The Hungry City is the story of medieval Barcelona, retold through the lens of food and famine. Between the summer of 1333 and the spring of 1334, severe weather-related grain shortages spread throughout the Mediterranean, and Barcelona's leaders struggled to bring food to the city as its residents grew increasingly desperate. Employing the perspectives of historical actors whose stories are drawn from the records of that catastrophic year, Marie A. Kelleher uses Barcelonans' varied responses to crisis in the food system to present multiple ways of understanding the city—as a physical space, as the center of a network of Mediterranean commerce, as one powerful entity within a broader monarchy, as a site of religious encounter, and as a complex social body. Even as the central figure in each chapter offers their own version of the city, the separate strands of these multiple Barcelonas intertwine to reveal the fabric of the city as a whole.

The medieval city was defined by its network of human relationships—between its rulers and ruled; its merchants, artisans, and laborers; its religious and secular authorities; its insider and outsider groups—and by its overlapping local and regional geographies. Barcelona in the fourteenth century was no different, and The Hungry City draws together multiple lives and narrative strands to focus on a single point in time, what one Catalan chronicler referred to as "the first bad year," providing a dynamic new perspective on the history of Barcelona and the medieval Mediterranean.