Tormented Voices: Power, Crisis and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140-1200 - Tapa dura

Tormented Voices is a microhistory meant to illuminate the condition of the peasantry and to bolster a broader thesis about sociopolitical crisis in the twelfth-century Catalan countryside. The book is built on a tenuous documentary base of sixteen parchments comprising villagers' complaints of maltreatment addressed to the count of Barcelona, Raimund Berenguer IV (1131-62), and his son, Alfons I of Aragon )(1162-96). It is a testimony to Thomas Bisson's erudition and imagination that he has fashioned a stimulating study from these unpromising sources. "Tormented Voices" is a microhistory meant to illuminate the condition of the peasantry and to bolster a broader thesis about sociopolitical crisis in the twelfth-century Catalan countryside. The book is built on a tenuous documentary base of sixteen parchments comprising villagers' complaints of maltreatment addressed to the count of Barcelona, Raimund Berenguer IV (1131-62), and his son, Alfons I of Aragon )(1162-96). It is a testimony to Thomas Bisson's erudition and imagination that he has fashioned a stimulating study from these unpromising sources.--James M. Boyden "Journal of Church and State " 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, Mr. Bisson tries to dispel layer after layer of distortion in these records in order to recover the 'tormented voices' of named and unnamed peasants who were at their wits' end in resisting lordly power...This is a remarkable book, not only because it sets

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 12th-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 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 12th century. His history considers demography, naming patterns, gender, occupational identities, and habitats, as well as power, coercion, and complaint and the moralities of faith, honour and shame. He concludes with reflections on the historical meanings of violence and suffering.