De Tuïr a Catarroja. Estudis sobre institucions catalanes i de la Corona d’Aragó (segles XV-XVII)

2001, 232 pp.

How far do the ‘ròssechs’ of Perpignan go? Is it really in the ‘feudal survival’ where the Andorran specificity is found, or in the survival until the 21st century (under changing designations) of its Council of the Medieval Land? How is it that courts, commons and ‘fueros’ of the different states of the Crown of Aragon, where so many historians of the 19th and 20th centuries see but representation and stately and oligarchic interests, were condemned as ‘almost republicans’, as ‘democratic’ by the ideologues of monarchic absolutism? Was it ‘the century of the Baroque’ richer than before and after, and the banditry more frequent in the Aragonese crown that ‘out’? Does the judgement of Guadalupe really mark the ‘victory of the farmhouse over the castle’, the great cut between servitude and freedom? Each chapter of the book of Núria Sales is a multiple question and the challenge of some topic, a fight. It fights against the frequent servitude historiographic by the application to the past of the schemes, and borders, of the present. Combat in favour of the reading and attentive re-reading of the original texts, too often not only misinterpreted but also misrepresented. Combat in favour of the recovery of the contemporary vocabulary, historical, in favour of the fidelity, property and precision in the use of this vocabulary. It fights, then, against ‘tricky toponymies, turned into homonymous’. Always in the assumption that the questions can be successful but that, in history, there must be very few definitive answers.