La societat rural a Catalunya en temps feudals: Valles Oriental, segles XIII-XVI.

By Merce Aventin i Puig (Barcelona, Spain: Columna Assaig, 1996. 657pp.).

The Catalan region of Valles Oriental, north and east of Barcelona, is the setting for this study of medieval peasants and their attempts at self-sufficiency. Although the area nearest the metropolis has been brutally altered by twentieth-century industrialization, most of the Valles Oriental retains the network of dispersed, prosperous farms and small towns established in the Middle Ages. Continuity in the occupation of the land has made possible the survival of private archives in addition to the massive documentation extant in the better-known royal and ecclesiastical collections. Merci Aventin has investigated rural family archives that tend to preserve transactions between peasants rather than exclusively seigneurial documents as is the case with the larger official collections. The sources thus permit detailed reconstruction of individual manses, families and their fortunes.

The book is an ambitious effort to describe the structure of the feudal economy and society. Feudalism is understood as possessing an internal logic of exploitation but nevertheless amenable to some degree of manipulation by peasants who might occasionally manage to profit from the system. Aventin is concerned, above all, to demonstrate the rationality and adaptability of peasants in the face of macroeconomic fluctuation and seigneurial pressure.

The temps feudal (feudal era) of the title runs from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries, thus spanning what is usually seen as the point of division between the late Middle Ages and the early modern periods. Aventin ascribes little significance to the cataclysmic events of these centuries (the Black Death of 1348, the Catalan peasants' revolt of 1462-1486). An emphasis on structures and the long-term logic of feudalism informs a focus on persistent aspects of feudal society in relation to peasant families. Aventin is strongly influenced by Guy Bois, whose examination of the late-medieval crisis in Normandy is similarly structural and neo-Marxist, although more chronological in presentation. Chayanov's theory of the peasant family economy and its rationality is another palpable inspiration, but Aventin distances herself from Chayanov's timeless peasant ethos in favor of elucidating responses to a specific (feudal) mode of production and social system. She also differs from Chayanov in regarding a substantial segment of the peasantry as ambitious and expansionist, admittedly within the constraints of a pre-capitalist order.

The major accomplishment of this project is to show how such seemingly disparate factors as inheritance, dowry, leasing arrangements and the mentality of investment interacted. The reproduction and survival of the peasant family, with its single male heir (l'hereu), directed peasants towards strategies to manipulate a surprisingly complex and flexible system. Emphyteusis, the practice of leasing land with the possibility of creating additional layers of subtenancy, was one such mechanism of expanding or insuring holdings. Where others have regarded emphyteusis as merely another form of seigneurial exploitation, Aventin shows how accumulating leases and then subleasing them out was used by peasants to set themselves up in effect as small-scale landlords. The recognition of a single heir, dowry and counter-dowry were customs that could be used as anticipatory inheritance or as debt instruments to assure orderly transmission of land and fund the parents' retirement. Aventin is particularly effective in underlining the popularity of secured annuities (censals morts) in and after the fourteenth century. As with emphyteusis, the censal mort could in some circumstances be a means of exploiting peasants (in this case by placing them under an onerous debt obligation), but it also benefited other more fortunate peasant families, those that preferred to purchase annuities rather than putting their small surplus into leases or land purchases. Such decisions were dictated by small family size (making the exploitation of additional land difficult). Complex financial arrangements of this type, backed by land or produce, have normally been regarded as means of seigneurial and urban domination of the countryside as has the brisk market in the buying and selling of land. By examining transactions among peasants rather than relying exclusively on seigneurial documents, Aventin shows us how such arrangements reflected rational consideration of family condition and ambition.

What emerges is a peculiar sort of feudalism, one in which money played a much greater role than used to be thought characteristic of late-medieval peasant life. Everything had a price: not only land, labor, marriage and loans, but liberty (the cost of manumission from servitude), and salvation (how much to provide for prayers after death - 200 sous on average). All these were considerations to weigh in attempting to secure property and pass it on to one's descendants.

That peasants made financial calculations and even became rentiers when possible does not mean that this era marked the first stirrings of capitalism. Aventin is careful not to confuse rationality with capitalism just as she does not define feudalism as simply seigneurial exploitation. The period under consideration was not characterized by an expansive economy or an investment mentality. It was a malleable if contracting system based on agriculture and rent.

The structuralist approach of this study tends to minimize the dynamics of social change. There is very little interest in servitude, for example, an institution which intensified and then was abolished during this period. Aventin regards serfdom as a mere legal form without great socio-economic significance. Indeed, while seigneurial extraction in general is often evoked, its specific workings are not. Aventin is so eager to present peasants as independent actors that factors external to the interaction of land, family and income are dismissed. The specifications of a complex mechanism are given, but its movement (i.e. social change) remains something of a mystery.

Having said this, the accomplishments of this penetrating and painstaking analysis should nevertheless be reiterated. Aventin has given us the most profound treatment of how late-medieval peasants participated in a market economy. They reveal themselves as resourceful and enterprising within an economically difficult environment and despite their disadvantageous social position.

Paul Freedman Yale University