Questions of survival and loss are quite crucial to the next major phase of Catalan literature, which runs from about 1500 to the beginning of the nineteenth century. This period is usually known as the ‘Decadence’, and, however much one may want to qualify the term, one can hardly reject it altogether. From the death of Roiç de Corella to the second half of the nineteenth century, there are no major writers in Catalan and until about a hundred years before this, the literary scene is one of almost unrelieved mediocrity. The reasons for this are complex, but there are several important points to bear in mind: (i) the decline in literature is one of standards, not of quantity; (ii) this decline is specifically literary: other kinds of art, for example, painting and architecture, did not suffer to nearly the same extent, and the eighteenth century in particular produced a number of outstanding intellectuals who wrote in Castilian; (iii) the literary situation does not correspond in any precise way to the pattern of economic prosperity and decline; (iv) nor does it reflect a change in the status of the Catalan language: Catalan remains the official language of the country until 1714, and the teaching of Catalan in schools is not prohibited until 1768.

It is only when one considers the apparent abruptness of the literary decline that a different kind of factor begins to emerge. The fifteenth century, clearly, is a period of considerable achievement, but even here there are signs that the situation is changing for the worse. After 1412, the country is ruled by the Castilian dynasty of the Trastámaras: Castilian becomes the familiar language of the Court, and one sign of this is the number of writers in the second half of the fifteenth century who use both Castilian and Catalan. This situation is confirmed by the union of Castile and Aragon in 1474, and in the sixteenth century, the Court withdraws still further from the Aragonese territories. As a result, the Catalan aristocracy is attracted more and more to the Castilian-speaking Court, while the mercantile classes fail to create a genuine culture of their own. When one reflects that practically any writer of importance before 1500 was connected in some way with the Court, one sees how serious the consequences were for literature