2026-04-14T03:26:32Zhttps://recercat.cat/oai/request
oai:recercat.cat:10459.1/4684852025-09-15T18:56:24Zcom_2072_3622col_2072_479130
RECERCAT author Benito i Monclús, Pere author Reixach Sala, Albert author Barber Blasco, Alberto author Mas Craviotto, Adrià author Roca Cabau, Guillem 2025-08-10 The present article aims to assess the epidemic sequence after the Black Death and up to around 1530 in Catalonia (northeastern Iberia). It specifically examines rich sources to assess its effects in the framework of European dominant scholarship on demographic and socioeconomic dynamics that are too often only centred on the lethal plague between 1348 and 1351. It resorts to a robust sample of urban and rural communities throughout Catalonia endowed with documentary sources that provide both direct evidence (institutional death counts and obituary books from the cities of Barcelona and Vic and various rural parishes) and indirect evidence (using will series as a proxy) complemented with municipal registers and narrative sources from different observatories throughout Catalan territory. It reconstructs the specific chronology, geography and changing features in terms of the duration and seasonality of epidemic crises in this area. Similarly, it offers local estimates of mortality directly due to some of the major outbreaks of plague and other diseases from 1362 to 1530 that improve on traditional approaches based on simple comparisons of total population figures at different moments. Finally, through the best documented cases, there are some preliminary insights into child and adult mortality trends in times of contagion, as well as their household-clustered impact. The observed frequency, distribution and approximative mortality rates of some epidemic episodes should contribute to resituate current hypotheses of the effects of demographic shocks arising from epidemics in premodern Europe.This work has been written within the framework of the research projects EPIDEMED [PID2020-117839GB-I00], funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, MORTALITAS [PID2023-151785NBI00], funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER, UE, IlerCriSan [2023CRINDESTABC], funded by Indest-UdL, the research group 2021 SGR 1607, supported by the Government of Catalonia, and in the particular case of Albert Reixach Sala, grant [RYC2022-036326-I], funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FSE+. cc-by-nc-nd (c) The Authors, 2025 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Epidemics Black Death 14th-16th centuries Catalonia Late medieval Iberia Mortality Obituary books Wills Assessing epidemic outbreaks in late medieval Catalonia (1348–1530): from communities to family units info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion