Revisiting Montaillou

REVISITING MONTAILLOU by Edna Ruth Yahil John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2001) 311 pp. Malcolm Barber, The Cathars : Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages (Harlow, Eng. and New York: Longman 2000) xxi + 282 pp., ill., maps. Charmaine Craig, The Good Men : A Novel of Heresy (New York: Riverhead Books 2002) 399 pp., maps. Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers 1998) 344 pp., ill., maps. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ed. Autour de Montaillou, un village occitan. Histoire et religiosité d’une communauté villageoise au Moyen Age (Paris: L’Hydre 2001) 416 pp. Mark Gregory Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246 (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2001) 372 pp., ill. René Weis, The Yellow Cross : The Story of the Last Cathars, 1290–132 (London and New York: Viking 2000) lv + 453 pp., ill. More than twenty-five years have passed since Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie introduced modern readers to the tiny medieval village of Montaillou , situated high in the Pyrenees.1 Little did the editors at Gallimard realize how popular Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 would become when in 1975 they ordered an initial press-run of only 6,000 copies.2 Montaillou became an instant best-seller in France and within three years a considerably shorter English translation awed readers in the Anglophone world.3 If one counts the multiple 1 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: 1978); idem, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris 1975; rev. ed. 1982). I would like to thank Michelle Mirandon, Melissa Verlet, Gregory Milton, Gregory Brown, Chris N. Jones, and Pierre Savy for help with this essay. 2 Montaillou has been well received throughout the world. In addition to multiple French (1975, rev. 1982, repr. 1985, 1991, 1998, 2000) and English editions (1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1984), it has been translated into Norwegian (1986), Polish (1998), Spanish (1981), and German (1989), with an English-language sound recording for the blind (1981). There has also been a musical adaptation of the testimonies of Béatrice de Planissoles , Jacques Charpentier, René Nelli, and Jean Duvernoy, Beatris de Planissolas: cinq “tensons” d’après les “minutes” du procès de Beatris de Planissolas” (Paris 1983). 3 Leonard Boyle describes the truncation of the English translation in “Montaillou Revisited: Mentalité and Methodology” in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. A. EDNA RUTH YAHIL 150 translations of this work, over 2,000,000 copies have been sold, making it one of the best-selling history books of all time. Le Roy Ladurie’s goals for this monograph were not immodest. A student of Fernand Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie sought to write an Histoire totale and chose the peasantry of Languedoc as his subject. He had already made a name for himself within the Annales tradition with the publication of his formidable thèse d’État, Paysans en Languedoc, in 1965 and a supplementary thesis, Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil, the following year.4 Montaillou was a logical next step, for Le Roy Ladurie’s work differed from that of Braudel and other early Annalistes in that he not only told the story of the land; he also wrote of its people. It was the publication of Montaillou, village occitan, a work that focused on the medieval mentalité, that catapulted Le Roy Ladurie into intellectual superstardom. He divided the book into two sections, ecology and archeology: the former true to Annales form concerns longterm , unchanging phenomena (la longue durée) such as the mountains, the domus-ostal family unit, and the pastoral sentiments expressed by the villagers; the latter is a discussion of appropriate ethnographic topics such as marriage, death, and magic. Throughout the gripping narrative , Le Roy Ladurie spent much effort outlining in titillating detail the villagers’ antics, those that he found normal and others that were deviant . Who can forget the sexual escapades of the local priest Pierre Clergue or the pédéraste actif, Arnaud de Verniolles? Le Roy Ladurie based his history of Montaillou on one source, albeit an...