Albert, Pere.  The Customs of Catalonia between Lords and Vassals. Donald J. Kagay, trans. and ed..  Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, volume 243. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002. xlix; 87 pp.  ISBN: 086698285X In 1994, Donald Kagay published the first annotated English translation of the Usatges, a twelfth-century collection of feudal custom known to scholars of medieval Catalonia as the foundational document of medieval Catalan law.  Eight years later, he has published what may be regarded as a companion piece, a highly readable and carefully annotated translation of and commentary on thirteenth-century jurist Pere Albert's Customs of Catalonia (also known as the Commemoracions).  While the Customs are not as well-known as the Usatges, it is fitting that Professor Kagay has turned to this work so soon after the Usatges, as the two texts were conceptually (and, by the end of the Middle Ages, sometimes literally) bound together as important sources for mediating the tension between local and regnal claims to authority. In the standard chronology of European legal development, the thirteenth century is most often characterized as the time when the ius commune – the combination of Roman and canon law taught in the medieval law faculties – was growing in influence under the sponsorship of centralizing monarchs throughout continental western Europe.  But in Catalonia at least, the centralizing tendencies of the high medieval monarchs were balanced against the interests of local authorities and castellans.  The work of the canonist Pere Albert (fl. 1233-1263) is illustrative of this tension.  The Customs of Catalonia, probably completed sometime between 1238 and 1244, take the form of a handbook for the adjudication of feudal conflicts both vertical and horizontal.  The Customs are divided into separate articles, each dealing with a specific set of legal problems: the extent of royal authority; the nature of homage agreements; sale, transfer, and division of fiefs and castle tenancies; and the nature and jurisdiction of castellans' tenancies. Pere Albert's work seems to have been only in limited circulation during his lifetime, but gained wider currency during the reigns of Jaume II (1291-1327) and Pere III (1336-1387).  Later, reacting to what they saw as encroachments of "foreign" (that is, Castilian) law, fifteenth-century Catalans began to insist on traditional law.  The two major sources of this territorial law were the Usatges and the Constitucions of Catalonia, and the latter of these two by then included the Customs.  Thus, Pere Albert's work became one of the core pieces of Catalan law, and fell out of use only in the early eighteenth century, with the suppression of Catalan law in favor of the Castilian-Bourbon Decreto de la nueva planta. Kagay's introduction to the Customs carefully places them in a number of contexts.  First, the Customs were a product of their times: the expansionist and centralizing reign of Jaume I (1213-76).  Professor Kagay highlights Jaume's preoccupation with his role as the principal source of law and justice in his lands, but simultaneously reminds us that the King's regalian legal moves were tempered by the compromises he had to make with those of his subjects who were equally adamant about maintaining baronial sovereignty.  As a document that defines spheres of influence for both castellans and kings, Pere Albert's Customs exemplify the conflict and compromise that marked political relations in this period. Kagay also contextualizes this work in terms of another document with which he is well-acquainted: the Usatges of Barcelona.   Kagay sees similarities between the two documents: neither one, he argues, sought to assert royal dominance so much as to define separate spheres of influence for royal and local authorities.  The closest that the Customs come to a statement of royal sovereignty is in article 39, which asserts that, in times of crisis, "public utility" demanded that any vassal's primary allegiance was to be to the sovereign, rather than to his feudal lord. This brings us to the core of Kagay's argument: the Customs in the context of the question of feudal relations in Catalonia, and the relations between independent-minded castellans and a centralizing king.  At the beginning of the tenth century, the authority of the counts of Barcelona was little more than nominal, especially at the local level, where castellans were the dominant force.  Professor Kagay points out that not even the Usatges attempted to articulate anything like a "feudal system," nor did they attempt to place the counts of Barcelona at the head of a "feudal pyramid"; rather, they interpreted the rights and obligations of castellans within a broader regalian framework.  While the territory here is well-worn ground (indeed, most of the secondary works that Professor Kagay references in this section date from the two decades between 1965 and 1985 – what might be considered a historiographic "golden age" for studies of feudalism), it is hard to argue with Kagay's overall assessment of the situation when he points out that the Usatges and the "feudal" relations they articulated were repurposed over the years to cover situations having little to do with any traditional narrative of a "feudal system."  Catalan jurists of Pere Albert's day had to deal with a diversity of feudal litigation that might include, for example, ecclesiastical lords and vassals, or public servants whose "fiefs" were in fact salaried positions.  According to Kagay, Pere Albert's Customs must be viewed as the next logical step in this process; as part of a high medieval royal program to "smooth away the complicated anomalies of a Catalan feudalism growing ever more complex." [xxxv] Any review of this book would be incomplete without reference to Professor Kagay's meticulous annotations of his translated text, clarifying textual references to persons and concepts with which Pere Albert expected his noble and royal audience to be intimately familiar.  These annotations range from the basic (e.g., the definition of a "gloss" at n. 24 on p. 19) more esoteric (see, for example, the bibliographic discussion of the history of a legal maxim on the superiority of public to private utility, p. 40, n. 57), but almost all the notes are as interesting as the text they explicate.  Kagay also includes a translation of the much briefer Consuetudo Barchinone, a shorter and more narrowly-focused work often attributed to Pere Albert, which provides an interesting text for comparison.  While specialist scholars will likely wish to consult editions of the Customs in the original Latin (for which Professor Kagay provides a handy reference list), this volume will be a valuable addition to the reference bookshelf of anyone interested, not only in the development of Catalan law, but also more generally in the larger questions of the nature of feudal relations (even in the absence of an overarching "feudal system") and centralizing regnal power. Marie A. Kelleher California State University, Long Beach