Abstract
The book’s principal subjects—the place and nature of Catalonia, how Catalans recall their medieval past, and the construction of a Catalan national identity—are introduced here. When states and their peoples are at odds, as are Spain and the Catalans, the past often becomes a political and cultural tool. This makes the past as much a part of anthropological and sociological realities as it is an accumulation of historical truths. The introduction identifies several subthemes: Catalan identity, definitional problems of nation and nationalism, problems in the historical construction of Spain, medieval history and medievalisms, and problems in the relationship of historical work to broader societal uses of the past.
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- 1.
Readers might benefit by keeping an electronic device handy while reading this book, since we will often refer to online sites that offer evidence and illustrations of what we are exploring. At this point, for example, entering “Catalonia medieval map” into a search engine will help you gain a visual sense of Catalonia’s geographic position in the western European, Iberian, and Mediterranean contexts. Depending on your degree of interest in the details, a comparison of several maps will demonstrate such things as the territorial construction of Catalonia over time, the region’s major cities and towns, its physical geography and major landmarks, and so on.
- 2.
See, as one of many examples, CEIP San José de Calasanz, “Jaume Primer Tenia Cents Soldats,” 2008, accessed November 8, 2017. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2TkJG_L-FQ
- 3.
Benedict Anderson , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
- 4.
Montserrat Guibernau , “Anthony D. Smith on Nations and National Identity: A Critical Assessment,” Nations and Nationalisms 10, no. 1–2 (2014): 125–141, at 130.
- 5.
J.N. Hillgarth, “Spanish Historiography and Iberian Reality,” History and Theory 24 (1985): 23–43, is still an outstanding presentation of the problem.
- 6.
Readers curious to encounter some of the myriad examples of its uses can type “Catalonia is Not Spain” into a search engine.
- 7.
Reported in Matthew Tree, “Catalan Language Literature: What’s Going On?” in What’s Up with Catalonia? ed. Liz Castro, ed., (Ashfield, MA: Catalonia Press, 2013): 147–152, at 152.
- 8.
Presentations of these internal distinctions include Rosa M. Bosch et al., Jo No Soc de Barcelona (Barcelona: Planeta, 2000), and Gregoria Morán, La Decadencia de Cataluña: Contado por un Charnego (Barcelona: Debate, 2013).
- 9.
Charles Beard, one of the first presidents of the American History Association, took up the problem of history as a noble dream in an essay published in 1935, “That Noble Dream,” The American Historical Review 41 (1935), 74–87. For a more recent assessment, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Also see David Lowenthal , The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and the introductory remarks in Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1978).
- 10.
A quick and useful introduction to the nature and problems of historical work is J. Llewellyn and S. Thompson, “Problems of thinking about history,” Alpha History (blog), accessed August 14, 2017, http://alphahistory.com/problems-of-history/
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Vargas, M.A. (2018). Introduction. In: Constructing Catalan Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76744-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76744-4_1
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