Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 118

In this nicely produced and useful little book, based on short papers presented to a conference at the University of Girona in 2004, researchers with backgrounds in linguistics, geography, history and sociology, debate the importance of rural place names in Catalonia (north-east Spain) for the point of view of their own academic disciplines. As the historian Elvis Mallorquí points out in his tidily written introductory essay, toponymy, defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the place names of a country or district as a subject of study’, can provide invaluable information for both amateur and professional investigators on the evolution of a particular locality over the centuries. In particular, considerable emphasis is placed on the original significance of names, on subsequent changes and, in a number of cases their disappearance. Some place names are fairly self-explanatory (for instance rocks, ravines or mountains), some descriptive (mills and monuments), whilst others make little or no apparent sense.

According to Ramon Amigó, the doyen of Catalan toponymists, it was not until the 1970s that studies of place names were first carried out in the Principality, mostly covering the south of the region, above all the wine growing area of the Priorat (Tarragona). While many of these accounts were based on archival research, others were derived from oral evidence including interviews with peasant farmers, shepherds, fishermen. Place names on the region’s maps, he tells us, are often far from reliable. Even so, by Amigó’s reckoning, such studies, published in a variety of sources, cover no more than ten per cent of Catalan municipalities: hence the urgent need for further research, not least in the under-researched province of Girona. In his own contribution, Mallorquí pays tribute to the English secondary school teacher John Field whose pioneering work English Field-Names (1972) demonstrated how men and women perceived a particular territory over time and how the latter supported a succession of social practices. Mallorquí then uses local place names, found in seigniorial ledgers (capbreus), in an attempt to reconstruct the Catalan landscape during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Such a source, he argues, provides much detailed information on such topics as crop types (e.g. beans), land use (meadows) or economic activity (mills). By consulting similar sources for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when viticulture took off in the Principality, he also shows how, at this stage, the names of cereals were frequently replaced by those of vines.

The study of rural place names south of the Pyrenees is clearly in its infancy, and often takes the form of amateur enthusiasts compiling lengthy alphabetical lists. This valuable little pocket book, with its exhaustive bibliography, informative maps and excellent photographic illustrations may go some way to further the progress of a sadly neglected area of research.