Description
Book SynopsisThe Splendor and Opulence of the Past traces the career of Jaume Caresmar (17171791), a church historian and a key figure of the Catalan Enlightenment who transcribed tens of thousands of parchments to preserve and glorify Catalonia''s medieval past in the face of its diminishing autonomy. As Paul Freedman shows, Caresmar''s books, essays, and transcriptionssome only recently discoveredprovide fresh insights into the Middle Ages as remembered in modern Catalonia and illustrate how a nation''s past glories and humiliations can inform contemporary politics and culture.
From the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, Catalonia was a thriving, independent set of principalities within what would become modern Spain. In the wake of the dismantling of its autonomy by the eighteenth-century Spanish state, Catalan scholars looked to the region''s medieval independence and wealth as a means of maintaining a distinct Catalan identity and resisting Castilian hegemony. Thro
