Posted by Jonathan Jarrett
https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2025/12/29/a-post-for-josep-mara-salrach/
http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/?p=24259
This is very old news now, partly because I didn’t hear it when it was new, but also because I’m afraid I left it until I’d got some of my own news out of the way, as the subject wasn’t going to mind the delay. Because yes, alas, this is another post of passing: one of the great contributors to my field is no more.
The late Josep María Salrach
If you read this blog, and also read my footnotes, then you’ve heard of
Josep María Salrach i Marès, who was Professor Emeritus of History at the Universitat Pompeu Fabrà, where he had been Professor since 1993. But if you read my blog and don’t read my notes, you might have missed his name, and otherwise, while his name would probably be familiar to anyone who studies Catalan history, if you’re not one of those I’d be surprised if you’d heard of him. I did a little bit to try to change that in 2014 when
I reviewed one of his books, in English, but even then I had to make the case that it would be worthwhile people trying to read it in Catalan, because as far as I know he never wrote in any non-Iberian language. Maybe some French? But nothing further north-east than that, for sure. And one might say that, since he was first and foremost a historian of early medieval Catalonia, no matter how important he was, did he need to write in any other languages? His readership could meet him on his own ground.
Now, let’s be clear, as a historian of early medieval Catalonia he was pretty important. I still cite a little pair of books he published in 1978,
El procés de formació nacional de Catalunya (segles VIII – IX), because since he wrote them we’ve known who succeeded whom in charge of the Catalan counties in the eighth to tenth centuries, at least as well as we’re ever likely to (
some work still to do in the ninth, some might say…).
1 But that was a set of problems historians had been wrestling with since the early nineteenth century, which he just solved. His work on social change in the area, which was very much in the vein of Pierre Bonnassie’s masterwork on the subject but more explicitly informed by Marx, seemed to go through slight changes every time he wrote about it and I found it quite hard to keep up with exactly what his views now were; but they were always the thing which needed citing on that topic.
2 And on the way into his retirement he did a huge amount on dispute settlement in the Catalan counties, some of which is what I was reviewing and which is all really good.
3 And he was a critical driver of
the monumental Catalunya Carolíngia project, as well as being part of the team which got the first decent slice of the comital archive of Barcelona into print since 1951, so as well as actually doing the history of the area he enabled many others to do it as well.
4 But yes, it might be argued that if you don’t read Catalan you can’t really play in that park, so if you needed that stuff you had already made sure you could read it. And if you were in that park, you know Salrach’s work.
But there was more to it, all the same. He wrote a really useful book in Spanish on the social situation of the medieval peasantry, not just in Catalonia but in Europe more widely, and there actually aren’t many of those (and really none in English except, kinda sorta, the work of
Paul Freedman, who also started by working on Catalonia).
5 And he wrote a short global history of famine in deep perspective which is, as far as I know, the only such thing, and no-one’s heard of it because it’s in Catalan.
6 And as I said in that review, even his Catalan-focused work still often has things to tell scholars of other areas, because when you have the kind of breadth and depth of evidence that that Catalan charter corpus gives you, you can just see more of what’s going on sometimes. I often found it quite frustrating that I couldn’t share what I was learning from his work directly. I would submit that Catalan is not a difficult language to learn to read, even, for European medievalists at least. I never had any training in it, or even in Castilian; I just went at it with French and Latin and managed. But few people put themselves in the position where they have to try, and so Salrach’s wider-ranging work was as little known outside Catalonia as his more locally-focused stuff. It seemed quite unjust.
However, these were choices he made and it obviously didn’t bother him very much. We had some very limited correspondence over the book that I reviewed in 2013; he had cited me in it and so sent me a copy, with a handwritten apology for having there called me an American. (It was a fair enough assumption; it’s not as if anyone else, other than
Roger Collins, has ever got into this stuff from the UK except
Susan Reynolds and
Chris Wickham, both always in comparison with other areas, whereas the US has quite a respectable array of medieval Catalanists.
7) That brought us into contact, and while it would be safe to say that he did not agree with much of what I have written, when we finally met at
my second Catalan doctoral examination, we talked pretty much non-stop for some time despite barely sharing a language. He was horrified to find I had intended to pay for the final volumes of the
Catalunya Carolíngia, and rang the shop the next day so that when I went in myself, they were already instructed to let me walk off with pretty much anything I wanted. I tried not to take the mickey, but it was difficult… And subsequently he did me an even greater favour, which was to secure me my second Catalan publication by asking me to write
a short biographical article on Count-Marquis Borrell II for a volume on famous Catalans where he was dealing with the medieval stuff. I had to do it, he said, because I was “el màxim especialista”, and as you can tell I’ve always treasured that compliment. So he was an extremely kind and courteous man and I owe him a lot in person as well as the masses I owe to his work, both in print and behind editorial scenes; he was one of those people without whom what I have done and what I have become would just not have been possible.
Joan Vilaseca also wrote him a touching and much more immediate obituary which also stresses Josep María’s kindness and courtesy, so I think we can assume this was a general trait, and it’s the one without which the whole academic business can’t survive so really, there are a great many reasons to be thankful for him and his work. I just wish there was still going to be more of them.
He was 80 when he died, which surprised me. Although I knew vaguely when he had retired, meeting him in 2019 I would have put him closer to 64 than the 74 he apparently was; he was fit, energetic and clear of mind, and I understand from this obituary that even a couple of weeks before he died he’d just got another book launched. Someone had told me he was ill some months before that; I heard no more and hoped it had been recoverable. But it was evidently not. I can’t claim to have known him well; but I would give something to be able to have a few more arguments with him about
who killed Archbishop Ató of Osona or what was behind
the closure of Sant Joan de les Abadesses.
7 I’m struggling to find an end to this that’s deeper than that, because in some sense I’m still not really convinced the chance, the man, has gone. But, it is. I wish I’d sent a few more e-mails, got to Barcelona a few more times… But I got a lot of good from Josep María Salrach anyway, a lot of people did and it is a great shame that he had to leave before he was finished.
1. Josep M. Salrach i Marés, El procés de formació nacional de Catalunya (segles VIII – IX), Llibres a l’Abast 137 & 137 (Barcelona 1978), 2 vols. For 9th-century modifications, try Joan Vilaseca Corbera, Recerques sobre l’Alta Edat Mitjana Catalana (Terrassa 2010).
2. The last one I actually read was Josep M. Salrach, Catalunya a la fi del primer mil·lenni, Biblioteca de Història de Catalunya 4 (Lleida 2005), which was definitely related to the first, Josep Maria Salrach, El procés de feudalització (segles III-XII), Historia de Catalunya 2 (Barcelona 1987), but not the same. I’m almost sure there must have been an update, as well, even if not a book-length one.
3. The core of this was the work I did review, Josep M. Salrach, Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Referències 55 (Vic 2013). There was also a massive edition of all relevant documents, Josep M. Salrach i Marès & Tomas Montagut i Estragués (eds), Justícia i resolució de conflictes a la Catalunya medieval: col·lecció diplomàtica, segles IX-XI, Textos jurídics catalans: documents 2 (Barcelona 2018), and one of his only two works in English known to me, Josep M. Salrach, "Documentary production and dispute records in Catalonia before the year 1100", in Isabel Alfonso, José Maria Andrade Cernadas & Andre Evangelista Marques (eds), Records and Processes of Dispute Settlement in Early Medieval Societies: Iberia and Beyond, Medieval Law and its Practice 41 (Leiden 2024), pp. 153–180.
4. On that project, see Gaspar Feliu, "La Catalunya carolíngia", Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics Vol. 31 (Barcelona 2020), pp. 79–93, online here.
5. José María Salrach, La formación del campesinado en el occidente antiguo y medieval: análisis de los cambios en las condiciones de trabajo desde la Roma clásica al feudalismo, Historia Universal Medieval 5 (Madrid 1997). A lot of the books that look as if they will be about the life of peasants actually turn out to be about the organisation of labour by lords, which even Salrach’s didn’t really aim to escape; one exception to my remark here is Werner Rósener, Peasants in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1996), but even that began in German and isn’t, I have to say, easy going. For Freedman’s work see Paul Freedman, "Sainteté et sauvagerie : Deux images du paysan au Moyen Age" in Annales : Économies, sociétés, civilisations Vol. 47 no. 3 (Paris 1992), pp. 539–560, DOI: 10.3406/ahess.1992.279062 and idem, "Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe: Approaches to the Question of Peasant Resistance" in Filozofski vestnik Vol. 18 no. 2 (Ljubljana 1997), pp. 179–211, online here; both of these seem to have come out of his work for idem, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia, Cambridge Iberian and Latin American Studies (Cambridge 1991), itself given an updated summary in idem, "Peasant Servitude in Mediaeval Catalonia" in Catalan Historical Review Vol. 6 (Barcelona 2013), pp. 33–43, DOI: 10.2436/20.1000.01.84.
6. Josep Maria Salrach i Marès, La fam al món: passat i present, Referècies 50 (Vic 2009).
7. Him: Josep Maria Salrach i Marès, L’assassinat de l’arquebisbe Ató (971) i les lluites pel poder en els orígens de Catalunya. Discurs de recepció de Josep Maria Salrach i Marès com a membre numerari de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, llegit el dia 30 de maig de 2018 (Barcelona 2018), on Academia.edu here; idem, "Política i moral: els comtes de Cerdanya-Besalú i la comunitat de monges benedictines de Sant Joan (segles IX-XI)", in Irene Brugués, Xavier Costa & Coloma Boada (edd.), El monestir de Sant Joan: Primer cenobi femení dels comtats catalans (887-1017) (Barcelona 2019), pp. 225–257. Me: Jonathan Jarrett, "Archbishop Ató of Osona: False Metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica" in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München 2010), pp. 1–42; idem, "Nuns, Signatures, and Literacy in late-Carolingian Catalonia" in Traditio Vol. 74 (Cambridge 2019), pp. 125–152, DOI: 10.1017/tdo.2019.7.
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