This essay explores how Catalan traders repurposed the commercial techniques and patterns of human deployment used to create their country’s Mediterranean merchant empire in the late medieval period, to generate important trade networks in the Atlantic basin starting in the 18th century. After explaining the dynamics of this new, but simultaneously old, transatlantic system, it zeroes in on one of the key nodes of the network, Uruguay, and explores how successive generations of Catalans shaped the development of that country’s culture in fundamental ways.
Argues that the imagination of prisons in medieval literature consciously played with the tension between dystopian realities and government's religio-political claims. “‘The Best Place in the World’: Imaging Urban Prisons in Late Medieval Italy,” in Medieval Cities, Texts and Social Networks, 400-1500: Experiences and Perceptions of Medieval Urban Space, ed. Caroline Goodson, Anne E. Lester, and Carol Symes, 263-78. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010
‘The Best Place in the World’: Imaging Urban Prisons in Late Medieval Italy