Jordi Bolòs, The Historical Landscape of Catalonia. Landscape History of a Mediterranean Country in the Middle Ages. The Medieval Countryside, 23. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols 2023.

Catalonia is the ancestral turf of Jordi Bolòs; and he knows his turf well. In this book of synthesis, he offers readers the fruits of his more than forty years of study of the Catalan landscape. Physical and cultural geographies are, from his vantage, indistinguishable. Such an approach to the relationship of people to land and places to power opens for study a great many problems and questions that are, as he says repeatedly throughout the text, complex. The complexities will likely lead readers upon either of two paths. One follows the author on an exhaustive examination of the partial and scattered evidence left over centuries of the varied and changing modes of medieval communal engagement with the environment. There is another path along which readers can use it as an encyclopedic reference, searching through it as a source of succinct accounts on one or another aspect of the history and morphology of hamlets and villages, castle towns and merchant cities, roads, forests and lakes, canals, and more. The plausibility of such divergent approaches to reading the book serves as both a symptom of its weaknesses and a signal of its real strengths.