Montaillou (book)
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Montaillou, village occitan (1975) is a book by French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. It is considered a pioneering work of microhistory and analyzes the town of Montaillou in great detail over a thirty-year period from 1294 to 1324. Then a village of some 250 people, the daily routines of the people are in the records of Jacques Fournier, later Pope Benedict XII.
Montaillou was one of the last bastions of the Albigensian belief also known as Catharism, considered heresy by the dominant Roman Catholic powers. The then local bishop, Fournier, launched an extensive inquisition involving dozens of lengthy interviews with the locals, all of which were faithfully recorded, such as the arrest of the entire village in 1308. When Fournier became Pope he brought the records with him and they remain in the Vatican Library.
In this work, he used the Fournier Register, a set of 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 years. Le Roy Ladurie used the records of interrogations conducted by Fournier to offer a picture of both the material and mental worlds of the villagers. 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.
See also
- Montaillou, a commune in the Ariège department in southwestern France.
- Château de Montaillou
- Fournier Register
