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  • Política, economia i guerra [Politics, economics and war]
  • La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
  • Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
  • Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
  • Barcelona, 2012
  • 286 pages

The Política, economia i guerra (2012) volume of the Barcelona 1700 collection includes articles by Albert Garcia Espuche, Joaquim Albareda, Eduard Puig, Eduard Martí, Rosa M. Alabrús, Agustí Alcoberro, Neus Ballbé, Francesc Miralpeix, and Miquel Gea, Laia Santanach and Juan Álvaro González. The last three writers collectively penned an article dedicated to “La reconstrucció de la Ciutadella” [The reconstruction of the Ciutadella], in which they explain not only the detailed planimetry used by the architect Joris Prosper van Verboom to plan the Ciutadella according to Vauvan’s model, but also their own computerised 3D reconstruction of the Ciutadella, which is now on show in El Born, as if it were a 1/500 scale model.

While the volumes of the Barcelona 1700 collection can be framed within micro-history and draw basically from Barcelona’s magnificent notarial archives, this volume, on the other hand, focuses more on pre-war power structures and the social and political consequences of defeat. Any historian will immediately realise that the volume contains the interpretation of Joaquim Albareda, who contributes two pieces: “Política, economia i guerra” [Politics, economics and war] and “Ramon de Vilana Perlas”. Long gone are the days when the word “decadence” could be used to refer to the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and Albareda’s studies have been pivotal in explaining the change in the interpretation model which helped to rediscover a Barcelona that was the maritime centre of the Mediterranean, capable of trading actively with the whole of Europe and tapping into the Dutch political model.

In pre-war Barcelona, the city’s local government was the expression, in the words of Albareda, of the “constant mobility of political personnel, far from being occupied by a hereditary class, as was the case with the councillors of Castilian cities”. In this Barcelona, with a dynamic patrician structure, and a Catalonia very closely linked to its own constitutions, a distinct self-awareness was possible, one which now, from the thesis of republicanism, we identify as nationalist and integrating. The more we learn of the history of the 17^th and 18^th centuries from first-hand sources, the more obvious it becomes that popular Catalan nationalism has lain at the core of the country over time.

The link between the citizens of Catalonia and their freedoms has been demonstrated repeatedly, often in the form of war, over the centuries. But it is highly significant that continuity in the country’s history has to be understood in terms of civil liberties. According to Giovanni Botero, one of the most interesting political philosophers of the Baroque, Barcelona “seems to be a free republic rather than a subjugated city”. And as Albareda writes, “the absence of royalty, a veritable drawback in the political sense, was an advantage when defining a policy on its own terms, a more republican one”. A reading of the text points to a very patent consequence. In a period of absolutist and centralising tendencies, absolutist power could not tolerate a dynamic and commercial Catalonia and Barcelona –and what was even worse– that these were linked to their own political, democratic and self-centred policies. A large part of this country’s political tragedy took shape in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, when it was obvious that the two poles of power (traditional and mercantilistic versus imperialist and centralist) were incompatible.

The defeat of 1714 and the awful international defence of the Catalan case led Pau Ignasi Dalmases to write: “With the Catalans enslaved, and Catalonia ruined, our own misfortunes will have worked to the benefit of the Germans, English, Dutch and Portuguese”. This kind of “unlucky awareness” has accompanied Catalans over three centuries. It is simply time to put it behind us.

• Interiors domèstics [Domestic interiors]
• La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
• Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
• Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
• Barcelona, 2012
• 315 pages

Interiors domèstics (2012) is a volume that brings us closer to the world of private houses and the intimate life of the inhabitants of Barcelona in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. It features texts by Albert Garcia Espuche, Xavier Lencina, Rosa M. Creixell, Immaculada Socias Batet, Anna Molina i Castellà, Julia Beltrán de Heredia Bercero and Núria Miró i Alaix. The “rich interiors, poor interiors” dilemma seems to describe, in Barcelona, the social complexity of a city where there were no large houses or good art collectors but which had an important silver industry and whose people lived in houses that were comfortable enough for the time. A city of middle classes is a space without the trappings of luxury, but with very good household articles.

The Barcelona of the Baroque was like many European cities; it may be described as commercial but not particularly sumptuary. We will therefore not find large aristocratic interiors or fine decorations. Indeed, in the city one does not strictly talk of “palaces”, but rather of “large houses”. Perhaps lavish decorations do not sit well with the country’s psychology. The paintings of Vigatà, now on show at the library of l’Ateneu Barcelonès, besides pertaining to a very late period, depict a lifestyle that was far from par for the country, even amongst the well-to-do classes. Immaculada Socias even documents that the provincial nobles of Barcelona had no gallery dedicated to the portraits of their ancestors, which would have been unthinkable in most of the large European capitals and which says a great deal about the mesocratic nature of Catalonia in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Without Court painting –perhaps only the painter Joan Arnau went to Madrid and made contact with Eugenio Gages there– what Barcelona had were “paintings of devotion”, and it mass produced well-intentioned paintings of the Virgin Mary, because there was a social demand for art, but boldness of form and motifs would have been deemed out of place.

It has been said, even of the great urban centres like Paris, that the concept of domestic comfort as such did not exist in the 18^th century; rooms were often dark and most houses had a ground floor and two storeys (51.9%) or a ground floor and one storey (29.2%), and were far from lavish. It was in England, after the Napoleonic Wars, and more specifically in Victorian times, that the idea of privacy took root, a concept finally enshrined by the famous literary term a “room of one’s own”, coined by Virginia Woolf. After all, “privacy” is ultimately a romantic concept. The problem of heating rendered it necessary to build houses around a hearth, which was the true core of the house. And if the hearth and kitchen were in the same place, then that is where the centre of the house was, and not in the other more private parts of the house. On the inside, the Catalan houses of the time were more like an extension of workshops, choc-a-bloc with tools. They were not always spacious, but neither were they claustrophobic, with furniture and fittings which often denote the complex –and interchangeable– uses of the household space, which also housed looms and other small workshop items. Even inside the 18^th-century houses of the well-off classes, luxury was minimal and functionality was decidedly non-decorative. Only the odd religious painting broke the monotony of these spaces. In spite of everything, Catalonia is not Holland, and floral decoration was not particularly prominent in the paintings purchased by the middle class of the time.

Yet again, and as is usually the case throughout the Barcelona 1700 series, we are talking about a city built by the middle class who, when they felt like being extravagant or had accumulated a small fortune, indulged in jewels, very traditional ones, often made of silver, both as a safe investment and as gifts, but who distrusted the value of paintings or sculptures in terms of increasing their assets. The list of clients of the silversmith Francesc Roig includes teachers, ironmongers, tailors and the occasional gardener, which means (although they sometimes bought on credit) that Barcelona had a well-established urban network of savers who were aware of their social role. Nevertheless, Albert Garcia Espuche and Anna Molina cannot help but warn us of how the notarial records and post-mortem inventories took great care in distinguishing between objects “of value” and false ones, with annotations such as “Berber gold”, “balas” (false ruby) or “counterfeit”, when referring to jewels. If cosmopolitanism was patent anywhere, then curiously enough it was in crockery and household articles. Pottery, dishes and small decorative curios arrived from Europe through the brisk maritime trade.

It is interesting to compare how our ancestors structured the insides of their households and the way “modern” flats were conceived, particularly after the advent of noucentisme in the architecture of Barcelona. 20^th-century Catalan society constructed the domestic scenario in a very Freudian way, and if we have become accustomed to the concept of privacy then the world of 1700 will seem very remote. The most common model of flat in Barcelona’s Eixample district features roomy areas for visitors, to be shown and be shown off, such as the salons and famous “salon-dining rooms”, so typical between 1920 and 1970, counterpoised to the private spaces and small rooms, which were kept private. The typical 90-square-metre small flat of Barcelona, which is still basically the norm in the city, can be described as a Freudian space because there is a conscious part (showable) that is counterpoised to the unconscious part (which is not shown), in what amounts to a very marked contrast. On the other hand, the household interior of the 18^th century is a communal space, much more crowded, hardly conceived as a space to be shown off, but nevertheless very lived-in. Smaller, but more alive. Who knows if the new social uses will somehow lead us back to this less individualistic model of habitation.

• Medicina i farmàcia [Medicine and pharmacy]
• La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
• Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
• Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
• Barcelona, 2011
• 303 pages

The Medicina i farmàcia (2011) volume of the Barcelona 1700 collection includes contributions by Albert Garcia Espuche, Alfons Zarzoso, Josep Maria Camarasa, Àlvar Martínez Vidal, José Pardo Tomás, Teresa Huguet Termes, Adrià Casas Ibáñez and Julia Beltrán de Heredia Bercero. In fact, the topic of medicine in the 17^th and 18^th centuries was a pivotal one, not only in the strict sense of health, meaning public and private hygiene, but also thanks to the contribution made by doctors to the appearance of a new mentality which in philosophy is known as empiricism. Medicine and public hygiene are two core parameters in the expression of modernity.

The importance of medical breakthroughs in shaping the change in popular mind-sets in the transition to the modern era has never been properly accounted for. Without the first medical breakthroughs in the fight against a long series of diseases, the power of the Church –and of tradition in general– would not have received the blow it did in the Age of Enlightenment. But medicine is not merely a kind of knowledge; in the eyes of historians it is also a guild that accumulates power. Since the Middle Ages, Catalan doctors, and particularly those hailing from Girona, had a long tradition of going to Montpellier (a centre of medical materialism in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, even commented upon by Diderot in D’Alembert’s Dream) to complete their training, and were an essential part of the political and institutional oligarchy. This is why the European-wide medical debate that raged throughout the second half of the 17^th century, with the traditional Galenists pitted against the “chemical” innovators, had a major echo in Catalonia in the twofold scientific and institutional sense.

The Estudi de Medicina of Barcelona, created in 1565, was not just structured around the school of the Hospital de la Santa Creu, rather it had also constructed a complex public health network in which doctors, apothecaries, surgeons and barbers, healers, midwives and even vets all had their own area of responsibility and where complicated problems of coexistence often reared their head. In fact, besides knowing Catalan, doctors also had to understand Latin. Works such as the Pharmacopea catalana [Catalan Pharmacopoeia], by Joan d’Alòs (1686), illustrate the difficulty involved in regulating the profession. Nor is it extraneous to know that this text was replaced in 1739 by the Pharmacopoeia matritensis, imposed by the Royal Tribunal of the Protomedicus of Castile for the purpose of standardisation.

The rupture caused by the Catalan defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession shattered the Catalan medical tradition, as documented in the valuable article by Alfons Zarzoso “Més que metges: ‘gaudints’” [More than doctors: privileged members of society]. Doctors were well-read individuals who tended to establish complex mechanisms to be part of the city’s well-to-do (the “gaudints”). However, at the same time, medicine and scientific activity were thriving, as documented by the Salvador line of botanists, and particularly Jaume Salvador i Riera (1683-1726), educated in France and Italy, who maintained extensive correspondence with the scientists of the time and who illustrates how culture fared very well in the archduke’s times. The pieces on “Mestres cirurgians i mestres anatòmics” [Master surgeons and master anatomists], by Àlvar Martínez Vidal and José Pardo Tomás, and “L’Hospital de la Santa Creu” (The Santa Creu Hospital), by Teresa Huguet Termes, also provide extensive documentation on a by no means negligible scientific activity which was brutally put down in the wake of the country’s defeat.

• Llengua i literatura [Language and literature]
• La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
• Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
• Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
• Barcelona, 2011
• 287 pages

The sixth volume of the Barcelona 1700 collection is dedicated to the always risky topic of language and literature, and includes articles by Joan Santañach i Suñol, Xavier Torres Sans, Xavier Cazeneuve i Descarrega, Albert Garcia Espuche, Francesc Feliu and Josep Solervicens. Like the rest of the series, this volume also underscores micro-history and social history to demonstrate the cultural growth of a city that, in the year 1516, had ten booksellers and 23 by 1714. Articles such as “La decadència de la Decadència. Consideracions sobre un concepte historiogràfic prescindible” [The decadence of decadence. Considerations regarding a dispensable historiographic concept], by Joan Santañach, establish that the romantic (and highly ideological, in the worse sense of the word) construction of the supposed “shameful decadence / in which the Catalan fable lies”, as Aribau said to Ramon Muns in 1817, has to be revised. Confusing diglossia, politically imposed by absolutism, with Castilianisation, is an error made too often until only recently, but nowadays it is a position that no longer holds up thanks to the available documentation.

The text by Xavier Torres Sans, titled “Llegir, escriure i escoltar a la Barcelona del Sis-cents” [Reading, writing and listening in seventeenth-century Barcelona] coincides with the observations of Albert Rossich and Pep Vallsalobre on appraising the effort made by men of letters at the end of the 16^th century to construct a more demanding literature in Catalan, frustrated by the “heavy silence” after the Catalan Revolt. An unbiased review of the apocryphal Llibre de feits d’armes de Catalunya (which could be translated as the Book of Deeds of Arms of Catalonia) worked upon by Coll i Alentorn is still pending, and which, being a careless text written by a supposed rector from Blanes from the 15^th century is, in actual fact, an “oblique form of political controversy”. It would also have been interesting to carry out an in-depth analysis of the highly complex figure of Narcís Feliu de la Penya and his Fènix de Catalunya [Phoenix of Catalonia; 1683] which, despite being famous as “literature of contrition”, is possibly much more than that. Feliu is a difficult character, and excessively marked by what are known as “retrospective readings” in literary history.

But it is true that the decline of Catalan did not begin after the defeat of 1714; its roots lie particularly in the political crisis after the Catalan Revolt. It is becoming increasingly more evident to historians that the loss of Catalan freedoms must be read as a two-act, rather than a one-act, tragedy. From the sociolinguistic standpoint it is obvious that a country’s loss of political power always goes hand in hand with the loss of the social prestige of its language. The self-hatred of the vanquished is a factor that is also well known to psychologists, so it should come as no surprise that a shaky language and the temptation to abandon one’s own language to take on the neighbours’ would constitute a very obvious characteristic among the dominant classes after two defeats, those of the Catalan Revolt and the War of the Spanish Succession, which left the country flailing and bereft of confident dominant classes. The same pidgin mixture of Catalan, Castilian and Latin used by the poets of the period, such as Jaume de Portell, studied by Francesc Feliu in the article “La llengua literària” [The literary language], can only elicit a smile of commiseration nowadays. It is worth retrieving, from the above article, a very brief excerpt by the canon Josep Romaguera, dated 1681, in which he attempts to “refute the vulgar mistake through which our language is scorned as coarse and crude”. Romaguera, who subsequently became a militant pro-Habsburg, also shows to what extent the most lucid people in the Catalonia of the time were aware of the existence of serious problems in the area of what we now call diglossia.

The defeat of 11 September was the definitive nadir for Catalan language. The notary public Aleix Claramunt, in the chronicle of the siege of Barcelona of 1713-1714, explicitly titled “Per desengany dels esdevenidors” [To the disappointment of those to come] wrote: “May his divine majesty look upon us in pity so that we may learn to mend our ways and fulfil our obligations as loyal vassals. As time goes by things settle down”. As everyone knows, things “did not settle down” at all, but Catalan language was still alive and kicking in the street even in the harshest times of political persecution; a persecution that was brutal and has been documented beyond dispute by Ferrer i Gironès.

Perhaps this is why the most innovative part of the volume are the articles “Paraules de la ciutat del Born” [Words of the city of El Born], by Garcia Espuche, which documents the rich vocabulary of the time, and the extraordinary “La llengua de la documentació notarial de la Barcelona del 1700” [The language of notarial documentation of Barcelona in 1700], by Xavier Cazeneuve, which shows that Castilian barely existed in documents before 1714 and had a purely token presence afterwards, simply because people did not speak the language of Castille. It took a full-blown and minutely-orchestrated programme of brutal repression by the absolutist Bourbons to attempt to turn the tide and make Catalan a minority language.

• Drogues, dolços i tabac [Drugs, sweets and tobacco]
• La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
• Albert Garcia Espuche (direction)
• Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
• Barcelona, 2010
• 240 pages

Drogues, dolços i tabac (2010) is another example of the central thesis of the Barcelona 1700 collection as a whole. The volumes in this series conform a veritable arsenal of documentation that allows us to assert, using first-hand sources, that the Barcelona of the second half of the 17^th century was far from decadent; quite the opposite –it was a first-order European trading hub. This assertion can now be made thanks to a compelling body of documentation, and it is explained in detail by the texts of Albert Garcia Espuche, Maria dels Àngels Pérez Samper, Sergio Solbes Ferri, Julia Beltrán de Heredia Bercero and Núria Miró i Alaix. As in preceding volumes, this one documents the dynamism of the city before 1714, this time through grocery shops.

Adroguer (grocer) is a word with an inevitable touch of exoticism and fantasy, with a special ring for anyone above the age of fifty who had the opportunity to experience the kind of shops that appear to have been driven to extinction by the modern supermarkets. From the end of the 16^th century, grocers, pastry-makers, confectioners, wine and spirit importers and sellers of tobacco (in tobacconists or “estancs” [controlled stores], because it was a much-coveted royal monopoly, which is well documented) fuelled a popular Barcelona that remained with us, it seems, until only yesterday. The book demonstrates that Barcelona’s fame as a “shop-keeping” and craftsman’s city is well founded.

Since days of old, Barcelona has been used to living well, and the documentation furnished in the volume proves that, particularly in the second half of the 17^th century, the level of consumption was very high and much more equitable than has often been believed. If ancient societies quarrelled over salt, then the wealth and growth of modern cities on the other hand can be measured by the increase in their consumption of sugar and tobacco. But if historians are interested in grocers and groceries it is because they are also a decisive economic phenomenon. The mental universe of groceries is not limited to the tight confines of the city, it is ubiquitous. By definition, the material sold by grocers to their customers is global. A grocer in the Baroque period and the Age of Enlightenment was a trader who dealt with the American colonies and countries with fantastic-sounding names. A city like Barcelona, which consumed Peruvian bark, lignum vitae and xina, products that reached the city from across the Mediterranean and the seven seas, was well integrated in the major trading routes and was a major consumer. This is why grocery articles eventually became known as “colonial” products. A city with a large number of grocers and where food of a certain level of luxury and distinction is eaten has to be well connected to the rest of the world.

Tobacco and spirits should not be regarded as mere commercial products; from the standpoint of what is now termed “sociological imagination”, the trading and consumption of these goods constitute, first and foremost, the symptom of a network of highly complex social relationships in which Barcelona held a significant position. From the second half of the 17^th century onwards, and very broadly speaking, it appears that all over Europe increasingly wider layers of urban society managed to switch from a purely subsistence-based economy to one driven by a certain level of lavish consumption. In the course of the 18^th century, new consumers began to appear among the petite bourgeoisie, who some two generations before had been known as “craftsmen” (a concept which, by the way, should be duly refined one day in terms of its complex relationship with those who since the end of the 19^th century must be regarded as “middle classes”). One trait of these craft-workers was how they began to consume products which might be regarded as luxury articles, such as chocolate, tobacco and coffee, thitherto reserved for aristocrats and idle clergy. It might be true that for the modest Catalan petit bourgeois a cup of drinking chocolate was a luxury to be partaken of only on special occasions (a birthday or wedding), because the pastry-making world conjures up the sophistication and complexity of social relationships. Both in the past and today, any city worth its salt must have good pastry shops and even better cafés.

Pastry and confectionery products in the 17^th century gradually became consumer items, initially more typical of the higher classes (King Charles II of Spain had a French pastry cook, warranting great respect in his Catalan subjects), although they eventually spread to a broader audience. Garcia Espuche documents that before 1663 some 560 different articles were on sale in Barcelona’s groceries, while the figure rose to over 800 after this date. However, it is obvious that the chief novelty in the 17^th and 18^th centuries was tobacco, sold in very different forms and with an increasingly greater demand. Long gone were the days when one of Columbus’s companions, Rodrigo de Jerez, had been incarcerated by the Inquisition in Barcelona for smoking in public “because only the devil could give a man the power to expel smoke through the mouth”. The whole affair is said to have cost poor Rodrigo ten years in jail!

The excavation work carried out at the Barcelona of El Born has yielded a major amount of household articles, many of which are beautifully made and were imported from all over the Mediterranean area and Northern European countries. It has also uncovered a huge number of kaolin pipes (almost 8,000 fragments from local workshops and from England, Holland and different Mediterranean and Balkan ports), which demonstrate how widespread the habit –or should we say the vice?– of smoking was among highly different social classes. A very interesting article by Núria Miró i Alaix, “L’èxit dels nous productes d’adrogueria: xocolata, te, cafè i tabac” (The success of new grocery products: chocolate, tea, coffee and tobacco), full of outstanding photographs, documents the fine porcelain of the period: drinking chocolate cups and “bowls”, imported wall tiles from Genoa, pottery from Umbria, Chinaware and Syrian imitations. We know that Barcelona imported almost 70,000 pipes from Holland between 1667 and 1675, and that its refined society was greatly concerned about pastry-making, hence a pottery industry flourished in the city: jars, pitchers, pots, pans, draining boards and a broad range of household articles were extensively consumed, and there was even a burgeoning home fashion industry in the city. The article “Adroguers i adrogueries, tot un univers d’objectes” (Grocers and groceries, a whole universe of objects), by Julia Beltrán de Heredia Bercero, also accompanied by some very interesting photographs, offers readers a broad and very significant overview of the findings from El Born which we are sure will spark great curiosity when they are eventually exhibited.

Maria dels Àngels Pérez Samper contributes an interesting article on “La confitura en els receptaris” (Confectionery in Recipe Books), which, while it might appear to be a minor topic, speaks volumes of the standard of living in the Barcelona of El Born, as well as the period’s feminine sensitivity. The fact that the inhabitants of Barcelona had a sweet tooth is no novelty; they still do. The recipes copied in her text (“how to make cherry cups”, “how to make quince jam”, “how to make marzipan”, etc.) are the living proof of the everyday existence of countless nameless women who, it should be said, knew how to read and write and felt obliged to pass on their wisdom to their daughters and granddaughters. What is more, readers can try their own hand at making the recipes proposed by Professor Pérez Samper, because, as I am told, jam and preserve making techniques have barely changed in three centuries…

But perhaps the most significant article is the one penned by Sergio Solbes Ferri, titled “Una cita con el monopolio del tabaco en España” (An appointment with the tobacco monopoly in Spain), which traces the development of the estanco general de tabaco (general tobacconist’s), an economic mainstay for the absolutist State, engendered in Castile in 1636 but which slowly but surely took root all over Spain. In Catalonia, the definitive tobacconist’s arrived with the Nova Planta decrees, although the story of tobacco tax long pre-dates it, because the Council of One Hundred had levied the tax as early as 1655 to redress the city’s financial difficulties, which, by the way, sparked an extraordinary uproar. Significantly, the tobacco monopoly led smokers in Barcelona, who had had more than fifty varieties to choose from before the War of the Spanish Succession, to have to make do with the output of the factory in Seville, which gave rise to smuggling. There is nothing new under the sun.

• Festes i celebracions [Festivals and celebrations]
• La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
• Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
• Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
• Barcelona, 2010
• 310 pages

The Festes i celebracions (2010) volume of Barcelona 1700 includes articles by Albert Garcia Espuche, Henry Ettinghausen and Lluís Calvo with Josep Martí which underline the collection’s general thesis: before 1700, Barcelona was an open and passably happy city in which religious and profane festivals (and even the more strictly political ones) heralded, paradoxically, an opportunity to reinforce the bonds of coexistence, and where political struggle often leveraged, almost strategically, recreational celebration.

In urban anthropology it is well known that festivals, far from being a reason for disproportionate revelry, are a well-defined manifestation of civility: the festival brings people together, leading to a social transversality that everyday work precludes. The article “Una ciutat de festes” [A city of festivals], by Garcia Espuche, a large part of which addresses Carnival, also makes an assertion that is of great significance for the study of the network of urban relationships. If his thesis is correct, the role of guilds and associations as the organisers of festivals was the element that afforded the latter a significance of their own and curtailed possible disturbances and unruliness by supposedly conflictive groups. The city’s autonomy was also a guarantee of order. At the end of the day, places like El Born were still like “town squares”, far removed from any aristocratic space. Barcelona, yesterday and today, had few spaces for the scenography of power.

One significant topic, also addressed by Ettinghausen in the article “Barcelona, centre mediàtic del segle XVII” [Barcelona, 17^th-century media centre], is the fight between the religious and civil authorities to control festivals. Both the small publications released for canonisation festivals or when eminent personages visited the city and the official rules of associations (but never their activities!) show that festivals in honour of patron saints were more recreational than religious, and the repeated prohibitions are, in themselves, a clear expression of the failure of repression.

• Jocs, triquets i jugadors [Games, ball courts and players]
• La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
• Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
• Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
• Barcelona, 2009
• 237 pages

Jocs, triquets i jugadors (2009), the third volume in the Barcelona 1700 collection, presents three extensive articles, the first two spanning more than one hundred pages each, written, respectively, by Albert Garcia Espuche, who describes “Una ciutat de triquets i jugadors” [A city of ball courts and players]; Paloma Sànchez and Esther Sarrà, who present “Naips, l’origen. Una aproximació” [Cards, the origin. An overview], and Julia Beltrán de Heredia Bercero, who, together with Núria Miró i Alaix, documents the archaeological findings in El Born related to this area in the article “Jugar a la Barcelona dels segles XVI-XVII: objectes de joc i joguines trobats a les excavacions de la ciutat” [Games in the Barcelona of the 16^th and 17^th centuries: game objects and toys found in the city’s excavations].

Anybody who is interested in forms of socialisation knows that both now and in the past, games –or esport, to use the more modern term in Catalan, although this word actually dates from the end of the 19^th century, and using it in the context of the 17^th century is anachronistic– not only “unleash passions” but are also a magnificent way of promoting social relationships. Through games and gambling, which have always gone hand in hand, one realises (as in the case of festivals) just how social groups define a region, how economic transactions are managed and how the city can pick up on and appropriate a vast number of foreign influences. In the words of Garcia Espuche: “Games show, as do other areas, that the Catalan capital absorbed foreign cultural elements, but that it also created and spread other ones, conceived locally.”

As the materials inherent in games are by nature perishable, there are few remaining objects and even fewer pictures related to this area. In Barcelona there are no period drawings or paintings that represent game pieces, which is easy to understand if we recall the expression “jocs de mans, jocs de vilans” (hand games are villains’ games), and that only nobles or the well-to-do purchased paintings. Neither was material culture held in any great social esteem, which explains why the dolls and toys of the era in general, such as cards, billiards or the ball court balls, are known to us more by dint of descriptions –and government prohibitions– rather than thanks to any material in the hands of collectors. Nevertheless, notarial documents and post-mortem inventories show that most homes normally had “playing cards” and sometimes even a chess set, albeit few.

The synodal constitutions of 1673 prohibited the sale of “clay dolls”, the cheap toy youngsters played with, “at the gates, walls and porticoes of this City’s Churches”. We also know the problems caused by the so-called “pedrades” (stone fights, not between young people from different streets, but rather organised events which even had rules), and we also have information on how people cheated at cards or used loaded dice. When all is said and done, the modern-day tricksters that work La Rambla are hardly new and are to be found in all maritime cities. This book records a substantial part of the recreational and festive life of the inhabitants of Barcelona in the 17^th and early 18^th centuries, from the innocent games of youngsters through to the vice associated with taverns and prostitution.

According to Miquel Ribes, a gentleman hailing from Granollers who visited Barcelona during the 1616 Carnival, the inhabitants of Barcelona “play polla/ pilota, argolla/ and passa Déu”. Polla is the amount wagered on the table in card games; the pilota is the French jeu de paume, a forerunner of tennis, and argolla is a halfway-house between cricket and golf. The meaning of the expression Passa Déu remains unknown. The game of billiards in Barcelona dates from 1682. Trinquets (ball courts) were places for games (although not necessarily ball games, as they are nowadays in Valencia). The trinquet was not actually a game in itself, but rather a recreational venue, sometimes with more or less covert prostitution; Garcia Espuche has identified 21, and there was at least one, the Casa de la Lleona, that was blatantly aristocratic and Pro-Habsburg, leading it to be shut down by Phillip V’s troops.

One interesting case is the joc de l’auca (a variant of Snakes and Ladders), very probably conceived in Florence circa 1580. Louis XIII of France is known to have played this game as a child in 1612. In Catalonia, the printer from Moià Pere Abadal printed a primitive Snakes and Ladders circa 1675, with white boxes containing drawings. Nevertheless, as history is full of surprises, apparently this auca is also derived from roulette. In a nutshell, when you study the history of people without history, you discover that our 18^th-century ancestors, far from being peevish prigs who spent most of their time in churches and smelt of candle wax, were fun-loving and outgoing people.

It should therefore come as no surprise –some things never change– that the authorities in the 17^th and 18^th centuries clearly sought to control games and gambling to prevent them from becoming a source of disturbances, cheating and vice. The role of games, how they spread and how systems of control grew up around them (and even possible associated public order problems), is an excellent mirror of social tensions. Garcia Espuche’s thesis, which holds that such games did not generate social tensions, but that they coexisted with “a high city, noble and passive; a low city, commercial and active; a silent and reverential levitic city, and a popular city, moderately given to vice”, allows an excellent insight into social segmentation in Barcelona in modern times.

• Dansa i música [Dance and music]
• La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
• Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
• Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
• Barcelona, 2009
• 326 pages

The Dansa i música (2009) volume of the Barcelona 1700 collection is written by Albert Garcia Espuche, Josep Borràs i Roca, Joan Pellisa i Pujades, Josep Dolcet and Carles Mas i Garcia, and also includes Joaquim Albareda’s transcription of the unpublished manuscript –kept in the city’s Historic Archive– entitled Memòria de les danses [Memory of the dances], by Josep Faust de Potau i de Ferran (1701). It is worth noting that this salvaged text is exceptionally important and that in the last three or four years it has had a major repercussion in ballet all over Europe, being one of the few documents that details how to execute a great number of cult dances. The transcript of the dance steps that the noble Potau learnt from his teacher from Barcelona Francesc Olivella is now part of the repertoire of some companies and we trust that one day, sooner rather than later, some of these choreographies will be performed on our stages.

Academic dance, along with fencing, was central to the socialisation of eighteenth-century nobles and high society, as Josep Dolcet explains in a well-documented article in this volume, “L’expansió de la dansa d’escola“ [The expansion of school dancing], which precedes the publication of the manuscript. Between 1603 and 1721 it is estimated that there were no fewer than 35 dancing teachers in Barcelona, an impressive figure for a demographically limited society. However, Dolcet suggests that Catalan dancing teachers, who ultimately made their living in a society with few nobles and far removed from the Court, “were probably in contact with very broad layers of society“; their clients were the wealthy bourgeoisie, merchants who wanted to organise soirées and young hotheads out to get married. The data is significant because it allows us to establish sociologically that social change was afoot in the Barcelona of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: if there were dancing teachers it meant that there were affluent social strata looking for new outlets for their socialité. Anyone interested in the forms of sociability of the Ancien Régime will find exhaustive documentation on the topic in the pages of the book. But in the pre-industrial world, music was not just the privilege of the nobles or an accompaniment for religious functions, rather the entire city abounded with music. The role of chapel masters and religious music was not, in Barcelona in 1700, as decisive as had been believed, because it was also accompanied by an abundant popular musical tradition, but even so it should not be underestimated.

Music, as is well known, possesses an amazing and strange characteristic; it can arouse an unconscious, deep-rooted and almost irrational aspect of human personality that marks a person’s character. If people sing to keep trouble at bay, then music accompanies (or if you want, it “drives”) the beat of the city, heightens personal relationships and adds sol-fa and counterpoint to life and death. Music was a well-known key element in socialisation in all ancient cities. The role festivities play as a “social lubricant” in the traditional setting cannot be overlooked. The rhythm of the bells laid down the beat for cities and civil or religious festivals were accompanied by music and dances. The residents of the different districts hired bands (and were often part of them) to act at local festivals, guild celebrations and family gatherings. In old cities, music was never “background music”, but rather a tune to work to and a call to socialisation and celebration. Until the industrial revolution and noise of the looms choked the city’s songs, music played a central role in coexistence. There are numerous accounts of how in the great European cities, particularly in the middle of the nineteenth century, the noise of the factories silenced the songs of the blind and the voices of women who would sing while hanging out the washing. Even in the twentieth century, in the grim aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán penned his classic texts on the role of music and radio songs on popular sensitivity.

As is inferred by the research from the volume in question, Barcelona, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was a “city of dancing and guitars” with lively carnivals organised “by each neighbourhood”, with autonomy in spending and very often conceived from the grass-roots level. Garcia Espuche cites a text from the chronicler Miquel Ribes, who wrote thus about Carnival in 1616: “The people dance/ with sails to the wind/ with great energy,/ as is the custom/ with a great beat/ of drums;/ young and old/ and artisans,/ on such days/ everyone celebrates.” In Barcelona, guitars were “the bachelors’ instrument” and tavern life was still a main cause of concern for do-gooders and ecclesiastical authorities, who looked warily upon such pursuits; inducement to sin (youth, music and taverns) was central to the concerns of the public authorities at the time, as it is today.

Josep Borràs, in a documented article titled “Els instruments musicals i els seus constructors” [Musical instruments and their makers], describes how Barcelona’s instrument-making workshops in the seventeenth century “have a technological foundation which would have been unthinkable not so long ago”, and as from 1556 they had had a guild of their own (the turners’ guild) which produced a whole range of instruments, including flutes, flageolets, oboes and bassoons. Barcelona had a band of minstrels (the forerunner of the city orchestra) that performed at official receptions, processions and public events, as well as at masses on particularly solemn saints’ days. He even goes into some detail regarding the organisation of the city’s trumpeters (nearly twelve members), who were “on the city’s payroll”, just like other cities such as Bologna, Naples, Florence and Antwerp. Joan Pellisa, besides contributing some very interesting information about the luthiers of the time, also comprehensively documents the connection between the city’s guilds of carpenters and musicians.

Obviously, a city of Barcelona’s standing had to have lineages of organists, and in this regard the article by Josep Borràs recovers the information provided by two very important books for the musical culture of the eighteenth century: Guía para los principiantes [A beginner’s guide; 1720), by Pere Rabassa (Barcelona, 1683-Seville, 1767), and Mapa armónico [Harmonic map), by Francesc Valls (c. 1671-1747), the former teacher and chapel master at the Cathedral of Barcelona between 1709 and 1726.

But perhaps, for the curious reader and non-music professional, the most significant part of the volume is to be found in the pages of the article Músiques de la Barcelona barroca [Music of Baroque Barcelona] (1640-1711), by Joseph Dolcet, documenting the world of chapel masters, organists and choirboys, and particularly the birth of the opera in Catalonia in the royal court of Charles III. Italian opera was the great novelty of the time and the Catalan Government’s Diaries narrate how after the king’s wedding and “the kissing of hands Their Royal Majesties went off to see an Italian opera in the Llotja del Mar”. The reader cannot help but imagine the scene. It would be very interesting to probe the relationship between the Catalan and Italian Court musicians, and perhaps one day we will have more information on the relationship between the Catalan composer Domènec Tarradellas, who had settled in Italy, and pro-Habsburg sentiment. Few Catalans know that the work of Tarradellas, now being reissued, is held on a par with Europe’s best, so much so that even Diderot cites him in Rameau’s Nephew. In any case, reading the volume leaves the reader in no doubt whatsoever: Barcelona has been a sophisticated and musical city for centuries! And it will continue to be so.

• Jardins, jardineria i botànica [Gardens, gardening and botany]
• La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
• Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
• Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
• Barcelona, 2008
• 229 pages

Jardins, jardineria i botànica (2008) is the first book in the collection La Ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700, a series in which ten volumes have been published hitherto with a twofold purpose: to publicise and situate the findings uncovered in the El Born excavation site and to put the Barcelona of the 17^th and 18^th centuries in context based on micro-history and on a detailed understanding of everyday life, particularly with the help of notarial and guild archives. The first book features the participation of Albert Garcia Espuche, Montse Rivero Matas, Josep M. Montserrat Martí and Neus Ibáñez Cortina. The volume ends with the transcription, by X. Cazeneuve, of the anonymous manuscript from 1703 entitled Cultura de jardins per governar perfetament las flors, arbres y plantas per la constel·lació de Barcelona [Garden culture to perfectly govern the flowers, trees and plants for the constellation of Barcelona], a veritable gardening manual, the work of a fine amateur, who gives detailed descriptions of the world of flowers and plants “for anyone who wants to have a harmonious and tidy garden”. This text features an interesting prelude in the form of an article by Montse Rivero, Cultura de Jardins. Les anotacions d’un jardiner [Garden culture. A gardener’s notes], which shows, for example, that the climate of Barcelona (a bit colder than it is now) was suitable for growing orange and lemon trees without any kind of winter protection.

It is significant that the concept of garden, counterpoised to that of the vegetable garden, should emerge at the beginning of modern times. A garden is a space dedicated to ornamental flowers, with a certain architectural organisation of its space, and with a recreational objective. The vegetable garden, on the other hand, is a space for subsistence agriculture, for growing food, and is often used recreationally by elderly people who cannot get out into the countryside. The garden, based on the Versailles, Italian or Central-European model, has always had a symbolic function, and denotes status; it conveys an urban and courtly sensitivity. The vegetable garden, on the other hand, is related to difficult subsistence in rural and hermetic societies, often troubled by the spectre of famine. The garden is urban, whereas the vegetable garden is peri-urban.

There is something intimate and unassailable in the garden, so that seeking reclusion in the hortus conclusus, the “secret garden”, alien to the sounds of the world, often provided classical men of letters with the exact gesture and metaphor for the sensitive soul. We do not know what the Epicure Garden was like, a model of harmony and friendship par excellence throughout the centuries, although it is known to resemble more the vegetable garden, rather than what we would identify today as a recreational space. But the platitude of the pagan hortus amoenus (a mixture of library and garden, in a letter by Cicero) quickly came to grief at the hands of the barbarians and did not reappear until the Renaissance. The medieval Christians and the first humanists who, like Petrarch and Boccaccio, regarded nature as a perilous place, reconstructed (perhaps using an Arab matrix) a veritable mythology of flowers and garden that they used as a space for pleasure, entertainment and social interaction. The maze was both a symbol and a society game.

Knowing that in the course of the 17^th and 18^th centuries Barcelona was a true “garden city”, where flowers were imported from everywhere, and several indigenous tulip varieties were created, signifies at least three things: that it was not a densely populated city (the city’s densification was yet another one of the consequences of the defeat in 1714); that it was a pleasant and rich city, whose citizens were sophisticated enough to have time and money to engage in cum dignitatem recreation, and finally that it was a city well connected with the world, that imported fruits and seeds that were cultivated by its gardeners. Pere Serra Postius described (between 1734 and 1748) the vegetable gardens of Fusina, near the Ciutadella, saying that “there could hardly be a more joyous and delightful place to walk in anywhere else in the world”. The waters of the Rec Comtal irrigation channel guaranteed a continuous supply to the city, and we know, as this volume also describes in detail, that for many traders the hort de regalo (ornamental garden) was a small but affordable luxury.

If gardening is a synonym of civility, and the flower is an expression of good taste, then there is no doubt that the Barcelona that tended to its horts de regalo, with anise, lavender, orange flower and rosemary plants in its houses, was an eminently civilised place. The defeat of 1714 was not merely a political and institutional calamity. As is wont to occur in all wars, it was also a civil calamity.