Making the citizen, building the citizenry. Family and citizenship in fi fteenth-century Barcelona

Taking citizenship as a broad measure of urban belonging, I intend to refl ect on the social imagination of medieval citizenries, 2 thereby following in the footsteps of scholars such as Withington and Shepard, who claim for an approach to the ‘community question’ in proper historical and contextualised terms. 3 Although a legally defi ned institution and an individual privilege, citizenship could also depend on the public acquiescence of a city’s inhabitants. As such, it becomes an analytical tool for the historian to penetrate the social experiences of medieval civic life.