Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error
by: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Barbara Bray (Translator)

Hardcover. NY, George Braziller, 1st US, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a very good dust jacket that has sunning to edges, 383 pages. a fascinating history of a fourteenth-century village, Montaillou, in the mountainous region of southern France, almost destroyed by internal feuds and religious heterodoxy. Ladurie's portrait is based on a detailed register of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers and future Pope Benedict XII, who conducted rigorous inquisition into heresy within his diocese. Fournier was a consummate inquisitor, an acute psychologist who was able to elicit from the accused the innermost secrets of their thoughts and actions. He was pitiless in the pursuit of error, and meticulous in recording that pursuit. LeRoy Ladurie analyzes the behavior, demography, social mentality, and cosmology of the community of peasants and shepherds, and vividly evokes the daily life of the village and mountain pastures.