This volume presents a gripping compilation of studies devoted to different forms of violence in two of the continental states of the Crown of Aragon between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. These forms of violence range from social events like territorial and private warfare, banditry and piracy to resolution mechanisms with a violent component, namely vengeance and torture as a judiciary proceeding (pp. 8–9). The book assembles the work of 11 authors through a multidisciplinary perspective that includes documentary history and art history. It deals evenly with the late medieval centuries and the early modern ones; the editors of the volume are advocating for a shared vision of the topic during pre-industrial times. It is worth mentioning that the issues dealt with here (i.e. violence, but also the exercise of power and jurisdiction) have traditionally been parcelled between the medieval and the modern periods in Iberian studies. Only in recent times, and thanks to new institutional approaches, have researchers begun to assess remarkable continuities between both periods. The book constitutes a vivid frieze of these, with several authors describing the use of violence to contain dissent, or the role of legitimate violence as a social glue. These are just two examples of these continuities, and they concern different scales of analysis. Regrettably, it is the reader’s chore to trace them, since the editors have dismissed the opportunity to present a set of general scientific conclusions.

All chapters meet scientific accuracy requirements and generally present novel data or hypotheses. But it is worth mentioning certain asymmetries among them. The editors have assembled researchers that are at different stages of their own careers, spanning from pre-doctoral students to senior professors. This is a praiseworthy initiative and, again, rare in the Iberian historiographical milieu. The combination does become evident, however, in relation to the structure of the chapters. Whilst early-career researchers present up-to-date and useful state-of-the-art perspectives in their chapters, the most consolidated authors prefer not to do so. Still another unbalanced aspect – this time not imputable to the academic stage of the authors – is the absence of proper conclusions in some chapters.

The latter aspect has more profound implications than may appear at first sight, so it is worth a short digression. Most of the studies in this volume have used unprecedented sources, derived from the exercise of jurisdiction: court books, deposition testimonies and so on. Although widely preserved in the archives of the territories of the Crown of Aragon, these sources have been overlooked and sometimes even despised by the stringent structuralism of the late twentieth-century social and economic historians. But as we now start to realize in Iberia, these sources are rich in detail and feature, amongst many useful materials, bits of spontaneous expressions from the defendants or the testimonies, the description of social or domestic incidents, and enjoyable sexual, scatological or sanguinary accounts. Some of these compelling texts have been edited by the authors, in the appendixes of the chapters. From our point of view, the peril of these new sources is to make historiography tip towards impressionism, hindering the possibility to achieve global interpretations of past conflicts and violence. As historians, it is our duty to overcome our own excitement before these sources, to analyse them through a qualitative or a quantitative lens, and ultimately present convincing conclusions based on our analysis. This is one of the main challenges for those researchers who intend to work with these materials.

Most of the studies in the volume do handle their sources thoughtfully and do not get carried away by them. The first four chapters, by Guillermo López Juan, Pablo Sanahuja, Miquel Faus and Javier Fajardo, address different types of violence in medieval times. Respectively, these four authors deal with vengeance, warfare from a collective and an individual point of view, and piracy. Art historian Francesc Granell analyses the social symbolism of warfare through an altarpiece (Centenar de la Ploma of Valencia, 1390–1420). The final group of authors deals with similar topics, but for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whilst Jacob Mompó, Vicent Josep Escartí and Ramon Alcoberro address, broadly, the use of torture as a valid method to obtain confessions by inquisitorial and civil courts, Àngel Casals, Víctor Jurado and Alejandro Llinares approach banditry and its use of violence.

Careful reading of these chapters demonstrates that the societies of the past developed effective means to contain violence, both by private and by public means. Within public we need to consider jurisdictions of all sorts, including those that were under ecclesiastical and seigneurial control (p. 22). After an episode of violence, peace was pursued when socially necessary. And this required not only formal institutions (e.g. bailiffs) but also social mechanisms of compensation. In addition, it should be noted that even the actors or the episodes deemed more violent, such as piracy or banditry, are presented in the book as socially integrated and capable of mitigating deathly violence when needed (p. 111). Unconstrained violence was rare.

Sentences, even to death, were the ultimate mechanism to halt the violence. Nonetheless, the absence of sentences, despite previous judiciary proceedings, is a common circumstance in the centuries under scrutiny. This does not mean that they were not issued or implemented; rather, it signifies that they were not written down since customary law was reluctant to condone this practice (and this is why we trace several attempts of the new Audiències of the sixteenth century and the jurists to ensure that sentences were provided).

This brings us to a last argument, which is the necessity of studying thoroughly and keeping in mind the jurisdictional context in which the violence took place, or in which its perpetrators were prosecuted. The judiciary establishes which types of violence will be sued and how they will be described. As an excellent example of this, Agustí Alcoberro’s study (pp. 219–238) is especially observant of the jurisdictional environment. Alcoberro presents bailiffs’ and vicars’ local civil courts as instances that collaborated with each other in the prosecution of witchcraft in the Modern Era in Catalonia, demoting at the same time the powers of the Holy Office.