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Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error

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Having read many of the reviews of 'Montaillou' at Amazon.com, I feel compelled to put fingers to keyboard in defence of this marvellous book. I have read both the original French version AND this most recent translation, and feel that the flavour, color, atsmosphere and historical accuracy lose NOTHING in translation. As to the footnotes, etc - 'Montaillou' is, first and foremost, an ACADEMIC book. It is not a 'light read', and if Le Roy Ladurie is sometimes a little pedantic with his footnotes and cross-references, it is because he is an academic whose chief aim is to adhere as closly as possible to the historical data he is working with. I think that potential readers might be a little 'put off' by some of the critisisms of the Amazon reviewers, yet if they approach 'Montaillou' with the knowledge that it IS an academic work and not a 'novel', then they won't be disappointed. In saying this, 'Montaillou' would work WONDERFULLY as a novel - all the elements are already in place for a beautifully rich and romantic tale of the Middle Ages - but until 'Montaillou - The Novel' is written, we must content ourselves with this sound, insightful and ultimately fulfilling ACADEMIC book.

The year is 1300, and the village of Montaillou in the south of France is full of heretics. One brave man, Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, embarks on a brave Inquisition to get rid of them. For years, he interviews everyone in the village and keeps meticulous notes. The everyday gossip, scandal and concerns of the common medieval man are documented here in a detail unsurpassed in any other primary source. In this book, French Historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie studies these documents and presents an incredible portrait of everyday life: 'love and marriage, gestures and emotions, conversations and gossip, clans and factions, crime and violence, concepts of time and space, attitudes to the past, animals, magic and folklore, death and beliefs about the other world.' An astounding book sitting on the border between history and anthropology. And as expected, the French have been fall-down funny for centuries. [HistoryHouse.com]

Every once in a while, some terrible act results in good. For example, the same Spanish bishop -- Diego de Landa -- who burned the irreplaceable writings of the Mayans wrote a book which was critical in subsequent scholars' understanding of Mayan culture. So also the inquisition established in southwest France in the early years of the 14th century to root out the last vestiges of the Cathar heresy resulted, ultimately, in this little treasure of a book.

The Albigensian Crusade had dealt a death-blow to Catharism, but rural pockets of the heresy persisted. The ambitious bishop of Pamiers, Jacques Fournier, brought in all the residents of one village for questioning. Consisting mostly of shepherds and peasants, Montaillou was a hotbed of Catharism, including the parish priest! Everyone was questioned in detail about their religious practices, households, relationships, work, and travel. Their testimony was taken down verbatim by a clerk; and, after the trial, the records lay untouched in the library of the Vatican until Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrote this book.

This is not the usual study of wealthy, educated, and influential Medieval people. Here we have the voice of Everyman. In addition to a great deal of detail about the practices of the Cathar "goodmen," with their sacraments of heretication, the "consolamentum," and the awful "endura," we see how average people formed households, managed to eke out a living, what they talked about, how they got along with their neighbors, how faithful they were to their wives -- in effect, everything.

Because Le Roy Ladurie is a scholarly historian, there are hundreds of footnotes pointing to records of this particular inquisatorial proceeding. They do not manage, however, to cover up the voices of the people of Montaillou, as they tried to explain to their inquisitors the details of their everyday lives.

It took me a little while to realize the uniqueness of this book as I read it. Then it came clear to me that these were the voices of the little people who are almost never heard in history.

This is definitely academic reading. Concerning itself chiefly with a cluster of tiny villages in the extreme south of France, the book takes details of villagers' confessions to the Inquisition to show what life was like for them. I found it to be very well-written, lucid, and not difficult to digest.

Ladurie (Amazon misspells his name continually as "Ladruie" -- either that or the book cover misspells it) extrapolates some amazing things from these confessions. Ideas of time and space, how villagers thought of the home and the family, concepts of sexuality and social status.. there's a lot here, extensively footnooted and extensively supported. As someone's said, this is definitely not light reading.

Ladurie spends quite a bit of time talking about religion, which is logical considering that Inquisition files are his source material. I did not detect a bias against either Catholicism or Catharism. Since his focus isn't actually religion, however, but an allover view of life in a remote, isolated 14th-century French/Spanish village, I wouldn't consider this specifically a resource for the study of Catharism. It is, however, an excellent resource for understanding people in a remote, isolated 14th-century French/Spanish village.

This is one of THE most important books for anyone interested in the varieties of the human mind. Thanks to the compulsive thoroughness of an early 14th century inquisitor (a bishop who became pope), lengthy quotes from the people that he was interrogating came to be preserved in the Vatican library. The accused are heretics, stubborn country folk supporting "the resistance", as it were, that handful of Cathar holy men hiding in the woods following the Church's campaign savage against the flourishing southern French civilization around the town of Albi in the first quarter of the 13th century. In spite of the slashing and burning that had laid waste to the land of the Cathars in the previous century, the folks of Montaillou were stubborn in holding to their beliefs, and here it gets interesting.

What on earth were these people like, what issues could possibly matter enough to medieval farmers for them to put their lives on the line over subtle theological distinctions, like whether the Trinity was indivisible? LeRoy Ladurie thankfully quotes extensively from the sources, and a picture emerges of a Christian religion influenced by contact with the Eastern Gnostics, leaning towards a belief in reincarnation and the virtues of vegetarian asceticism. The Catholic Church was seen as a nasty political beast at odds with a true faith, and the villagers turn out to have been surprisingly sophisticated, reading books, for instance, at a time when only hand-copied manuscripts existed. It is apparent that many popular religious movements preceded the protestant schism.

In their literal testimony we glimpse the villagers' daily lives, their sense of time and reality, their relations with neighbors (like the Moors of northern Spain), as well as a social organization that was more communal (and less class-divided) than our unconsciously marxist-influenced history books would have it. The lady of the manor is seen regularly spending time gossiping in the kitchens of the farmers, the shepherds tend each others' flocks on cash contract, and when it's safe, religion is vigorously debated by the fire. It's not a dark oppressed feudal world. The romantic entanglements of the village priest alone are enough to liven the place up. If we had such documents for other times and places, in which people's thinking was as thoroughly documented, we might better appreciate our origins. This book is a gold mine.

Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie's book, Montaillou is an informative look at a medieval village in Southern France. Its writing style is similar to Bibbey in its ability to place the reader inside a historical period and see it from the perspective of the people involved. It is an objective, though intimate look at the hypocrisy of clergy and the excesses to which they were involved. Stake-burning and the debauching of virgins were an ever-present threat, as well as cuckholded husbands terrified to reveal the priests responsible. A smooth, flowing narrative, it is a must-read for anyone interested in medieval European society, and captures the attention of the reader from start to finish.

In my historiography classes this book has been lauded and used as an example of a new form of history-writing: a complete discription of a village and all it's aspects: religion, sex, food, families, houses etc.
It is definitely not a boring book about one particular subject but covers wide aspects of the Pyrennee Village of Montaillou. Besides being interesting to read it also might open your eyes about certain ideas we might have had about religion and society in the 14th century. We read now that everyone slept with everyone, including the priest, the greatest fornicator of them all. Homosexuality is normal and people cried a lot sooner than now.

Read it and be amazed about 14th century France, it's different than you always though

Montaillou was a little village up in the foothills of the Pyrenees in the Middle Ages. The Cathar heresy took root there, so the Church sent in an inquisitor who was an unusually thorough records-keeper (it seems he had ambitions), and his detailed interviews have all been saved. From them, Ladurie brings the village back to life, and it's a dirty, rollicking place. Nothing I've read except "Canterbury Tales" gets you closer to the medieval mind, which turns out, of course, to be endearingly like our own.

This book is for those who enjoy reading serious historical and anthropological studies; for those who delight in asking how did our predecessors live? Sometimes we wonder when travelling in Europe how was life in those medieval villages? We can spot them everywhere, with a bunch of little houses below, slowly climbing up a hill, and a large feudal mansion on top. If this has happened to you, this book is not only essential but it will be a very pleasant adventure. The details we learn about daily life in Montaillou, the people's beliefs, their gestures, their sexual life, their culture and commerce, all can only be so precise thanks to an obsessive preoccupation of Inquisition's guardian Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers and later on Pope at Avignon, known as Benedict XII. We owe our pleasure also to the masterly data intrepretation and selection of Fournier's archaic texts to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a fine scholar. Fournier, a dedicated religious man was interested in documenting the practice of Catharism -- a heretic sect -- in Languedoc, France. This way he left for future generations rich material about the habits and ways of living of the time. Ladurie guides us through this data and give us a dynamic view of life in the first two decades of the 14th c. It is seductive. It is worth the effort to lose ourselves among these villagers, from lice-picking to the priest's amorous adventures, from a shepherd's life to the punishments for heresies. Do not miss this book. It is time-travelling. Although this is not a novel, I recommend after this book the reading of Iian Pears, The Dream of Scipio.

I am so pleasantly suprised to find this book still in print. I first read it in a class on Medieval religion. Basically, it is an account of peasant life and society in a villiage in Medieval France- taken from, of all things, an inquisitor's depositions. It describes the people's moral and religious beliefs, their superstitions, the vices and virtues of their society, their social structure and so on. Anyone who has any interest in the Middle Ages MUST read this!