Montaillou (book)

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Montaillou - A Village Before the Inquisitor 1294–1324 is a book by the French Annales historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie . The work was first published in 1975 under the title Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 in Paris . Le Roy Ladurie continues with the Inquisition Acts of Bishop Jacques Fournier, who later became Pope Benedict XII, from 1318 to 1325 . , about the village of Montaillou apart. Using these sources, Le Roy Ladurie tries to reconstruct the mental and everyday world of the inhabitants of Montaillou at the turn of the 13th to the 14th century and at the same time works out the social structures within a society. The monograph by Le Roy Ladurie is now considered a standard work in microhistory .

Synopsis

background

The twenty-year crusade of the Roman Catholic Church and the French king against the Occitan people of different faiths, also called Albigensians or Cathars , ended in 1229 with the conclusion of peace in Meaux and the de facto annexation of the Languedoc region by France . This was not enough, however, to prevent the heterodox Cathar stream in Occitania , which remained almost a century later in the remote mountain valleys of the Sabarthès , including in the village of Montaillou. This remote village in the south of the County of Foix was on the east bank of the Hers , a little north of the town of Ax-les-Thermes , where the river then flows into the Ariège . The place still exists today, even if it is not quite in the same place where it once was ( Montaillou ).

When Jacques Fournier finally became bishop of the diocese of Pamiers , which also included the county of Foix , in 1317 , Montaillou first came into his focus. Fournier was not only a bishop, but also an inquisitor who tried to ensure the orthodoxy of the congregations under him. For this purpose, Fournier put up protocols in Latin between 1318 and 1325 of his interviews as an inquisitor. The manuscript of these protocols is now in the Vatican library and was edited by Jean Duvernoy in 1965 and published under the title Le Registre d'Inquisition de Jacques Fournier, Évêque de Pamiers (1318–1325) . The edited version of the Inquisition Acts is the main source in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's monograph. According to him, the minutes show how the farmers of Montaillou "speak on their own behalf". In addition, from the point of view of Le Roy Ladurie, Bishop Fournier was a conscientious man who, as an inquisitor, was not only “patiently trying to find out everything his witnesses knew, but also conscientiously worried that the spoken word for word was written down see".

Ecology of Montaillou: The House and the Shepherd

Le Roy Ladurie's work basically consists of two parts. The first part comprises seven chapters and deals with the ecology of Montaillou. In it, he introduces the two most important industrial groups in the mountainous south of the County of Foix , on the one hand the farmers and on the other hand the shepherds. The farmers tilled the land, rearing cattle and were the largest social group in Montaillou. The central unit in the life of every farming family was the house, which included not only the nuclear family, but also material goods, land, animals, the household, guests, relatives etc. included. In Fournier's files the terms domus , ostal or hospicium were used for the term “house” . The individual households in Montaillou were in lively exchange with others. So there were houses that were friendly, hostile or neutral to one another.

The house also had a religious function and significance. Thus, according to Albigensian teaching, one could practice the faith in one's own room instead of in the church. For this reason, the network of the individual house communities in Montaillou played a major role in the re-establishment and expansion of Catharism . According to Fournier's files, there were said to have been eleven heterodox and five Catholic houses in Montaillou, some of which sometimes changed camps, such as the house of the Clergues. Le Roy Ladurie devotes an entire chapter to the Clergue family, which was at times the richest and most influential family in Montaillou. The historian seems to be particularly interested in the landlord, Pierre Clergue, who was both the village pastor and Catharist at the same time.

After the farmers, the second largest group in the village was that of the shepherds. The shepherds' rhythm of life was conditioned by the "ecology and chronology of transhumance ". This meant that the shepherds eke out a living as wanderers, as they changed the pastures for their flocks of sheep several times a year. The shepherds from Montaillou organized themselves in so-called cabanes (in English huts). So after the summer cabane on the pastures in the Pyrenees, the winter cabane in Catalonia followed . Using the person of Pierre Maurys as an example, Le Roy Ladurie shows what the world and life of such a shepherd from Montaillou looked like and to what extent shepherds were receptive to the teachings of Catharism. Among other things, it addresses the feeling of freedom, openness, the partly egalitarian values ​​and the fatalistic perspective of the shepherds. According to Le Roy Ladurie, however, it is precisely “the traveling society” of shepherds that exerts a stronger attraction “than the families of settled farmers who are confined to their domus ”.

Archeology of Montaillou: From Signs to Myths

In the second, more comprehensive part, Le Roy Ladurie is devoted to the archeology of Montaillou. He deals extensively with the mentality of the residents of Montaillou. So he deals with this part of the ideas of the people in terms of love and marriage, childhood and old age, religion and magic, morality and work and this life and the afterlife .

Le Roy Ladurie explains, for example, how the love life of the villagers took on extremely different forms. There were fleeting love affairs, men who entered into relationships with concubines, long-lasting relationships and many arranged marriages, but also incest and rape. In addition, it often happened in Montaillou that a married man or woman had other affairs outside of marriage. In this context Ladurie speaks of a “culture of promiscuity ” and points out that the Church was extremely tolerant of the “Epicurean sexual morality” of the common people. In addition, the chapter "The Libido of the Clergues" illustrated how the love life of the members of a household could develop, especially the lustful village pastor Pierre Clergue with his countless love affairs is again the focus.

Ladurie also describes, among other things, the relationship between the people of Montaillou and religion. The people believed, for example, that one could not come into direct contact with God and that one had to rely on the help of mediators - in the case of the Catholics on the pastor and in the case of the Cathars on the bonhomme or parfait . However, the boundaries between heterodoxy and orthodoxy were not set in stone. So it did happen that residents who were well sunbathed by the Catharian ideas and the bonhommes nevertheless took part in the Sunday service.

concept

In the first part, Le Roy Ladurie deals with structures that remain unchanged over a longer period of time. In the ecology of Montaillou, he addresses the house, which functions as the most important social unit in the life of the farmer, and addresses the shepherds' rhythm of life. With this he builds on the approach of the longue durée , which was significantly shaped by his teacher Fernand Braudel .

In the part about the archeology of Montaillou everything revolves around the cultural forms ( mentality ) of the inhabitants, which have a certain permanence. Le Roy Ladurie depicts the feelings, thoughts, ideals and ideas of the residents of Montaillou between the 13th and 14th centuries and tries to explain how these in turn affected people's actions and determined their attitudes in specific situations (history of mentality ). According to him, not only does the farmer speak for itself, but also the culture.

Le Roy Ladurie brings together the approach of the longue durée and research on the history of mentality by focusing a magnifying glass on a region and examining it on a small or micro-historical level. Today, Montaillou - A Village Before the Inquisitor 1294–1324, along with Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and Worms, is considered a classic of micro-history.

reception

Montaillou - A Village Before the Inquisitor 1294-1324 was a commercial success and achieved high sales after its publication. The work was also recognized by the critics. It has often been touted as a "masterpiece of social history ". According to Natalie Zemon Davis, Le Roy Ladurie artfully combined the two disciplines of history and anthropology in his book . According to her, therefore, all those who practice local history can only admire the efforts of Le Roy Ladurie, who “tests the field of great theories about family relationships, social organization, the mentality […] of the peasants, etc.”. Even Laurence Wylie praised Le Roy Ladurie in the highest terms. If Wylie has his way, Le Roy Ladurie created “the most extensive and exciting tableau of medieval life in a French community” that has ever been written, based on Jacques Fournier's files. Wylie described the work of Le Roy Ladurie as a "milestone in science". Philipp Lewis even went as far as saying that no review could do justice to Ladurie's monograph, which according to Lewis comes extremely close to a Histoire Totale .

However, other voices criticize Ladurie's handling of the sources: David Herlihy compared Ladurie's text version with that of Jean Duvernoy and came to the conclusion that "the research that is subject to the arguments shows worrying signs of haste and inattention". According to Herlihy, Ladurie works with paraphrases that are often shortened without highlighting the omitted passages in the text, and points out that some paraphrases even distort the actual meaning of the content. For Herlihy, the main reason behind the book's commercial success lies in the open and sometimes extensive treatment of the subject of sex.

According to Renato Rosaldo , Le Roy Ladurie would like the reader to believe that the Inquisitor Jacques Fournier created a detailed and trustworthy document that the historian can use six centuries later - in the case of Le Roy Ladurie, extremely "uncritically". The Annales historian disregards the context in which the sources were created and thus does not take into account the power relationships through which they were produced, according to Rosaldo. He therefore sees the use of Inquisition acts as a "transparent medium for the votes of the peasants" to be extremely problematic. Even Jessie Sherwood is linked to the criticism of Rosaldo, adding that Le Roy Ladurie hesitation sources ransacked for information about the ideas and the everyday lives of people in Montaillou and thereby rendered "dispositions of the third person in the first".

expenditure

  • French original edition: Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324. Gallimard, Paris 1975.
  • Revised French edition. Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324. Gallimard, Paris 1982, ISBN 2070209512 .
  • English translation: Montaillou: the promised land of error. Vintage Books, New York 1979, ISBN 0-394-72964-1 .
  • German translation: Montaillou: a village before the Inquisitor 1294 to 1324. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-548-34114-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: Montaillou - A village before the Inquisitor 1294–1324 . Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Ullstein Verlag 1986.
  2. ↑ a b c d Renato Rosaldo: From the Door of His Tent. The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor . In: James Clifford, George Marcus (Eds.): The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography . University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1986, pp. 77-97.
  3. ^ Rudolf Schlögl - Mental History. Website of the University of Konstanz. Retrieved August 4, 2019
  4. ↑ a b c Review by David Herlihy on: Montaillou - Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324 by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie . In: Social History , Vol. 4, No. 3. George Mason University, 1979, pp. 517-520. Retrieved August 5.
  5. ↑ Natalie Zemon Davis: Les Conteurs de Montaillou , in: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (1979), Vol. 34, No. 1. Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 61. Retrieved August 11.
  6. ^ A b Laurence Wylie: The Historian as Detective , in: The Washington Post , Nash Holdings LL C, 1987. Retrieved August 11.
  7. ↑ Review by PS Lewis of: Montaillou, village occitan, de 1294 à 1324 by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie , in: The English Historical Review , Vol. 92, No. 363. Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 372 August.
  8. ↑ a b Jessie Sherwood: The Inquisitor as Archivist, or Surprise, Fear, and Ruthless Efficiency in the Archives , in: The American Archivist , Vol. 75, No. 1. Society of American Archivists, 2012, pp. 56-80. Retrieved August 5.