Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error

About this book

"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 the public as a sensational revelation of the thoughts feelings and activities of the ordinary people of the past."Times Literary Supplement. With a new introduction by author Le Roy Ladurie this special edition offers a fascinating history of a fourteenth-century village Montaillou in the mountainous region of southern France almost destroyed by internal feuds and religious heterodoxy. Laduries portrait is based on a detailed register of Jacques Fournier Bishop of Pamiers and future Pope Benedict XII who conducted rigorous inquisition into heresy within his diocese. Fournier was a consummate inquisitor an acute psychologist who was able to elicit from the accused the innermost secrets of their thoughts and actions. He was pitiless in the pursuit of error and meticulous in recording that pursuit. LeRoy Ladurie analyzes the behavior demography social mentality and cosmology of the community of peasants and shepherds and vividly evokes the daily life of the village and mountain pastures. His portrait of Montaillou is dominated by the personal histories of two men: the cur Pierre Clergue a brutal and powerful man who placed his enemies in the hands of the inquisitor; and the shepherd Pierre Maury a friend of the Albigensian perfecti and a fatalist who returned from Spain to disappear in the inquisitors prison in his own country. Montaillou which has received even more praise than LeRoy Laduries earlier work provides a portrait of a fascinating place with a dark intriguing history.