Cuenca is a city in central Spain, appreciated for its eerie beauty and its remoteness: it is popularly named “the enchanted city.” David Reher’s study clearly belongs within the recent trend of multidisciplinary urban studies produced by historical social scientists, which includes the books on Valladolid by Bartolomé Benassar, on Segovia by Ángel García Sanz, and on Madrid by David Ringrose.
In Reher’s words, “The central theme of this book addresses the question of urban structures and urban behavior patterns, whether or not they were influenced by rural, regional, or specifically urban factors” (p. 5). After a brief general introduction about the aims and methods of urban history, the author sketches a brief but illuminating economic history of early modern Cuenca and then studies several demographic topics: nuptiality, fertility, mortality, economic fluctuations, epidemics, family structures, and migration patterns. What emerges is a picture of remarkable social stability with only one traumatic discontinuity. This was the seventeenth-century crisis, when the economy of Cuenca—which had been a notably prosperous textile town in the sixteenth century—was definitively deindustrialized and its population reduced by more than half. This only confirms what other studies of urban and demographic history have shown. For Spain the seventeenth was indeed a century of crisis and depression.
Reher has relentlessly explored Cuenca’s archives, and he masters the methods and the literature of historical demography. His use of statistical methods, however, does not prevent him from making contradictory statements, such as, for example, in chapter 5 (esp. pp. 153ff.) about the relationship between economic fluctuations and mortality. All in all, however, the book offers a vivid and convincing portrait of a preindustrial town. In so doing, it makes a solid contribution to Spanish history—many of Reher’s analyses encompass far more than Cuenca alone—and to our understanding of the complexities of early modern European urban history.
