SENYORS CAMPEROLS I MERCADERS

From limited scale observations -local or even familiar-, the studies compiled in this volume show the transformations experienced by the Valencian Country at the end of the Middle Ages, which, after all, were in line with he great processes of social and political change that, already on the threshold of the modern times, were closing the crisis of the feudal societies. It is, then, an approach to the world of peasants, but of a peasantry that was classed by the noble structures and that, at the same time, was immersed in the, sometimes stimulant and other times exhausting, game of the market's strength. In a «rural world» that was actually the immense territory stretched beyond the walls of the triumphant Valencia of the fifteenth century, the peasants cannot be understood without the presence of the feudal lords, neither without the merchants' activities. In the Valencian case, the 1400s still reach denser meanings. It is the Golden Age of the city of Valencia, but the landscape that appears in this book is, above all, the rural country, that of the net of villages, places and farmhouses that were far away from the golden reflections of the capital of the kingdom.