.



A pp e n d i x 1

277

B. Posthumous Publications 11.  Carta del Dr. D. Jaime Caresmar, canónigo premonstratense del monasterio de nuestra señora de Bellpuig de las Avellanas, dirgida al muy ilustre Sr. D. Manuel de Teran, baron de la Linde, intendente general interino del egército y principado de Cataluña; en la cual se prueba ser Cataluña en lo antiguo más poblada, rica y abundante que hoy (Barcelona: José Torner, 1821). That same year, the Carta was serialized in the weekly Periódico universal de ciencias, literatura y artes (issues 1–21, January 6–­May 26, 1821). A new edition appeared in 1959 as Carta al barón de la Linde, ed. Juan Reglá (Barcelona: Asocaición de Bibliófils de Barcelona, 1959), and this version was in effect reprinted for an edition with the same title twenty years ­later (Igualada: Centre d’Estudis Comarcals, 1979). Originally, the Carta al barón de la Linde formed part of a larger work on the Catalan economy and its history that was put together in 1780 but not published at the time, appearing in print only in 1997: Discurso sobre la agricultura, comercio e industria del Principado de Cataluña (1780), ed. Ernest Lluch (Barcelona: Alta Fulla, 1997). In the 1970s and 1980s, Lluch had argued that Caresmar was responsible for the entire Discurso, but by the time the edition was published, he had given up this position but continued to credit Caresmar with organ­ izing the research involved in the Discurso. BC, MS 9363 was copied in 1801 from Caresmar’s autograph manuscript, dated June 9, 1780. It contains just the Carta. On the last folio (61) is a note by the state attorney (fiscal) on October 1, 1801, approving the manuscript for publication. It was endorsed by his superior on November 1, 1801, but no publication ensued ­until 1821. Cit. Alòs, “Contribució a la bibliografia del P. Caresmar,” Butlletí de la Biblioteca de Catalunya 3 (1916): 35. Other manuscripts of the Carta as a separate work are BC, MS 339 and MS 1545; Barcelona, Biblioteca Universitària de Barcelona, MS 734; RB, MS 2471 and MS II/2525; RAH, MS 5713; and Sabadell, Biblioteca del Museu d’Història de Sabadell (unnumbered). The other two sections of the original Discurso (on the economy and a historical-­geographical index), along with the Carta, are contained in MS 143bis of the Junta de Comerç section of the BC and in RB, MS 2649. 12.  Carta dirigida a Don Francisco Dorca, written August 28, 1789. Published in España Sagrada, vol. 43, ed. Antolín Merino and José de la

27 8

A pp e n d i x 1

Canal (Madrid: Miguel Francisco Rodríguez, 1819), appendix 57, pp. 521–36. Responses to questions from the canon of Girona, Francesc Xavier Dorca, over the dating of a privilege of Charles the Bald. Caresmar states that the document is from 858 and goes on to describe the history of the Carolingian-­appointed counts in the northeast of the ­f uture Catalonia along with the ninth-­and tenth-­ century bishops of Girona. In the recent edition of España Sagrada, ed. Rafael Lazano (Guadarrama: Revista Agustiniana, 2002), the letter is in volume 43, pp. 583–96. Cit. Garí et al., 10. 13. “Notícias del venerable P. Fr. Bernardo Boyl por D. Jaime Caresmar,” ed. Anselm Albareda, Analecta Montserratensia 2 (1918): 345–73. Boyl, spelled in modern Catalan as “Boïl”; ca. 1450–1509), having been appointed “apostolic vicar” to the transatlantic territories by Pope Alexander VI, accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, 1493– 1494. Written in 1791, the second-­to-­last work composed by Caresmar according to Vega i Sentmenat 21 (Alòs [1918–1919], 21). Montserrat, MS 725, part 3, is a late nineteenth-­century copy by Joaquim de Plandolit of a manuscript formerly in Barcelona, Arxiu del Convent dels Caputxins de Sarrià, destroyed by fire in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. See no. 41 below. Cit. Garí et al., 61. 14.  Història de la primacia de la Seu de Tarragona, ed. P. Fr. Martí, O.P.C. ( Jaume Bagunyà i Casanovas) (Tarragona: Torres i Virgili, 1924). First published in parts as P. Martí, “Manuscrit inèdit del Pare Caresmar sobre l’història de la primacia de la Seu de Tarragona,” Butlletí arqueològic (Tarragona), nos. 7–17 (1922–1924). Manuscript of 180 pp. in Tarragona, Biblioteca Pública de Tarragona, MS 05 But. Arg. 7 (1922). Caresmar’s title was “Historia de la contravertida primacia eclesiastica entre la Metropoli de Toledo y la de Tarragona.” Written in 1781 according to Vega i Sentmenat 19 (Alòs [1918–1919], 19), but the manuscript (a posthumous fair copy) is dated Madrid, December 16, 1793. Cit. Elías de Molins 18; Garí et al., 32. 15.  Vetusti codices manuscripti (i.e., of the Library of the Cathedral of Barcelona), in Francesc Martorell i Trabal, “Manuscrits dels PP. Caresmar, Pasqual i Martí a la Biblioteca del Convent de Franciscans de Balaguer,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans 12 (1927): 225–36. The cata­log is in the ACB and in BPA, Caixa 14, Llibre 32–4. Cit. Garí et al. 6. 16.  Cata­logus incunabilium aliorumque librorum a P. Caresmar confectus (i.e., early printed books in the Library of the Cathedral of Barcelona), in “El catálogo de libros impresos de Caresmar,” Scrinium fasc. 8–10 (1953): 38–51. This cata­log is in the ACB. The article is unsigned but



A pp e n d i x 1

279

 is prob­ably by the canon archivist of Barcelona at the time, Mn. Josep Oliveras i Caminal, who added (pp. 51–63) an index of subjects, authors, and publication locations. Cit. Garí et al., 2. 17.  Historia de Santa María de Bellpuig de las Avellanas en el 360 aniversario [sic] del nacimiento de Jaime Caresmar, a translation of part of Caresmar’s De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum, by Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez (Balaguer: Romeu, 1977). Cit. Garí et al., 28. Caresmar presented this work before the Academia in Barcelona in 1773. Corredera based his translation on what was thought ­until recently to be a unique manuscript, presently at BPA (no. 23 below). This version ends in 1314. BC, MS 9339 is a newly recovered manuscript that continues chronologically as far as 1435 (no. 37 below).

C. Manuscripts in the Archive of BPA The following list is based on Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, La escuela histórica avellanense, 2nd ed. (Lleida: Instituto de Estudios Ilerdenses, 1971), pp. 93–99, and a more recent cata­log at BPA. All the following are from the Fons Antic de l’Ordre dels Canonges Regulars Premomstratesos de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes. 18. Caixa 11, Llibre 29 (= “Manuscritos de Caresmar, A” according to Corredera’s classification). Untitled. Notes, transcriptions, excerpts, and other material on ecclesiastical history. 585 pp. but missing pp. 1–42. Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, pp. 93–94. Includes: 18a. (Llibre 29–13) “Origen, progreso y estado de la Causa Pia de la Limosina de la exma. Iglesia de Barcelona llamada vulgarmente Pia Almoina.” 34 pp. Cit. Garí et al., 37. 18b. (Llibre 29–14) “Dissertació apologètica de lo ús contínuo de la creu pectoral en los prelats inferiors, que gòzan de l’exercici de pontificals y de las diferents facultats los competeixen en virtut de sus privilegis o antigua consuetut y possessió en què estan.” Signed by Caresmar and dated September 18, 1757. 34 pp. Copies in RABLB, MS 639 (formerly lligall 10, num. 2); and Barcelona, Biblioteca Pública Episcopal del Seminari de Barcelona, MS 443. Spanish version in RAH, MS 9-21-2-31 (9–3975), ff. 167r–186v. Sent by Caresmar and read before the Barcelona Academia de Buenas Letras on June 7, 1758. Miret y Sans, p. 93.

28 0

A pp e n d i x 1

The RABLB manuscript contains a letter from Caresmar to Ramon de Ponsich y Camps, secretary of the acad­emy, apologizing for the unrevised state of the text (i.e., that it is in Catalan) and promising Spanish and Latin translations. Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs 14, which says the text has been “traducida en varias lenguas del original en cathalan.” Cit. Elías de Molins 14; Garí et al., 49.  18c. (Llibre 29–15) “Razón del especial Patronato del Glorioso Martyr Sn. Jorge en los Reynos de la Corona de Aragó.” 10 pp. Cit. Garí et al., 57.   19. Caixa 12, Llibre 30, “Anales del Real Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas de la Orden de Canónigos Reglares Premonstratenses en el Principado de Cathaluña, su propagación en Abadias y Prioratos dependientes, sus dotationes, donaciones, privilegios Pontificios y Reales [. . .]” In Castilian. Written in 1751–1752. 372 pp. Ends in 1363 in midsentence. Described in Paul Freedman and Flocel Sabaté, “Jaume Caresmar i les fonts històriques de l’Església catalana,” Butlletí de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona 51 (2007–2008): pp. 27–28; Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, pp. 91–92. Cit. Garí et al., 23.   20. Caixa 13, Lllibre 31 (= “Manuscritos de Caresmar, B” in Corredera). “Monasteriología” (extracts, notes, transcriptions of documents from monasteries and collegiate chapters). Originally 756 pp. but now missing pp. 600–700. Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, p. 95; Felio A. Villarrubias, “Nota sobre un manuscrito existente en el monasterio de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de las Avellanas,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 57–58 (1984–1985): 279–86. Information on female Cistercian monasteries extracted from the manuscript is edited and discussed in Josep Joan Piquer i Jover, “Notícies sobre fundacions femenines cistercenques a Catalunya (extrets de la ‘Monesteriológia’ inèdita del P. Caresmar),” in I Colˑloqui d’història del monaquisme català, vol. 1 (Santes Creus: Monastir de Santes Creus, 1967), 233–62. Cit. Garí et al., 36.   21. Caixa 14, Llibre 32 (= “Manuscritos de Caresmar, C & D” in Corredera). Untitled, extracts and lists of documents from the ACA and the ACB. 430 pp. Consists of 346 pp. of volume C and all of volume D (84 pp.) according to the classification of Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, p. 96. Includes: 21a. (Llibre 32–3) “Aranceles de los manuscritos del monasterio de Ripoll.” On pp. 21–24, t­ here follows a letter from Caresmar to the royal minister Pedro de Campomanes (in Latin) concerning this material.



A pp e n d i x 1

281

21b. (Llibre 32–4) “Vetusti Codices MSS qui in segregatis Sancte Ecclesie Barcinonensis hodiedum asservantur,” ­later published, as noted above (no. 15).   22. Caixa 15, Llibre 33 (= “Manuscritos de Caresmar, E” in Corredera). Untitled, miscellaneous notes and historical studies. 664 pp. Corredera, La escuela histórica avellanense, pp. 96–97. Includes: 22a. (Llibre 33–8 = pp. 279–80) “Juicio del privilegio de los hombres de Parage.” Only t­ hese two first pages survive. Read at the Barcelona Acad­emy, June 4, 1776, Miret y Sans, p. 107. Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/ Alòs 12; Cit. Garí et al., 53. 22b. (Llibre 33–17 = pp. 391–96) “Oratio habita ad Academicos super verba Isaiae cap. 53, v. 8., ‘Generationem eius, quis enarrabit?’ ” The minutes of the Barcelona Acad­emy indicate that Caresmar presented a sermon to be approved for publication on September 6, 1752. The sermons he is known to have published all date from before this, so the unidentified sermon in the minutes might be this one. 22c. (Llibre 33–22 = pp. 441–50) “Juicio sobre la autenticidad de carthorales.” Cit. Garí et al., 54. 22d. (Llibre 33–27 = pp. 533–72) “Para el Sr. Marques de Llió.” Material collected for Josep de Móra i Catà, Marquis of Llo, presumably in connection with the preparation of the Real Academia’s first volume of Memorias (1756). 22e. (Llibre 33–31 = pp. 609–65). An untitled treatise on ancient and medieval coinage. Jaume Pasqual, a devoted collector and numismatist, might appear to be a more likely author of such an essay than Caresmar, but the handwriting is Caresmar’s and ­there would be ­little reason for him to have copied a work of his chapter colleague.   23. Caixa 17, Llibre 36. “De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum.” Written in 1773. 735 pp. The entirety of book 1 and chapters 1–17 of book 2 of a Latin history of Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Translated into Spanish by Corredera (no. 17 above). The narrative ends in 1314 with the death of Count Ermengol X. A more complete manuscript is described below (no. 37).   24. Caixa 19, Llibre 39. “Epistolario de l’Abad de la Colegiata de Ager, del año 1261 hasta el 1648” (modern title given by Eduardo Corredera in 1980). Transcription of seventy documents in Latin, Catalan, and Spanish. Written in 1766. 98 pp. This was considered a completed work as “Finis, Laus Deo” is written at the end. Eigh­teen of the documents are summarized in Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, El archivo de Ager y Caresmar (Balaguer: Romeu, 1978).

28 2

A pp e n d i x 1

25. Caixa 19, Llibre 40 (unknown to Corredera). Untitled; spine of binding reads “Appendix Docu,/ Reg.s Can.s Per.s; 5.” Notes, excerpts, and transcriptions of documents relating especially to the establishment of the Augustinian canons in Catalonia, ninth through twelfth centuries. Approximately 400 pp.

D. Unpublished Works Preserved Elsewhere 26. Madrid, RB, MS II/2525, “Papeles varios sobre Cataluña.” 837 pp. Includes: 26a. pp. 1–268, “Memorias cronológico-­históricas sacadas de varios archivos de Cataluña.” Written ­after 1775. An annalistic history of Catalonia from 843 to 1347 based mostly on documents from the Barcelona cathedral archives. Part of a projected “Anales Generales de Cataluña.” 26b. pp. 555–818, “Índice del Archivo del Mestre Racional de Cataluña que existe en la segunda Pieza, que era la Sala del antiguo Tribunal de Cuentas de las Rentas y Patrimonio de los Reyes desde 1269 hasta 1669.” 26c. pp. 818–37, “Lista de los pueblos y parroquias actuales del Obispado de Barcelona.” This manuscript also contains (pp. 289–508) Caresmar’s “Disertación histórica sobre la antigua población de Cataluña en la edad media,” the Carta al Baròn de la Linde (see no. 11 above). Cit. Alòs (1916), 2 (pp. 30–31). 27. Madrid, RAH, MS 5713, “Memorias cronológico-­historicas que apuntó el P. Dn. Jayme Caresmar, Canónigo Premonstratense sacados en la inspección que hizo a varios archivos de Cataluña.” Undertaken on behalf of Antonio de Capmany—­“Por diligencia de Dn. Antonio de Capmany, Individuo de num[erario] de la Academia [de Buenas Letras de Barcelona].” 554 unnumbered pp. Much of what is in this manuscript is similar to the contents of no. 26. Cit. Garí et al., 1. Includes: 27a. pp. [1–112] Continuation of rec­ords from the never completed “Anales generales de Cataluña.” 27b. pp. [115–27] “Lista de los pueblos y parroquias actuales del Obisbado de Barcelona, con noticia de su población segun el número de almas de comunión segun el estado que resulta de la ultima visita.” 27c. pp. [131–54], “Extractos de varios privilegios de Reyes de Aragón que existen en el archivo de la casa de la ciudad de Barcelona.”



A pp e n d i x 1

283

27d. pp. [157–80], “Inscripciones sepulcrales que se hallan en varias urnas y lápidas en algunos templos y claustros de la ciudad de Barcelona.” Cit. Garí et al., 26. 27e. pp. [183–342], “Dissertación histórica sobre la antigua población de la Cataluña en la Edad Media,” the Carta al Barón de la Linde (see no. 11 above). 27f. pp. [347–83], “Memorias cronológicas de las pestes y contagios padecidos en Barcelona desde 1333 hasta 1712.” 27g. pp. [391–530], “Índice del Mestra Racional de Cataluña, 1296–1669.” 27h. pp. [533–54] “Varias muestras de papel [i.e., examples of blank paper] de distintos siglos que ha recogida en Barcelona por la Academia Dn. Antonio de Capmany, su Ind. de” (thus not by Caresmar but collected by Capmany).   28. Madrid, RAH, MS 9–5220 (vol. 2 de la Colección Joaquín Traggia). Includes short outlines, lists, and notes by Caresmar (and ­others) concerning church history. Caresmar’s material includes lists of bishops, abbots, and church councils and an example of Hispano-­ Gothic liturgy. Cit. Miret y Sans, “Los manuscritos del Padre Joaquín Traggia en la Real Academia de la Historia,” Revista de la Asociación Artístico Arqueológica Barcelonesa 1 (1896–1898): 369–70.   29. Madrid, RAH, MS 9–5223 (vol. 4 de la Colección Joaquín Traggia). Includes Caresmar’s “Cátalogo chronológico de los Abades de Sta. Maria de Gerri, Orden S. Benito desde su fundación año 776 hasta el año 1765.” This is Vega i Sentemenat’s title, but the work is longer and more synthetic than this implies. It is a history of the foundation, expansion, and dependencies of Gerri. Read at the Barcelona Academia, March 8 and 13, 1776. Miret y Sans, p. 107. Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs 10; Miret y Sans, “Los manuscritos del Padre Joaquín Traggia,” 370; Garí et al., 51.   30. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 13464, “Copia de los apuntamientos que iba haciendo el P. Dn. Jayme de Caresmar, Canónigo Premonstratense en el Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas, para formar una ‘Biblioteca de Escritores Catalanes’ y añadir varios artículos a la de Don Nicolás Antonio.” 216 ff., in Latin. Copied by order of Francisco Antonio González, librarian of the Royal Library, at the request of Fèlix Torres Amat. Over eight hundred entries on Catalan writers, mostly taken from Nicolás Antonio’s Biblioteca Hispana (1676) with some additions of Caresmar’s. Cit. Garí et al., 16.

28 4

A pp e n d i x 1

Josep Martí’s revision is preserved in Biblioteca Nacional, MS 13603, listed as “Diccionario bio-­bibliográfico de escritores catalanes” with a prefatory note “Hoc opus compilatum est a R. D. P. Josepho Marti, Barcinonensi Monasterii Bellipodi Avellanarum Canonico et quandam Abbate qui pluribus aliis ingenii eruditionisque suae monumentis relictis pieteissime obiit, anno 1806.” 91 ff., in Latin. Cit. Alòs (1916), 1 (p. 30). Biblioteca Nacional, MS 13604 is an e­ arlier list of Catalan writers, titled “Biblioteca catalana,” by the Barcelona academician Pere Serra i Postius. Written in 1737, it, too, is based on the work of Nicolás Antonio. 31. Barcelona, Real Academia de Buenas Letras, Arxiu, MS 165, “Memorial sobre la ciudad de Manresa.” In Castilian, with a prefatory Oración gratulatoria of 1797 by Francesc Vila. Originally given at the Real Academia in Barcelona as it is mentioned among the discourses of Caresmar that the acad­emy asked Gonzalvo Saura to search for in 1804 (see appendix 3). The same text in Latin, titled “Apendix in historiam urbis Manresae,” is at ABEV, Manuscrits de Jaume Ripoll Vilamajor, vol. 18, fasc. 10, ff. 33v–43v, with additional notes to f. 52v; and at the Biblioteca de Montserrat, MS 725, part 2, a late nineteenth-­ century copy by Joaquim de Plandolit of a manuscript in Barcelona, Arxiu del Convent dels Caputxins de Sarrià, destroyed by fire in 1936. See no. 41 below. Cit. Garí et al., 44. 32. Barcelona, ADB, Procoessos de beatificació i canonització, Eulàlia, Santa, núm 1, “Santa Eulalia de Barcelona, virgen y mártir, patrona y tutelar de la misma ciudad, nuevamente vindicada e ilustrada.” 22 folios, ca. 1790. Caresmar’s last effort to defend his position on Santa Eulalia. Cit. Garí et al., 42. 33. Barcelona, ADB, Mensa Episcopal, Caresmar, vols. 1–5. 1789–1791. Caresmar’s transcriptions of the first four Títols of the episcopal archive, a work cut short by his death. The sections of the Mensa Episcopal covered are Títol 1: Jurisdicció Episcopal i llibertat eclesiàstica; 2: Palau i mensa episcopal; 3: Barcelona, alous; 4: Territori de Barcelona. Cit. José Sanabre, El Archivo Diocesano de Barcelona (Barcelona: Fidel Rodríguez, 1947), pp. 21–22; Maria Pardo i Sabartés, Mensa Episcopal de Barcelona (878–1299) (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1994), pp. 18–19. 34. Barcelona, ACB, “Col·leció de documents de l’Arxiu de la Catedral de Barcelona.” The first volume bears the title “Caresmar: Index. Ab anno 800 a.d. 1233.” 8 vols., containing about fourteen thousand



A pp e n d i x 1

285

transcriptions and summaries, arranged chronologically. Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs 20. Cit. Garí et al., 3. 35. Barcelona, Biblioteca Pública Episcopal (formerly Biblioteca Arquebisbal del Seminari de Barcelona), MS 161, “Santos que no están descritos en el Martirologio Romano, pero sin embargo tienen algún culto ecclesiástico en la ciudad y diócesis de Barcelona.” Written in 1791. Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs 22 noting that this was completed just a few days before Caresmar’s death; cit. Àngel Fàbrega Grau, “Inventario de los manuscritos de la Biblioteca Arzobispal del Seminario Conciliar de Barcelona,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 37 (1964): 287. Cit. Garí et al., 39. 36. Barcelona, BC, MS 941, “Compendi de tots els instruments antichs y moderns que’s troban en lo arxiu de la Molt Insigne Iglesia Colegiata de St. Pere de Ager.” Another copy, incomplete, is at the Arxiu Històric Jaume Caresmar at Àger. Compiled in 1766 at the request of Francisco de Esteve, archpriest of the collegiate church of Àger. Transcriptions and summaries (the latter in Catalan) of approximately twenty-­six hundred documents. Described by Ramon Chesé Lapeña, Col·lecció diplomàtica de Sant Pere d’Àger fins 1198, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2011), 1:26–31. BC, MS 834 consists of 23 ff. of Caresmar’s summaries (in Catalan) of Àger acensaments, the annual payment (census) owed by certain tenants. T ­ hese run from 1487 to 1592. The volume does not have a title but begins “Se notaran los acensaments fets per lo monestir” and is cata­loged as “Notes sobre documents de l’Arxiu de la Colˑlegiata de Sant Pere d’Àger.” See no. 42 below, a related description of rec­ords from Àger. 37. Barcelona, BC, MS 9339, “De rebus ecclesiae sancate Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum in Catalonia ordinis canonicorum regularium S. Augustini Praemonstratensium libri VIII [. . .]” 397 ff. Written before 1773—­the year that it was presented at the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona. The title indicates it was intended to consist of eight books, of which only three ­were completed. On f. 397r is written “Liber IV De rebus Bellipodiensis,” but only seven blank pages follow. The account ends in the year 1435. Book 1 and chapters 1–17 of book 2 are included in BPA, Caixa 17, Llibre 36 (no. 23 above). BC 9339 includes chapters 18–21 of book 2 and all of book 3, consisting of twenty-­five chapters. From the point at which the BPA copy leaves off, BC 9339 is written in a more hurried handwriting and with more crowding and marginal notes on the page.

28 6

A pp e n d i x 1

The manuscript belonged to Ramon d’Alòs-­Moner. See Anna Guadayol, “Un recorregut par­tic­u­lar per la història de la cultura a Catalunya: Els papers de la família Alòs-­Moner,” Estudis Romànics 36 (2014): 439–46.   38. Barcelona, APFC, MS 5/C/14-10. Untitled. Unfoliated. A collection of materials on Catalan history, mostly ecclesiastical. Includes: 38a. “Informe del derecho compete al Abad del Real e Imperial Monasterio de Santa Maria de Gerri en proveher los Beneficios seculares curatos ­simples en su territorio . . .” Signed and dated 1765. Consists of 9 ff.   39. Barcelona, Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona, MS 96, ff. 336r–41r. “Discurso necrológico a la muerte de Fernando VI, pronunciado en la Junta General de la Real Academia de Barcelona en 5 de Setiembre de 1759, por el Dr. Jaume Caresmar, canónigo premostratense” (title given in Miquel Rosell’s cata­log of the library’s manuscripts; in the manuscript the work is untitled). Caresmar composed this eulogy for King Ferdinand VI and delivered it to the academicians on September 5, 1759.   40. Barcelona, Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona, MS 2029, ff. 127r–41v, vari­ous transcriptions and notes. Includes: 40a. ff. 127r–29r, Office of St. Thomas Aquinas according to a Breviary from Lleida. 40b. f. 130r, Two letters to the abbot of Àger concerning the administration of the sacrament of penance: (a) from Humbert of Romans, master of the Dominican Order, to Abbot Pere, February 28, 1263; (b) from Pere, prior of the Dominican convent of Urgell, to an unnamed abbot of Àger, June 7, year not stated but prob­ably 1260s. With Caresmar’s notes on Abbot Pere and the Dominican friar Pere, prior of Urgell, along with notes on the administration of penance. 40c. ff. 131r–35r, Letter of Raymond of Penyafort to Pope Clement IV, ca. 1256, regarding the annulment of the marriage of Àlvaro, Count of Urgell, to Constancia, ­daughter of Pere de Montcada. With Caresmar’s notes on the resulting litigation. 40d. ff. 135r–36v, Letter of Guillem de Montcada, bishop of Urgell, to Andreu, abbot of Àger, December 16, 1301. With Caresmar’s biographical notes concerning Bishop Guillem. 40e. ff. 139r–41v, Office of Santa Eulàlia of Barcelona according to a breviary from Lleida, ­here identified as dating from the f­ ourteenth ­century.   41. Montserrat, Biblioteca, MS 725, part 1, “Descubrimiento del Sepulcro en que estuvieron los Sagrados huesos de Santa Eulalia de



A pp e n d i x 1

287

Barcelona desde los primeros siglos de la Iglesia hasta el siglo XIV.” Written by Caresmar in 1774. Cit. Sentmenat/Alòs 28; Garí et al., 30. MS 725 is P. Joaquim Plandolit’s late nineteenth-­century copy from Caresmar’s original, then in the Arxiu del Convent dels Caputxins de Sarrià, destroyed in 1936. The manuscript also includes (part 2) the “Apendix in historiam urbis Manresae,” as indicated above (no. 31), and Caresmar’s notices concerning Bernat Boïl (part 3), above (no. 13). 42.  Àger, Arxiu Històric Jaume Caresmar, REF 55 and Madrid, AHN, Códices L. 795, “Resumen del archivo de la insigne iglesia colegial de San Pedro de Ager en Cataluña.” Written in Castilian in 1769–1770 for the Real Cámera in Madrid. A chronological ordering, summary, and commentary on the documentation of Àger that had been put together in no. 36 above, the “Compendi de tots els intrruments [. . .]” Described in Chesé Lapeña, Col.lecció diplomàtica, 1:26–31. Eduardo Corredera published 431 of Caresmar’s approximately 2,000 summaries and 15 of his transcriptions (El archivo de Ager y Caresmar). Caresmar described the proj­ect in a pre­sen­ta­tion to the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona in June 1770, “Razón del arreglo del archivo de Ager a la Real Cámera en 1770,” which forms an introduction to the “Resumen.” Both the “Resumen” and the “Compendi” are related to a third, now lost collection known as the “Notícies d’Àger,” put together in 1768. 43. Balaguer, ACN, Fons “Ordre de canonges regulars premonstratesos de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes,” Cartulari. In five volumes comprising approximately four thousand folios. Put together by Caresmar with the aid of four assistants. Caresmar described the first three volumes as constituting a “Cartophylacium” (trea­sure of charters) completed in 1752, containing copies of documents ranging chronologically from 1034 to 1699. Vols. 4 (from 1756) and 5 (1771) rec­ord litigation and correspondence from 1703 to 1771. Hidden at Vilanova de la Sal from 1835 ­until 2002. Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alòs [25]. 44. Lleida, Arxiu Capitular, P1_M3_P4_CO3, LC008, ff. 261r–70r, “Episcopolgium Ilerdense ex schedis Doctoris Jacobi Caresmar, canonici Bellipodiensis monasterii excerptum,” 70 ff. Descriptive list of bishops of Lleida to 1759. Caresmar’s list is continued in another hand on the last folio, 8r–8v from 1759 to 1825. 45. Perpignan, Archives Départemantales des Pyrénées-­Orientales, 12 J 26, Fond François de Fossa, “Recueil de monuments pour l’histoire du Roussillon,” vol. 3. A total of 166 documents transcribed from

28 8

A pp e n d i x 1

Catalan archives and sent by Caresmar between March 1786 and October 1788 to François de Fossa, charged with obtaining ­these rec­ords for what ultimately became the Collection Moreau of the Bibliothèque National de France. The rec­ords run chronologically from 776 (a donation to the monastery of Gerri) to 1628 (a dispute between the bishop of Girona and the abbot of Camprodon over episcopal visitation). The transcriptions are in Caresmar’s hand with extensive marginal notes in French by Fossa.

Appendix 2

Works of Caresmar That Were Sent to Madrid but Never Published

The following is drawn up using Jaime Villanueva, Viage literario a las iglesias de España, vol. 12 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1850), 88–89, who in turn relied on a list made by Joaquín Traggia, member of the Real Academia de la Historia. As given by Eduardo Corredera y Gutiérrez, “Historia del Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanas (desde su fundación hasta los abades comendatrios)” (doctoral diss.,, Universidad de Valencia, 1954), 309. Numbers in parentheses refer to works in appendix 1. * indicates that the work is lost. De la antigua población de Cataluña (the Carta al Barón de la Linde, no. 11) Del Principado de la Iglesia de Tarragona (no. 14) * Del imperio de los Arabes en Cataluña desde el año 712 hasta el de 806 * Sobre los bailes Sepulcro antiguo de Santa Eulalia (no. 41) Algunos puntos de la historia de Manresa (related to no. 31?) * Codice de los concilios de Ripoll * Hombres de parage (two pages are extant, no. 22a) * De primitiva liturgia seu missa hispano-­gótica ad primaeva gallicana. Cit. Vega i Sentmenat/Alos [24]; Elías de Molins 20 Sobre el uso de los pectorales por los abades (no. 18b) 289

29 0

A pp e n d i x 2

Sobre el origen del orden militar de San Jorge y del patronato de este santo en Cataluña (no. 18c) Índice de los códices de la Catedral de Barcelona (no. 15)

Appendix 3

Discourses by Caresmar Read to the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona

A. As Mentioned in a Letter of the Acad­emy to Gonzalvo Saura, December 15, 1804 RABLB, MS 848, lists twelve works read before the acad­emy that do not figure into what in 1804 was the acad­emy’s attempt to order Caresmar’s papers. Numbers in parentheses refer to works in appendix 1. * indicates that the work is lost Papel sobre las abreviaturas que usaban los antiguos en sus escritos, y en los instrumentos (no. 7) May 1, 1754—­Miret y Sans, “Dos siglos de vida académica,” p. 29 * Sobre la fundación del Monasterio de San Martín de Canigo dando las noticias de su casa y orígen de su fundació, August 5, 1761—­Miret y Sans, p. 96. Disertación sobre la inscripción de S. Emeterio (no. 6) Idem sobre lo contenido en los instrumentos antiguos de la Iglesia Colegial de Ager (presumably based on nos. 36 and 42) * Disertación en latín sobre el concilio Iliberitano November 3, 1771—­Miret y Sans, p. 104. Disertación sobre la Ciudad de Manresa (no. 31) February 5, 1772—­Miret y Sans, p. 104.

291

29 2

A pp e n d i x 3

Sobre el patronato especial de San Jorge en la Corona de Aragón y singularmente en Cataluña (no. 18c) Sobre la autenticidad y autoridad que tienen las escrituras y documentos que se encuentran en los archivos y en los cartorales y las Iglesias mayores, monasterios, ciudades, ­etc. (no. 10) March 8, 1775—­Miret y Sans, p. 106. Origen y progresos del Monasterio de Gerri (no. 29) March 13, 1776—­Miret y Sans, p. 107. * Disertación sobre los privilegios de los hombres de paraje (no. 22a) June 4, 1776—­Miret y Sans, p. 107. Two pages survive (as noted above, no. 22a) * Colección y explicación de ciertas medallas February 5, 1777—­Miret y Sans, p. 108. * Disertación sobre el imperio de los Arabes en Cataluña—Miret y Sans, pp. 108-09.

B. Other Pre­sen­ta­tions as Indicated in Miret y Sans, “Dos siglos de vida académica” October 3, 1759 (Miret y Sans, p. 95): “Aun en la sesión general de 3 de octubre el P. Jaime Caresmar leyó un discurso en prosa á la perdida del monarca protector de la Academia” (i.e., marking the death of King Ferdinand VI) (no. 39) May 6, 1761 (Miret y Sans, p. 96): “ [. . .] el P. Caresmar lee su dissertación del tiempo del martirio de San Severo” (based on no. 5) June 3, 1761 (Miret y Sans, p. 96): “Lee el P. Caresmar sobre la traslación de las reliquias de San Severo” (based on no. 5) December 1, 1773 (Miret y Sans, p. 105): “D. Jaime Caresmar lee parte de la historia ‘que vá componiendo en latín’ de su convento de Bellpuig de las Avellanas” (nos. 17, 23, 37)

C. Other Pre­sen­ta­tions Known from Caresmar’s Texts September 6, 1752 (?): “Oratio habita ad Academicos super verba Isaia cap. 53, vol. 8., ‘Generationem eius, quis enarrabit?’ ” (no. 22b)

Bibliography

d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Ramon. Dels Visigots als Catalans. 2nd ed. Edited by Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó. 2 vols. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1974. —­—. “Doscientos años de historia de Cataluña en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras.” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 25 (1953): 327–39. —­—. Els primers comtes catalans. Barcelona: Teide, 1958. —­—. Pere el Ceremoniós: Els inicis de la decadència política de Catalunya. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1972. Abascal Palazón, Juan Manuel. Fidel Fita, 1835–1918: Su legado documental en la Real Academia de la Historia. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1998. d’Achery, Luc. Spicilegium sive collectio veterum aliquot scriptorum qui in Galliae bibliothecis delituerant. 3 vols. Paris: Montalant, 1723. Actas del Congreso Internacional sobre Gregorio Mayans: Valencia-­Oliva, 6 al 8 de mayo de 1999. Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 1999. Actes del Congrés “La primera guerra carlina a Catalunya.” Edited by Josep Mundet i Gifre. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1990. Albareda, Anselm M. “Notícias del venerable P. Fr. Bernardo Boyl por D. Jaime Caresmar.” Analecta Montserratensia 2 (1918): 345–73. Albareda i Salvadó, Joaquim. “La Catalunya il·lustrada del segle XVIII.” Ausa 18 (1999): 519–28. —­—. La Guerra de Sucesión de España (1700–1714). Barcelona: Crítica, 2010. Alberti i Oriol, Jordi. El silenci de les campanes: De l’anticlericalisme del segle XIX a la persecució religiosa durant la guerra civil a Catalunya. Barcelona: Proa, 2007. d’Alòs-­Moner, Ramon. “Contribució a la bibliografia del P. Jaume Caresmar.” Butlletí de la Biblioteca de Catalunya 3 (1916): 28–36 and 5 (1918–1919): 52–82. Altisent, Agustí. Historia de Poblet. Poblet: Abadia de Poblet, 1974. Álvarez Barrientos, Joaquín. “Cultura e ilustración: Interpretaciones catalanas del siglo XVIII.” In 1714: Cataluña en la España del siglo XVIII, edited by Antonio Morales Moya, 293–313. Madrid: Cátedra, 2014. Álvarez Junco, José. “Los intelectuales: Anticlericalismo y republicanismo.” In Los orígenes culturales de la II República, edited by José Luis García Delgado, 101–216. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España, 1993. Amades, Joan. Costumari català: El curs de l’any. Vol. 1. Barcelona: Salvat, 2001. Amelang, James S. Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490–1714. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986.

293

29 4 B ib l i o g raphy

—­—. “The ­Mental World of Jeroni Pujades.” In Spain, Eu­rope and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, edited by Richard Kagan and Geoffrey Parker, 211–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Amengual i Batle, Josep. “Una presència dels canonges premonstratesos segons el model colonial: Bellpuig d’Artà (1230–1425).” In De Bellpuig a Bellpuig: Els premonstratesos de les Avellanes a Artà, 99–118. Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2019. Anderson, Glaire D. “The Cathedral in the Mosque and the Two Palaces: Additions to the ­Great Mosque of Cordoba and the Alhambra during the Reign of Charles V.” Thresholds 25 (2002): 48–55. Anguera, Pere. Déu, rei i fam. El primer carlisme a Catalunya. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1995. —­—. El Carlisme a Catalunya (1827–1936). Barcelona: Empúries, 1999. Antón Pelayo, Javier. “La historiografia catalana del siglo XVIII: Luces y sombras de un proyecto ilustrado y nacional.” Revista de historia moderna 18 (2000): 289–310. ____. “The Enlightenment in Catalonia.” Catalan Historical Review 6 (2013): 61–71. ____. “La desamortización de las bibliotecas conventuales en Cataluña durante la crisi del Antiguo Régimen.” Memoria y Civilización: Revista de historia 21 (2018): 611–51. ____. “The Secularization of Spanish Religious Libraries (1767–1836): The Catalan Case.” In How the Secularization of Religious Houses Transformed the Libraries of Eu­rope, 16th-19th Centuries, edited by Cristina Dondi, Dorit Raines, and Richard Sharpe, 99–124. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Antonio, Nicolás. Censura de historias fabulosas. Valencia: A. Bordazàr de Artàzu, 1742. Aparicio Valero, María Gloria. Regalismo borbónico e historia crítica. Las comisiones de archivos: Su recopilación documental (1749–1756). Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 2013. El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los siglos IX–­X: Estudio crítico de sus fondos. Edited by Frederico Udina Martorell. Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1951. L’art gòtic a Catalunya: Escultura, vol. 1, La configuració de l’estil. Edited by Antoni Pladevall i Font. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 2007. Aurell, Jaume. “La formación del imaginario histórico del nacionalismo catalán, de la Renaixença al Noucentisme (1850–1930).” Historia contemporánea 22 (2001): 257–88. Avril, Joseph. Conclusion to Le monde des chanoines, XIe–­XIVe s. = Cahiers de Fanjeaux 24, 353–64. Toulouse: Privat, 1989. Aymerich, Mateo. Nomina et acta Episcoporum Barcinonensium. Barcelona: Joannes Nadal, 1757. Balaguer, Victor. Las ruinas de Poblet. Madrid: M. Tello, 1885. Baldwin, Oliver. “A Spaniard in Essence: Seneca and the Spanish Volksgeist.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 28 (2021): 335–52. Baleña i Abadia, Pere. “Jaume Caresmar: Un cas inèdit d’arabofília al segle XVIII.” In Miscel·lània d’homenatge a Enric Moreu-­Rey, edited by Albert Manent and Joan Veny, vol. 2, 136–51. Barcelona: Abadia de Monterrat, 1988.

B ib l i o g raphy

295

Ballot i Torres, Josep Pau. Gramatica y apologia de la llengua cathalana. Barcelona: J. F. Piferrer, 1815. Baraut, Cebrià. “Diplomatari del monestir de Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles (segles IX–­XIII).” Urgellia 12 (1994–1995): 7–414. —­—. “El monestir de Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles i els orígens del monaquisme benedictí al comtat d’Urgell.” Studia monastica 22 (1980): 243–59. —­—. “Els documents dels segles IX–­XII conservats a l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell.” Urgellia 2 (1979): 7–145; 3 (1980): 7–166; 4 (1981): 7–186; 5 (1982): 7–158; 6 (1983): 7–243; 7 (1984–1985): 7–218; 8 (1986–1987): 7–149; 9 (1988– 1989): 7–312 and 403–570; 10 (1990–1991): 7–349; 11(1992–1993): 7–160. —­—. “L’evolució política de la senyoria d’Andorra dels origens fins als Pariatges (segles IX XIII).” Urgellia 11 (1992–1993): 225–99. Baró i Queralt, Xavier. “Caresmar i Alemany, Jaume.” In Diccionari d’historiografia catalana, edited by Antoni Simon i Tarrés, 297–98. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 2003. —­—. “L’escriptura de la historia i l’identitat catalana de Jeroni Pujades (1568–1635) a Antoni de Capmany (1742–1813).” Biblio3W: Revista bibliogáfica de geografía y ciencias sociales 21, no. 1 (2016) 5–13. https://­revistes​.­ub​.­edu​/­index​.­php​/­b3w​ /­article​/­view​/­26361​/­27807. Barraquer y Roviralta, Cayetano. Las casas de religiosos en Cataluña durante el primer tercio del siglo XIX. 2 vols. Barcelona: F. J. Altés y Alabart, 1906. —­—. Los religiosos en Cataluña durante la primera mitad del siglo XIX. 4 vols. Barcelona: F. J. Altés y Alabart, 1915–1918. Barrera, Guillaume. “Spain.” In Dictionnaire Montesquieu, edited by Catherine Volpilhac-­Auger. http://­dictionnaire​-­montesquieu​.­ens​-­lyon​.­fr​/­en​/­home​/­. Accesed January 10, 2023. Barrera i Vidal, Albert. “Les débuts de la Renaixença catalane: Entre le libéralisme bourgeois et le passéisme nostalgique.” Zeitschrift der Katalanistik / Revista d’estudis catalans 1 (1988): 106–19. Barret-­Kriegel, Blandine. Jean Mabillon. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988. El barroc català: Actes de les jornades celebrades a Girona els dies 17, 18 i 19 de desembre de 1987. Edited by Albert Rossich and August Rafanell. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1989. Barton, Simon. “The Count, the Bishop and the Abbot: Armengol VI of Urgel and the Abbey of Valladolid.” En­glish Historical Review 111 (1996): 85–103. Bastardas, Joan. Usatges de Barcelona. El Codi a mitjà segle XII. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1984. Bastero, Antonio. La Crusca Provenzale ovvero le voci, frase, forme, e manière di dire, che la gentillisima e celebre Lingua Toscana ha preso dalla Provenzale. Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi, 1724. Batllori, Miquel. La Il·lustració. Vol. 9 of Batllori, Obra completa. Valencia: Tres i Quatre, 1997. Baucells i Reig, Josep. El Baix Llobregat i la Pia Almoina de la Seu de Barcelona: Inventari dels pergamins. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1984. Bauer, Johannes Josef. “Die ‘vita canonica’ an den katalanischen Kollegiatskirchen im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert.” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 21 (1963): 54–82.

29 6 B ib l i o g raphy

—­—. “Rechtsverhältnisse der katalanischen Klöster in ihren Klosterverbänden (9.–12. Jahrhundert).” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 23 (1967): 1–130. —­—. “Sankt Peter zu Ager. Zur Kanonikerbewegung und Kirchenreform in der zweiten Hälfte des XI. Jahrhunderts.” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 19 (1962): 99–114. Beer, Rudolf. Die Handschriften des Klosters Santa Maria de Ripoll. 2 vols. Vienna: A Hölder, 1907–1908. Benet i Clarà, Albert. El procés de l’independència de Catalunya (897–989). Sallent: Institut d’Arqueologia, Història i Ciències Naturales, 1988. Benítez i Riera, Josep M. “Historiadors i humanistes en l’epistolari inèdit (1773–1789) de Joan Antoni Mayans i Josep Vega.” Pedralbes: Revista d’història moderna 5 (1985): 221–28. —­—. “La relació de Mateu Aymerich amb Gregori Maians.” Revista catalana de teologia 25 (2000): 223–32. Bertrán, José Luís, Antonio Espino, and Lluis Ferran Toledano. “Pere Serra i Postius y el criticismo historiográfico en la Barcelona de la primera mitad del siglo XVIII.” Manuscrits, revista d’història moderna 10 (1992): 315–29. Bertran i Roigé, Prim. “Donacions de la comtessa Dulça d’Urgell als ordes religiosos (1184–1210).” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 49–50 (1976–1977): 41–50. Bisson, Thomas N. The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Blanc, François-­Pierre. “Le marquisat de Llo et le droit féodal: Contribution à l’histoire des fiefs de dignité en Roussillon au XVIIIe siècle.” Annales du Midi 131 (2019): 441–56. Bofarull y Mascaró, Próspero de. Los condes de Barcelona vindicados y cronología y geneaología de los Reyes de España considerados como soberanos independientes de su marca. 2 vols. Barcelona: J. Oliveres y Monmany, 1836. Bonnassie, Pierre. La Cata­logne du milieu du Xe à la fin du XIe siècle: Croissance et mutations d’une société. 2 vols. Toulouse: Université de Toulouse-­Le Mirail, 1975–1976. —­—. “Les documents catalans des IXe–­XIIe siècles: Éditions récentes et publications en cours.” Le Moyen Age 105 (1999): 149–60. Boria y de Llinás, Domingo Ignacio. Justa repulsa del argumento negativo y equivocaciones en que cimentala la defensa de su censura que dio luz el M. R. P. Mro. Fr. Agustín Sala [. . .]. Madrid: Hilario Santos Alonso, 1786. —­—. Nuestra paysana, patrona y tutular Eulalia, vindicada en la mejor porción de las glorias de su pasión y triunfo. Barcelona: Bernardo Pla, 1779. Borràs i Feliu, Antoni. “El monestir de Bellpuig de les Avellanes i la Companyia de Jesús a mitjan segle XVII.” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 49–50 (1976–1977): 159–75. —­—. “Obres de les bibliotheques personals de Jaume Caresmar i Jaume Pasqual conservades a la Biblioteca Borja.” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 71 (1998): 143–69.

B ib l i o g raphy

297

Bosl, Karl. “Das Jahrhundert der Augustinerchorherren.” In Historiographia Medievalis: Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters: Festschrift für F.-­J. Schmale zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Dieter Berg and Hans-­Werner Goetz, 1–17. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989. Brown, Elizabeth A. R., and Alan Forey. “Vox in excelso and the Suppression of the Knights Templar: The Bull, Its History, and a New Edition.” Mediaeval Studies 80 (2018): 1–58. Brown, Kenneth. “Encara més sobre Pere Serra i Postius.” In Actes del Vuitè Col·loqui Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes, vol. 2, 267–89. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1989. Caballero García, Antonio. “Desamortización y patrimonio documental: Un ejemplo de tratamiento de archivos en el siglo XIX.” Signos: Revista de historia de la cultura escrita 15 (2005): 77–117. Cacho Viu, Vicente. El nacionalismo catalán como ­factor de modernización. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema 1998. Callahan, William J. Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 1750–1874. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Campabadal i Bertran, Mireia. “La recepció dels clàssics medievals catalans al segle XVIII.” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics 15 (2004): 31–57. —­—. La Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona en el segle XVIII: L’interès per la història, la llengua i la literatura catalanes. Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona and Abadia de Montsererat, 2006. —­—. “Sobre la concepció de la poesia catalana al segle XVIII.” Butlletí de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona 48 (2001–2002): 231–67. Canal, Jordi. El Carlismo: Dos siglos de contrarrevolución en España. Madrid: Alianza, 2000. Canal Sánchez-­Pagin, José Maria. “Casamientos de los condes de Urgel en Castilla.” Anuario de estudios medievales 19 (1989): 119–35. Canales, Carlos. Primera guerra carlista. Madrid: Grupo Medusa, 2000. Cao Costoya, David. “Catalonia: Unique Consciousness and Collective Identity in the First Half of the 19th ­Century: Notes and Consideration.” In Historical Analy­sis of the Catalan Identity, edited by Flocel Sabaté, 235–67. Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. Capmany y de Montpalau, Antonio de. Discurso económico-­político en defensa del trabajo mecánico de los menestrales, y de la infuencia de sus gremios en las costumbres populares, conservación de las artes y honor de los artesanos. Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1778. Reprinted, Madrid: Almundru, 1986. —­—. Memorias históricas sobre la marina, comercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona. 4 vols. Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1779–1792. Reprinted, Barcelona: Cámera Oficial de Comercio y Navigación de Barcelona, 1961–1963 (2 vols.) and Barcelona: Alta Fulla, 2001 (4 vols.). —­—. Observaciones críticas sobre la excelencia de la lengua castellana. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1991. —­—. Teatro histórico-­crítico de la eloquencia española. 5 vols. Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1786–1794. Cárcel Ortí, Vicente. Politica eclesial de los gobiernos liberales españoles, 1830–1840. Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra, 1975.

29 8 B ib l i o g raphy

Carlisme: Sis estudis fonamentals, ed. Jordi Canal i Morrell. Barcelona: L’Avenç, 1993. Carr, Raymond. Spain 1808–1939. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. Cartulari de Poblet: Edició del manuscrit de Tarragona. Edited by Eduard Toda i Güell. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1938. El Cartulario del monasterio aragonés de San Andrés de Fanlo, siglos X–­XIII. Edited by Carlos Laliena Corbera and Eric Knibbs. Saragossa: Universidad de Zaragoza, 2007. Cartulario de “Sant Cugat” del Vallès. Edited by José Rius Serra. 3 vols. Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1945–1947. El cartulario de Tavernoles. Edited by Josefina Soler García. Castellon de la Plana: Socieded Castellonense de Cultura, 1961. Casanovas, Ignasi. Josep Finestres: Estudis biogràfics. Barcelona: Biblioteca Balmes, 1931. —­—. La cultura catalana en el siglo XVIII. Finestres y la Universidad de Cervera. Barcelona: Editorial Balmes, 1953. Casellas i Domènech, Oriol. “El Bisbat de Vic durant la Guerra Civil.” Ausa 28, no. 181–182 (2018): 707–28. Cassanyes Roig, Albert. “Bellpuig després dels premonstratesos: Una possessió en un antic priorat.” In De Bellpuig a Bellpuig: Els premonstratesos de les Avellanes, 119–54. Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2019. Els castells catalans. 6 vols. in 7 parts. Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1990–1993. Castellón, Francisco. “El canonge Finestres, primer historiador de Lleida.” In Arrels cristianos: Presència i signficació del cristianisme en la història i la societat de Lleida, 249–52. Lleida: Pagès, 2007. Catalunya Carolingia. Edited by Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Iganasi Baiges i Jardí, Ramon Ordeig, Pere Ponsich, Pere Puig i Ustrell, Sebastià Riera i Viader, Manuel Rovira i Solà, and Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal. 8 vols. in 17 parts. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1952–2020. Cattini, Giovanni C. “The Advent and Politicisation of Distinct Catalan Identities (1860–1898).” In Historical Analy­sis of the Catalan Identity, edited by Flocel Sabaté, 270–82. Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. Chandler, Cullen. Carolingian Catalonia: Politics, Culture, and Identity in an Imperial Province, 778–987. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. —­—. “Carolingian Catalonia: The Spanish March and the Franks, c. 750–­c. 1050.” History Compass 11, no. 9 (September 2013). https://­compass​.­onlinelibrary​ .­wiley​.­com​/­doi​/­abs​/­10​.­1111​/­hic3​.­12078. Charmes, Xavier. Le Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques (histoire et documents). Vol. 1. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1886. Chesé Lapeña, Ramon. “Colección diplomática de S. Pedro de Ager (1010–1198).” Doctoral thesis, University of Saragossa, 1972. Cingolani, Stefano M. La formació nacional de Catalunya i el fet identitari dels catalans (785–1410). Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2015. Clemente, José Carlos. Las guerras carlistas. Barcelona: Península, 1982. Closa i Farrés, Josep. “La tradició europea en la lectura dels clàssics dins la Universitat de Cervera.” In Miscel·ània d’homenatge a Enric Moreu-­Rey, edited by Albert Manent and Joan Veny, vol. 2, 53–71. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1988.

B ib l i o g raphy

299

Código de las costumbres marítimas de Barcelona hasta aqui vulgaramente llamado Libro de Consulado, nuevamente traducido al castellano, con el texto lemosin restituido a su original integredad y pureza [. . .]. Edited by Antonio de Capmany. 2 vols. Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1791. Col·lecció diplomàtica de l’Archivo Ducal de Cardona (965–1230). Edited by Francesc Rodríguez Bernal. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2016. Colˑlecció diplomàtica de Sant Pere d’Àger fins 1198. Edited by Ramon Chesé Lapeña. 2 vols. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2011. Collell, Jaime. Fray Bernal Boyl, primer apóstol de Amer­i­ca. Vic: L. Anglada, 1929. Coll i Alentorn, Miquel. Guifré el Pelós en la historiografia i en la llegenda. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1990. Comas, Antoni. L’Acadèmia de Bones Lletres des de la seva fundació l’any 1700. Barcelona: Real Academia de Bones Lletres, 2000. —­—. Les excel·lències de la llengua catalana. 2nd ed. Barcelona: Rafael Dalamu, 2009. —­—. Literatura: La Decadència. Barcelona: Dopesa2, 1978. La Commemoració del mil·lenari de Catalunya. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1990. Conde, José Antonio. Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España. 3 vols. Madrid: Imprenta que fue de Garcia, 1820–1821. Constitutións y altres drets de Cathalunya compilats en virtut del capitol de Cort LXXXII de las Corts per la S.C.Y.R. Majestat del Rey Don Philip IV nostre Senyor celebradas en la Ciutat de Barcelona, any MDCCII. Barcelona: Joan Pau Marti y Joseph Llopis Estampers, 1704. Contessa, Andreina. “Le Biblie dell’abbate Oliba de Ripoll: Testo biblico e rinascita spirituale nella Cata­logna dell’XI secolo.” Estudios biblicos 61 (2003): 27–64. Corredera y Gutiérrez, Eduardo. “Al margen de Caresmar (Caresmar en Ager).” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 47 (1974): 11–26. —­—. “Al margen de Daniel Finestres (una página de monasteriología catalana del siglo XVIII).” Analecta Sacta Tarraconensia 46 (1973): 423–30. —­—. “Caresmar y Barcelona.” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 37 (1964): 111–27. —­—. El archivo de Ager y Caresmar. Balaguer: Romeu, 1978. —­—. “El Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Bonrepòs (un priorato premonstratense).” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 38 (1965): 231–80. —­—. “Historia del Monasterio de las Avellanas (desde su fundación hasta los abades comendatarios).” Doctoral diss., University of Valencia, 1954, 2 vols. —­—. La escuela histórica avellanense. 2nd ed. Lleida: Instituto de Estudios Ilerdenses, 1971. —­—. “Los condes soberanos de Urgel y los Premostratenses.” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 36 (1963): 33–102. —­—. Noticia de los condes de Urgel. Lleida: Instituto de Estudios Ilerdenses, 1973. —­—. Páginas de historia catalana: Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Barcelona: Institut de Germans Maristes, Catalunya, n.d. —­—. “San Nicolás de Fondarella: Un priorato premonstratense.” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 38 (1965): 59–86. —­—. “Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes.” In Catalunya Romànica, vol. 17, 395–399. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1994.

30 0 B ib l i o g raphy

—­—. “Santa Maria de Bellpuig de las Avellanas y los condes de Urgel (breve relatio histórico).” Ilerda 31, no. 1 (1971): 115–41. —­—. Santa Maria de Mur: Cronologia. Tremp: Garsineu, 2003. Cortadellas i Vallès, Anna. Repertori de llegendes historiogràfiques de la Corona d’Aragó. Barcelona: Curial and Abadia de Montserrat, 2001. Corts i Blay, Ramon. L’arquebisbe Fèlix Amat (1750–1824) i l’última Il·lustració espanyola. Barcelona: Facultat de Teologia de Catalunya, 1992. Costumbres de la ciudad de Barcelona sobre las servidumbres de los predios urbanos y rústicos, llamadas vulgarmente d’En Santacília [. . .]. Barcelona: Juan Francisco Piferrer [1818]. Coulet, Jules. Étude sur l’Office de Girone en l’honneur de Saint Charlemagne. Montpellier: Coulet et Fils, 1907. Coverdale, John F. The Basque Phase of Spain’s First Carlist War. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1984. The Crown of Aragon: A Singular Mediterranean Empire. Edited by Flocel Sabaté. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Cueva, Julio de la. “Religious Persecution, National Tradition and Revolution: On Atrocities Against the Clergy during the Spanish Civil War.” Journal of Con­temporary History 33 (1998): 355–69. De Bellpuig a Bellpuig: Els premonstratesos de les Avellanes a Artà. Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2019. Delcor, Mathias. “Un monastère aux portes de la Seu d’Urgell, Sant Sadurní de Tabernoles: Histoire et archéologie.” Cahiers de Saint-­Michel-­de-­Cuxa 17 (1986): 34–60. Deles consuetuts de la ciutat de Barcelona, sobre les servituts deles cases de honors vulgarament dites den Sancta Cilia. Barcelona: Pedro Mulo, 1574. Delisle, Léopold Victor. Le cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Impériale. Vol. 1. Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1868. Dereine, Charles. “Les origines de Prémontré.” Revue d’histoire ecclesiastique 42 (1947): 352–78. Deswarte, Thomas. “Saint Jacque refusé en Cata­logne. La lettre de l’labbé Césaire de Montserrat au Pape Jean XIII (970).” In Guerre, pouvoirs et idéologies dans l’Espagne chrétienne aux alentours de l’an mil, edited by Thomas Deswarte and Phillippe Sénac, 143–61. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Diplomatari de la Catedral de Barcelona. Edited by Àngel Fàbrega i Grau. Barcelona: Arxiu Capitular de la Catedral de Barcelona, 1995. Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic. Edited by Eduard Junyent i Subirà and Ramon Ordeig i Mata. 11 parts. Vic: Patronat d’Estudis Ausonencs, 1980–2010. Pérez i Gómez, Xavier. Diplomatari de la cartoixa de Montalegre (segles X–­XII). Edited by Xavier Pérez i Gómez. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1998. Diplomatari de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Catedral de Barcelona, segle XI. Edited by Josep Baucells i Reig, Àngel Fabrega i Grau, Manuel Riu i Riu, Josep Hernando i Delgado, Carme Batlle i Gallart. 5 vols. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2006. Diplomatari de Santa Maria de Poblet. Vol. 1 (960–1177). Edited by Agustí Altisent. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1993. Diplomatari del monestir de Santa Maria de Serrateix. Edited by Jordi Bolòs i Masclans. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2006.

B ib l i o g raphy

301

Diplomatari del monestir de Ripoll (segles IX–­X). Vol. 1. Edited by Ramon Ordeig i Mata. Vic: Arxiu Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic, 2015. Discurso sobre la agricultura, comercio e industria del Principado de Cataluña (1780). Edited by Ernest Lluch. Barcelona: Alta Fulla, 1997. Dobal, Carlos. El primer apostol del Nuevo Mundo Biografía de Fray Barnardo Boyl, Vicario apostólico en América y celebrante de la primera missa. Santiago, Dominican Republic: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1991. “Documentos del siglo IX.” Scrinium 2 (April–­August 1951): 36–45; 3 (September–­ December 1951): 61–66. “Documentos del siglo X.” Scrinium 8–10 (1953): 14–32. Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio. Carlos III y la España de la Ilustración. Madrid: Alianza, 2005. Dou y de Bassóls, Ramon Lázaro de. Finestresius vindicatus [. . .] adversus clarissimum virum Henricum Florezium. Barcelona: Franciscus Suriá et Burgada, 1772. —­—. La riqueza de las naciones, nuevamente explicada con la doctrina de su mismo investigador. Cervera: Imprenta de la Pont. y Real Universidad, Cervera, 1817. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in E­ ngland, 1400–1580. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Edelstein, Beth, Silvia A. Centeno, and Mark T. Wypyski. “Illuminating a Complex History: The Materials and Techniques of the Tombs of Urgell at the Cloisters.” Studies in Conservation 51, supplement 2 (2006): 204–10. Eguia Ruiz, Constancio. Los jesuítas y el Motín de Esquilache. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1947. [Elías de Molins, Antonio]. Discursos leídos en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona en la recepción pública de D. Antonio Elías de Molins el día 8 de febrero de 1903. Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 1903. Elliott, J. H. “The Decline of Spain.” Past & Pre­sent 20 (November 1961): 52–75. —­—. The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain, 1598–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963 ______. “Self-­Perception and Decline in Early Seventeenth-­Century Spain.” Past & Pre­sent 74 (February 1977): 41–61. —­—. Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Engels, Odilo. “Episkopat und Kanonie im mittelalterlichen Katalonien.” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 21 (1963): 83–135. —­—. Schutzgedanke und Landesherrschaft im östlichen Pyrenäenraum (9.–13. Jahrhundert). Münster: Aschendorff, 1970. Escartín Sánchez, Eduardo. “Los intendentes de Cataluña en el siglo XVIII. Datos biográficos.” In Historia social de la administración española. Estudios sobre los siglos XVII y XVIII, 249–86. Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1980. Escriptures de Santa Maria de Vilabertran (968–1300). Edited by Josep Maria Marquès. Figueres: Institut d’Estudis Empordanesos, 1995. Escrits polítics del segle XVII. Edited by Eva Serra. 2 vols. Vic: Eumo, 1995. Escrits polítics del segle XVIII. Edited by Joaquim Albareda and Josep M. Torras i Ribé. 2 vols. Vic: Eumo, 1996.

30 2 B ib l i o g raphy

Español Bertran, Francesca. “Els comtes d’Urgell i el seu panteó dinàstic.” In El comtat d’Urgell, edited by Flocel Sabaté, Prim Bertran, Francesca Español, Francesc Fité, Gener Gonzalvo, and Max Turull, 149–83. Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 1995. Estatutos y privilegios apostolicos y reales de la Universidad e Estudio General de Cervera. Cervera: Josef Barber, 1750. Esteve, Joaquín, Josep Bellvitges, and Antonio Junglái Font. Diccionario catalán-­ castellano-­latino. 2 vols. Barcelona: Tecla Pla Viuda, 1803. Fage, Émile. Étienne Baluze. Sa vie, ses ouvrages, son exil, sa défense. Tulle: Imprimerie Grauffon Administrative et Commercial, 1899; Reprinted, Paris: Slatkine, 1971. Faura i Pujol, Neus. “La Apologia del idioma cathalà d’Ignasi Ferreres.” Anuario de filología 3 (1977): 457–507. Feliu, Gaspar. “La Catalunya Carolíngia.” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics 31 (2020): 79–93. Felíu de la Peña y Farell, Narciso. Anales de Cataluña. 3 vols. Barcelona: Juan Pablo Martí, 1709. Felton, Franz J. “Frauenklöster und -­stifte im Rheinland im 12. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Frauen in der religiöse Bewegung des hohen Mittelalters.” In Reformidee und Reformpolitik im spätsalisch-­frühstaufischen Reich, 188–299. Mainz: Gesellschaft für Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 1992. Fernández, Roberto. Cataluña y el absolutismo borbónico: Historia y política. Barcelona: Universitat de Lleida, 2014. Fernández de la Cigoña, Francisco José, and Estanislao Cantero Núñez. Antonio de Capmany (1742–1813): Pensamiento, obra histórica, política y jurídica. Madrid: Fundcaión Francisco Elías de Tejada y Erasmo Percopo, 1993. Ferran i Planas, Elisabet. El jurista Pere Albert i les Commemoracions. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2006. Ferrer i Alòs, Llorenç. “Una revisió del creixement demogràfic de Catalunya en el segle XVIII a partir dels registres parroquials.” Estudis d’història agrària 20 (2007): 17–68. Ferrer i Mallol, Maria Teresa. Joaquim Miret i Sans, semblança biogràfica. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2003. Ferro, Victor. El dret public català. Les institutcions a Catalunya fins al Decret de Nova Planta. Vic: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1987. El feudalisme comptat i debatut: Formació i expansió del feudalisme català. Edited by Miquel Barceló, Gaspar Feliu, Antoni Furió, and Jaume Sobrequés. Valencia: Universitat de València, 2003. Finestres, Jaime. Historia del Real Monasterio de Poblet. 5 vols. Cervera: Joseph Barber, 1753–1755. Reprinted with a sixth supplemental volume, Barcelona: Orbis, 1947–1955. Fité i Llevot, Francesc. “El monestir premonstratès de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes, panteó comtal.” In De Bellpuig a Bellpuig: Els premonstratesos de les Avellanes a Artà, 47–97. Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2019. —­—. “La presència dels ordes religioso-­militars a Montsec. L’Hospital d’Ares.” In Actes de les Primeres Jornades sobre els ordes religioso-­militars als Països Catalans, 275–82. Tarragona: Diputació de Tarragona, 1994.

B ib l i o g raphy

303

—­—. Reculls d’història de la vall d’Àger, periode antic i medieval. Àger: Centre d’Estudis del Vall d’Àger, 1985. —­—. “Senderes i hospitals del camí de Sant Jaume a Catalunya.” In El camí de Sant Jaume i Catalunya. Actes del Congrés Internacional celebrat a Barcelona, Cervera i Lleida, els dies 16, 17, i 18 d’octubre de 2003, 333–50. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2007. Fiter i Rossell, Antoni. Manual Digest de las Valls neutras de Andorra. Andorra la Vella: Govern d’Andorra, 1987. Flórez, Enrique. España Sagrada. Theatro geographico-­historico de la Iglesia de España. 47 vols. Madrid: A. Marin ­etc., 1747–1830. Reprinted, Guadarrama: Revista Agustiniana, 2000–2012. Folch, Artemi. Aspectes de la desamortització (segle XIX). Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1978. —­—. La Universitat de Cervera. Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1970. Fontana, Josep. La crisis del antiguo régimen, 1808–1833. Barcelona: Crítica, 1979. —­—. “La Guerra de Successió i les Constitucions de Catalunya: Una proposta interpretiva.” In Del patriotisme al catalanisme: Societat i política (segles XVI–­XIX), edited by Joaquim Albareda, 13–30. Vic: Eumo, 2001. —­—. La revolució liberal a Catalunya. Vic: Eumo, 2003. Fontanals, Reis. “Arxiu Històric de la Biblioteca de Catalunya.” In Guia del arxius històrics de Catalunya, vol. 6, 59–88. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1995. La formació i expansió del feudalisme català. Edited by Jaume Portella i Comas. Girona: Col·legi Universitari de Girona, 1986 = Estudi General 5–6 (1985–1986). Fradera, Josep. Cultura nacional en una sociedad dividida: Cataluña, 1838–1868. Barcelona: Curial, 1992. Freedman, Paul. “Cowardice, Heroism and the Legendary Origins of Catalonia.” Past & Pre­sent 121 (November 1988): 3–28. —­—. The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in Medieval Catalonia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983. ______. “Jurisdictional Disputes over the Monastery of Sant Pere d’Àger (Catalonia) in Light of New Papal Documents.” In Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, edited by Peter Landau and Jörg Müller, 725–56. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1997. ______. The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medeval Catalonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). —­—. “Symbolic Implications of the Events of 985–988.” In Symposium Internacional sobre els orígens de Catalunya, 117–29. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1991. Freedman, Paul, and Flocel Sabaté. “Jaume Caresmar i les fonts històriques de l’Església catalana.” Butlletí de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona 51 (2007–2008): 13–38. —­—. “Two Twelfth-­Century Papal Letters to the Collegiate Church of Vilabertran (Catalonia).” Archivum Historiae Pontifciae 37 (1999): 39–59. Freedman, Paul, and Damian Smith. “A Privilege of Pope Innocent III for the Premonstratensian House of Bellpuig de les Avellanes.” Römische Historische Mitteiluingen 55 (2013): 81–97.

30 4 B ib l i o g raphy

Friedrich, Markus. The Birth of the Archive: A History of Knowledge. Translated by John Noël Dillon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Friera Álvarez, Marta. La desamortización de la propiedad de la tierra en el tránsito del antiguo régimen al liberalismo: La desamortización de Carlos IV. Gijón: Caja Rural de Asturias, 2007. Fuchs, Franz. “Wolle oder Leinen. Zum Streit um den rechten Habit in der Regularkanonikerbewegung des 12. Jahrhunderts.” In Regula Sancti Augustini. Normative Grundlage differenter Verbände im Mittelalter, edited by Gerd Melville and Anna Müller, 219–37. Paring: Akademie der Augustiner-­Chorherren von Windesheim, 2002. Fullana Puigserver, Pere. “L’antic monestir de Bellpuig de les Avellanes (1836–1898): Manuel de Oviedo, Dolores Ruiz i Antonia de Oviedo.” In De Bellpuig a Bellpuig. Els premonstratesos, de les Avellanes a Artà, 187–205. Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2019. Gallisá y Costa, Luciano. De vita et scriptis Iosephi Finestres et a Monsalvo, iurisconsultus Barcinonensis in Cervariensi Academia iuris civilis primarii antecessores emeriti commentariorum libri IIII. Cervera: S. Bou et Baranera, 1802. Gams, Pius Bonifacius. Series Episcoporum Ecclesiae Catholicae quotquot innotuerunt a Beato Petro Apostolo. Regensburg: Gregorius Josephus Manz, 1873. Gaquère, François. Pierre de Marca (1594–1662): Sa vie, ses oeuvres, son gallicanisme. Paris: Lethielleux, 1932. García, Francesc Vicent. La Armonia del Parnàs, més numerosa en les poesies vàries de l’atlant del cel poètic, lo Dr. Vicent Garcia, rector de la parroquial de Santa Maria de Vallfogona [. . .]. Barcelona: J. Rubió, 1703. García Cárcel, Ricardo. “El austriacismo: Representación y realidad.” In Actes del Congrés “L’aposta catalana a la Guerra de Successió (1705–1707),” 165–75. Barcelona: Museu d’Histôria de Catalunya, 2007. —­—. “La Guerra de Sucesión, una guerra poliédrica.” In 1714: Cataluña en la España del siglo XVIII, edited by Antonio Morales Moya, 45–69. Madrid: Cátedra, 2014. —­—. La leyenda negra: Historia y opinion. Madrid: Alianza, 1992. García Espuche, Albert. Barcelona 1700. Barcelona: Editorial Empúries, 2010. García Hernán, David. “La Guerra de Sucesión en España: Luces y sombras en la historiografia ­actual.” In 1714: Cataluña en la España del siglo XVIII, edited by Antonio Morales Moya, 71–93. Madrid: Cátedra, 2014. García López, Genaro Luís, and Leticia Martín Gómez. Libros para envolver en las boticas: Bibliotecas y política bibliotecaria en España durante la década moderada. Mérida: Editorial Regional de Extremadura, 2015. —­—. “Situación de las bibliotecas conventuales y monacales españolas hasta la supresión de las comunidades religiosas.” Documentación de las Ciencias de la Información 35 (2012): 193–206. Garí, Marina, Ramon Masdeu, and Manuela Urbina. “Jaume Caresmar. L’home i la seva obra.” Manuscrits 10 (1992): 331–71. Generalis index librorum qui in Bibliotheca Pont. ac Reg. Cervariensis Universitatis reperiuntur, academici senatus consulto digestus anno MDCCCXXXI. Cervera: Bernardus Pujol, 1831.

B ib l i o g raphy

305

Les “Gesta comitum Barchinonensium” (versió primitiva), la “Brevis Historia” i altres textos de Ripoll. Edited by Stefano Cingolani. Valencia: Universitat de València, 2012. Gesta y Leceta, Marcelino. Índice de una coleción manuscrita de obras del Rmo. Padre Fr. Martín Sarmiento. Madrid: Vda. y Hijos de Gómez Fuentenebro, 1888. Gibson, Charles. The Black Legend: Anti-­Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New. New York: Knopf, 1971. Gifre, Josep Mundet. La primera guerra carlina a Catalunya: Història militar i política. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1990. Ginebra Serrabou, Jordi. “La lengua catalana en el siglo XVIII. Una lengua doméstica?” Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightement 35 (2012): 105–16. Giralt, Emili. Ideari d’Antoni de Capmany. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1965. Gonzalvo i Bou, Gener. Breu història del monestir de Vallbona. Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2002. —­—. “The Dissolution of the Catalan Monasteries and the Fate of Their Archives: The Example of Poblet.” Mediterranean Studies 9 (2000): 183–201. —­—. Eduard Toda i Güell (1855–1941) i el salvament del monestir de Poblet, a través del seu epistolari. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2005. —­—. Història del panteó dels comtes d’Urgell: Els sepulcres del monestir de Bellpuig de les Avellanes. Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 2007. —­—. Introduction to Carta del P. D. Pasqual, canónigo premostratense de Bellpuig de las Avellanas, al M. L. S. Marqués de Capmany. Valls: Consell Comarcal de l’Urgell, 1991. Goovaerts, Léon. Écrivains artistes et savants de l’Ordre de Prémontré: Dictionnaire biobibliographique. Vol. 1. Geneva: Slatkine, 1971. Originally published, Brussels: Société Belge de Librarie, 1899. Grafton, Anthony. “Church History in Early Modern Eu­rope: Tradition and Innovation.” In Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Re­nais­sance World, edited by Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan, 3–26. Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press, 2012. —­—. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. —­—. Inky Fin­gers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Eu­rope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Grau, Josep M. T., and Manel Güell. “La crònica negra de la destrucció d’arxius a la demarcació de Tarragona.” Lligall 18 (2001): 65–120. Grau i Fernàndez, Ramon. Antoni de Capmany i la renovació de l’historicisme polític català. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2006. —­—. “El círculo virtuoso de Capmany: Las relaciones entre la sociedad barcelonesa y la corona en la baja edad media.” In Renda feudal i fiscalitat a la Catalunya baixmedieval: Estudis dedicats a Manuel Sánchez Martínez, edited by Jordi Morelló Baget, Pere Orti Gost, and Pere Verdés Pijuan, 683–726. Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigciones Científicas, 2018. —­—. “Els intel·lectuals entre la Ilˑlustració i les tradicions nacionals.” In Història, política, societat i cultura dels Països Catalans, edited by Borja de Riquer, vol. 5, 326–43. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1995. —­—. “Les batalles de la historiografia crítica.” In Història de la Cultura Catalana, vol. 3, edited by Pere Gabriel, 163–88. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1996.

30 6 B ib l i o g raphy

—­—. “Un patriota d’altres temps: Antoni de Capmany i la historiografia racionalista.” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics 22 (2011): 93–112. Grau i Fernàndez, Ramon, and Marina López. “Antoni de Capmany: El primer model del pensament polític català modern.” In El pensament politic català del segle XVIII a mitjan segle XX, edited by Francesc Artal and Albert Balcells, 13–40. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1988. —­—. “Lectures d’historiografia catalana, III. Sobre les proves documentals.” L’Avenç 147 (April 1991): 60–65. Guadayol, Anna. “Un recorregut par­tic­u­lar per la història de la cultura a Catalunya: Els papers de la família Alòs-­Moner.” Estudis Romànics 36 (2014): 439–46. Guadayol, Anna, and Eulàlia Miralles. “Notas sobre la formació de les Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crítico de los autores catalanes de Fèlix Torres Amat.” Barcelona Quaderns d’Història 12 (2005): 93–100. La Guerra de Sucesión en España y la batalla de Almansa. Europa en la encrucijada. Edited by Francisco García González. Madrid: Silex, 2009. Guiance, Ariel. “Portugal, un azar histórico: El pasado lusitano y la historioiografia de Claudio Sánchez-­Albornoz.” Revista portuguesa de história 42 (2011): 109–30. Guilleré, Christian. “Pierre de Marca à la fin du XXe siècle: L’historiographie française et l’histoire de la Cata­logne.” In Catalunya i Europa a través de l’edat mitjana, edited by Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré, 31–53. Lleida: Pagès, 2002. Gwara, Joseph, Jr. The Sala ­Family Archives: A Handlist of Medieval and Early Modern Catalonian Charters. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1984. Hamilton, Earl J. “The Decline of Spain.” Economic History Review, 1st ser., 8 (1938–1939): 168–79. Herr, Richard. The Eigh­teenth ­Century Revolution in Spain. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1958. Hillgarth, J. N. The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700: The Formation of a Myth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. —­—. The Prob­lem of a Catalan Mediterranean Empire, 1229–1327 (supplement no. 8 to the En­glish Historical Review). London: Longman, 1975. Història de Catalunya. Edited by Joaquim Nadal i Farreras and Philippe Wolff. Barcelona: Oikos-­Tau, 1983. Història de Catalunya. Edited by Pierre Vilar. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1985. Hobsbawm, Eric. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. How the Secularization of Religious Houses Transformed the Libraries of Eu­rope, 16th– 19th Centuries. Edited by Cristina Dondi, Dorit Raines, and Richard Sharpe. Turnhout, Brepols, 2022. Husband, Timothy. “ ‘Sancti Nicolai de Fontibus Amoenis’ or ‘Sti. Nicolai et Fontium Amenorum’: The Making of Monastic History.” In The Cloisters: Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary, edited by E. C. Parker, 354–83. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992. Iglésies, Josep. “La població monacal catalana l’any 1787 segons el cens de Floridablanca.” In II Col·loqui d’història del monaquisme català, San Joan de les Abadesses 1970, vol. 1, 244–62. Poblet: Abadia de Poblet, 1970.

B ib l i o g raphy

307

Inventario de los legajos de las Comisiones Provinciales y de la Comisión Central de Monumentos Histórico-­Artísticos. Rev. ed. Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 2016. Jaspert, Nikolas. “La reforma agustiniana: Un movimiento europeo entre ‘piedad popu­lar’ y ‘política eclesiástica.’ ” In XXXII Semana de Estudios Medievales, Estella, 18 a 22 de julio de 2005, 375–420. Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2006. —­—. Stift und Stadt: Das Heiligrabpriorat von Santa Anna und das Regularkanoniker Santa Eulàlia del Camp im mittelalterlichen Barcelona (1145–1423). Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1996. Johnston, Hank. Tales of Nationalism: Catalonia, 1939–1979. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981. Jomtob, Natanael [Antonio Puigblanc]. La Inquisición sin mascara ó disertación en que se prueban hasta la evidencia los vicios de este tribunal, y la necesidad de que se suprima. Cádiz: José Niel, 1811. Jorba, Manuel. “The Biblioteca de Catalunya, National Library of Catalonia.” Item: Revista de biblioteconomia i documentació, special issue, IFLA’93 (1993): 5–11. Juher, Cristina. “La frontera entre lingüística i història literária en els erudits catalans del segle XVIII. El cas par­tic­ul­ar de Josep de Móra, Marquès de Llió.” Estudi general: Revista de la Facultat de Lletres de la Universitat de Girona 22 (2002): 101–23. Junyent, Eduard. El monestir de Santa Maria de Ripoll. Barcelona: Russet, 1975. Kagan, Richard. Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. —­—. “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain.” American Historical Review 101 (1996): 423–46. —­—. Students and Society in Early Modern Spain. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974. Kamen, Henry. “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?” Past & Pre­sent 81 (November 1978): 24–50. —­—. The War of Succession in Spain, 1700–1715. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. Kehr, Paul Fridolin. Papsturkunden in Spanien: Vorarbeiten zur Hispania Pontificia. Berlin: Weidmansche Buchhandlung, 1926. Knowles, David. ­Great Historical Enterprises: Prob­lems in Monastic History. London: Thomas Nelson, 1963. Kosto, Adam. “Aragon and the Catalan Counties before the Union.” In The Crown of Aragon: A Singular Mediterranean Empire, edited by Flocel Sabaté, 70–91. Leiden: Brill, 2017. —­—. “Laymen, Clerics, and Documentary Practices in the Early ­Middle Ages: The Example of Catalonia.” Speculum 80 (2005): 44–73. —­—. “Un diplôme, inédit de H ­ ugues Capet, a. 991: Un nouveau dernier diplôme royal franc pour les comtés catalans?” Journal des savants (2020): 539–61. Langond-­Davies, John. Carlos: The King Who Would Not Die. New York: Prentice-­Hall, 1963. Lawrence, Mark. Spain’s First Carlist War, 1833–1840. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

30 8 B ib l i o g raphy

Lehner, Ulrich L. Enlightenend Monks: The German Benedictines, 1740–1803. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Leinsle, Ulrich G. Die Prämonstratenser. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2020. Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus qui sunt in Ecclesia. Edited by Giles Constable and Bernard S. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Liber maiolichinus de gestis Pisanorum illustribus. Edited by Carlo Calisse. Rome: Forzani, 1904. Linehan, Peter. The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth ­Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Lire, copier, écrire. Les bibliothèques manuscrites et leurs usages au XVIIIe siècle. Edited by Élisabeth Décultot. Paris: CNRS, 2003. Llanas, Manuel. El llibre i l’edició a Catalunya: Apunts i esbossos. Barcelona: Gremi d’Editors de Catalunya, 2000. Lluch, Ernest. El pensament econòmic a Catalunya (1760–1840): Els orígens ideològics del proteccionisme i la presa de consciència de la burguesia catalana. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1973. —­—. “Jaume Caresmar i el Discurso sobre la agricultura, comercio e industria del Principado de Catalunya 1780.” Recerques 10 (1980): 177–81. —­—. La Catalunya vençuda del segle XVIII: Foscors i clarors de la Ilˑlustració. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1996. —­—. “La construcció de la imatge de Catalunya a la Ilˑlustració: L’aportació de l’Escola de les Avellanes.” In Creences i ètnies en una societat plural, edited by Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré, 153–65. Lleida: Pagès, 2002. Loaisa, Garsia. Collectio conciliorum Hispaniae. Madrid: Pedrus Madrigal, 1593. Longares Alonso, Jesús. La ideología religiosa del liberalismo español, 1808–1843. Córdoba: Real Academia de Córdoba, 1979. López de Guerreño Sanz, María Teresa. “El particularismo de las fábricas premonstratenses hispanas en la Edad Media. Una revision necessaria: balance y nuevos aportaciones.” In De Bellpuig a Bellpuig: Els Premonstratesos, de les Avellanes a Artà, 17–46. Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2019. López-­Morillas, Juan. The Krausist Movement and Ideological Change in Spain, 1854– 1874. Translated by Frances M. López-­Morillas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Lynch, John. Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Mabillon, Jean. De re diplomatica libri VI. Paris: Ludovicus Billaine, 1681. Madurell, Josep Maria. “Más sobre Pedro Serra y Postius.” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 46 (1973): 387–421. —­—. “Pedro Serra y Postius.” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 29 (1956): 345–400. Maians, Gregori. Epistolario de Gregorio Mayans i Siscar: Transcripción, notas y estudio. 25 vols. Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Oliva, 1972–2011. Maldà, Rafael d’Amat de Cortada i de Sentjust, Baró de. Calaix de sastre. Edited by Ramon Boixareu. 11 vols. Barcelona: Curial, 1987–2003. Manual completo de desamortización civil y eclesiástica. Madrid: Imprenta de la Revista de Legislación, 1856. Manual Digest, 250e anniversari. Andorra la Vella: Ministeri de Turisme i Cultura, Andorra, 1991.

B ib l i o g raphy

309

“Els manuscrits dels ‘Sacra Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta’ del P. Jaume Pasqual.” Butlletí de la Biblioteca de Catalunya 5–6 (1918–1919): 198–207. Marca, Pierre de. Marca Hispanica sive limes Hispanicus [. . .]. Paris: Franciscus Muguet, 1688. Marfany, Joan-­Lluís. La llengua maltractada: El castellà i el català a Catalunya del segle XVI al segle XIX. Barcelona: Empúries, 2000. —­—. “ ‘Minority’ Languages and Literary Revivals.” Past & Pre­sent 184 (August 2004): 137–67. —­—. Nacionalisme espanyol i catalanitat (1789–1859): Cap a una revisió de la Renaixença. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2017. Marín, Dolors. La Semana trágica: Barcelona en llamas, la revuelta popu­lar y la Escuela Moderna. Barcelona: Esfera de los Libros, 2009. Martène, Edmond, and Ursin Durand. Veterum scriptorum et monumentorum historicarum, dogmaticorum, moralium, amplissima collectio. 9 vols. Paris: Montalant, 1724–1733. Martí, P[are] [Jaume Bagunyà i Casanovas]. “Notas bio-­bibliográficas de Caresmar: Commemorando un centenario (1717–1791).” Estudios Franciscanos 22 (1919): 197–204. Martí Bonet, J. M. El martiri dels ­temples a la diòcesi de Barcelona (1936–1939). Barcelona: Arxiu Diocesà de Barcelona, 2008. —­—. “Las pretensiones metropolitans de Cesáreo, abad de Santa Cecília de Montserrat.” Anthología Annua 21 (1974): 157–82. Martí i Mayor, Josep. “Arxiu dels Franciscans de Catalunya.” In Guia dels arxius històrics de Catalunya, vol. 7, 117–24. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1998. Martín, Isidro. “En el segundo centenario del concordato español de 1753.” Revista Española de derecho canónico 8 (1953): 745–58. Martínez Alcalde, María José. Las ideas lingüísticas de Gregorio Mayans. Valencia: Universitat de València, 1992. Martínez Shaw, Carlos. “La Cataluña del siglo XVIII bajo el signo de la expansión.” In España en el siglo XVIII: Homenaje a Pierre Vilar, edited by Roberto Fernández, 57–89. Barcelona: Crítica, 1983. Martorell i Trabal, Francesc. “Manuscrits dels PP. Caresmar, Pasqual i Martí a la Biblioteca del Convent de Franciscans de Balaguer.” Estudis Universitaris Catalans 12 (1927): 178–240. Masnou Pratdesaba, Josep. “Santa Maria de l’Estany i la consolidació d’una canònica agustiniana a principis del segle XIII.” Miscel·lània litúrgica catalana 29 (2021): 281–335. McCrank, Lawrence. “The Frontier of the Spanish Reconquest and the Land Acquisitions of the Cistercians of Poblet.” Analecta cisterciensia 29 (1973): 57–78. —­—. “Restauración canónica e intento de Reconquista de la sede Tarraconense, 1076–1108.” Cuadernos de historia de España 61–62 (1977): 145–245. —­—. “Restoration and Reconquest in Medieval Catalonia: The Church and the Principality of Tarragona, 971–1177.” Doctoral diss., University of V ­ irginia, 1974. —­—. “Seeing History Differently: Toledo vs. Tarragona in the Reconstruction of the Hispanic Church.” Butlletí arqueològic, 5th ser., 36–37 (2014–2015): 147–98.

31 0 B ib l i o g raphy

McDonogh, Gary. Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power in the Industrial Era. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986. Mercader, Joan. Els capitans generals (segle XVIII). Barcelona: Teide, 1957. —­—. Historiadors i erudits a Catalunya i a València en el segle XVIII: Caresmar i l’escola de les Avellanes; Mayans, el solitari d’Oliva. Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1966. —­—. “La desamortización en la España de José Bonaparte.” Hispania 32 (1972): 587–616. —­—. Un Igualadí del segle XVIII: Jaume Caresmar. Igualada: Estudis Comarcals, 1947. Merino de Cáceres, José Miguel. “Expolios de arte religioso.” Descubrir el arte 34 (2001): 112–15. Mestre Sanchis, Antonio. Don Gregorio Mayans y Siscar entre la erudición y la política. Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1999. —­—. Historia, fueros y actitudes políticas: Mayans y la historiografia del XVIII. Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Oliva, 1970. —­—. Influjo europeo y herencia hispánica: Mayans y la ilustración valenciana. Valencia: Diputación de Valencia, 1987. —­—. Mayans: Proyectos y frustraciones. Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Oliva, 2003. Miquel Rosell, Francisco. Inventario general de manuscritos de la Biblioteca Universitaria de Barcelona. Vol. 1. Madrid: Dirección General de Enseñanzas Universitaria, 1958. Miralles, Eulàlia. Sobre Jeroni Pujades. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2010. Miret y Sans, Joaquim. “Dos siglos de vida académica.” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 9 (1917–1920): 10–32, 92–116, 168–93, 249–85, 305–62. —­—. “Los manuscritos del Padre Joaquín Traggia en la Real Academia de la Historia.” Revista de la Asociación Artístico Arqueológica Barcelonesa 1 (1896–1898): 362–76. Miró Baldrich, Ramon, and Pep Vila Medinyà. “Bellpuig de les Avellanes (segona meitat del segle XVII fins a inicis del XIX).” Urtx: Revista cultural de l’Urgell 18 (2005): 171–94. —­—. “La defensa de la llengua catalana de Gonzalo Saura (1807).” Urtx 23 (2009): 413–51. Molas Ribalta, Pere. El comerç i estructura social a Catalunya i València els segles XVII i XVIII. Barcelona: Curial, 1977. —­—. “Els Acadèmics Desconfiats el 1713.” In Actes del VII Congrès d’Història Moderna de Catalunya “Catalunya entre la guerra i la pau, 1713–1813,” edited by J. Dantí, X. Gil, and I. Mauro, 731–48. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2013. —­—. “Les Acadèmies al segle XVIII.” Butlletí de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona 48 (2001–2002): 85–92. Moli, Montserrat. “Les desamortitzacions a l’Alt Urgell.” Urgellia 20 (2019–2021): 739–70. Moliné y Brasés, Ernesto. “La Academia dels Desconfiats.” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 9 (1917–1920): 1–10. Momigliano, Arnaldo. Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977. Monfar y Sors, Diego. Historia de los Condes de Urgel (Colección de Documentos Inéditos del Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, vol. 10, part 2). Barcelona: José Eugenio Monfort, 1853.

B ib l i o g raphy

311

Monsalvatje y Fossas, Francisco de. Los monasterios de la diócesis gerundense. Noticias Históricas. Vol. 14. Olot: Juan Bonet, 1904. Montesquieu. Lettres Persanes. Paris: Pierre Marteau, 1721. Moral Barrio, Joan Jesús. Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes: Una història que es renova. Trobajo del Camino, León: Edilesa, n.d. Moral Roncal, Antonio M. Las guerras carlistas. Madrid: Silex, 2006. Moran i Ocerinjauregui, Josep. “Català i castellà als segles XVIII i XIX.” In La multiculturalitat i les llengües (Actes del seminar del CUMPB-­CEL 2006), edited by Joan Martí Castell and Josep M. Mestres i Serra, 185–97. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2007. —­—. “Diferències artístiques entre Ordo Antiquus i Ordo Novus en el món canonical agustinià.” Lambard: Estudis d’art medieval 11 (1998–1999): 59–63, 163–64. —­—. “Homilies d’Organyà. Edicions i estudis nous.” In Estudis d’història de la llengua catalana, 73–108. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2004. —­—. “La llengua en l’església a Catalunya.” In Episcopus: El bisbat de Vic i l’església a Catalunya en el context europeu, edited by Carme Sanmartí and Marc Sureda, 399–406. Vic: Eumo, 2021. —­—. “La prédication ancienne en Cata­logne: L’activité canoniale.” In La prédication en Pays d’Oc (XIIe–­début XVe siècle.) Toulouse: Privat, 1997 = Cahiers de Fanjeaux 32 (1997): 17–25. —­—. Les homilies de Tortosa. Barcelona: Curial, 1990. —­—. Treballs de lingüística històrica catalana. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1994. Moreno, A., T. Domenech, J. Gunzberg, and J. Planguma. “Las crisis demográficas en Cataluña, siglos XIV al XVII: Algunas reflexiones.” Contrastes: Revista de historia moderna 2 (1986): 15–38. Moreu-­Rey, Enric. El “Memorial de Greuges” de 1760. Barcelona: Mediterrània, 1968. —­—. El pensament il·lustrat a Catalunya. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1980. —­—. “Els nuclis il·lustrats i els principals centres de cultura.” In Història de Catalunya, vol. 4, 273–76. Barcelona: Salvat, 1978. —­—. Els treballs històrics de mossèn Josep Mas i Domenech. Barcelona: Fundació Salvador Vives Casajuana, 1980. Mulholland, Marc. Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Muñoz, Josep Maria. Jaume Vicens i Vives: Una biografia intel·lectual. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1997. Muntada, Marta. “Els integrants de l’Acadèmia dels Desconfiats (Barcelona, 1700–1703).” Butlletí de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona 48 (2001–2002): 11–84. Murphy, Graham. University Life in Eighteenth-­Century Oxford. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Nadal, Jordi. “La població.” In Història de Catalunya, edited by Joaquim Nadal i Farreras and Philippe Wolff, 65–94. Barcelona: Oikos-­Tau, 1983. Nenias reales y lágrimas obsequiosas, que á la inmortal memoria del gran Carlos Segundo Rey de las Españas y Emperador de la Amer­ic­ a, en credito de su imponderable dolor y desempeño de su mayor fineza dedica y consagra la Academia de los Desconfiados de Barcelona. Barcelona: Rafael Figuerò, 1701.

31 2 B ib l i o g raphy

Neveu, Bruno. Érudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994. Norbert von Xanten, Adlinger—­Ordenstifter—­Kirchenfürst. Edited by Kaspar Elm. Cologne: Wienand, 1984. Norbert von Xanten und der Orden der Prämonstratenser. Sammelband zur historischen Vortragsreihe im Norbertjahr 2009/2010. Edited by Clemens Dölken. Magdeburg: Norbertus Verlag, 2010. Noriega, Joseph Estevan de. El segundo esposo de María: Vida maravillosa del Beato Joseph Hermanno, canonigo reglar Premonstratense. Valladolid: Thomàs de Santander, 1764. Olds, Katrina B. Forging the Past: In­ven­ted Histories in Counter-­Reformation Spain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Olivar, Alexandre. Catàleg dels manuscrits de la Biblioteca del Monestir de Montserrat. Montserrat: Abadia de Montserrat, 1977. —­—. Catàleg dels manuscrits de la Biblioteca del Monestir de Montserrat, segon suplement: Manuscrits 1379 a 1487. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2010. Oliver, Jaime. “Biografia de Jaume Caresmar y Alemany, 1717–1791.” El Ateneo, Revista Mensual del Ateneo Igualadina de la clase obrera, published in twenty-­two installments between numbers 102–103 (1894) and 135 (1896). Omont, Henri. Inventaire des manuscrits de la Collection Moreau. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1891. Ordeig i Mata, Ramon. “Ató, bisbe i arquebisbe de Vic (957–971), antic arxiprest-­ ardiaca de Girona.” Studia Vicensia 1 (1989): 61–97. —­—. Ató de Vic, mestre de Gerbert d’Orlhac (papa Silvestre II). Vic: Arxiu Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic, 2009. —­—. El monestir de Ripoll en temps dels seus primers abats (anys 879–1008). Vic: Arxiu Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic, 2014. Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. Boston: Beacon Press, 1953. Ovenden, Richard. Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Palao Gil, Francisco Javier. “The Crown of Aragon in the War of the Spanish Succession.” In Britain, Spain and the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713–2013, edited by Trevor J. Dadson and J. H. Elliott, 18–38. London: Routledge, 2014. Palomo Reina, Cristian. “Catalan National Identity in the 18th ­Century. The War of the Spanish Succession and the Bourbon Regime.” In Historical Analy­sis of the Catalan Identity, edited by Flocel Sabaté, 185–227. Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. —­—. “Noves perspectives per a una questió no resolta: Per què Catalunya fou un principat i no un regne?” Anuario de estudios medievales 50, no. 1 (2020): 323–52. Paquette, Gabriel B. Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pardo de Guevara y Valdés, Eduardo. Fray Martín Sarmiento, el amador de la verdad (1695–1772). La Coruña: Diputación Provincial, 2002. Pardo i Sabartés, Maria. Mensa Episcopal de Barcelona (878–1299). Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1994. Parlements a les Corts Catalans. Edited by Ricard Albert and Joan Gassiot. Barcelona: Barcino, 1928.

B ib l i o g raphy

313

Pascual i Rodríguez, Vicenç. El Baró de Màlda: Materials per una biografia. Barcelona: Serra d’Or, 2003. Pasqual, Jaume. Carta del P. D. Pasqual, canónigo premostratense de Bellpuig de las Avellanas, al M. I. S. Marqués de Capmany. Barcelona: Valentin Torras, 1837. Reprinted, Valls: Consell Comarcal de l’Urgell, 1991. —­—. El Antiguo obispado de Pallás en Cataluña sacado de la obscuridad y tinieblas en que estuvo embuelto por muchos siglos: Discurso historico [. . .]. Tremp: Pablo Galifa, 1768. —­—. “Relació puntual y verdadera de las solemníssimas festas que ha celebrat la insigna vila de Os est any 1769, en los dias 29 y 30 de setembre y 1 d’octubre ab lo motiu de la dedicació de son magnífich ­temple nou, composta por lo reverent Doctor Don Jaume Pasqual, canonge de Bellpuig de las Avellanas a instància del magnífich ajuntament de Os y señor president del monastir de les Avellanas.” Edited by Manuel Daviu i Fortuny and Àngel Martín i Auberni, La Noguera: Estudis 1 (1985): 71–86. Pellicer y Pagés, José María. Santa María del Monasterio de Ripoll. Mataró: Feliciano Horta, 1888. Pérez Latre, Miguel, and David Asensio Vilaró. “Cultura histórica en Cataluña: El caso de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona entre 1752 y 1799.” Pedralbes: Revista d’història moderna 8 (1988): 227–43. Els pergamins de l’Arxiu Comtal de Barcelona, de Ramon Berenguer II a Ramon Berenguer IV. Edited by Ignasi Baiges, Pere Benito, Rafael Conde, Victor Farías, Gaspar Feliu, Pere Galceran, Margot Pons, and Josep M. Salrach. 4 vols. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2010. Els pergamins de l’Arxiu Comtal de Barcelona, de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer I. Edited by Gaspar Felíu, Josep M. Salrach, M. Josep Arnall, Ignasi Baiges, Pere Benito, Rafael Conde, Victor Farías, and Lluís To. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1999. Perramón, Luis. “Una controversia historiográfica del siglo XVIII: Maians—­ Aymerich—Caresmar.” Miscellanea Aqualatensia 1 (1949): 153–58. Pettegree, Andrew, and Arthur der Weduwen. The Library: A Fragile History. New York: Basic Books, 2021. Pi y Arimon, Andrés Avelino. Barcelona antigua y moderna ó descripción é historia de esta ciudad desde su fundación hasta nuestros dias. 2 vols. Barcelona: Imprenta y Libreria Politécnica de Tomás Gorchs, 1854. Piquer i Jover, Josep Joan. “Notícies sobre fundacions feminines cistercenques a Catalunya (extrets de la ‘Monasteriologia’ inedita del P. Caresmar).” In Col·loqui d’història del monaquisme català, vol. 1. Santes Creus: Monestir de Santes Creus, 1967. Pladevall, Antoni, and F. Català Roca. Els monestirs catalans. Barcelona: Destino, 1978. Planes i Albets, Ramon, Laureà Págaroles i Sabaté, and Pere Puig i Ustrell. El Archivo de la Corona de Aragón: Un nuevo perfil para el Archivo Real de Barcelona, 2003. https://­www​.­almendron​.­com​/­tribuna​/­wp​-­content​/­uploads​/­2015​/­07​/­ACA​ -­CAST​.­pdf. Pons López, Joan Josep. “Fons libraris i documentals secularitzats durant les desamortitzacions del segle XIX a Catalunya: Creació del sistema bibliotecari,

31 4 B ib l i o g raphy

pèrdua, comerç i col·lecionisme del llibre.” Master’s thesis, University of Barcelona, Facultat de Biblioteconomia i Documentació, 2018. Porta i Roigé, Robert. “La casa Carrobé de Santa Linya retorna documents a l’Arxiu del Monestir de Bellpuig de les Avellanes.” In Butlleti digital del Monestir de les Avellanes, 2013. https://­monestiravellanes​.­wordpress​.­com​/­2013​/­10​/­22​/­la​ -­casa​-­carrobe​-­de​-­santa​-­linya​-­retorna​-­documents​-­a​-­larxiu​-­del​-­monestir​-­de​ -­bellpuig​-­de​-­les​-­avellanes​/­. —­—. “Les fonts per a l’estudi del monestir de les Avellanes.” In De Bellpuig a Bellpuig: Els premonstratesos, de les Avellanes i Artà, 207–50. Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2019. Prats i Cuevas, Joaquim. La Universitat de Cervera i el reformisme borbònic. Lleida: Pagès, 1993. Prešeren, France. Sonetni venec. Ljubljana: Nova Revija, 1995. Puig i Ferreté, Ignasi, and M. Assumpta Giner Molina. Ìndex codicològic del “Viage literario” de Jaume de Villanueva. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1998. Puig i Oliver, Jaume de. “Catalunya Carolíngia: Cent anys.” Arxiu de textos catalans antics 32 (2017–2019): 719–50. Puig i Ustrell, Pere. El monestir de Sant Llorenç del Munt sobre Terrassa: Diplomatari dels segles X i XI. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1995. —­—. Els pergamins documentals: Naturalesa, tractament arxivístic i contingut diplomàtic. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1995. Puigvert i Solà, Joaquim M. “Església, cultura i llengua a la societat catalana del Setcents.” In La llengua catalana al segle XVIII, edited by Pep Valsolobre and Joan Gratacós, 225–86. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1995. Pujades, Jeroni. Coronica vniversal del Principat de Cathalvnya. Barcelona: Hieronym Margarit, 1609. —­—. Corónica universal del Principado de Cataluña. Edited by Fèlix Torres Amat et al. 8 vols. Barcelona: J. Torner, 1829–1832. —­—. Coronica vniversal del Principat de Cathalvnya. Barcelona: Hieronym Margarit, 1609. Pujol i Casademont, Enric. “Noucentisme historiogràfic.” In Tendències de la historiografia Catalana, edited by Antoni Simon, 351–63. Valencia: Universitat de València, 2009. Quevedo, Francisco de. Obras de Francisco de Quevedo Villegas [. . .] dedicadas a la muy ilustre Academia de Desconfiados de la excelentíssima ciudad de Barcelona. Barcelona: Jayme Suriá, 1702. Radatz, Hans-­Ingo. “ ‘Katalanisch’ oder ‘Valencianisch’?: Zum sprachlichen Sezessionismus im Land Valencia.” Zeitschrift für Katalanistik / Revista d’estudis catalans 6 (1993): 97–120. Raeff, Marc. The Well-­Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Rus­sia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Rasico, Philip D. Cafè i Quilombo: Els diaris de viatge de Joaquim Miret i Sans (1900– 1918). Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2001. Real Academia de Buenas Letras de la Ciudad de Barcelona: Origen, progressos y su primera junta general, baxo la protección de Su Magestad, con los papeles que en ella se acordaron. Barcelona: Francisco Suriá, 1756.

B ib l i o g raphy

315

Die Register Innocenz’ III. Vol. 1. Edited by Othmar Hageneder and Anton Haidacher. Graz: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1964. Reglà i Campistol, Joan. El bandolerisme català del barroc. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1966. Le Règle de Saint Augustin. Edited by Luc Verheijen. 2 vols. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1967. Reseña de la función civico-­religiosa celebrada en Barcelona el 15 de julio de 1857 para la traslación de las cenizas de D. Antonio de Capmany y de Montpalau. Barcelona: Imprente Nueva de Jaime Jepús y Ramó Villegas, 1857. Revuelta González, Manuel. La exclaustración, 1833–1840. 2nd ed. Madrid: CEU Ediciones, 2010. —­—. “La supresión de la Compañia de Jesús en España en 1820.” Razón y Fe 182, nos. 170–171 (1970): 103–20. —­—. Política religiosa de los liberales del siglo XIX: Trienio constitucional. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1973. Reynolds, Roger E. “An Early Rule for Canons Regular from Santa Maria de l’Estany (New York, Hispanic Society of Amer­i­ca, MS HC 380/819).” Miscel·lania litúrgica catalana 10 (2001): 165–91. Ribot, Luis. “El dictamen ‘más firme a la seguridad de mantener inseparables los reinos de mi corona’. La sucesión de Carlos II.” In 1714: Cataluña en la España del siglo XVIII, edited by Antonio Morales Moya, 21–43. Madrid: Cátedra, 2014. Riera i Tuèbols, Santiago. Una visió de la il·lustración catalana. Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2003. Riu i Riu, Manuel. “Fundació del monestir de Santa Maria de Serrateix.” Urgellia 15 (2002–2005): 175–90. —­—. “La canònica de Santa Maria de Solsona. Pre­ce­dents medievals d’un bisbat modern.” Urgellia 2 (1979): 211–56. Robles Montesinos, Javier. “La dispersió del fons documental del monestir de Sant Llorenç del Munt: Un intent d’assaig interpratiu.” In VIII Trobada d’Estudiosos de Sant Llorenç del Munt i l’Obac, 104–10. Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona, 2014. Roderici Ximeni de Rada Historia de rebus Hispaniae, sive Historia gothica. Edited by Juan Fernández Valverde. Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis. Vol. 72. Turnhout: Brepols, 1987. Rodríguez, Laura. “The Spanish Riots of 1766.” Past and Pre­sent 59 (1973): 117–46. Roma i Casanovas, Francesc. L’excursionisme a Catalunya 1876–1939. Barcelona: Bubok, 2009. Romà y Rossell, Francisco. Las señales de la felicdad de España y medios de hacerlas eficaces. Madrid: Antonio Muñoz del Valle, 1768. Romeu i Figueras, Josep. “Poemes inèdits de Ignasi Ferreres, escriptor del segle XVIII.” Llengua & Literatura 3 (1988–1989): 121–91. Rorimer, James. “A ­Fourteenth ­Century Catalan Tomb at the Cloisters and Related Monuments.” Art Bulletin 13 (1931): 409–37. —­—. “Four Tombs from les Avellanes and Other Gothic Sculptures.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 8, no. 8 (1950): 228–41.

31 6 B ib l i o g raphy

Rosenblatt, Nancy. “Church and State in Spain: A Study of Moderate Liberal Politics in 1845.” Catholic Historical Review 62 (1976): 589–603. Rossich, Albert. “És vàlid avui el concepte de la decadència de la cultura catalana de l’època moderna? Es pot identificar decadència amb castellanització?” Manuscrits 15 (1997): 127–34. Rubió i Balaguer, Jordi. Història de la literatura catalana. 3 vols. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1984–1986. —­—. Llibreters i impressors a la Corona d’Aragó. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1993. Rubió i Borràs, Manuel. Historia de la Real y Pontificia Universidad de Cervera. 2 vols. Barcelona: Joaquím Horta, 1915–1916. Rueda Hernanz, Germán. La desamortización en España: Un balance (1766–1924). Madrid: Arco, 1997. Rueda Hernanz, Germán, et al. La desamortización en la Península Ibérica. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 1993. Ryder, A. F. C. The Wreck of Catalonia: Civil War in the Fifteenth ­Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Sabaté, Flocel. “Catalan Identity Discourse in the Late Medieval Mediterranean: Creation and Contrast with Neighboring Identities.” In Memories in Multi-­ ethnic Socie­ties: Cohesion in Multi-­ethnic Socie­ties in Eu­rope from c. 1000 to the Pre­sent, edited by Przemsław Wiszewski, vol. 1, 349–68. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. —­—. “Constructing and Deconstructing the Medieval Origin of Catalonia.” In Historiography and the Shaping of Regional Identity in Eu­rope: Regions in Clio’s Looking Glass, edited by Dick E. H. De Boer and Luís Adão da Fonseca, 257–81. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. —­—. “Los Premostratenses: Creación de la Orden e inicial expansion ibérica.” In Entre el claustro y el mundo: Canónigos regulares y monjes premostratenses en la Edad Media, edited by José Àngel García Cortázar and Ramón Teja Casuso, 125–62. Aguilar de Campoo: Fundación Santa Maria la Real, 2009. —­—. “Medieval Documentation and Archives in Catalonia ­after the 19th ­Century Upheavals.” In Identity and Loss of Historical Memory: The Destruction of Archives, edited by Igor Filippov and Flocel Sabaté, 187–252. Bern: Peter Lang, 2017. Published in Catalan as a short book: La dissort de la documentació medieval catalana (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2019). Sáez Marín, Juan. Datos sobre la Iglesia española contemporánea, 1768–1868. Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1975. Sahlins, Peter. Bound­aries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Salrach, Josep Maria. Catalunya a la fi del primer mil·lenni. Vic: Eumo, 2004. —­—. El procés de formació nacional de Catalunya (segles VII–­IX). Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1978. Sanabre, José. El Archivo de la Catedral de Barcelona. Barcelona: Pulcra, 1948. —­—. El Archivo Diocesano de Barcelona. Barcelona: Fidel Rodríguez, 1947. Sanabria, Enrique A. Republicanism and Anticlerical Nationalism in Spain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

B ib l i o g raphy

317

Sánchez-­Blanco, Francisco. El absolutismo y las Luces en el reinado de Carlos III. Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2002. Sanpere y Miquel, Salvador. Fin de la nación catalana. Barcelona: L’Avenç, 1905. Sans i Travé, Josep Maria. El Llibre Verd del Pare Jaume Pasqual: Primera història del monestir de Vallbona. Barcelona: Llibres de l’Índex, 2002. Santirso Rodríguez, Manuel. Revolució liberal i guerra civil a Catalunya (1833–1840). Lleida: Pagès, 1999. Sawilla, Jan Marco. Antiquarianismus, Hagiographie und Historie im 17. Jahrhundert: Zum Werk der Bollandisten. Ein wissenschaftshistorischer Versucht. Tübingen: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. Sendra Beltrán, Pilar. “La canònica agustiniana de Sant Tomás de Riudeperes (Osona): Un treball pendent.” Lambard: Estudis d’art medieval 11 (1998–1999): 79–85. Serra i Postius, Pere. Prodigios y finezas de los Santos Ángeles hechas en el Principado de Cataluña. Barcelona: Jaime Suriá, 1726. —­—. Trecenario de la insigne virgen e invencible martyr, la noble Santa Eulalia. Barcelona: Juan Jolis, 1746. 1714: Cataluña en la España del siglo XVIII. Edited by Antonio Morales Moya. Madrid: Cátedra, 2014. Shneidman, J. Lee. The Rise of the Aragonese-­Catalan Empire. 2 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1970. Silleras-­Fernández, Núria. “La formación de la identidad lingüística catalana (siglos XIII–­XVII) en su contexto peninsular y mediterráneo: Un prefacio.” In La formación de la identidad lingüística catalana (siglos XIII–­XVII), edited by Vicente Lledó-­Guillem, 9–16. Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2019. Simon, Antoni, and Jesús Villanueva. “El cercle erudit i històric barcelonés dels anys vint i trenta dels Sis-­cents i la revolució catalana de 1640.” Revista de Catalunya 122 (1997): 40–53. Simon i Tarrés, Antoni. Construccions polítiques i identitats nacionals: Catalunya i els orígens de l’estat modern Espanyol. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2005. —­—. “La historiografia del segle del Barroc (de Jeroni Pujades a Narcís Feliu).” In Història de la historiografia catalana, edited by Albert Balcells, 93–116. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2004. Simón Segura, Francisco. La desamortización española del siglo XIX. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales: 1973. Sobrequés i Callicó, Jaume. Repressió borbònica i resistència identitària a la Catalunya del segle XVIII. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2020. Soldev­ila, Ferran. Barcelona sense universitat i la restauració de la Universitat de Barcelona (1714–1837). Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1938. Solsona, Carme. La desamortització eclesiàstica a la província de Lleida (1838–1851). Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 1999. Somerville, Robert. “Canon Law, Inspired Law, and Papal Authority.” In Netocot David: Jubilee Volume for David Weiss Halivni, 119–34. Jerusalem: Omot Press, 2004. Sorkin, David. “Reform Catholicism and Religious Enlightenment.” Austrian History Yearbook 30 (1999): 187–219.

31 8 B ib l i o g raphy

Southern, R. W. The Making of the M ­ iddle Ages. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953. Symposium Internacional sobre els Orígens de Catalunya (segles VII–­XI). 2 vols. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1991. Taxonera i Comas, Marc. “Arxiu de l’abadia de Montserrat.” In Guia del arxius històrics de Catalunya, vol. 7, 171–76. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1998. Te Heesen, Anke. “The Notebook: A Paper Technology.” In Making ­Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 582–89. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Thomas, Hugh. The Spanish Civil War. 2nd ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Tischler, Mathias M. “From Disorder to Order: The Scientific Challenge of Early Medieval Catalonia for Twenty-­First ­Century Medieval Studies.” In Disorder: Expressions of an Amorphous Phenomenon in ­Human History. Essays in Honour of Gert Melville, 93–140. Münster: Aschendorff, 2020. Toda i Güell, Eduard. La destrucció de Poblet, 1800–1900. Sant Boi de Llobregat: Pompeu Vidal, 1935. To Figueres, Lluís, and Ignasi Bellver i Sanz. “Les fundacions de Santa Maria de Cervià i Santa Maria de Vilabertran en el context de la societat feudal (1053–1069).” Annals de l’Institut d’Estudis Gironins 29 (1987): 9–26. Torné i Cubells, Josep. Catàleg dels pergamins de l’­actual Arxiu del Monestir de Poblet. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2010. Torra Pérez, Alberto. “Fondos documentales de los conventos de Barcelona en el Archivo de la Corona de Aragón.” Barcelona quaderns d’història 7 (2002): 507–22. Torralba Rosselló, Francesc. “La Il·lustració a Catalunya.” Afers: fulls de recerca i pensament 13, no. 29 (1998): 287–96. Torras i Ribé, Josep M. Misèria, poder i corrupció a la Catalunya borbònica (1714–1808). Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2020. Torres Amat, Fèlix. Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crítico de los escritores catalanes y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura de Cataluña. Barcelona: J. Verdeguer, 1836. Torres Sans, Xavier. “El bandolerisme català del Barroc: ‘Fill de la misèria’ o de la benestança?” In El barroc català: Actes de les jornades celebrades a Girona els dies 17, 18 i 19 de desembre de 1987, edited by Albert Rossich and August Rafanell, 47–60. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1989. —­—. Naciones sin nacionalismo: Cataluña en la monarquía hispánica (siglos XVI–­XVII). Valencia: Universitat de València, 2008. —­—. Nyerros i Cadells: Bandòls i bandolerime a la Catalunya moderna (1590–1640). Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1994. Tractar de la nostra llengua catalana: Apologies setcentistes de l’idioma al Principat. Edited by Francesc Feliu, Sadurni Martí, Francesc Ten, and Jose Vicens. Vic: Eumo, 1993. Trenchs Odena, José. El monasterio de Bellpuig de les Avellanes desde 1708 a 1730. Lleida: Instituto de Estudios Ilerdenses, 1976. Trouillot, Michel-­Ralph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

B ib l i o g raphy

319

Ullman, Joan Connelly. The Tragic Week: A Study of Anti-­clericalism in Spain, 1875– 1912. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1968. Usatges de Barcelona i Commemoracions de Pere Albert. Edited by Josep Rovira i Ermengol. Barcelona: Barcino, 1933. Valls Junyent, Francesc. La Catalunya atlántica: Aiguardent i teixits a l’arrencada industrial catalana. Vic: Eumo, 2004. Vallverdú i Martí, Robert. La Guerra dels Matiners a Catalunya (1846–1849): Una crisi econòmica i una revolta popu­lar. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 2002. Valvasor, Johann Weichard von. Die Ehre dess Herzogthums Crain. Laibach: Wolfgang Moritz Endler, 1689. Vargas, Michael. Constructing Catalan Identity: Memory, Imagination and the Medieval. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. —­—. “The Past as an Actor in Barcelona’s Con­temporary Metropolitics.” Journal of Catalan Studies 17 (2014): 114–32. Vaux-­de-­Cernay, Peter de. Petri Vallium Sarnaii monachi, Hystoria Albigenesis. Edited by Pascal Guébin and Ernest Lyon. 3 vols. Paris: Champion, 1926–1939. Velasco Gonzàlez, Alberto. Jaume Pasqual, antiquari i colˑlecionista a la Catalunya de la Il·lustració. Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 2011. —­—. “Sepulcres, altars i relíquies. Els canonges il·lustrats de Bellpuig de les Avellanes i la recerca històrica.” In De Bellpuig a Bellpuig: Els Premonstratesos, de les Avellanes a Artà, 155–85. Palma de Mallorca: Consell de Mallorca, 2019. Velasco Gonzàlez, Alberto, and Francesc Fité Llevot. “El Comte Pere d’Urgell II i les arts.” Lambard: Estudis d’art medieval 26 (2014–2016): 93–147. Velasco Gonzalèz, Alberto, and Joan Yeguas Gassó. “Intel·lectualitat i encàrrecs artístics al segle XVIII: Els erudits de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes.” Urtx 25 (2011): 337–59. Veyrenchie, Yannick. “Quia vos estis qui sanctorum patrum vitam probabilem renovatis . . .” Naissance des chanoines réguliers jusqu’à Urbain II.” In Les chanoines réguliers: Emergence, expansion (XIe–­XIIe s.), 29–69. Saint-­Étienne: Université de Saint-­ Étienne, 2009. Vicens Vives, Jaume. Moments crucials de la història de Catalunya. Barcelona: Editorial Vicens Vives, 1962. Vila Bartolí, Frederic. Reseña histórica, científica y literaria de la Universidad de Cervera. Barcelona: Tipografía Católica Pontificia, 1923. Vilar, Pierre. “Capmany i el naixement del mètode historic.” In Pierre Vilar, Assaigs sobre la Catalunya del segle XVIII, 2nd ed., 83–90. Barcelona: Curial, 1979. —­—. La Cata­logne dans l’Espagne moderne: Recherches sur les fondements économiques des structures nationales. 3 vols. Paris: S. E. V. P. E. N., 1962. —­—. Procés històric i cultura catalana: Reflexions crítiques sobre la cultura catalana. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1983. Villanueva, Jaime. Viage literario a las iglesias de España. Vol. 12. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1850. Villarrubias, Felio A. “Nota sobre un manuscrito existente en el monasterio de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de las Avellanas.” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 57–58 (1984–1985): 279–96.

32 0 B ib l i o g raphy

Vives, José. “La historia eclesiástica en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras.” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 25 (1953): 341–53. Vones-­Liebenstein, Ursula. Saint-­Ruf und Spanien: Studien zur Verbreitung und zum Wirken der Regularkanoniker von Saint-­Ruf in Avignon auf der iberischen Halbinsel (11. und 12 Jahrhundert). 2 vols. Turnhout: Brepols, 1996. Wallnig, Thomas. Critical Monks: The German Benedictines, 1680–1740. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Weinfurter, Stefan. “Norbert of Xanten in the Judgement of His Contemporaries.” Communicator 20, no. 2 (2002): 25–50. Winroth, Anders. The Making of Gratian’s “Decretum.” 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wolbrink, Shelley Amiste. “­Women in the Premonstratensian Order in Northwestern Germany, 1120–1250.” Catholic Historical Review 89 (2003): 387–408. Zamora i Escala, Jaume Enric. “El salvament dels arxius catalans durant la Guerra Civil espanyola (1936–1939).” Lligall 16 (2000): 85–151. —­—. “Josep Maria Font i Rius i el salvament dels arxius de Vic durant la Guerra Civil Espanyola.” Ausa 17, no. 138 (1997): 277–301. Zaragoza Pascual, Ernesto. “Danys ocasionats al monestir de Poblet durant el Trieni Constitucional.” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 81 (2008): 169–84. —­—. “Documentació inèdita oficial ran de la crema de convents de Barcelona els dies 25 i 26 de juliol de 1835.” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 80 (2007): 141–56. —­—. “Estado de los monasterios benedictinos catalanes y aragoneses en 1835.” Studia monastica 34 (1992): 79–138. Zimmermann, Michel. Écrire et lire en Cata­logne (IXe–­XIIe siècle). Vol. 1. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2003. —­—. En els orígens de Catalunya. Emancipació política i afirmació cultural. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1989. —­—. “­Hugues Capet et Borrell: À propos de ‘l’in­de­pen­dence’ de la Cata­logne.” In Catalunya i França meridional a l’entorn de l’any Mil, 59–64. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1991. —­—. “Les origines carolingiennes de la Cata­logne.” In Catalunya i Europa a través de l’edat mitjana, edited by Flocel Sabaté and Joan Farré, 11–30. Lleida: Pagès, 2002. —­—. “Les origines de la Cata­logne d’après les Gesta comitum Barcinonensium: Mythe fondateur ou récit étiologique?” In Liber largitorius: Études d’histoire médiévale offerts à Pierre Toubert par ses eleves, 517–43. Geneva: Droz, 2003.

Index

Page numbers followed by letters f and m refer to figures and maps, respectively. Aachen, Rule of, 108 d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Ramon, 55, 56n23 Abadesses, Sant Joan de les, 21, 111 Abarca, Pedro, 39 abbot(s): Caresmar as, 11, 21, 25–26; Finestres as, 134; non-­resident, 128–29 ACA. See Archive of the Crown of Aragon d’Achery, Luc, 38; Caresmar compared to, 12n15, 40; Spicilegium, 38–39 ACN. See Arxiu Comarcal de la Noguera Adrian IV, Pope, 110 Àger, 20m, 20–21 Àger, Augustinian collegiate chapter at, 20, 111, 193; Caresmar’s archival efforts at, 12, 20, 21, 26, 86, 172, 193–95, 201, 258, 287; Carlist Wars and, 20, 219; prominence of, 107; surviving documents from, 20, 243 Agramunt, Jews of, 181 agriculture: as basis of national wealth, French physiocrats on, 75; and economic growth, Caresmar on, 15, 35, 75, 79, 80; monastic land owner­ship as hindrance to, 213; small-­scale, Carlist support for, 221 d’Aguilar, Santa Maria, 106 Agustín, Antonio, 85 AHN. See Archivo Histórico Nacional Albareda, Anselm, 190 Albareda i Salvadó, Joaquim, 67 Albert, Pere, 201 Albertí i Oriol, Jordi, 225, 238 Alegret, Antoni, 163 Alemany, Rosa, 21 Alexander II, Pope, 193 Alexander VI, Pope, 278 Alexander VIII, Pope, 18 Alfonso I (King of Aragon), 52, 58, 115, 118, 122 Alfonso V “the Magnanimous” (King of Aragon), 127

Almirall, Valenti, 102, 269 Almohads, 58 Almolda, ­castle of, 118, 122, 127 Almoravids, 58 d’Alòs-­Moner i de Dou, Ramon, 192, 273, 274 Àlvar (Viscount of Àger): death of, 141; tomb of, 124, 134 Àlvar I de Cabrera (Count of Urgell): annulment of marriage of, 286; tomb of, 124, 126f, 139, 142 Amadeo I (King of Spain), 226 Amat, Fèlix (Bishop of Osma), 168, 218 Amelang, James, 93 Amell, Francesc, 137 Anales del Real Monasterio de Bellpuig de las Avellanes (Caresmar), 136, 138, 140, 190, 191, 192; fate of, 258, 259 Anastasius IV, Pope, 186 Andorra, 96–97 Anglesola, Master of, 141 d’Anglesola, Blanca, Codex of, 147 d’Anglesola, Guillem, 19 Angoulême, Duke of, 218 Antequera, Fernando de, 59, 128 anthem, of Catalonia, 61, 102 anticlerical vio­lence: in 19th-­century Catalonia, 217–18, 222–24; during Semana Trágica of 1909, 209, 228–29; during Spanish Civil War, 229–30, 231 Antonio, Nicolás, 169, 173, 283, 284 Arabic history: Barcelona Acad­emy and study of, 159–60; Caresmar on, 180–81 d’Aragó, Pere Antoni, 247 Aragon: and Castile, ­union of, 10, 60, 269; and Catalonia, ­union of, 58; status in unified Spain, 61, 69. See also Crown of Aragon; specific rulers arbitristas, 17th-­century, 73, 74 321

32 2 I NDEX

archival rec­ords: 18th-­century interest in, 203; assessment of reliability of, 38–39; Caresmar’s interest in, 2, 15–16, 26, 34, 35, 40, 43–44; Caresmar’s study of authenticity of, 12n15, 40, 175, 177, 202, 276; and church property, proof of possession of, 2, 8; fortuitous discovery at Vilanova de la Sal, 1–2, 5, 10, 24, 135, 287; vs. legends and literary chronicles, 34–35, 36–37, 43; science of researching, pioneers of, 38; Spanish Civil War and losses of, 229–30, 231; theft/sale of, 7, 8, 232–34, 236, 245; transcriptions of, 13–14, 34, 35. See also church rec­ords; medieval rec­ords Archive of the Crown of Aragon (ACA): ecclesiastical rec­ords ­housed at, 22, 193, 224, 233, 237, 242–43, 247. See also Bofarull i Mascaró, Pròsper de Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), 241; Caresmar’s material at, 287; disamortized rec­ords ­housed at, 116n40, 241, 247 Arenys de Mar, historical archive at, 4–5 Aribau, Carles, Oda a la Patria, 90, 100 art: at Bellpuig, 125f, 126f, 131, 139, 141, 252–53; Gothic, flowering of, 59 Artà (Majorca), Bellpuig satellite community at, 105–6, 122, 127 Arxiu Comarcal de la Noguera (ACN), Bellpuig material at, 11, 257, 287 Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó. See Archive of the Crown of Aragon (ACA) Arxiu del Monestir de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes (BPA): archivists at, 257n85; Caresmar’s manuscripts at, 278, 279–82 Arxiu Provincial dels Franciscans de Catalunya, 236 Athens, Catalan conquest of, 51, 59 Ató (Bishop of Vic), 189 Augustine, Saint: regulations attributed to, 22, 108–9; texts attributed to, 112 Augustinian movement, 23, 108–9; cultural influence in Catalonia, 112; diversity of foundations within, 109–10; golden age of, 110; ­houses in Catalonia, 110–12, 130; ordo antiquus practices of, 110–11, 119; vita mixta of, 110. See also Premonstratensian Order Aulèstia i Pijoan, Antoni, 68 Aurell, Jaume, 269 Austria, and War of Spanish Succession, 63–64 Avellanes, village of, 19, 20; Bellpuig material held by residents of, 254–55. See also Bellpuig de les Avellanes

Avril, Joseph, 110 Aymerich, Mateu, 153, 173 Baden, Treaty of, 65 Bagunyà i Casanovas, Jaume (P. Fr. Martí), 184, 258, 278 Balaguer, 20, 20m; Bellpuig material held in, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 274; conflicts with townspeople of, Bellpuig canons and, 127; Franciscan library in, Caresmar’s manuscripts in, 258, 274; Jesuit library in, Caresmar’s manuscripts in, 256, 258, 259, 273; Santa Maria d’Almatà in, 119. See also Arxiu Comarcal de la Noguera (ACN) Balaguer, Victor: on Capmany, 85–86; on Catalonia’s potential, 265; collection of Catalan folklore, 101; on Poblet, documentary remains of, 248; and Romantic school of history, 269; on university closures, 151 Balearic Islands, Catalan conquest of, 58 Ballot i Torres, Josep Pau, 87, 93 Baluze, Étienne, 38, 40, 44, 46, 232 Barceló, Miquel, 56n24 Barcelona: anticlerical vio­lence in (1835), 222–23; building proj­ects in 14th ­century, 59; Capmany’s ceremonial reburial in, 85–86; Caresmar’s l­ater years in, 17, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28–32, 138; Ciutadella construction in, 49, 66; decline of, 61, 62, 180, 181–82; as engine of economic prosperity, Capmany on, 75, 76; fall to Bourbon forces (September 11, 1714), 48, 49–50, 65; Franciscan archive in, Bellpuig material ­housed at, 135, 254, 257; Frankish conquest of, 53; Islamic expedition and destruction of, 54–55, 56; population decline and recovery, 60, 178, 179, 180; power during ­Middle Ages, 4, 59, 262; religious community in early 19th ­century, 218; Ribera neighborhood in, destruction of, 49, 71; rise as tourist destination, 268; self-­governing rights of, 62; Semana Trágica in (1909), 209, 228–29; during Spanish Civil War, 230, 231; trade access to Atlantic colonies, 68; War of Spanish Succession and, 48, 49–50, 65 Barcelona, Count(s) of: Carolingian emperors and, 53; and Catalonia’s heraldic symbol, 41–42; Cistercians supported by, 115–16; Deeds of (Gesta comitum Barcinonensium), 54, 55; Premonstratensians supported by, 115; as ruler of Catalonia, 52, 54, 57

I NDEX 323 Barcelona Acad­emy. See Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona Barcelona Cathedral: Caresmar’s archival efforts at, 12, 172, 177, 193, 195–98, 201, 258; charitable foundation (Pia Almoina) run by, Caresmar’s account of, 201–2 Baroque historiography, 33, 36, 41–42; methodological limitation of, 42–43 Barraquer, Cayetano, 238, 239, 252, 254–55, 258 Bastero, Antonio de, 89 Batllori, Miquel, 153 Baucells, Josep, 196, 197 Bavaria, Duke of, 18 Bellpuig d’Artà, 106 Bellpuig de les Avellanes, Santa Maria de: in 13th and 14th centuries, 105–6; architecture of, 106f, 114, 114f, 119, 124; art/liturgical objects from, fate of, 7, 8, 252–53; Augustinian customs and, 113–14; benefactors of, 1, 19, 105, 106, 111, 115, 116–25, 127, 130, 142; Black Death and, 127; canons of, fate ­after disamortization, 252; Caresmar as abbot of, 11, 21, 25–26; Caresmar’s entrance into, 21, 24; in Caresmar’s era, 23, 24, 131–32; Caresmar’s histories of, 25, 98, 118, 136, 138–39, 190–93; Carlist Wars and, 206–7; cartulary of, 2, 13, 27, 46, 136–37, 172, 181, 192, 193, 207, 287; church of, entrance to, 114, 114f, 124; commendatory abbots of, 128–29; decline of, 126–30, 191; disamortization of 1820 and, 205, 206, 251; disamortization of 1835 and concealment of rec­ords of, 1–2, 6, 7, 251–52; discovery of rec­ords of, 1–2, 5, 10, 24, 135, 287; end of Premonstratensian chapter at, 207; female members of, 107–8; Finestres as abbot of, 134; French invasion of 1808 and, 205–6; “golden epoch” of, 130–31; Hieronymites’ attempt to take over, 116, 128, 129, 130, 135; hospitals associated with, 113, 121m, 123; intellectual distinction of, 21, 23, 24; isolation of, 19, 25; Jesuit effort to divert revenue from, 130, 256; lay members of, 118; lay o ­ wners of, 7, 208–9; library of, 237, 251, 259; location of, 19–20, 20m; manuscripts and books from, fate of, 7, 8, 236, 238, 251–57; Marist community at, 7, 209; memorial fountain with bust of Caresmar at, 14f; museum at, 143, 149, 251; numismatic collection at, 251, 252,

253; origins of, 19–20, 115–18, 123, 142; papal privilege in f­ avor of, 120–22; as Premonstratensian collegiate chapter, 1, 19–20, 22, 105, 107, 112, 113–14, 115; properties of, 121m, 122, 123, 127; royal efforts to suppress, 129–30; sacred objects at, 119–20; sandal relic at, 119–20, 127, 139, 207, 252–53; symbol of, 124; tombs of counts of Urgell at, 7, 124, 125f, 126f, 130, 134, 136, 139–43, 206, 209, 227, 250; Trappist community at, 7, 208–9; during War of Spanish Succession, 131, 205; water-­rights disputes involving, 19, 25–26, 46, 131, 142 Bellpuig el Vell (Old Bellpuig), 19 Bellpuig school of historians (Bellpuig circle; erudits de les Avellanes), 2, 10, 11, 136, 164; Caresmar and, 44, 81, 164; and Catalan history, exploration of, 2, 271–72; and Catalan identity, development of, 202, 203–4, 262–63, 270; Finestres (Daniel) and, 2, 134, 136; interest in ­Middle Ages, 3–4, 9, 10, 165, 262–63, 270; languages used in writings of, 87; members of, 144, 147–49; Pasqual and, 143; role in preserving, ­organizing, and drawing attention to historical sources, 272; transcriptions made by, 261; University of Cervera and, 155; work of, connection to modern concerns, 263 Bellvitges, Josep, 91 Benedict XIII, Pope, 59 Benedictines: Augustinians compared to, 111; monasteries in Catalonia, 57, 107, 112. See also specific monasteries Benet de Bages, Sant, parchments from, 242, 244 Benjamin of Tudela, 182 Bentley, Richard, 154 Berenguer, Seniofred de Lluçà (Bishop of Vic), 111 Berenguer IV/Ramon Berenguer (Count of Barcelona), 58, 115, 181 Bernard, Saint, 113 Bernat (Viscount of Cerdanya), 111 Berwick, Duke of, 48, 49 Besalù, Santa Maria de, 111 Biblioteca Borja, Bellpuig material at, 257 Biblioteca de Catalunya (Barcelona), 243; Bellpuig material h ­ oused at, 254; Caresmar’s writings in, 79, 192; medieval parchments donated to, 239, 243; Vilabertran parchments at, 8

32 4 I NDEX

Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), Caresmar’s manuscripts in, 169, 283–84 Bibliothèque National de France, Collection Moreau of, 200, 201n115, 288 Bielefeld, Jakob Friendrich von, 70 Black Death, 59, 60; devastation following, 127; impact on Catalan population, 60, 178, 179, 180 “Black Legend” (leyenda negra), 72 Blanch, Francesc, 129 Blanquerna (Llull), 89 Bofarull i Mascaró, Pròsper de: on Caresmar, 47; inventory of Bellpuig library, 251; language used in correspondence of, 101–2; monastic documentation sal­vaged by, 149, 224, 232, 242; on Olzinelles, 246 Boïl, Bernat, 189–90, 278 Bollandists, 37 Bonaparte, Joseph, 11, 212 Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon Bonaparte Bonnassie, Pierre, 204 Bonrepòs, Santa Maria de, 106, 107–8, 122, 144 Bòria i de Llinars, Domènec Ignasi, 31–32, 162, 175–77 Borrell II (Count of Barcelona), 55, 188, 189 Bosl, Karl, 110 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Mur frescoes in, 227 Bouillon, Cardinal de, 40 Bourbon kings: Barcelona Acad­emy and, 156; Bellpuig during first d­ ecades of rule of, 131–32; Caresmar’s praise of, 180; Catalonia during rule of, 48, 50–51, 62, 63–69, 79, 90, 214, 262; contrasting interpretations of rule of, 264–66; and cultural homogenization, attempts at, 263, 264, 265; economic growth u ­ nder, 50–51, 67–69, 74–80, 133; Hapsburg kings compared to, 63–64; hegemony of, implications for con­temporary history, 263; paradox of ­political repression and economic expansion ­under, 13, 50–51, 67–69, 83, 262; reformist absolutism ­under, 67; rule in Spain, 65–71, 214; and War of Spanish Succession, 10, 48, 49–50, 62, 63, 270 Boyne, ­Battle of the, 49 BPA. See Arxiu del Monestir de Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes Britain. See ­England Brocà i Bofarull, Salvador, 102 Cabrera, Ponç Guerau de, 123 Cadells (bandit gang), 62 Caixal, Josep (Bishop of Urgell), 253

Calaix de sastre (Maldà), 93–94, 165 Calixtus II, Pope, 175 Campabadal, Maria, 91 Campins, Jaume, 28, 29 Campomanes, Pedro Rodríguez de, 75, 211, 280 Camprodon, Benedictine foundation of, 28, 288 Canal, José de la, 199, 224, 277–78 canons, of Premonstratensian Order, 22, 108–9; Caresmar’s biographical notes on, 172–73; fate a­ fter disamortization, 252; monks compared to, 109; rules governing, 22, 108 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio, 226 Canterbury, Saint Augustine’s monastery in, 17 Capmany, Marquis of, 96, 144 Capmany i de Montpalau, Antoni de, 74, 76, 85–86; Barcelona Acad­emy and, 157; Caresmar and, 35, 75, 76, 77, 80, 178, 180; Castilian (Spanish) language used by, 97; on Catalan language, 82–83, 88; on Catalonia’s economy, 35, 74–76, 78–79, 99, 166; on Catalonia’s p­ olitical structure, 76–77, 85; on Catalonia’s potential/distinctiveness, 265, 270; ceremonial reburial in Barcelona, 85–86; Junta de Comerç (Barcelona) and, 155; Memorias históricas sobre la marina, comercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona, 75, 76, 77, 80, 82, 83, 198; modernizing agenda of, 263; reputation of, 133; on Spain’s decline, 74; translation of Libre del Consolat de Mar, 83 Caresmar, Ramon, 21 Caresmar i Alemany, Jaume: as abbot of Bellpuig, 11, 21, 25–26; as archivist and historian, 2, 11–13, 21, 26, 34, 35, 36, 40, 136–39, 171–72, 193–98; and Barcelona Acad­emy, 28–29, 31, 81, 98–99, 160, 161, 162, 164, 170, 172, 176, 190, 274, 279, 284, 291–92; and Bellpuig circle of historians, 44, 81, 164; on Bellpuig foundation legends, 116; birthplace of, 172; books belonging to, preservation of, 254; and Bòria i de Llinars, dispute with, 31–32, 162, 175–77; burial place of, 120; and Capmany, 35, 75, 76, 77, 80, 178, 180; and cartulary of Bellpuig, 2, 13, 27, 46, 136–37, 172, 181, 192, 193, 287; on Catalan economy, 14–15, 35, 50, 75, 277; and Catalan history, exploration of, 12, 35, 81, 138, 177–82, 262, 270, 271–72; and Catalan language, written use of, 13, 86–87; on Catalonia’s accomplishments and potential, 15, 202; on Catalonia’s decline, 180, 271; chronological princi­ple

I NDEX 325 used by, 46, 137, 195, 196; and church history, 15, 36, 182–90, 198–202; contributions to larger proj­ects, 27, 76, 80, 181, 198–200; correspondence with other scholars, 28, 95, 192; death of, 32; disciples/ assistants of, 137, 144, 147; disor­ga­nized papers of, 16, 27, 45, 144, 167, 168, 170–71, 184, 196, 197; dispersion and disappearance of works of, 257–61; early life of, 21; on economic growth, ­factors responsible for, 75, 79, 80, 178–79, 180; as Enlightenment figure, 14–15, 27, 35, 81, 178, 180; entrance into Bellpuig, 21, 24; epitaph for, 12n15, 46, 47f; examination of tombs of counts of Urgell, 136, 139–43; French exemplars of, 11–12, 12n15, 38, 39, 40, 44; friendships of, 27–28, 30; hagiographies of, 29, 31, 37, 40, 172, 173–77; handwriting of, 32; and histories of Bellpuig, 25, 98, 118, 136, 138–39, 190–93; historiographic standards of, 15–16, 37, 40, 42; importance of works of, 201–2; interest in archival documents, 2, 15–16, 26, 34, 35, 40, 43–44; interest in Graeco-­Roman past, 165; and Junta de Comerç (Barcelona), 81, 155, 164; languages used by, 13, 81, 83, 86–87, 98–99, 190, 194; life in Barcelona, 17, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28–32, 138; literary estate of, 16–17, 27; lost works of, 169–70, 289–90; memorial fountain with bust of, 14f; notes of, 16–17, 26, 184, 201; and Pasqual, 143–44, 146; passion for transcriptions, 26, 34, 35; personality of, 17, 24–25; poor health of, 21, 24; prolific output of, 15–16, 17, 27, 35; publication of works of, obstacles to, 30, 168–69; published works of, 16, 172–82, 275–79; reputation of, 46–47, 199–200, 246; on sandal of Virgin Mary, 119, 120; scholarly controversies involving, 28–32; study of authenticity of archival documents, 12n15, 40, 175, 177, 202, 276; surviving works of, 273–88; on tombs of counts of Urgell, 136, 139–43; travels of, 17, 21–22, 26; unfinished works of, 15, 201; unpublished works of, 257–58, 279–88; ­water rights dispute and, 25–26, 46, 131; work of, connection to modern concerns, 263; writing style of, 35. See also specific titles of works Carlist Wars, 219–22, 226; and anticlerical vio­lence, 223; impact on Àger, 20, 219; impact on Bellpuig, 206–7 Carta al Barón de la Linde (Caresmar), 15, 22, 35, 36, 79, 177–82, 198; Capmany’s

Memorias compared to, 77, 180; on Catalonia’s past prosperity, 15, 35, 50, 165, 181, 262; geo­graph­ic­ al survey of Catalonia in, 178, 180; importance of, 202; informal circulation during Caresmar’s lifetime, 202; on population density as key to economic growth, 178–79, 180; posthumous publications of, 277; prologue praising author of, 12n15, 15; survival of, 274; transcriptions in, 35 Carta dirigida a Don Francisco Dorca, 277–78 Cartas morales (Maians), 97 Carthusians, Augustinians compared to, 110 cartulary (Cartophylacium), Bellpuig, 137, 287; Anales citing, 191; Caresmar and, 2, 13, 27, 46, 47, 136–37, 172, 181, 192, 193, 287; chronological ­organization of, 46, 137; disamortization of 1835 and preservation of, 207 Casanova, Gabriel, 87, 89, 159 Casanovas, Ignacio, 152–53, 154, 166 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 33 Caspe, Compromise of, 59–60, 128, 269, 271 Castellbó, Bernat de (Bishop of Urgell), 121, 122 Castile: and Aragon, ­union of, 10, 60, 269; vs. Catalonia, historiography rejecting permanent construct of, 266; domination over Catalonia, 9–10, 59–61, 263; hegemony in unified Spain, 61; population of, imputed character of, 61, 72, 73–74, 271; Premonstratensian ­houses in, 115; supremacy of, Castilian historians on, 41 Castilian comunero revolt, 179 Castilian (Spanish) language: 19th-­century Liberals and support for, 101–2; Capmany’s use of, 82, 83; Caresmar’s written use of, 13, 81, 83, 86, 98–99, 190, 194; Catalan language displaced by, 87, 97, 100; Catalan writers using, 85; dominance ­after Bourbon victory, 4, 50, 66, 71, 84, 91; as language of commerce and public discourse, 83–84, 97, 99; as language of education, 100; as language of high culture, 52, 84–85, 97; Maians on, 98; prestige associated with use of, 93, 104; La Renaixença using, 101; tracts on Catalan revolt written in, 33 Catalan, first use of term, 52 Catalan culture: central government’s efforts to eradicate, 263, 264–65; decline of (la decadència), 13, 61, 62, 81, 84; decline of, paradox of economic growth accompanying, 13, 50–51, 67–69, 83, 262; revival of (La Renaixença), 51, 80, 100, 101, 227, 270

32 6 I NDEX

Catalan dictionary, unfulfilled proj­ect of, 91, 176 Catalan economy: Capmany’s study of, 35, 74–76, 78–79, 99, 166, 178; Caresmar’s study of, 14–15, 35, 50, 75, 277; decline of, rise of Castile and, 61, 62; growth in 18th ­century, 50–51, 67–69, 74–80, 133; growth in 19th ­century, 99; growth of, vs. cultural decline, 13, 50–51, 67–69, 83, 262 Catalan history: Barcelona Acad­emy and study of, 42, 44–45, 95, 148, 156, 159, 160–63, 165, 270; Baroque chronicles of, 33, 36, 41–42; Bellpuig circle and research on, 2, 271–72; Caresmar’s exploration of, 12, 35, 81, 138, 177–82, 262, 270, 271–72; church history and, 12, 204; ­after High M ­ iddle Ages, 269–70; importance of ­Middle Ages in, 266–67; legends invented/repurposed to assert autonomy of, 41–42; Marca hispanica on, 39–40; medieval chronicles of, 33, 89; Pujades’s chronicle of, 36, 40, 42; La Renaixença and view of, 165 Catalan ­House of Barcelona, end of, 10, 59 Catalan identity: Bellpuig historians and development of, 202, 203–4, 262–63, 270; deliberate campaigns to wipe out, 264–65; ­Middle Ages and formation of, 271; per­sis­tence/survival of, 264, 266 Catalan ­independence movement: historical memory and, 9–10; Memorial de greuges and, 69, 91, 102; modern grievances and, 9, 268–69. See also Catalan nationalism; Revolt of the Catalans Lo Catalanisme (Almirall), 102, 269 Catalan language: Barcelona Acad­emy and study of, 159, 163, 165; Capmany on, 82–83, 88; Caresmar’s use of, 13, 86–87, 99, 194; Castilian language eclipsing, 87, 97; church use of, 55; decline of, 9, 13, 33, 50, 52, 61, 81, 82, 84–85, 90; literary marginalization of, 84–85, 86; poetry in, 87–88, 89, 94–95, 102; ­popular lit­er­a­ture in, 93–95; primacy during ­Middle Ages, 4, 9, 13, 52, 88–90, 263; printing in, golden age of, 84; Pujades and use of, 36, 85; La Renaixença and, 9, 51, 102–4; Saura on, 87, 148; suppression u ­ nder Bourbon rule, 67, 71, 90–91; suppression u ­ nder Franco dictatorship, 48, 90, 264; survival of, 55, 81, 90–91, 100, 103–4; treatises on excellence of, Castilian language used for, 87, 148, 159; use in Andorra, 96–97; use in government acts, 85; use in private conversations and letters, 87, 91–92, 93, 95–96, 100

Catalan nationalism, 102; Bellpuig school of historians and, 202, 203–4; Catholic piety and, 266–67; conservative, 102, 227; con­ temporary politics and, 56, 267–68; economic growth and, 51; historical memory and, 9–10, 51, 99, 263, 266–67; legends supporting, 41–42, 54–55; noucentist movement and, 269; paradigm of grievance in, dangers of, 265; repression of Catalonia and, 269–70; Romanticism and, 269. See also Catalan ­independence movement Catalan population: Black Death and, 60, 178, 179, 180; Caresmar’s surveys of, 178, 180–82; industriousness of, Enlightenment thinkers on, 74–75 Catalò, Otger, 41, 162–63 Catalonia: accomplishments and potential of, Caresmar on, 15, 202; anticlerical uprisings in, 217–18, 222–24; Augustinian ­houses in, 110–12, 130; Benedictine monasteries in, 57, 107, 112; Bourbon rule and, 48, 50–51, 62, 63–69, 79, 90, 214, 262; Caresmar’s travels throughout, 21; Carlism in, 219–20, 221; Carolingian origins of, 52–54, 55n22, 56; vs. Castile, historiography rejecting permanent construct of, 266; Castilian domination over, 9–10, 59–61, 263; con­temporary, Pujol on, 267; decline of, Caresmar on, 180, 271; diglossia in, 92, 95–96, 100; ecclesiastical h ­ ouses in, 57; etymological origins of, theory of, 57, 162–63; ­European orientation of, 56, 187; excursionisme in, 227; Franco dictatorship and suppression of, 48, 90; government institutions of, 61–62, 85, 214, 269; heraldic symbol of, 41–42; industrialization of, 51; legendary accounts of origins of, 41–42, 54; literary figures of, 89–90; medieval rec­ords preserved in, 4–5, 204–5, 260–61; millennium cele­brations in, 55, 55n22; national anthem of, 61, 102; national formation of, 55–56; national holiday of, 48; during Nine Years’ War, 64; Nueva Planta Decrees and, 50, 65, 66, 67, 90, 264; peculiar status within Spain, 2–3; Philip V and suppression of, 50, 64, 65–66; power/expansion during ­Middle Ages, 3–4, 9, 10, 51–52, 58–59, 78, 262, 263; pre­sent crises and opportunities for, 272; response to Franco’s coup, 229; territories of, 3, 3m; territory ceded to France, 3, 39–40, 72; ­union with Aragon, 58; ­after War of Spanish Succession, 9–10, 48, 49–50, 62, 63–66.

I NDEX 327 See also Catalan culture; Catalan economy; Catalan identity; Catalan language; Catalan nationalism Cataluña y el absolutisomo borbónico (Fernández), 265–66 Catalunya Carolingia, 201, 204, 261 Cecilia de Foix (Countess of Urgell), tomb of, 124, 126f, 142 Cellorigo, Martín González de, 74 Cerda, Tomàs, 153 Cervantes, Miguel de, 89 Cervera, town of, 66, 151. See also University of Cervera Cervoles, Santa Maria de, 106 Cesarius (Archbishop of Tarragona), 188 Charlemagne (Holy Roman emperor), 3, 41; heir to, 33; and origins of Catalonia, 52–54, 55n22, 56 Charles I (King of Spain), 61; Castilian communero revolt suppressed by, 179. See also Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) Charles II (King of Spain), 63; Catalan dirges on the death of, 94; patronage of Bellpuig, 130 Charles II “the Bald” (Holy Roman Emperor), 278 Charles III (King of Spain): Caresmar’s praise of, 180; Catalonia during reign of, 68, 91, 265; economic policies ­under, 80, 214; Esquilache Mutiny and, 70–71; progressive policies ­under, 67, 69, 70, 71 Charles IV (King of Spain): appropriation of church property u ­ nder, 212; confessor to, 168 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor), on G ­ reat Mosque of Cordoba, 10 Charles VI (Holy Roman Emperor), and War of Spanish Succession, 62, 63, 65 cholera epidemic (1832–1834), 222 Christina (Queen of Sweden), 18 Chrodegang of Metz, Saint, 108 chronological princi­ple, Caresmar’s use of, 46, 137, 195, 196 church: Carlism and, 221, 222, 227; and Catalan cultural revival, 227; Catalan language used by, 95; and Catalan nationalism, 266–67; ­after disamortization of 1835, 225–27; during Franco regime, 5, 267; as hindrance to economic growth, views of, 6–7, 73, 179, 213; in medieval Catalonia, 57; and non-­resident abbots, system of, 128–29; as reactionary force, Liberals on, 7, 11, 213–14, 219, 220. See also anticlerical vio­lence

church history: Caresmar on, 15, 36, 182–90, 198–202; and Catalan history, 12, 204; techniques of investigating, 37–38 church property: archival rec­ords as proof of possession of, 2, 8. See also confiscations of monastic property church rec­ords/archives: Caresmar as scholar of, 12; efforts to preserve and inventory, 5–6, 236–37; historians’ interest in, 9; institutional recipients following disamortization, 239–44, 247; private collections and preservation of, 239, 248; public libraries’ lack of interest in, 237–38, 238n13. See also archival rec­ords; church rec­ords, destruction and dispersal of; medieval rec­ords church rec­ords, destruction and dispersal of, 235–39; disamortization of 1835 and, 11, 146–47, 209, 210, 223, 224, 232–34, 235; Napoleonic Wars and, 223, 251; neglect and, 4–5, 232–34, 237–38, 238n13; Spanish Civil War and, 5, 229–30, 231, 249, 253, 256–57 Cistercians: Augustinians compared to, 110, 111; benefactors of, counts of Barcelona as, 115–16; female monasteries of, 123, 169; foundations in Catalonia, 57; headquarters in France, 129; Premonstratensians compared to, 113, 119 Civil War. See Spanish Civil War Clavé, Anselm, 103 Clement IV, Pope, letter of Raymond of Penyafort to, 286 Clermont, Council of, 195, 201 Climent, Josep (Bishop of Barcelona), 27, 91 Cloisters Museum, New York, tombs of counts of Urgell at, 7, 124, 125f, 126f, 209, 250 Clovis (King of the Franks), 140 Codex of Blanca d’Anglesola, 147 Colbert, Jean-­Baptiste, 40 Collection Moreau, Caresmar’s contribution to, 200, 201n115, 288 colonial empire, Spanish, 60–61, 65; Barcelona’s trade access to, 68 Columbus, Christopher: first voyage of, 60; second voyage of, cleric accompanying, 189, 190, 278 Comas, Antoni, 162 Comes i Codinac, Segismon, 159 Compromise of Caspe, 59–60, 128, 269, 271 Conde, José Antonio, 160

32 8 I NDEX

confiscations of monastic property, 6, 7, 99, 211; French invasion and, 212; Liberals and, 6, 205, 211, 213, 218, 220, 222, 224, 225, 228. See also u­ nder disamortization Confraternity of the Holy Sandal of the Virgin, 129 conservative nationalist movement (Lliga Catalana), 102, 227 Constantine, Donation of, 36 Convergència i Unió party, 267–68 conversi, in Premonstratensian ­houses, 107 Corbera, Esteve de, 33 Cordoba, caliphate of: Catalan conquest of, 53, 56–57; Count of Barcelona and, 54; ­Great Mosque of, 10 Corònica universal del Principat de Catalunya (Pujades), 36, 40, 42, 160, 163; use of Catalan language in, 36, 85 Correano, Francesc de, 191 Corredera, ­Father Eduard, 24 Corredera y Gutiérrez, Eduardo: on Bellpuig historians, 135; on Bellpuig’s history, 127, 130, 134, 148; on Caresmar’s surviving manuscripts, 259–60, 274, 279, 287, 289; translation of De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae (Caresmar), 190–91, 279 correspondence: Caresmar’s, 28, 95, 192; Finestres’s (Josep), 145, 154; use of Castilian language in, 101–2; use of Catalan language in, 87, 91–92, 93, 95–96 Corsica, Catalan conquest of, 51 Cortés, Josep, 258 Cortes of Cádiz: Barcelona intellectuals as delegates to, 164, 165; effort to create constitutional monarchy, 76–77, 263; and Liberal agenda, 216, 217 Crown of Aragon, 58; Castilian domination in lands of, complaints about, 69; Catalan rulers of, 60; as model of constitutional government, 76–77, 85, 100, 166, 263; power in ­Middle Ages, 262; and War of Spanish Succession, 62. See also Archive of the Crown of Aragon; specific rulers Crusade, First, 195 Cugat del Vallès, Sant, 56n22; Caresmar’s archival efforts at, 21, 22; destruction of library of, 22; surviving parchments from, 242, 244 Cuixà, Sant Miquel de: Boïl as abbot of, 190; Caresmar’s archival efforts at, 21 Culloden, 48

Dalmases i de Vilana, Ramon de, 159, 160n101 Dalmases i Ros, Pau Ignasi, 160n101 Dante Alighieri, Catalan author compared to, 89 Dávalos, Count of (Martí de Riquer i Morera), 159 la decadència, in Catalonia, 13, 61, 62, 81, 84; economic growth accompanying, paradox of, 13, 50–51, 67–69, 83, 262 Decretum (Gratian), 245 Deering, Charles, 252 Demotte, Joseph, 209 De rebus ecclesiae Sanctae Mariae Bellipodiensis Avellanarum (Caresmar), 98, 118, 138–39, 190, 191–92; on Joan d’Organyà, veneration of, 140; Spanish translation of, 190–91, 279; survival of, 259, 279 De rebus Hispaniae (Ximénez de Rada), 186 De re diplomatica (Mabillon), 38 Desclot, Bernat, 33, 89 Descubrimiento del sepulcro de Santa Eulalia (Caresmar), 258, 286–87 dictionary, Catalan, efforts to create, 91, 176 diglossia, practice of, 92–93, 95–96; in Catalonia, 92, 95–96, 100 Dionysius Exiguus, 174 diplomatics, historical science of, 12 disamortization of 1820: Bellpuig during, 205, 206, 251; Liberal Triennial and, 218, 220, 245; Ribot during, 148–49 disamortization of 1835, 6–7, 11, 209–10, 212–13, 223, 224–25; aftermath of, 225–27, 235–39; anticlerical vio­lence preceding, 222–23; Bellpuig rec­ords hidden during, 1–2, 6, 7, 251–52; Carlism and, 222; cultural artifacts seized during, efforts to inventory, 236–37; and dispersal/destruction of ecclesiastical rec­ords, 11, 146–47, 209, 210, 223, 224, 232–34, 235; exceptions to, 224, 244; financial rationale for, 225; impact on Àger, 20; impact on Bellpuig, 205, 207; institutions housing material dispersed during, 239–44; Liberals and, 222, 224; religious communities on eve of, 218 Discurso sobre la agricultura, comercio e industria del principado de Cataluña (Caresmar et al.), 15, 77–80, 164, 178, 198; impact of, 80, 202; informal circulation during Caresmar’s lifetime, 80, 202; publication of, 79, 277; purpose of, 78; on superiority of the past, 78–79 Discurso sobre la Lengua Catalana, Lemosina o Provenzal (Saura), 148

I NDEX 329 Disdier, Juan Antonio, 247 Dolça (Countess of Urgell), 115, 116–17, 123, 125; tomb of, Caresmar’s conjecture regarding, 141, 142 Dominicans: in Catalonia, 57; lay members of, 107; Protestant Reformation and suppression of, 210 Donation of Constantine, 36 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 89 Dorca, Francesc Xavier, 165, 199, 278 Dou, Ignasi de, 95 Dou i Bassols, Ramon Llàtzer de, 145, 153, 164–65, 192 Durand, Ursin, 39 Duran i Sanpere, Agustí, 231 Dutch language, use in Java, 92 economic growth: Catalonia as engine of, Enlightenment thinkers on, 74–80; church seen as hindrance to, 6–7, 73, 179, 213; ­factors responsible for, Caresmar on, 75, 79, 80, 178–79, 180; impediments to, Enlightenment thinkers on, 72–74. See also Catalan economy educational system, use of Castilian (Spanish) language in, 100 Eiximenis, Francesc, 163, 267 Eliás de Molins, Antonio, 273–74 Elies i Robert, Antoni, 163 Elizabeth Farnese (Queen consort of Spain), 65–66 Elliott, Sir John, The Revolt of the Catalans, 71–72 El Vapor (periodical), 68 Elvira (Countess of Urgell), 119 Emeterius, Saint, 174 emphyteutic land tenure, Caresmar on, 80 Empúries (l’Emporadà/Ampurdán), Caresmar on, 181 ­England (Britain): dissolution of monasteries ­under Henry VIII, 17, 209, 210; medieval documentation in, loss of, 17; and War of Spanish Succession, 63, 65, 66 ­English language, status in 18th ­century, 84 ­English Romantics, interest in M ­ iddle Ages, 267 enlightened despotism, 67 Enlightenment, Age of: Caresmar as representative of, 14–15, 27, 35, 81, 178, 180; church regarded as hindrance to economic growth in, 6–7, 73; economic pro­g ress from perspective of, 74–80; history from perspective of, 33; and negative images of Spain, 72–74, 179

Ermengol I (Count of Urgell), 141 Ermengol II (Count of Urgell), 141 Ermengol III (Count of Urgell): death of, 141; gifts by, 1 Ermengol VI (Count of Urgell), and Castilian Premonstratensian chapters, 115 Ermengol VII (Count of Urgell): as benefactor/cofounder of Bellpuig, 1, 19, 115, 116–18, 141, 142, 191; tomb of, Caresmar’s conjecture regarding, 141, 142 Ermengol VIII (Count of Urgell), 121; as benefactor of Bellpuig, 118, 119, 252; ­sister of, 123 Ermengol X (Count of Urgell), 124–25; ­brother of, 124, 134, 141; Caresmar’s De rebus on, 191; parents of, 124, 139; Sicilian campaign of, 141; support for Bellpuig, 106, 123, 124–25; tomb of, 125f, 139, 206, 250; and tombs at Bellpuig, 124, 141 Ermessenda d’Àger, 123 erudits de les Avellanes. See Bellpuig school of historians Escaró, Guillem, 7, 207, 251, 253 La escuela histórica avellanense (Corredera), 259–60, 279 España Sagrada (Flórez), 38, 203, 224; on Barcelona, 181–82; Caresmar’s contribution to, 27, 181, 198–200; on Caresmar’s reputation, 46; on Finestres ( Josep), 165 Esteve, Josep, 91 Esteve i Ferrer, Francesc, 194 Estonia: languages used in, 92–93; native language of, fate of, 90 Eulalia, Saint, 31; Caresmar on, 31–32, 37, 175–77, 284; dispute regarding, 31–32, 162, 198; Serra i Postius on, 42 ­Europe: Catalonia’s orientation ­toward, 56, 187; medieval rec­ords of, loss of, 17–18; Spanish involvement with, Hapsburg kings and, 61 Eusebius, 43 Evans, Lewis G., 233 excursionisme, in Catalonia, 227 Fàbrega, Àngel, 196, 197 Fanlo, San Andrés de, 11 Feijóo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo, 97 Féliberge movement, 103 Felix (Bishop of Urgell), 148 female religious ­houses: Cistercian, Caresmar’s material on, 169; disamortization of 1835 and, 224, 244; revolution of 1868 and suppression of, 226. See also ­women

33 0 I NDEX

Ferdinand II (King of Aragon): Bernat Boïl and, 190; marriage to Isabella of Castile, 10, 60, 214; sandal of Virgin Mary and, 120, 129 Ferdinand II (King of Leon), 116 Ferdinand of Antequera (Fernando de Antequera), 59, 128 Ferdinand VI (King of Spain): Caresmar’s eulogy for, 286; Catalonia during reign of, 68; pro­g ress ­under, 67 Ferdinand VII (King of Spain): death of, 220; Liberal opposition to, 219; Liberal Triennial and, 217; restoration of, 100, 216–17, 218 Fernández, Roberto, 265–66 Fernández de Velasco, Francisco Antonio, 64 Ferran i Planas, Elisabet, 201 Ferreres, Igansi, 88 Finestres, Daniel, 2, 23, 134–36; as abbot of Bellpuig, 134; and Bellpuig school of historians, 2, 134, 136; books owned by, preservation of, 207; death of, 24, 134; manuscripts of, 135–36; notes by, in Vilanova de la Sal cache of documents, 2, 24, 135 Finestres, Ignasi, 23–24 Finestres, Jaume, 23 Finestres, Josep, 23, 134, 145, 152, 165, 173; and Caresmar, 24, 174; Casanovas’s study of, 166; correspondence of, 145, 154; Dou’s defense of, 164–65; and Jesuit circle at Cervera, 153; languages used by, 95, 98; list of Daniel Finestres’s written works, 135; on Maians’s Cartas morales, 97; on Pasqual, 145 Finestres, Pere Joan, 23 First Crusade, 195 Fita, Fidel, 258, 259, 273, 274 Fita, Mateu, 129 Fiter i Rossell, Antoni, 96–97 Flabemont, Premonstratensian ­house of, 115 Flórez, Henrique: on Barcelona, 181–82; on Caresmar’s accomplishments, 46, 199–200; Caresmar’s collaboration with, 27, 181, 198–200; death of, 224; España Sagrada, 38, 203, 224; on Finestres ( Josep), 165 Floridablanca, Count of, 182 Foix, Cecilia de (Countess of Urgell), tomb of, 124, 126f, 142 Foix, Count of, 121 Fondarella, Sant Nicolau de, 106 Font i Rius, Josep Maria, 231 Fort i Cogull, Eufemià, 233 Fossa, François de, 200, 288 France: Collection Moreau in, Caresmar’s contribution to, 200, 201n115, 288; critical

historical approaches in, 38–40, 44; invasion of Spain (1808), 10–11, 18, 100, 201, 205–6, 212; invasion of Spain (1823), 100, 218; Jesuit suppression in, 70; medieval languages in, fate of, 103; Muslim attack on Barcelona and, 55; Napoleon’s rule in, 77; in Nine Years’ War, 63, 64; parts of Catalonia ceded to, 3, 39–40, 72; Premonstratensian headquarters in, 129; in Thirty Years’ War, 61; and War of Spanish Succession, 63, 65. See also French Revolution; Napoleon Bonaparte Franciscans: archive in Barcelona, Bellpuig material ­housed at, 135, 254, 257; in Catalonia, 57; lay members of, 107; library in Balaguer, Caresmar’s manuscripts in, 258, 274; Protestant Reformation and suppression of, 210 Franco, Francisco: anticlerical vio­lence and, 230; Barcelona Acad­emy during rule of, 158; Carlist support for, 221; church during regime of, 5, 267; and Spanish Civil War, 229; and suppression of Catalan language and culture, 48, 90, 264, 265; transition to democracy ­after death of, 264 Frederick the ­Great (King of Prus­sia), 70 French Revolution: and dissolution of monasteries, 210–11; and Liberalism, 212; and Spanish government instability, 215 friendships, Caresmar’s, 27–28, 30 Fructuosus, Saint, 186 Gaelic language, fate of, 90 Gallard, Abbot, 126 Gallia Christiana proj­ect, 38 Galliardo, Bartolomé José, 233 Gallissà, Llucià, 153, 154 Gams, Pius Bonifacius, 175 Ganivet, Ángel, 271 Garcia, Francesc Vicent, 94–95, 158 Garí, Marina, 169, 274 Garibay, Esteban de, 51 Lo Gayté del Llobregat (Rubió), 102 Generalitat, Catalan, 61–62; on Catalan identity, 264; and commemoration of Catalan millennium, 55n22, 268; and protection of ecclesiastical art/documentation, 231, 252 Gente Bien (Rusiñol), 104 Georgetown University, Catalan archival rec­ords at, 233 Gerbert of Aurillac, 189 Germany: cameralist theory of state administration in, 70; medieval rec­ords in, 18, 205

I NDEX 331 Gerri, Santa Maria de, Caresmar’s archival efforts at, 12, 21, 283, 286, 292 Gesta comitum Barcinonensium, 54, 55 Gibraltar, British occupation of, 65 Gil, Josep, 149 Gil, Pere, 177 Ginebra, Rafel, 257n85 Girona: Diocesan Archive of, 8; episcopology of, Caresmar and, 199; ­European orientation of, 56; Frankish conquest of, 53 Girona, cathedral of: construction of, 59; manuscripts from, 240 Girona, Sant Feliu de, 110 Glastonbury, loss of medieval rec­ords of, 17 González, Francisco Antonio, 283 Gonzalvo, Gener, 250 Gothic art: flowering of, 59; stone carving on tombs of counts of Urgell, 125f, 126f, 139, 141 Goya, Francisco, 11, 72 Granada: Alhambra of, ­Renaissance palace built in, 10; Spanish conquest of, 60 Gratian, Decretum, 245 Grau, Ramon, 36, 43, 133 ­Great Mosque of Cordoba, 10 ­Great Schism: crisis associated with, 128; and kings of Aragon, 59 Gregorian Reform, 108, 109 Gregorio, Leopoldo de (Marquis of Squillace), 70–71 Gros, Miquel, 257n85 Gualter, Santa Maria de, 119 Guerra, Pedro Cevallos, 168 guerra del segadors (War of the Reapers), 61. See also Revolt of the Catalans guerrilla, origins of term, 11 Guicciardini, Francesco, 60 Guifré I “the Hairy” (Count of Barcelona), 42, 54 Guillem (Abbot of Bellpuig), 122–23, 139 Guillem II of Anglesola, as benefactor of Bellpuig, 1, 115, 117, 123, 142 Guzmán, Santiago Miguel de (second marquis de la Mina), 71 Gwara, Joseph, Jr., 233 hagiographies: Caresmar’s, 29, 31, 37, 40, 172, 173–77; study of, 37. See also specific saints Haiti (Hispanola), loss of, 72 Hapsburg kings: Catalan support for, 42, 64–65, 214; and enlightened despotism, 63–64, 67; and Spanish involvement with ­European affairs, 61; and War of Spanish succession, 62–63, 65

Hebrew language, 92 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 265 Henry VIII (King of E ­ ngland), confiscation of monasteries by, 17, 209 Hermanas Oblatas del Santíssimo Redentor, 208 Hermanno, Joseph, 135 Herr, Richard, 67 Hieronymites, attempt to take over Bellpuig, 116, 128, 129, 130, 135 Higuera, Román de la, 173, 174 Hispanola (Haiti), loss of, 72 Historia de la controvertida primacia eclesiastica entre la Metropoli de Toledo y la de Tarragona (Caresmar), 184–88 Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España (Conde), 160 “Historia del monastir” (Finestres), 135 Historia de rebus Hispaniae (Mariana), 41 historic catastrophes, commemoration of, 48–49, 61 historiography: Baroque, 33, 36, 41–43; Caresmar’s approach to, 15–16, 37, 40, 42; conservative nationalist, 266–67; critical method in, Catalan adoption of, 37, 40, 41, 43–45; critical method in, French scholars and, 38–40; early modern Catalan scholars and, 41–42; Maurist monks and, 38–39, 41, 44; purpose of, 32–33; reliance on archives vs. legends/literary chronicles, 34–35, 36–37; of resentment, dangers of, 265; Romantic school of, 269. See also Catalan history; church history Homage to Catalonia (Orwell), 230–31 Homilies of Organyà, 22–23 Honorius II, Pope, 110 Honorius III, Pope, 123 Horta, Franciscan ­house in, 217 Hortleder, Friedrich, 34 Hospitallers, in Catalonia, 57 hospitals, Bellpuig de les Avellanes and, 113, 121m, 123 ­House of Barcelona, end of, 10, 59 Hugh Capet (King of France), 42, 55, 55n22 humanist scholarship, in 16th and 17th centuries, 36–37 Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis, 100, 218 Hungarian language, fate of, 90 Husband, Timothy, 142 Iglésias i Fort, Josep, 233 Illana, Manuel Abad, 28

33 2 I NDEX

­independence movement. See Catalan ­independence movement Indonesian language, 92 industrialization, of Catalonia, 51 Innocent II, Pope, 110 Innocent III, Pope, 40; letter to Abbot Guillem, 122–23, 139; privilege issued in ­favor of Bellpuig, 120–23 Inquisition: abolition of, 216, 217; demands for restoration of, 219; power of, and decline of Spain, 73, 179; and ­resistance to Protestant Reformation, 128 Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 239, 243 Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs, 255, 256 Ireland: heroic defeat memorialized in, 49; native language of, fate of, 90, 100 Isabella I (Queen of Castile), 10, 60, 214 Isabella II (Queen of Spain), 220, 226 Isabella of Portugal, 167 Jamaica, loss of, 72 James, Saint, 41 James/Jaume I (King of Aragon): chronicle of, 33, 89; conquest of Majorca, 105; conquest of Valencia, 186; policies of, con­temporary Catalonia as product of, 267–68; and privileges on Bellpuig, 122, 124 James II (King of Aragon-­Catalonia), 122, 126–27, 141 James II (King of ­England), 49 Jaumandreu i Triter, Eudald, 155, 157 Jaume I (King of Aragon). See James I Jaume II “the Unlucky” (Count of Urgell), 59–60, 128 Java, languages spoken in, 92 Jesuits: and Bellpuig, effort to divert revenues from, 130, 256; expulsion from Spain, 70, 71, 151, 153, 211, 217, 222, 226, 256, 273; library in Balaguer, Caresmar’s manuscripts in, 256, 258, 259, 273; at University of Cervera, 151, 152, 157 Jews: of Agramunt, 181; expulsion from Spain, 10, 61, 72, 180; pogroms in 14th ­century, 59 John I (King of Aragon-­Catalonia), 34 John II (King of Aragon), 60, 128 John XIII, Pope, 188, 189 John XXIII, Pope, 267 John of Organyà ( Joan d’Organyà), 19, 116, 117, 123; veneration of, 140; vestiges of, 207 Joseph I (Holy Roman Emperor), 65 Joseph II (Holy Roman Emperor), 67 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchior de, 97, 179

Juglà, Antoni, 91 Julius II, Pope, 190 Junta de Comerç. See Real Junta Par­tic­u­lar de Comercio de Barcelona Justi, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von, 70 Kehr, Paul Fridolin, 147n55, 259 Kosovo, B ­ attle of, 48 Kosto, Adam, 55n22 Krain (Slovenia) language, 90 Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich, 216 Lacavalleria, Joan, 91 land(s): disamortization campaign of 1835 and sale of, 225; emphyteutic tenure of, Caresmar on, 80; Liberal Triennial and seizure of, 218, 220; poorly exploited, blamed for Spain’s decline, 73. See also church property Langor, Bernat, 130 language(s): abandonment of, 100; diglossic system of, 92–93, 95–96, 100; llemosi group of, 89; native, revival in 19th ­century, 90; used by Caresmar, 13, 81, 83, 86–87, 98–99, 190, 194; used by Catalan writers, 93–98. See also specific languages La Portella, Bellpuig material held by resident of, 255 Lara y Martínez, José Manrique de, 209 La Seu d’Urgell, Tridentine Seminary of, 249, 253 Latin: Caresmar’s written use of, 13, 24, 25, 81, 83, 86, 98–99, 190; Catalan writers using, 85, 97, 98; status of, 84, 90, 92 Lavaix, Caresmar’s archival efforts at, 21 La Vid, Premonstratensian chapter at, 115 legend(s): vs. archival rec­ords, historiography based on, 34–35, 36–37, 43; and Catalan autonomy, assertions of, 41–42, 54–55; of origins of Bellpuig, 116 Leo IX, Pope, 140 León, Pedro Ponce de (Bishop of Plasencia), 135 Lerroux, Alejandro, 228–29 leyenda negra (“Black Legend”), 72 Liberals/Liberalism, in Spain, 7, 100–101, 212–13, 215–16; and anticlerical vio­lence, 217–18, 222–23; and challenge to royal absolutism and clerical power, 7, 11, 213–14, 219, 220; and confiscation of church properties, 6, 205, 211, 213, 218, 220, 222, 224, 225, 228; Cortes of Cádiz and, 216, 217; el Krausismo and, 216; moderates

I NDEX 333 (Moderados), 215–16, 220, 221, 225–26, 228; and program of Castilianization, 101; progressives (Progresistas), 215–16, 221, 225, 226; and reactionary governments, oscillation between, 219; and suppression of monasteries, 217 Liberal Triennial, 217, 245; lands seized during, 218, 220; violent anticlerical uprisings during, 217–18 Liber Bullarum, 249–50 Liber maiolichinus, 52 Libre del Consolat de Mar, Capmany’s translation of, 83 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 16 Linde, Baron de la (Manuel Terán), 77, 177–78. See also Carta al Barón de la Linde (Caresmar) literary figures, of Catalonia and Valencia, 89–90; Caresmar’s unfinished work on, 169; languages used by, 93–98; Torres Amat’s bibliography of, 80, 137, 148, 158, 169 lit­er­a­ture: in Catalan, 93–95, 102–4; Spanish, discipline of, 101. See also poetry Lleida, 20m; antiquarian books deposited in, 255–56; Catalan conquest of, 58; cathedral of, ecclesiastical rec­ords moved to, 249, 251; Museu Diocesà i Comarcal in, Bellpuig material h ­ oused at, 252–53; School of, and stone carving on tombs of counts of Urgell, 141 llemosi group of languages, 89 Llibre Verd (Pasqual), 147 Lliga Catalana, 102 Llo, Marquis of ( Josep de Móra i Catà), 44–45, 88, 161, 162 Llorenç del Munt, Sant, surviving parchments from, 244 Lluch, Ernest, 35, 69, 78, 80, 84, 133, 152, 277 Llull, Ramon, 89–90, 267 Loaysa, García, 185 Louis I “the Pious” (King of the Franks/Holy Roman Emperor), 108, 180 Louis V (King of West Francia), 55 Louis XIII (King of France), 33 Louis XIV (King of France), 40, 66, 223 Louis XV (King of France), 44 Lucius II, Pope, 110 Mabillon, Jean, 11, 12n15, 38, 40, 41, 43 Madrid: Capmany in, 75; Caresmar’s works sent to, 168–69, 289–90; Esquilache Mutiny in, 70–71; intrigues in, and obstacles to printing Caresmar’s works, 30

Maians, Gregori, 29–30, 40; Cartas morales, 97; correspondence with Finestres ( Josep), 134; evaluation of sources by, 45; influences on, 41; languages used by, 96, 97–98; Pasqual’s epigram against, 145; on Saint Severus, 29–30, 40, 173–74 Majorca (Mallorca): Bellpuig satellite community on, 105–6, 122, 127; Catalan conquest of, 58, 105 Maldà, Baron of (Rafael d’Amat de Cortada i de Sentjust), 93–94, 165 Mallorca. See Majorca Malvès, Ignasi, 137 Manegat, Josep Antonio, 197 Manresa, Caresmar’s history of, 199, 202, 284, 289, 291 Manual Digest de las Valls neutras de Andorra (Fiter), 96–97 Manucomunicat, 269 manufacturing: ­under Bourbon rule, 67–68; in Catalonia, 51, 61; Duscurso on, 80 Marca, Pierre de, 11–12, 39–40, 42; Caresmar compared to, 11–12, 12n15, 44; Catalan manuscripts appropriated by, 232, 245; transcriptions made by, 261 Marca hispanica, 39–40, 46, 53 Marcet, Domènec, 253, 254, 258 March, Ausias, 89, 159 Marfany, Joan-­Lluís, 93 Margaret of Montferrat (Countess of Urgell), 127 Maria Cristina (Queen regent of Spain), 220 Maria de Luna (Queen consort of Aragon), 59 Mariana, Juan de, 41 Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empress), 70 Marist F ­ athers, at Bellpuig de les Avellanes, 7, 209 Marquesa (Countess of Urgell), 123 Martène, Edmond, 38–39 Martí, Josep, 147–48; and Bellpuig library, 251; on Caresmar’s De rebus, 192; inventory of Caresmar’s works, 17, 147, 170, 273, 274; and Pasqual’s collection of ancient and medieval objects, 143; surviving works of, 274 Martí, P. Fr. ( Jaume Bagunyà i Casanovas), 184, 258, 278 Martí Bonet, Josep M., 188, 238 Martin I “the Humane” (King of Aragon), 59, 60, 82, 128 Martin IV, Pope, 260 Martorell, Joanot, 89 Martorell i Trabal, Francesc, 197, 259, 260, 278

33 4 I NDEX

Masdeu, Ramon, 169 Mas i Domènech, Josep, 197 Master of Anglesola, 141 Maurist monks: and archival rec­ords, assessment of reliability of, 38; Caresmar’s accomplishments compared to, 11–12, 12n15; influence of, 12, 41, 44; scholarship by, 38–39 Mayans, Gregorio. See Maians, Gregori McCrank, Lawrence, 188 medieval rec­ords: losses throughout ­Europe, 17–18; preservation of, disamortization of 1835 and, 207; science of diplomatics and, 12; theft/sale of, 232–34, 236, 245; transcriptions of, 13–14 medieval rec­ords, in Catalonia, 4–5, 204–5; accessibility of, recent pro­gress in, 260–61; loss of, 4–5, 204; trajectories of dispersion and preservation of, 8, 251–60 Medir, Saint, 174 Memorial de greuges, 69, 91, 102 Memorias del Monasterio (Ribot), 135, 148 Memorias históricas sobre la marina, comercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona (Capmany), 75, 80; Caresmar’s Carta compared to, 77, 180; Caresmar’s contributions to, 76, 77, 198; on Catalan, decline of, 82, 83 Mendizábal, Juan Álvarez, 210, 213 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, 41, 271 Menologium Premonstratensium (Caresmar), 172–73 Menorca, British occupation of, 65 Merino, Antolín, 277 Mestre, Antonio, 30 Metge, Bernat, 89 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 209. See also Cloisters Museum ­Middle Ages: Bellpuig historians’ interest in, 3–4, 9, 10, 165, 262–63, 270; and Catalan identity, formation of, 271; Catalan language during, 4, 9, 13, 52, 88–90, 263; Catalonia’s power/expansion during, 3–4, 9, 10, 51–52, 58–59, 78, 262, 263; conservative nationalist historians on, 266–67; con­temporary Catalan perspective on, 264, 269–70; historical memory of, and Catalan nationalism, 9–10, 51, 99, 263, 266–67; importance of, historians of Catalonia on, 266–67; nostalgia for, con­ temporary Catalan government on, 268; notion of, origins of, 270; Romanticism and interest in, 9, 267, 269, 270; teaching of history of, decline in, 268; as touchstone

for revival of Catalan culture (La Renaixença), 100. See also medieval rec­ords Milà i Fontanals, Manuel, 101 Mina, second marquis de la (Santiago Miguel de Guzmán), 71 Miñano Bedoya, Salvador, 213 Mirèio (Mistral), 103 Miret i Sans, Joaquim, 8, 233, 239, 243, 274, 292 Mistral, Frédéric, 103 Moles, Pere, 253 Molins, Antonio Elías de, 258 Monasticon Cathalanum (Caresmar), notes for, 182 Mondéjar, Marquis of (Gaspar Ibáñez de Segovia), 39 Monfar y Sors, Diego, 143 monks, canons compared to, 109 Monsalvatje, Francesc, 8 Montalegre, Carthusian ­house of, 242–43 Montcada, Guillem de (Bishop of Urgell), 286 Montesquieu, on Spain’s decline, 72, 73, 74, 76 Montfaucon, Bernard de, 38 Montiano, Augustí de, 159 Montserrat, abbey of: Caresmar’s archival efforts at, 21, 188, 201; Catalan nationalism and, 267; destruction of, 11, 201, 212; disamortized books and manuscripts ­housed at, 22, 242, 244, 257; exaltation of, 227, 267; historical journal published by, 190; prominence of, 107; restoration of, 239, 244 Moorish conquest, impact on Catalonia, Caresmar on, 180–81 Móra i Catà, Josep de (Marquis of Llo), 44–45, 88, 161, 162 Moreau, Charles, 200 Moreu-­Rey, Enric, 69, 153 Morgades, Josep, 267 Moriscos, expulsion from Spain, 10, 180 Morris, William, 267 Motín de Esquilache (Esquilache Mutiny), 70–71 Mount Malet, Bellpuig site on, 19, 116, 117 Muntaner, Ramon, 33, 89, 163 Mur, Santa Maria de, 118, 147, 147n55; sale of archival parchments from, 239; sale of frescoes from, 227 Muslims, expulsion from Spain, 10, 72 Naples, Catalan conquest of, 51 Napoleon Bonaparte: defeat of, 100, 216; disamortization ­under, 212; invasion of Spain, 10–11, 18, 100, 201, 205–6, 212; unity imposed on France, 77

I NDEX 335 Napoleonic Wars: and Bellpuig’s archival losses, 251; impact on Spanish universities, 154; and Ripoll’s archival losses, 223; and Spanish government instability, 215 nationalism: and anticlericalism, 228n62; vs. language distinction, 100; and ­Middle Ages, notion of, 270; moderate, 269. See also Catalan nationalism Necker, Jacques, 79 Netherlands: loss of, 72; Spanish kings’ efforts to retain, 61; War of Spanish Succession and, 63, 65 New World, first apostolic vicar to, 189–90 Nicholas II, Pope, 193 Nine Years’ War, 63, 64 Ninve (­sister of Guillem II of Anglesola), 117 Norbert of Xanten, Saint, 23, 109, 112–13; statue at Bellpuig, 131, 252 Noriega, José Esteban de, 135 Norte crítico (Segura), 41 “Notes per la historia del monastir” (Finestres), 135 note taking: Caresmar and, 16–17, 26, 184, 201; early modern scholars and, 184; Finestres (Daniel) and, 2, 24; golden age of, 26 Notícias del Venerable P. Fr. Bernardo Boyl (Caresmar), 189–90, 278 noucentist movement, 269 novatores (scholars), 39 Nueva Planta Decrees, 50, 65, 66, 67, 90, 264 numismatic collection, Bellpuig, 251, 252, 253 Nyerros (bandit gang), 62 Oblate ­Sisters of the Most Holy Redeemer, 208 Occitan language, 103 Oda a la Patria (Aribau), 90, 100 Oliba (Abbot of Ripoll, Bishop of Vic), 245 Olivares (minister), 214 Olivares, Count-­Duke, 232, 269 Oliver, Josep Feliu, 163 Oliveras i Caminal, Josep, 197 d’Olzinelles, Roc, 224, 245–46 ordo antiquus, 110–11, 119 Ordo monasterii, 112 ordo novus, 111; Premonstratensian Order and, 112 Organyà: homilies of, 22–23; surviving ecclesiastical documents from, 243; village of, 22. See also John of Organyà ( Joan d’Organyà) Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia, 230–31

Os de Balaguer, 20m; Bellpuig’s rights over, 127; church of, Bellpuig altarpiece at, 252; festivities at, 145, 208 Ottoman Empire, Spanish kings’ efforts to combat, 61 Oviedo, Antonia de, 208 Oviedo, Manuel de, 208, 254 Oxford University, in 18th ­century, 154 Paschal II, Pope, 8 Pasqual i Coromines, Jaume, 143–47; antiquarian activities of, 143, 144, 145–46, 206; as archivist and copyist, 146–47; and Bellpuig library, 251; on Bellpuig’s isolation, 19; books belonging to, preservation of, 274; epitaph for Caresmar’s tomb, 12n15, 46; on festivities at Os de Balaguer, 145, 208; interest in Graeco-­Roman past, 165; languages used by, 95–96; Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta (SACM), 146, 147, 170, 250, 254, 273; writings of, 144–45 Paul, Saint, supposed mission to Spain, 186 Peninsular War, 11 Penya, Narcís Felíu de la, 42 Pere II (Count of Urgell), 120, 127 Pérez, Vicente Salvá, 233 Periódico universal de ciencias, literatura y artes (journal), 12n15, 15 Persian Letters (Montesquieu), 72, 73 Peter, Saint, Caresmar’s sermon on, 172 Peter I “the Cruel” (King of Castile), 59 Peter I “the ­Great” (Tsar of Rus­sia), 67 Peter II (King of Aragon), 122, 260 Peter IV “the Ceremonious” (King of Aragon), 33, 59; burial of, 141; chronicle of, 33, 89 Petronilla of Aragon, 58 Pey, Josep, 137, 144 Pezuela, Manuel de la, 208 Philip II (King of Spain), 61, 129–30 Philip III (King of Spain), 130 Philip IV (King of Spain), 33, 130; Catalan revolt and, 214; descendants of, 63 Philip V (King of Spain): economic growth ­under, 67; and suppression of Catalonia, 50, 64, 65–66, 264; and university closures, 150, 151; in War of Spanish Succession, 62, 63, 65 Pia Almoina, Caresmar’s account of, 201–2 Piferrer, Pau, 269 Pinós, Galceran de, 118 Piquer i Jover, Josep Joan, 169 “The Pit and the Pendulum” (Poe), 72

33 6 I NDEX

Pitarra (Fréderic Soler), 103 Pius V, Pope, 129 Pius IX, Pope, 226 Pla, Jacint, 247 Plandolit, Joaquim de, 278, 284 Poblet, Cistercian foundation of, 116, 246–47; archival rec­ords from, institutions housing, 241, 242, 248–49; Caresmar’s archival efforts at, 21; libraries of, fate of, 247–48; prominence of, 107; restoration of, 239, 248 Poe, Edgar Allan, 72 poetry: Barcelona Acad­emy and, 159; in Catalan language, 87–88, 89, 94–95, 102; in Provençal language, 103 ­Political Laments for a Poor ­Little Idler Accustomed to Live at Someone ­Else’s Expense (Bedoya), 213 Ponç (Count of Urgell), 123 Ponisch y Camps, Ramon de, 86 Pons, Josep de, 22, 153 Ponsa, Joaquim, 258 population: density and growth of, as key to prosperity, Enlightenment thinkers on, 178–79, 180; Spanish, imputed character of, 61, 72, 73–74, 271. See also Catalan population Porta, Robert, 257n85 Portella, Jaume, 56n24 Portugal: i­ndependence of, 72; Jesuit suppression in, 70 Prats, Josep, 153 Premonstratensian Order, 23, 105, 112–13; architecture of, 114, 118–19; at Bellpuig de les Avellanes, 1, 19–20, 22, 105, 107, 112, 113–14, 115, 207; canons of, 22, 108–9; canons of, Caresmar’s biographical notices on, 172–73; Castilian chapters of, 115; churches of, direct access to, 114, 114f, 118–19; confiscation of properties of, 205; diffusion of, 115; distinctive features of, 113; female members of, 107; ­founder of, 23, 109, 112–13; headquarters in France, 129; lay members of, 107; and ordo novus, 112; rigor of, 109. See also Bellpuig de les Avellanes Prescott, W. H., 72 Prešeren, France, 90 Prim, Juan, 101 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 264, 269 printing: Catalan, 84. See also publication(s) Proclamación Católica (Sala), 33 Prologo al Código de Ripoll (Caresmar), 258 protectionism, ­under Bourbon kings, 67–68 Protestantism, and negative images of Spain, 72

Protestant Reformation: Spanish ­resistance to, 61, 128; and suppression of monasteries and mendicant o ­ rders, 210 Provençal language, 103 publication(s), of Caresmar’s works, 172–82; ­limited number of, 16, 170; obstacles to, 30, 168–69 public libraries, lack of interest in ecclesiastical manuscripts, 237–38, 238n13 Puigblanc, Antonio, 99 Pujades, Jeroni, 33; Corònica universal del Principat de Catalunya, 36, 40, 42, 85, 160, 163; use of Catalan language by, 36, 85 Pujol, Jordi, 267 Pujol, Pere, 249 Puritans, and loss of medieval rec­ords/art, 17 Pyrenees, Treaty of, 3, 39–40, 72 Quaritch, Bernard, 233 Queralt i de Reart, Francesc de, 151 Quevedo, Francisco de, 158 Radical Republican Party, 229 Ramon Berenguer/Berenguer IV (Count of Barcelona), 58, 115, 181 Rassow, Peter, 259 Rastatt, Treaty of, 65 Raymond of Penyafort, letter to Pope Clement IV, 286 Rázon de la obra: Arreglo del archivo de Ager (Caresmar), 258 Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Madrid), 236–37 Real Academia de Buenas Letras (Barcelona), 156–65; and Arabic history, study of, 159–60; Bòria and, 31, 176; Bourbon dynasty and, 156; Capmany and, 157; Caresmar and, 28–29, 31, 81, 98–99, 160, 161, 162, 164, 170, 172, 176, 190, 274, 279, 284, 291–92; Castilian language used by, 87, 95; and Catalan historiography, 42, 44–45, 95, 148, 156, 159, 160–63, 165, 270; and Catalan language, study of, 159, 163, 165; and Catalan poetry, 94–95; emblems of, 156–57; ­founders of, 157; members of, 157–58, 160; Memorias published by, 45, 88, 161–62; mission of, 156, 157, 159, 160, 165; Pasqual and, 146; publications of, 158; reputation of, 133, 158, 159; work of, connection to modern concerns, 263 Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid), 241; and Bellpuig library, inventory of, 251; founding of, 39; monastic archives h ­ oused at, 240–41, 247; Pasqual and, 146; Sarmiento’s manuscripts at, 16

I NDEX 337 Real Cámara (Madrid): and Caresmar’s work at Àger, 194; Caresmar’s works sent to, 168–69, 195, 289–90 Real Junta Par­tic­ul­ar de Comercio de Barcelona ( Junta de Comerç), 164; Caresmar and, 81, 155, 164; on Castilian language, 83–84; formation of, 68; importance of, 155; medieval past glorified by, 166; reputation of, 133 Reccared I (Visigothic King of Hispania), 186 Reconquista, Spanish rulers and, 215 reformist absolutism, 67 Regiment de l’home (Moles), 253 Reglà, Joan, 12n15, 15, 277 Rehtmeyer, Philipp Julius, 35 Remigius, Saint, 140 La Renaixença, 51, 80, 100, 101, 270; and Catalan history, view of, 165; and Catalan language, 9, 51, 102–4; church and, 227; poetry and, 94 Repressió borbònica i resistència identitària a la Catalunya del segles XVIII (Sobrequés), 264–65, 269 Retuerta, Premonstratensian chapter at, 115 Revolt of the Catalans (Catalan revolt), 61, 214, 270; and Ripoll’s archival losses, 223; works published in wake of, 33, 84 The Revolt of the Catalans (Elliott), 71–72 Ribera, Manuel Mariano, 167 Ribes, Bernat de, 161 Ribot, Francesc Ignasi, 135, 147, 148–49; during disamortization of 1820, 148–49, 251; on French invasion of 1808, 205–6; Memorias del Monasterio, 135, 148 Riera, ­Father Agustí, 28 Rigau, Pere, 111 right-­wing nationalists, and attempts at cultural homogenization, 264 Ripoll, Benedictine monastery of: archives and library of, losses sustained by, 4, 223–24, 245–46; as burial place for counts of Urgell, 141; burning and pillaging in 1835, 4, 223, 224; institutions housing manuscripts from, 242, 245; parchments of, reconstruction of, 246; prominence of, 107; restoration of, 227, 267 Ripoll Bible, 245 Riquer i Morera, Martí de (Count of Dávalos), 159 Risbourg, Marquis of, 156, 265 Riu i Riu, Manuel, 5 Rius i Serra, Josep, 259 Roca i Cornet, Joaquim, 101 ­Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 250

Roda Bible, 245 Rodes, Sant Pere de, 56n22; Bible of, 223 Romà i Rossell, Francesc, 69–70 Romanticism: and Catalan nationalism, 269; and interest in ­Middle Ages, 9, 267, 269, 270 Ros i Hebrera, Carles, 87–88 Roussillon, 3, 27, 39, 53, 200 Rovere, Giulio della, 190 Royal Acad­emy of Belles-­Lettres of Barcelona. See Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona Rubio i Lluch, Antoni, 269 Rubió i Ors, Joaquim, 101; Lo Gayté del Llobregat, 102 Ruf of Avignon, Saint, 111, 112 Ruiz, Luis, 250 Ruiz Chavero, Dolores, 208–9 Rule of Aachen, 108 Rule of Saint Chrodegang of Metz, 108 Rupprecht, Theodor Maria, 172 Rusiñol, Santiago, 104 Rus­sia, imperial, diglossic system in, 92 Ryder, F. C., 60 Ryswick, Treaty of, 63 Sacrae Antiquitatis Cathaloniae Monumenta (SACM) (Pasqual), 146, 147, 170, 250, 254, 273 sainet, 94 Sala, Gaspar, 33 Salazar y Castro, Luis de, 39 Salrach, Josep Maria, 55 Sanabre, Josep, 197 Sánchez-­Albornoz, Claudio, 41, 271 Sanchis, Antonio Mestre, 30n36 Sancho I (King of León), 188 Santes Creus, Cistercian foundation of, 116; Aragon kings buried at, 141; archival rec­ords from, institutions housing, 241; prominence of, 107 Santesmases i Pujol, Agustí, 209, 250 sardana dance, 102 Sardinia, Catalan conquest of, 51 Sarmiento, Martín, 16, 97 Saura i de Febrer, Gonzalo, 147, 148, 284; and Caresmar’s writings, effort to ­organize, 17, 170–71; treatise in praise of Catalan, 87, 148 Sawyer, P. H., 204 Scala Dei, archival rec­ords from, 241 Scheuch, Herman, 233 Scots, heroic defeat memorialized by, 48 Scott, Sir Walter, 270 Scotus, Duns, 151

33 8 I NDEX

Scrinium (journal), 196, 197 sculptures, at Bellpuig, 14f, 131, 141, 252 “Els Segadors,” 61, 102 Segovia, Gaspar Ibáñez de, 39 El segundo esposo de Maria (Noriega), 135 Segura, Jacinto, 41 Semana Trágica of 1909, 209, 228–29 Seminario erudito, Caresmar’s article in, 202 Los señales de la felicidad de España (Romà), 69–70 Seneca, 271 Se­niorfré (Abbot of Ripoll), 245 September 11, 1714, 48, 49–50, 65 Septimania, 53, 54 Serabona, Santa Maria de, 111 Serbs, heroic defeat memorialized by, 48 Serra, Josep Maria Benet, 208 Serra d’Or (magazine), 267 Serra i Postius, Pere, 42, 158, 160, 284 Serrateix, monastery of, 146 Servatius, Michael, 85 Severus, Saint: Caresmar’s defense of, 29, 31, 37, 40, 173–75, 177; Maians on, 29–30, 40, 173–74; modern ecclesiastical dictionary on, 175 Sibil·lia (­sister of Guillem II of Anglesola), 117 Sicily: Catalan conquest of, 51, 58–59; strategic importance of, 59 Simancas, ­castle of, 241 Sixtus IV, Pope, 129 Slovenian language, 90 Smith, Adam, 164 “Sobre lo contenido en los instrumentos antiguos de la Iglesia Collegial de Ager” (Caresmar), 195 Sobrequés i Callicó, Jaume: Repressió borbònica i resistència identitària a la Catalunya del segles XVIII, 264–65, 269; on University of Cervera, 152 Sociedad Económica of Santiago de Compostela, 238 Soldev­ila, Ferran, 68, 152, 266, 270 Soler, Fréderic (Pitarra), 103 Solsona, Santa Maria de, 110; as burial place for counts of Urgell, 141; cathedral church of, plundering of, 218 Lo somni (Metge), 89 The Song of Roland, 53 Spain: Bourbon period in, 65–71; Catalonia’s peculiar status within, 2–3; colonial empire of, 60–61, 65, 68; cultural homogenization of, attempts at, 263, 264; decline of, 99, 179; decline of, explanations for, 15, 71–74,

179; and ­European ­Union, 56; French invasion of (1808), 10–11, 18, 100, 201, 205–6, 212; French invasion of (1823), 100, 218; fundamental unity of, historiographical attempts to assert or dispute, 41; Golden Age of, absence of lit­er­a­ture in Catalan during, 84–85; principal internal crisis in, 9, 272; unified, creation of, 10, 60–61, 214 Spanish-­American War, aftermath of, 228 Spanish character, ideas regarding, 72, 73–74, 271 Spanish Civil War: anticlerical vio­lence during, 229–30, 231; and dispersal/destruction of church rec­ords, 5, 229–30, 231, 249, 253, 256–57 Spanish language. See Castilian language Spanish lit­er­a­ture, discipline of, 101 Spicilegium (d’Achery), 38–39 Squillace, Marquis of (Leopoldo de Gregorio), 70–71 Stephen (Abbot of Flabemont), 115, 116 Stone, Lawrence, 154 Strauch, Raimundo, 217–18 Suarez, Francisco, 151n64 Succession War. See War of Spanish Succession Sylvester II, Pope, 189 Tarragona: archbishop of, 57; Catalan conquest of, 58; claims of ecclesiastical preference, Caresmar’s defense of, 184–88, 201, 278; disamortized ecclesiastical rec­ords at, 248–49; ecclesiastical archive of, destruction of, 212 Tarragona, Miquel, 257 Taverner y de Ardena, Joseph, 254 Tavèrnoles, Sant Sadurní de, 249–50, 253 Tear of Vendôme, 43 Templars: in Catalonia, 57; suppression of, 194 Terán, Manuel (Baron de la Linde), 77, 177–78. See also Carta al Barón de la Linde (Caresmar) textile industries, in Catalonia, 51, 61 Thecla, Saint, Caresmar’s sermon on, 172 Thirty Years’ War: French victory in, 61; and loss of medieval documentation, 18 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 151n64 Tillemont, Sébastien Le Nain de, 43 Tirant lo Blanch (Martorell), 89 Toda i Guëll, Eduard, 248 Toledo: as capital to Visigothic kingdom, 186; claims to ecclesiastical primacy, Caresmar’s refutation of, 184–88 tombs of counts of Urgell, at Bellpuig, 7, 124, 125f, 126f, 130; Caresmar’s examination

I NDEX 339 of, 136, 139–43; Finestres’s investigation of, 134; French invasion of 1808 and damage to, 206; sale of, 209, 227, 250 Toreno, Count, 210, 213 Torras i Bages, Josep, 152, 227, 267 Torres Amat, Fèlix, 12n15, 283; bibliography of Catalan writers, 80, 137, 148, 158, 169, 246–47, 273; on Caresmar’s De rebus, 191; on Olzinelles, 246 Tortosa: Catalan conquest of, 58; ­under Muslim rule, Caresmar on, 181 Tost, Arnau Mir de, 111, 193 “Tractatus de Divini Verbi Incarnatione” (Finestres), 135 La tradició Catalana (Torras), 152, 227 Traditionsbücher, 205 Traggia, Joaquin, 12n15, 168, 289 transcriptions: Caresmar’s devotion to, 26, 34, 35, 193, 200, 201; history of, 13–14 Trappist community, at Bellpuig de les Avellanes, 7, 208–9 Trastámara dynasty, succession of, 10, 59, 128, 269 Tratado de la regalía de amortización, 211 Trelles, Pere, 28 Ullastre, Josep, 87 Ultrecht, Treaty of, 49, 65, 66 United States: Declaration of I­ ndependence in, 78; Spain’s decline as lesson for, 72 universities: 18th-­century, reputation of, 154; Catalan, closure a­ fter War of Spanish Succession, 66, 133, 150, 151–52; Spanish, conservatism of, 154, 155. See also specific universities University of Barcelona: closure of, 66, 67, 150, 156; reopening of, 151, 237, 239; transfer of monastic archives to, 239–40, 242 University of Cervera, 133, 150–55, 164, 165; Bellpuig school of historians and, 155; books published by, 256; Caresmar and, 81; Caresmar’s works published by, 174; creation of, 66, 150; disbanded library of, transfer of contents of, 240; distinguished individuals at, 153–54; facade of, 149f, 152; Finestres (Daniel) at, 134; Finestres ( Josep) at, 23, 134, 145, 152, 153–54, 165, 173; impact on surrounding area, 181; Jesuit faculty at, 151, 152, 157, 173; Pasqual and, 145, 146; unfavorable opinions of, 151–52, 156; use of Latin at, 98 University of Pennsylvania, rare books library at, 11

Urban II, Pope, 175, 195, 201 Urbina, Manuela, 169 Urdax, monastery of, 116 Urgell, counts of: burial places of, 141; Caresmar’s history of, 138, 140, 191; patronage of Bellpuig, 1, 105, 106, 111, 115, 116–20, 123, 124, 127. See also tombs of counts of Urgell Valencia: Catalan conquest of, 51, 58, 186; creation of unified Spanish nation and, 61 Valla, Lorenzo, 36 Valladares, Gavino de (Bishop of Barcelona), 31, 177, 198 Valladares de Sotomayor, Antonio, 12n15, 276 Vallbona, female convent of, 144, 146–47; archive and library of, 244 Vallfogonisme, 95 Valls, Timoteu, 254 Valls i Bonet, Pau, 254 Valvasor, Johann Weichard von, 90 El Vapor (periodical), 68 Vatican library, Bohemian and German books in, 18 Vega i Sentmenat, Josep de, 165; on Caresmar’s De rebus, 191; and Dou i Bassols, 192; inventory of Caresmar’s works, 17, 137, 147, 169, 170, 191, 259, 260, 273, 274, 278; and Maians, 30; on Pasqual’s collection of ancient and medieval objects, 143; and Ribot, 149 Velasco, Alberto, 155, 166, 257 Velasco, Francisco Antonio Fernández de, 64 Verdaguer, Jacint, 104 Vetusti codices manuscripti (Caresmar), 197 Viage literario a las Iglesias de España (Villanueva), 32, 38, 47, 203, 289 Vic, 5; cathedral archive of, 5–6; cathedral chapter of, ­resistance to Saint Ruf practices at, 111; Cathedral of, Bellpuig material ­housed at, 254, 256, 257; diocese of, Caresmar’s research and writing on, 199, 200 Vicens Vives, Jaume, 265–66, 270 Vidal-­Quadras i Ramon, Manuel, 253 Vienna, Peace of, 156 Vilabertran, Santa Maria de, 8, 243 Vilanova de la Sal, 19; Bellpuig material held by residents in, 254–55; parish library of, Caresmar’s manuscripts in, 192–93, 259 Vilanova de la Sal, church of: Bellpuig rec­ords discovered at, 1–2, 5, 10, 24, 135, 287; disamortization of 1835 and concealment of Bellpuig rec­ords at, 1–2, 6, 7, 207, 251–52; rector of, 7, 207

34 0 I NDEX

Vilar, Josep, 252 Vilar, Pierre, 50, 133, 214, 266, 272 Villanueva, Jaime de: on Bellpuig library, 251, 253; on Caresmar’s works, obstacles to publication of, 168; and disamortization campaign of 1823, 232; ecclesiastical manuscripts mentioned by, 238; on Pasqual, 96, 143, 145; Viage literario a las Iglesias de España, 32, 38, 47, 203, 289; visit to Ripoll, 245 Virgili, Francesc, 130 Virgin Mary, Conception of, Caresmar’s sermon on, 172 Virgin Mary, sandal relic of, 119–20, 127, 139; casket for, 120, 252–53; Confraternity of, 129; disamortization of 1835 and fate of, 207, 252, 253 vita apostolica, 22 Vives, Jaume Vicens, 48 Vives, Juan Luis, 85 Vivot, Joan, 127 Voltaire, 30, 74, 213 Vox in excelso, 194–95, 201

losing side in, 64, 214; Catalonia ­after, 9–10, 48, 49–50, 62, 63–66; domestic peace following, 133; end of, 48; Nueva Planta Decrees ­after, 50, 65, 66, 67, 90, 264; university closures ­after, 66, 133, 150, 151–52 War of the Reapers (guerra del segadors), 61. See also Revolt of the Catalans ­water rights, Bellpuig and disputes regarding, 19, 25–26, 46, 131, 142 wealth: national, agriculture as basis of, 75; unproductive, and Spain’s decline, 72, 73–74 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 164 Welsh language, 90 William III (King of ­England), 49 Witsicle (Abbot of Ripoll), 245 ­women: at Bellpuig, 107–8; benefactors of Bellpuig, 115, 116–17, 123; occupations of, Caresmar on, 182; in Premonstratensian ­houses, 107. See also female religious h ­ ouses

War of Spanish Succession, 62–65; Bellpuig during, 131, 205; Bourbon triumph in, 10, 48, 49–50, 62, 270; Catalan support for

Zaportella, Bernat de, 118 Zimmermann, Michel, 205 Zurita, Jerónimo, 85

Ximénez de Rada, Rodrigo, 41, 186 Yeguas Gassó, Joan, 166