Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324

Originally published in French in 1975, Montaillou is a pioneering work in microhistory by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (b. 1929), a study of the village of Montaillou in the region of Languedoc in the south of France during the age of the Cathar heresy. He drew upon the meticulous notes of a member of the Inquisition, Jacques Fournier, who served as the Bishop of Pamiers between 1318 and 1325 before becoming Pope Benedict XII, to develop a multi-layered study of life in a small French village over the course of several decades. Using the records of interrogations conducted by Fournier -- a consummate and pitiless inquisitor in the pursuit of heresy, an acute psychologist who was able to elicit from the accused the innermost secrets of their thoughts and actions -- Le Roy Ladurie recreated both the material and mental worlds of a rich cast of village characters. He examined the former as reflected in farming practices, houses, relations with other villages and with both secular and ecclesiastical power, and the latter as reflected in their beliefs about God, fate, sexuality, death, life, marriage, magic, space, time, and salvation.
"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