Tormented Voices Power, Crisis, and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140-1200 [Paperback]

Mute in life as in death, peasants of remote history rarely speak to us in their own voices. But Thomas Bisson's engagement with the records of several hundred twelfth-century people of rural Catalonia enables us to hear these voices. The peasants' allegations of abuse while in the service of their common lord the Count of Barcelona and his son the King reveal a unique perspective on the meaning of power both by those who felt and feared it, and by those who wielded it. These records--original parchments, dating much earlier than other comparable records of European peasant life--name peasants in profusion and relate some of their stories.

Bisson describes these peasants socially and culturally, showing how their experience figured in a wider crisis of power from the twelfth century. His compassionate history considers demography, naming patterns, gender, occupational identities, and habitats, as well as power, coercion, and complaint, and the moralities of faith, honor, and shame. He concludes with reflections on the historical meanings of violence and suffering.

This rich contribution to medieval social and cultural history and peasant studies suggests important resources and ideas for historians and anthropologists.

Bisson has distinguished himself with a number of careful scholarly monographs on the politics and finance of southern France and Spain in the Middle Ages. But in this book, although he necessarily draws on this research, Mr. Bisson breaks new ground. A historian of the elite--of kings, parliaments and treasuries--turns his considerable analytic powers to the question of village society and culture. Catalonia, the author's chosen area of research, has one of the richest documentary traditions in Europe, and in the last half-century scholars have begun to exploit with care and missionary zeal the cache of records that have survived. Focusing on a group of complaints from several Catalonion villages in the middle and late 12th century,lÓÕ