You were promised pictures of Lleida from several years ago, I know, but in week, nay, a month, where there hasn’t been much in academic life to be pleased about, I have unexpected news that I can share, so let me do that first, and if I can set you up with the promised post for later in the week I will. For lo, a few days ago a package arrived at my door that was pretty evidently a book from Catalonia. There was only one of those I had any reason to expect, and so, after the obligatory 24-hour Covid cool-off period, I duly opened it and found within this rather handsome volume…
Cover of Borja de Riquer (ed.), Vides catalanes que han fet història (Barcelona 2020)
What is inside it are short, four- to six-page, biographies of a hundred-and-twenty significant Catalans, or where no Catalans are available, significant persons with a connection to the area that is now Catalonia. That stretch is clearest in the ancient and medieval periods, where all the women are foreigners except three, one of whom is arguably fictional, and there are only six to start with, but things balance a bit better in the modern and contemporary periods, the latter of which, starting with a birth-date in 1800 and ending with one in 1946, makes up more than half the volume.1 Nonetheless, there are twenty medieval personalities here, and among them we find none other than…
First page of Jonathan Jarrett, ‘El comte marquès Borrell II de Barcelona: arquitecte involuntari de Catalunya?’, trans. Mònica Molera i Jordà, ibid. pp. 95–102
… Count-Marquis Borrell II of Barcelona, Girona, Osona and Urgell, born (as far as we can guess) in 931 A. D. and thus falling between his grandfather, Count Guifré the Hairy, half-legendary national founder figure, and Borrell’s first cousin once removed, Count Oliba II of Ripoll and Berguedà, later instead Abbot Oliba of Sant Miquel de Cuixà and Santa Maria de Ripoll, among quite a few others, and Bishop of Vic, whose metal likeness has more than once graced this blog. Given how generally Borrell can wind up forgotten in the Catalan historiography, for reasons that this brief biography touches on, indeed, it’s rather nice to see him there. But when Josep María Salrach, no less, is writing on Guifré, and Marc Sureda on Oliba, whom could they get who could contribute anything equally worthwhile on Borrell?
The guilty party is named, ibid. p. 102!
Well, obviously, I wouldn’t be writing about it if it weren’t me, would I? I am ridiculously delighted by this. Firstly I was asked in quite flattering terms; secondly, I actually got paid for my labours on this, not a small thing; and thirdly, I do think Borrell gets short shrift in the record and I have such clear views on him that I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to do it. Fourthly, I’m one of only three anglophones in the volume, so I feel quite elect. Fifthly, and maddest-sounding I know, during the final stages of the redaction of my doctoral thesis, working against a deadline in somewhat adverse personal circumstances, I actually felt as if I was beginning to hear an image of Borrell in my head shouting at me to get on with making him famous again. This hasn’t recurred, I should assure both you and my employers, but I remember. And although Borrell is a decent part of my first book, as far as I know there are only five copies of that in Catalonia and I sent two of them there.2 Then, as you know, my plans to write a full book on Borrell have had to be shelved for the time being, and unless I could have got it translated I wasn’t sure that would attract any more of an audience in Catalonia. But now, what I would like to say about him has at least been signalled, and translated into stylish Catalan by the good offices (and officers) of Edicions 62, whom I’m also quite pleased to have knowing my name, in a work that really anyone in the country with historical interests might pick up.3 I now feel somewhat as if I have discharged a debt to my chosen subject, by mediating his name for the first time since, really, 1836, to those who would consider themselves his countrymen, and whom he might even have considered such as well.4 So for all those reasons, although it’s only a little thing with no footnotes, I’m really rather proud of this. It will presumably be my last publication of 2020 – there is one more due but not very many days left for it to materialise – but it’s a good way to close a year. In case you should be interested but not sufficiently able in Catalan, I have also stuck an unpaginated English version on my website here. Do have a look if you’re so inclined!
Statistics, meanwhile, look good on this one, even given the year of the plague. There was only one draft, and one stage of revision. The first submission went in in November 2019; I had revisions in April 2020. There were no author proofs, but it looks OK to me, and my changes were in fact implemented; I guess this is what you get for dealing with an actual commercial press rather than a specialist one with a captive market, isn’t it? 13 months between submission and print is actually better than average for me, and there’s no arguing with the result, so I’m happy with it!
1. The women in question are Saint Eulalie (on whose factuality see here, but if real murdered in Barcelona by her countrymen), Empress Galla Placidia (born in Rome, died in Rome, lived in Barcelona during a short-lived marriage by force), Dhuoda (married to a count of Barcelona and mother to a usurper there who probably executed Guifré the Hairy’s father, but probably never went south of the Pyrenees herself), Almodis de la Marche (from la Marche, as you’d expect, resident in Barcelona only from her third marriage on, and also murdered in Barcelona, by a relative from that marriage), and then Elisenda de Montcada and Isabel de Villena, about whose Catalan credentials I have no quibbles, not least because I learnt about them from this very book!
2. Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 147-166.
3. Citation: Jonathan Jarrett, ‘El comte marquès Borrell II de Barcelona: arquitecte involuntari de Catalunya?’, trans. Mònica Molera i Jordà, in Borja de Riquer (ed.), Vides catalanes que han fet història (Barcelona 2020), pp. 95–102.
4. He is covered at length only on Prospero de Bofarull y Mascaró, Los condes de Barcelona vindicados, y cronología y genealogía de los reyes de España considerados como soberanos independientes de su marca (Barcelona 1836), 2 vols, vol. I, online here, pp. 65-71, not that much length really, and in Miquel Coll i Alentorn, ‘Dos comtes de Barcelona germans, Miró i Borrell’ in Marie Grau & Olivier Poisson (edd.), Études Roussillonnaises offertes à Pierre Ponsich : Mélanges d’archéologie, d’histoire et d’histoire de l’art du Roussillon et de la Cerdagne (Perpignan 1987), pp. 145-162 at pp. 147-160, which is wrong in quite a few details. However, I cannot as yet promise to fix all of this any time soon…
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 
What a post! First, congratulations. Secondly, thank you for “Count Guifré the Hairy”. I shall add him to my collection of wunnerful monikers.
Thirdly, “Saint Eulalie” – a pleasant reminder of the Jeeves and Wooster stories about the odious Spode. WKPD: “While the leader of the Black Shorts, he is also secretly a designer of ladies’ underclothing, being the proprietor of Eulalie Soeurs of Bond Street.”
Fourthly: “the final stages of the redaction of my doctoral thesis, working against a deadline in somewhat adverse personal circumstances”. In my case I missed a deadline for submission and received a letter of complaint from my Faculty. I replied, explaining that I hadn’t expected my father’s recent death and the family duties it burdened me with. The Faculty replied generously – how sorry they were to hear the news, their apologies for chivvying me, would an extension by six months answer the case?
Mind you, universities were then run by a cadre of intelligent and sensible middle-aged women, lightly supervised by former academics. Them wuz the days.
Thankyou, on all counts. I’m not sure how much my department could have done about the personal circumstances, which were really my own doing, but in any case I wanted the thing done. Otherwise the immediate problem was the distraction of certain persons vital to the process by the 2005 general election, which was inconsiderately going on at the same time and in which said persons had a bit of a stake. But all was in the end done.
If I haven’t written of Guifré the Hairy while I’ve been privileged by your readership, by the way, I can add to your joy by explaining that the byname is not contemporary, but first comes up in the twelfth-century Gesta Comitum Barcinonensium, Deeds of the Counts of Barcelona, in which Guifré (who did exist, and out of whose real existence the inimitable Roger Collins thus got a paper called “Charles the Bald and Wifred the Hairy”) is something of a romance hero by now, and in which his mother recognises him, on his emplotted return from a long and unjust exile, ‘because he had hair in a place where other men do not’.
Fifty per cent of the time when I say this to an audience of the public, a woman will raise the question, “Where don’t men have hair?”, and I don’t like to presume that I can answer…
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