Leroy Ladurie's "Montaillou"

In Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error Le Roy Ladurie goes deeply into the lives of the villagers of Montaillou, relying primarily on their own testimony as recorded by the Inquisition under the direction of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers and, later, Pope Benedict XII. The carefully kept records of the Inquisition provide a remarkable fund of information about a small, poor town in the early fourteenth century. The methods of the Inquisition required such detailed testimony, from witnesses as well as from the accused, and went into so many areas of the people's everyday lives that when an Inquisitor such as Fournier was concerned with meticulous record-keeping the result could be an unrivaled source of information about otherwise obscure village life. But Le Roy Ladurie's methods, admirable in many respects, raise a number of serious questions.

Le Roy Ladurie integrates the testimony of the villagers into his narrative either with direct quotations from the transcripts or by recounting and paraphrasing the substance of their accounts. Le Roy Ladurie also makes it clear when he is drawing conclusions or generalizing from a limited number of cases. He is also careful to clearly state the fact that he is using information that derives from and applies to other locations -- as in the discussion of homosexuality in Chapter Eight. Though such instances sometimes raise the question of why they were included, they are usually pertinent. Overall the author seems to m

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d of filial respect that women, badly treated as young wives, could expect when their children became adults. The instance was also used as an example of the terror that the thought of the Inquisition inspired. Here, in this last example, is the crux of Le Roy Ladurie's credibility problem. He refers on a number of occasions to the fear that the Inquisition inspired. He quotes a conversation from the record in which a woman wonders how heretics can stand the pain of being burned and another's response that God takes away the pain. Yet these people, so prone to bursting into tears, are, at the time this evidence is compiled, in danger of being burned or chained and imprisoned for life and, Cathar faith aside, few people actually welcome such a fate. How does Le Roy Ladurie account for what has to be a major bias in the information on which his account is based? He barely does so. In the introduction Le Roy Ladurie seems to want to defuse this reaction against his source. He tells the reader that Fournier was a relatively mild Inquisitor when it came to using torture or meting out sentences of death or life imprisonment. Fournier was able to tell a heretic from a true believer very quickly and was regarded as "a very dev

Category: History - L