Charity and Welfare: Hospitals and the Poor in Medieval Catalonia by James William Brodman (review)

BOOK REVIEWS449 ragona would become in the twelfth century when the archbishop shared power with a Norman mercenary, Robert Bürdet. In a feud which stretched from the 1 140's to 1 172, Bürdet and his family struggled with successive archbishops in a virtual title war that culminated with the assassination of one of these prelates and the eventual replacement of Bürdet by the ruler of Barcelona as "Prince of Tarragona." Besides the religious and urban development of New Catalonia, McCrank has also dedicated much study to the growth of an increasingly complicated and literate government of the region's greatest ruler, the count of Barcelona. At the center of this development stood the proliferation of documents at every level of comital administration. This reliance on the written word resulted in a virtual "paper revolution" that eventually necessitated a depository for official records and led to the creation of one of Europe's great archives, the Arxiu de la Corona de Aragó in Barcelona. McCrank follows this paper trail back to the Liber Feudorum Maior, a huge collection of feudal documents, pivotal in the transition to the written record undertaken by the twelfth-century Barcelona court. In a sense, all of the articles in this volume begin and end with McCrank's interest in the frontier of New Catalonia. Besides the geographical line which divided the land and history of Barcelona from that of Tarragona, McCrank has probed the social frontier between the region's secular and ecclesiastical worlds, a line which often paled as abbots functioned as landlords and great prelates shared power with "over-mighty" laymen. He has also explored the distinction between oral and literate government, showing how potent the written word could be in this process. McCrank himself seems to cross intellectual and professional frontiers at will, informing his work as archivist with a deep historical knowledge and broadening his view as a historian by great technical familiarity with manuscripts. Donald J. Kagay Albany State University Charity and Welfare:Hospitals and the Poor in Medieval Catalonia. ByJames William Brodman. [The Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1998. Pp. xv, 229. $39.95.) This thoughtful and well written book about public health and hospitals, social welfare, charities, and poor people in the Middle Ages focuses on AragoCatalunya in northeastern Spain, primarily on Barcelona but extending south to Valencia as well, from the earliest documentation in the late tenth century through more plentiful records in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although ostensibly attempting a broad, comparative sweep in the style of New Social History rather than old-style institutional histories in local and regional studies, the institutions still dominate rather than poor people who remain largely veiled behind their poverty with the usual anonymity. But donors 450BOOK REVIEWS emerge, and so too the occasional spokesman for the poor. Thinking about social problems and responses, and charity as both a Christian social action and secular duty, are all addressed as Brodman explains how organized social welfare evolved in medieval Catalunya. Organizational means to aid the poor are delineated with local and regional variance, and in this book the human side of medieval welfare takes precedence over finances. In this way the study advances well beyond institutional histories or merely a synthesis of prior work. It is a welcome contribution. A decade in the making, this book builds upon the author's previous contributions in numerous articles and a book deriving from a dissertation undertaken at the University of Virginia with Charles J. Bishko. This treated another form of charity during the era of the Reconquista, namely, the ransoming of Christian captives from Muslim strongholds by the Redemptorists. Both rely on explorations in the Catalan archives and continued mining of parchments in the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, but in this recent book such primary sources are not clearly delineated. The extensive notes (55 pages for 143 pages of text) indicate a greater reliance on published documents and a thorough integration of the secondary literature. The bibliography cites nearly 300 works, integrating documentary editions with secondary sources. Few relevant narrative sources survive from their earlier periods;later one has such commentators as Fransec...