ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book began with a phrase: an offhand observation from a Catalan chronicler who referred to the famine year 1333 as “the first bad year.” Sitting in a library in Barcelona in 2010 as I read these words, I was struck by this medieval chronicler's matter-of-fact pessimism and set out to research the events that had provoked them. Along the way, what began as a book about a famine turned into something different—the study of a city as seen through the lens of a crisis experienced in different ways by all its members.

In the decade-plus since that moment, our world has seen its share of bad years in the form of economic crisis, political upheaval, and global pandemic that have caused the words of that long-ago chronicler and the experience of the individuals whose stories fill these pages to resonate with me more deeply than I would have thought possible when I began. Over time, this project has taken many twists and turns, but the one thing that has remained constant has been the support I have received at every turn from friends, colleagues, and institutions. I began my own research into Barcelona's bad year during a semester-long sabbatical leave provided by the College of Liberal Arts at California State University Long Beach and its Department of History and received further institutional support in the form of research-related course releases and another sabbatical semester in the fall of 2017. I also had the privilege of spending a year at Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center in 2015/2016. This fellowship, under the directorship of Philip Nord, provided me not only with time to read, write, and reflect but also with access to the resources of Princeton's libraries and an intellectual community of faculty and fellows who listened, encouraged, and challenged me as I fumbled my way toward better arguments. This book also benefitted from the month I spent as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on the medieval Mediterranean held in Barcelona in July of 2012. Organized by Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita, this seminar and its speakers and participants helped me clarify how I might approach the Mediterranean dimensions of my project. Portions of chapters are adapted from earlier publications that appeared in the journals eHumanista (2013), Mediterranean Studies (2016), and Speculum (2022), as well as in a 2019 essay collection published by Campus Verlag; I thank the editors of these publications and my coauthor on the Speculum article, Adam Franklin-Lyons, for permission to publish parts of this research in its current revised form.

Many institutions and individuals have aided me throughout the research process. In Barcelona, the staff of Barcelona's many libraries and archives—the Arxiu de la Història de la Ciutat de Barcelona, the Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, the Biblioteca de Catalunya, the Arxiu Històric de Protocols, and the Arxiu Diocesà and Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona—have supplied generous assistance over the years as my project unfolded from one annual visit to the next. The Institució Milà i Fontanals of Spain's Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas and its director, Roser Salicrú Lluch, provided me with an office and a congenial work environment during Barcelona's memorable fall of 2017, while the IMF's librarians helped me find what I needed in their collections every time I have visited. Similar thanks go to the Interlibrary Loan staff at the CSULB University Library, who worked tirelessly to find me every obscure book or article I requested once I had returned home.

This book required me to learn about the city in numerous ways, each with its own set of potential pitfalls for a novice. I am, therefore, incredibly grateful to the specialists who read individual chapters and put me on the right path when I was going wrong: Philip Banks, Daniel Duran, Tom Barton, Sarah Ifft Decker, and Adam Franklin-Lyons all not only read chapters, but they each, at some point, shared with me journal articles, book chapters, or references to documents that I would not otherwise have had access to. The members of the online medieval women and gender reading group organized by Michelle Armstrong-Partida not only made helpful framing and bibliographic suggestions but also provided intellectual nourishment and friendship in equal measure when we were all feeling isolated during the height of the COVID pandemic. Sarah Davis-Secord, Rowan Doran, Susan McDonough, Michael Ryan, and Dan Smail each appeared just when I needed them with a recommendation for a reading that gave me a new way to think about my sources. Thanks go to the team at Cornell Press: series editors Cecilia Gaposchkin and Anne Lester; acquisitions editor Mahinder Kingra; and the manuscript's two anonymous readers, all of whose suggestions helped me add a final layer of polish.

There is also the more indirect aid provided by friends and colleagues—that encouragement and emotional support that sustain any writer through a long and sometimes frustrating process. In Barcelona, I have been fortunate in several enduring friendships that have made that city a second home for me. Some, like Pere Benito Monclús, Helena Garrigas, Roser Salicrú Lluch, and Xavier Sanahuja, I have known for only the past decade or so. Others extend back to my dissertation days: Josep Capdeferro, Brian Catlos, Luis Corteguera, Núria Silleras-Fernández, Marta Vicente, and, of course, Daniel Duran, who has provided me with moral support, help with research questions, friendship, laughter, and a place with his wonderful family during my visits for over a quarter of a century. In the United States, individual conversations with Paul Freedman, Bill Jordan, Teofilo Ruiz, and Jerome Singerman early on in this project helped me shape and clarify my ideas before I charged off too far into more than one swamp. For keeping me on track, big thanks go the women of ABC, the amazing online writing group whose members have offered one another not only accountability but also encouragement, feedback, sympathy, and humor for all the ups and downs of our writing and nonwriting lives over the past several years, as well as to the friends and colleagues in the small but mighty “writing therapy” group organized by Bonnie Gasior and Max Rosenkrantz whose weekly in-person meetings on campus have kept us all laughing while we work. Friends and colleagues in the CSULB Department of History have been another pillar of support. They were the audience for my very first presentation on this project in 2011 and have continued to offer me encouragement over the years. I wish I had the space to name them all here because they have all—individually and collectively—sustained me through this process. Special thanks go to current and former department chairs David Shafer and Nancy Quam-Wickham, who provided the structural support this project needed, and to Eileen Luhr and Caitlin Murdock, who have been saving my sanity for nearly two decades now with walks, coffee meetups, pep talks, and baked goods.

Finally, thanks to my family. The good-natured humor with which my sister, brother, niece, and nephews have regarded the medievalist nerd in their midst reminds me not to take myself too seriously. They know that behind all the footnotes still lurks the girl who was always reading some book with a dragon on the cover. My parents have unwaveringly supported my intellectual curiosity, from the twice-monthly summer trips to the public library when I was young through never questioning my utterly impractical decision in my twenties to dedicate myself to the study of medieval history. In the final years of this book, my father was always interested in the details of the research process, while my mother, ever the avid reader, read a good chunk of what I had written and helped me see places where I could make my writing more welcoming to readers. They are the ones I most look forward to sharing this book with and the ones to whom I dedicate it, with love.