True Citizens

This first book-length, English-language study of medieval urban citizenship focuses on Perpignan, a town second in population only to Barcelona in fourteenth-century Catalonia, yet neglected by modern historians. True Citizens describes and analyzes the rules that governed membership in the community of citizens, the definition of citizenship, and how the development of divergent memories within the community resulted in a crisis of citizenship. This study uses urban citizenship to shed new light on many important historiographical issues, such as Jewish-Christian relations, the place of towns in feudal society, the place of Catalonia in the urban history of medieval Europe, and the transition from the High to the Late Middle Ages.