Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a noted author and renowned historian. During his long and distiguished career he has taught at the Sorbonne, and most recently at the College of France (Paris) where he held the chair of the History of Modern Civilization from 1973-1999 and is now Professor Ereritus.

Montaillou
The Promised Land of Error
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Translated by Barbara Bray

Paperback, 384 Pages

ISBN 978-0-8076-1598-0
$28.95 (Can $38.95)
 

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. Ladurie’s 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.

Le Roy 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 curé 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 inquisitor’s prison in his own country. Montaillou, which has received even more praise than Le Roy Ladurie’s earlier work, provides a portrait of a fascinating place with a dark, intriguing history

Praise For Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

“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