Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The Citizens of Granada, 1570-1739

Abstract

Throughout the Reconquista—the long struggle of the Iberian Christian kingdoms to expel the Moors from the Peninsula—military progress was accompanied by a no less important development, that of resettlement of the newly acquired territories. The final conquest of the kingdom of Granada in 1492 was no exception. The political, social, and religious contexts of this rather belated incorporation provides the starting-point of Professor James Casey's new book, with which he rounds out a long and patient stint of research on early modern Granadan society. Following the publication of his well-known The Kingdom of Valencia in the Seventeenth Century (1979), he moved southwards to Granada. His findings there unfolded within more general studies, including his classic The History of the Family (1989) and his fine Early Modern Spain: A Social History (1999). The book under review shows the same mastery of sources, subtle analysis of complex social relations, keen eye for geographical and environmental factors, and familiarity with sociological and anthropological theory. It is a penetrating study of what constituted, throughout most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the last frontier society within Spain.