Few Americans, even among those interested in the language and literature of Spain, are more than vaguely aware of the existence of the Catalan language. Yet it is the habitual speech of about six million people, slightly more than one-fifth of the population of Spain. The area of its use includes Catalonia proper, a thin slice of eastern Aragon, the greater part of the old Kingdom of Valencia, and the Balearic Islands in Spain, plus the Republic of Andorra and a small part of France north of the eastern Pyrenees. The total area is in the vicinity of 23,000 square miles, larger than that of several of the independent countries of Europe. The language is not a dialect of Castilian Spanish, but another Romance language coeval with it, which developed from Latin in northeastern Spain during the same period in which Castilian was taking form on the western edge of the Basque country. Catalan literature has a long and illustrious history.' It first appeared in the thirteenth century, when the troubadours from this area, who had been writing in Provengal for more than a century, began to shift to their native language. The change is already complete in the poetry of Pere and Jaume March, Febrer, and their contemporaries of the early fourteenth century. At the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the following century appeared the extensive religious, scientific, and philosophical works of Ramon Lull (Lulio in Castilian), the works of Arnau de Vilanova, and the chronicle of Ramon Muntaner. The production of the Renaissance was very considerable, including the works of such poets as Roig de Corella and Ausias March, and Joan Martorell, author of Tirant lo Blanch, a novel of chivalry which was one of the favorites of Cervantes. The union of Catalonia with Aragon occurred in 1137, through the marriage of the heirs to the two sovereignties. The new entity took the name of Aragon, probably because the title of king was used in this region. In any case, the new kingdom was eighty per cent Catalan-speaking, and most of its literature was written in that language. But after the union with Castile, which became final on the death of Ferdinand the Catholic in 1516, a long period of decadence in Catalan literature set in. Ferdinand was the last Catalan-speaking sovereign of Catalonia. In the early eighteenth century the regional language ceased to be accepted as official in all the provinces in which it was spoken. By the nineteenth, nearly all educated people spoke Castilian habitually, and Catalan was sinking toward the status of a regional dialect. Nevertheless, it appears that the idea found so frequently among Castilians, that it became virtually a dead language, is considerably exaggerated. It is extremely unlikely that it disappeared even from the city in the provinces of Gerona and Lirida, or that more than a few people abandoned it in the islands.