Assessing epidemic outbreaks in late medieval Catalonia (1348–1530): from communities to family units

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.