Història de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Vol. I: 1907-1942

2002, 396 pp.

To write the history of the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC) is equivalent to studying the process of institutionalising Catalan culture in its own language, which before 1907 had not counted with any public or official support. It is also equivalent to studying the constitution of a Catalan academic community with a differentiated personality of the Spanish and with direct presence, without going through Madrid, in the international scientific and erudite organisations. This book is not limited to the internal evolution of the IEC, but it has also situated it within the policultural context of an era characterised by traumatic political and social changes over three and a half decades. The study of a culture has to be addressed through its creative agents, such as corporations and movements, and must be done with the highest degree of historical objectivity possible, avoiding falling into the typical easy monograph of corporate homage. This book is the first volume of the two anticipated in the history of the IEC. It starts from its foundations in 1907 as a centre of historical studies created by Barcelona’s council, it is in its enlargement in 1911 in three sections – the historical-archaeological, the science and philological – and arrives at the beginning of its reconstructions in 1942, in  clandestinity, after the collapse of the 1939.