Tormented Voices: Power, Crisis, and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140-1200 (review)

The “power” in Bisson’s title is that of the count-king of Aragon during the second half of the twelfth century, as invoked by groups of peasants in the hinterlands of Barcelona (the “humanity” and “tormented voices” of the title) against the count-king’s nominal servants, who were exercising their power in novel and destructive ways, to the disadvantage—in terms of traditional obligations, personal honor, and economic loss—of both the count-king and the peasants (the “crisis” of the title, summarized on 141). The book is consistent with Bisson’s recent argument that conventional studies of institutional power building during the eleventh and twelfth centuries failed to account for either the temper of those who exercised power or the effects of the exercise of power on those who felt them: “It came to seem pointless to stress law and justice as proof of the continuity of government when the realities of power were so manifestly bound up with force and constraint. . . . What was typical was surely not ‘government’ by any but the vaguest of definitions, but rather the personal exercise of power,” not to be checked for a long time by any higher theory or other constraints.¹

Bisson has examined these “realities of power,” the modalities and strategies of “force and constraint,” in several works, as have other recent scholars, some of whose work Bisson has collected in a valuable volume of studies.² The new twelfth century now looks much more gritty, self- and dynasty-serving, theoretically clueless, nasty, brutish, and shorter (1140–1190) than that of Charles Homer Haskins.³

The peasant complaints that Bisson considers in this book are found on scattered leaves of parchment housed in the archives of the Crown of Aragon. Transcribed by literate clerks in a mixture of Latin and Catalan from local testimony, and eloquently analyzed by Bisson in graceful and often moving prose, they constitute the “tormented voices” of a stunned and bewildered peasantry that has not yet learned to express the terrifying fury of later centuries.⁴ The first chapter identifies and characterizes the documents. As usual, Bisson’s extraordinary archival competence is fully evident and trustworthy. His second chapter does the same for the peasants and their scribes—their naming patterns, their rural character and gender, their households, and their status.

The third, fourth, and fifth chapters, which examine the kinds of exercise of power that the peasants encountered, the character of those who wielded it, and the culture in which it was wielded, are perhaps most interesting to readers of this journal. Both peasant history and the history of lordship now require mediated help from other disciplines. Bisson acknowledges his debts to anthropology, political science, and historical sociology at the end of his bibliography (176). Robert Redfield, Eric Wolf, Julian Pitt-Rivers, and James C. Scott are as much in evidence here and in Bisson’s text as are Marc Bloch and Georges Duby.

Bisson concludes the book by asking, “Has only the wielding of power a history . . . why should [these peasants’] history be neglected in favor of their oppressors?” (140) Bisson has done his tormented voices a service that the count-kings of Aragon never did. He has given them a history.