Montaillou

By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Barbara Bray (translator),

Book cover of Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error

Book description

"Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has had a success which few historians experience and which is usually reserved for the winner of the Prix Goncourt...Montaillou, which is the reconstruction of the social life of a medieval village, has been acclaimed by the experts as a masterpiece of ethnographic history and by…

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Why read it?

3 authors picked Montaillou as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

It is virtually impossible to write or even investigate medieval southern France, especially the famous Cathar Period without delving into this classic work.

Still available in different translations, Le Roy Ladurie takes us into the life of a 14th-century French mountain village and its people in a way no one else has ever attempted. Based upon meticulous church records of contemporary individual interviews and interrogations with alleged heretics in one small village by Church Inquisitors, the author gives us a look into the lives of common people of that time that has never been equaled.

I found myself returning to…

Montaillou, which was published while I was in graduate school, provided a new, highly personalized way to study medieval social history: not with quantitative data but through a nuanced examination of court records that offer a mirror into the everyday lives of obscure villagers. When I first read the “Miracles of Saint Louis” I realized this source for late thirteenth century Paris was nearly as rich as Le Roy Ladurie’s inquisitorial record concerning Montaillou. Had Montaillou not been written, I might not have seen the potential in the “Miracles of Saint Louis,” and thus I might not have written Surviving…

This unique book is based on the written records from the early 1300s – more than 700 years ago – of the Cathar heretics living in the village of Montaillou in southern France.  Determined to stamp out hereticism, the Inquisition in the person of the Bishop of Pamiers spent considerable time in Montaillou, writing down a huge amount of incidental information about the way people really lived at the time in such places, what their worldviews entailed, how they behaved and why.  Le Roy Ladurie peppers his analysis of this community with masses of direct quotes from its residents.  I…

From Patrick's list on ancient oral traditions.

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