De Tuïr a Catarroja. Estudis sobre institucions catalanes i de l

ISBN:

2001, 232 pp.

How far the “ròssechs” of Perpignan date back, and how long do they crawl? Is it really in the “feudal survival” where the Andorran specific nature lives, or in the survival until the twentieth century (under changing designations) of its medieval Council of the Earth? How can it be that the regional assemblies, the commons, and the regional law codes of the different states of the Kingdom of Aragon, in which so many historians of the nineteenth and twentieth century only see representation and noble and oligarchic interests, were condemned as “almost-republicans”, as “democratic people” by the ideologists of the monarchical absolutism? Was “the baroque century” richer than the previous and the later ones, and the brigandage more common in the Kingdom of Aragon and Catalonia than “abroad”? Does the Sentence of Guadalupe really mark the “victory of the farm over the castle”, the great cut between the serfdom and freedom? Every chapter of Núria Sales’ book is a multiple query and a challenge to some cliché, a combat. It is a combat against the statement of the common historiography, so the schemes and frontiers of the present could be applied to the past. A combat in favour of the close reading and rereading of the original texts, quite often bad interpreted and also bad transcribed. It is a combat in favour of the recovery of the contemporary and historical vocabulary; in favour of the truthfulness, accuracy and precision when using it. A combat, then, against “trickster toponymies turned into homonymies”. Always understanding that the questions can be accurate, but that in History there must not be many definitive answers.