Pursuing themes ranging from antiquity to modern times, from the Inquisition and Joan of Arc to the anti-labor bias of present-day history books, History as Mystery demonstrates how past and present can inform each other and how history can be a truly exciting and engaging subject.
Michael Parenti unveils the history of falsified history, from the early Christian church to the present: a fascinating, darkly revelatory tale. He is one of the nation's leadiing progressive political analysts. He is the author of over published articles and twenty books, including Against Empire, Dirty Truths, and Blackshirts and Reds. His writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad. A fresh examination of the Cathar heresy, using the records of inquisitorial tribunals to bring out new details of life at the time. Very little has been written on the subject of old age in pre-industrial Europe and even less on old women.
The topic of post-menopausal women in the Middle Ages has not received much attention in historical scholarship. It investigates some of the attitudes and perceptions held by medieval writers concerning post-menopausal women and whether their discourses reflected or diverged from how they actually lived their lives.
Historical Knowledge approaches the topic of historical knowledge in depth and from various angles. It seeks to offer theoretical and methodological building blocks for the use of anyone pursuing historical research. The overall theme of the book, the possibility of historical knowledge, reflects the very issue that makes historical research distinctive: the challenges of evidence and the problems, both concrete and conceptual, with deciphering and interpreting remnants of the past.
This book refreshes the discussion about sources and proper evidence, two issues that the linguistic turn and the postmodern challenge pushed into the background. The book addresses these issues in an easily accessible way and serves as an introduction and guide to the role of theory, method and evidence in historical research not only for students and scholars of history, but also for anyone outside the field with an interest in the topic.
The other contributors, Professors Risto Alapuro, Janken Myrdal and Matti Peltonen, are active debaters in current theoretical and methodo-logical discussion.
Insights developed in the past two decades by philosophers of the social sciences can serve to enrich the challenging intellectual tasks of conceptualizing, investigating, and representing the human past. This volume brings these perspectives together and considers fundamental questions, such as: What is historical causation?
What is a large historical structure? What is involved in understanding the subjectivity of historical actors? What is involved in arriving at an economic history of a large region? How are actions and outcomes related? The arguments touch upon a wide range of historical topics -- the Chinese and French Revolutions, the extension of railroads in the nineteenth century, and the development of agriculture in medieval China.
From a wealth of vivid autobiographical writings, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons, bringing to life the customs, perceptions, and character of an age poised at the threshold of modernity. All rights reserved. Burnham takes us inside the world of a little-known heretical group in the south of France in the early fourteenth century.
The Beguins were a small sect of priests and lay people allied to and sharing many of the convictions of the Spiritual Franciscans. They stressed poverty in their pursuit of a Franciscan evangelical ideal and believed themselves to be living in the Last Days.
By the late thirteenth century, the leaders of the order and the popes themselves had begun to discipline the Spirituals, and by they had been deemed a heresy. The Beguins refused to accept this situation and began to evade and confront the inquisitorial machine. Burnham follows the lives of nine Beguins as they conceal themselves in cities, construct an "underground railroad," solicit clandestine donations in order to bribe inquisitors, escape from prison, and venerate the burned bones of their martyred fellows as the relics of saints.
Their actions brought the Beguins the apocalypse they had long imagined, as the Church's inquisitors pursued them along with the Spirituals and began to arrest them and burn them at the stake. Reconstructing this dramatic history using inquisitorial depositions, notarial records, and the previously unknown Beguin martyrology, Burnham vividly recreates the world in which the Beguins lived and died for their beliefs.
Karen Sullivan proposes that such literature allowed medieval culture a means by which to express truths about heretics and the epistemological anxieties they aroused.
Author : Harvey J. Author : Mary S. Author : William W. Author : Eric C. Author : Jessica E. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Barbara Bray translator. Get A Copy. Paperback , pages. More Details Original Title.
Pope Benedict XII. Montaillou France. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Montaillou , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Montaillou was a small community of some souls, farmers and shepherds, of no particular interest except that it became the subject of this extraordinarily detailed and exhaustive inquisition.
I purchased this book on a whim about twenty years ago. The sad looking ruin on a rather desolate hillside appealed to me for some obscure reason as did the subject of the Cathars and catholics during the mediaeval period. Unfortunately it has lain lost and forlorn on one of my upper bookshelves where only dust has kept it company all these years. Yes, the reason I discovered it was that I was dusting that section of the top shelf, just below the ceiling.
They did not go bathing or swimming. On the other hand, there was a great deal of delousing, which was an ingredient of friendship, whether heretical or purely social. Remarkable really. The Clergues, as leading citizens, had no difficulty in finding women to relieve them of their insect life. As we are dealing with heresy here, there is an excellent glossary at the end which shows which of the main families were, or were not, heretical households.
On reflection, yes, this book on the one hand is somewhat dry in parts but then on the other, this is one of those books that can be opened at any chapter and will continually interest the reader. View all 8 comments. Into the Pyrenees, almost every wooded slope is topped with a picturesque ruined chateau. Which in itself is a bit weird. But Catharism has become a tourist attraction.
The Cathars are hailed as an inspiration by various neo-Gnostic groups, praised for their pioneering vegetarianism, their feminism, their antiestablishment free-thinking, their nature-loving eco-friendliness, take your pick.
It's a strange fate for a movement that was an almost unbroken record of suffering and repression for over a century. The Catholic Church had identified it as a clear heresy back in the s, and a twenty-year Crusade was duly waged against the Cathars of Languedoc from — — after which it lingered in scattered remote parts of the Pyrenees until the Inquisition burned the last few believers in the early s. By the mid-fourteenth century it was all over.
Why was it such a problem? Obviously this wouldn't sit well with the Church establishment, but it still seems rather strange to think of them launching a Crusade — an actual Crusade, with crusading knights, like what they sent to Jerusalem! The key to understanding this is to wander round Languedoc and appreciate that the whole area, in the thirteenth century, was not France but rather a massive patchwork of little semi-independent feudal territories of which Andorra has somehow survived to the present day; to imagine early-medieval Languedoc, start by picturing a network of Andorras.
Even at the height of Catharism, Cathar believers were probably never a majority, and they certainly weren't by the time of the Crusade against them. The sieges and battles of the Albigensian Crusade were never about Christian armies fighting Cathar armies: they were about French armies fighting Occitanian armies. It's the fact that before the Crusade, the area was owned by the Counts of Toulouse, the Trencavel viscounts, the Aragonese king, and so on; after the Crusade, it was all owned by France.
This political dimension was clear from what happened after the battles. Statutes introduced by Simon de Montford the legendarily ruthless early leader of the Crusade , for instance, banned Occitanian noblewomen from marrying local men; instead, they had to give their hands, and their tempting dowries, to Frenchmen.
Which is not to say that religion was not a factor; in fact, it may be that the cruelty of the Crusade can only be explained with some reference to religious fanaticism. Twenty thousand people were massacred. It was just the first of many disproportionate and unpleasant acts that would characterise the whole conflict. But the story of Catharism has an interesting postscript, which O'Shea covers in a brief final chapter and which is dealt with more fully by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in his classic microhistory Montaillou.
Montaillou is a tiny village in the mountains, where it seems that Catharism lingered on into the s; we know this because the entire village was eventually rounded up and questioned by the Bishop of Pamiers, working in conjunction with the Inquisition in Carcassonne.
Compared to O'Shea, who writes in a free journalistic style though his endnotes are satisfyingly thorough , Ladurie gives the impression of having one finger always on the primary sources in front of him; his work is built around direct quotation. Though his painstaking detail can occasionally feel punishing, he comes across as definitive.
Eventually Fournier had the last few Cathar intransigents burned at the stake, before he left the mountains and went on to bigger and better things ultimately becoming Pope Benedict XII, promotion working rather more dramatically in those days. View all 5 comments. This amazing study of life in small village in the early fourteenth century in southern France is a classic example of good use of archive material. The basis of the book were the records of the work of the Papal inquisition against the Cathers who were undergoing a resurgence in that place and time largely through the actions of individual holy men whose local prestige despite public assertions of celibacy allowed them to become deeply embedded in the community.
Le Roy Ladurie's micro-history us This amazing study of life in small village in the early fourteenth century in southern France is a classic example of good use of archive material. Le Roy Ladurie's micro-history uses those records to lay bear the daily life of the villagers from loving couples picking fleas off each other as much as to detail popular belief far from the more familiar and regulated Christian life of the towns.
Very interesting on the interdependence between the forms of peasant life and geography. View all 4 comments. Oct 29, Czarny Pies rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: Those eho have taken an undergraduate course on medieval French history.
Shelves: european-history. Written by Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, the star pupil of Fernand Braudel and informal leader of the third wave of the Annales school of historians, "Montaillou" was touted as a classic the year it was published in It unquestionably merits five stars.
The problem is that many of its best points are likely to go over the head of anyone un familiar with either medieval France and Catholic theology on sacraments. Fortunately the principal players fornicated even more than they prayed so the book i Written by Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, the star pupil of Fernand Braudel and informal leader of the third wave of the Annales school of historians, "Montaillou" was touted as a classic the year it was published in Fortunately the principal players fornicated even more than they prayed so the book is nonetheless highly entertaining even for the under-qualified reader.
LeRoy Ladurie's book is based on the base on the inquisition register of Mgr. Jacques Fournier of Pamiers later Pope Benedict XII containing the transcripts of the interrogations conducted between to of individuals suspected of being Cathars.
The author insists that the subject of his book is the peasant society of Montaillou a mountainous region on the Spanish border in southwest France rather than the Cathar heresy. LeRoy Ladurie's intention may have been to describe the overall peasant society, but in reality his book says a great deal about Catharism. LeRoy Ladurie describes the peasants as leading comfortable lives without working very much. They raised livestock and grew crops to feed themselves.
Cash came from shepherding. The chief problem was that the Catholic Church had heavy tithes that if paid in full would have compromised their relative prosperity.
The practice of the Church was to excommunicate those who did not pay and to persecute as heretics any who embraced Catharism. In LeRoy Ladurie's view it was very hard to distinguish "heresy over tithes from heresy over religion. In turn several "domus" "domii" would be aggregated to form clans. There was no trace of anything that might be considered class consciousness in Marxist terms. The decision to be a Cathar heretic or Catholic was made by the head of the "domus" who would impose it on the entire unit.
While resentment over tithes seems to be have been a factor that predisposed some "domus" leaders towards Catharism, there was still a clear set of beliefs and practices that the members of the Cathar heresy subscribed to. The Cathars believed that the physical world was the creation of the devil while the spiritual world belonged to God. The Cathars had their own priests called parfaits or bonhommes and an initiation rite referred to as a consolamentum.
The Cathar parfaits were not allowed either to eat meat or engage in sexual relations. Catharism rejected the Catholic doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
Similiarly Cathars did not believe that extreme unction administered by a Catholic priest had any effect. Rather salvation was achieved through the consolamentum administered by the Cathar parfait or bonhomme. LeRoy Ladurie provides marvellous descriptions of multiple aspects of the lifestyle of the Montaillou peasants.
The most entertaining section is the one dealing with their very free sexual practices. He also writes strong descriptions of their buildings, relations with animals and the relations of the peasants with government officials. He is possibly at his most insightful when he describes the processes of spying and denunciation that dominated the daily lives of the Cathars.
In this regard, one can see that LeRoy Ladurie was very much a man of his time as the previous generation of Frenchmen had lived through two rounds of spying and denunciation. In the first round it was the participants of the French Resistance who had been spied on and denounced to the Germans. In the second round, it was Nazi collaborators who were denounced to the Communist vigilantes. For the reader with the right background, its pleasures are many.
View all 3 comments. Dec 14, Katie rated it really liked it Shelves: medieval , cultural-history , history , lay-piety , french-history , religious-history , economic-history. A really fascinating look at what life was like in a little village in the Pyrenees during the early 14th century. Le Roy Ladurie is obsessed with detail, so you'll get to find out all kinds of little anecdotes ranging from friends of different social strata delousing each other to the widespread sexual exploits of the adventurous village priest, Pierre Clergue.
It's one of the only chances to see non-nobles and non-clerics of this era as full fledged people with voices, talking about their live A really fascinating look at what life was like in a little village in the Pyrenees during the early 14th century. It's one of the only chances to see non-nobles and non-clerics of this era as full fledged people with voices, talking about their lives.
It swings around from anthropological study to biography to narrative in a way that really gives the village texture. It's really cool. There are definitely problems - the degree to which testimony taken from inquisitorial records is accurate, among others - but it's a really lovely and almost romantic book. Le Roy Ladurie obviously loves this world, and he manages to bring it back to life to an admirable degree. It almost reads at times like a memorial or a eulogy. Definitely worth a read if you're interested a less institution-heavy view of medieval history.
Jan 14, Terence rated it liked it Shelves: history-general , history-medieval. When I began my undergraduate career I was part of an honors seminar where this was one of the books we read. It was an eye-opening experience and probably did as much as anything at that time in propelling me to specialize in Medieval history. Montaillou was a village in southern France that suffered an inquisitorial investigation in the midth century because of a recrudescence of the Cathar heresy which had been "eradicated" in the previous century, or so the Church believed.
The book's fa When I began my undergraduate career I was part of an honors seminar where this was one of the books we read. The book's fascination and brilliance lies not so much in its discussion of the inquisition but in the insight the inquisition's depositions that it took from the peasants gives into the lives of the people of Montaillou. LeRoy Ladurie is a major figure in the Annales strain of Medieval historiography, which focuses on such sources to tease out how people lived and thought, and Montaillou is one of the better examples for a general reading audience to enjoy.
View 1 comment. Mixed feelings. The basis of the book is that in the early 14th century the tiny village of Montaillou, on the north side of the Pyrenees, saw most of its inhabitants subscribe to the Cathar heresy, which had once been widespread in Southern France. A Church Inquisitor, Jacques Fournier, interrogated the villagers. He was relentless in questioning Mixed feelings. It was a poor place. On the other hand, the peasants were free. Although the peasants had to do backbreaking work to survive, they did not strive after wealth and were not bound by the timetabling of modern life.
When they chose to, they would take long breaks from work and sit in the sun to talk to their neighbours. Girls were married as young teenagers, generally to men years older than they were.
All the men seemed to have used violence against their wives to a greater or lesser degree, but interestingly the author suggests the lives of women generally improved as they aged.
Because wives were so much younger than their husbands, they mostly outlived them, and older widows with adult children lived out their days as respected matriarchs.
Older men experienced the opposite. Once into his fifties, a man lost his position as head of the household to his oldest son and had to defer to the latter. Married or not, most of the villagers, male and female, had pretty racy love lives. As is often the case, there was one particular man who took the role of village Lothario, in this case it was the village priest! Reading the book, I gained the impression that Catharism was an early expression of the very French tradition of anti-clericalism, which has been a big part of French history and is still a part of French life today.
The clergy were viewed as parasites who did no work and who lived off the sweat of others, and reading these pages you get a clear sense that many people regarded them with intense hostility. On the whole people were anti-clerical rather than anti-religious, but there were also a fair number of sceptics who denied the existence of God altogether, something which was extremely dangerous to do. Despite all the plus points, I did struggle with this book at times. Long stretches of the book were descriptions of everyday conversations, or the annual changes of employment for shepherds, who might work for a different farmer each year.
Of course, this is fantastic material for historians, maybe less so for the general reader. Apr 18, Alex marked it as to-read. Apparently some Inquisitor back in the 14th century performed exceptionally detailed interrogations on an entire town; the author used those records to piece together a new look at exactly what life was like in that town. So it's not so much about the Inquisition as it is about every day life. Interesting, huh? GR reviews indicate it's not a thrilling read, but it's a pretty cool idea.
Shelves: nonfiction , history , overseas. Overhead lines blew down. Since the intended arrival time was 8pm, at 1am I was still trying to find a comfortable reading position on a train seat, whilst distracted by low blood sugar and a loud drunken hen party. In short, I was not in the best of moods during much of reading process.
Nonetheless, it is a fascinating and unique book. Life in the French village of Montaillou in the early 14th century is unusually well documented thanks to an assiduous inquisitor. Bishop Fournier interviewed nearly every adult in the village about their lives and the answers survived the centuries. Indeed, discussing heresy seems to have been a favourite hobby throughout the village, although different people displayed different levels of sincere interest.
I was pleased by how well the author managed to balance academic rigor and approachability in the narrative. The stories of particular village characters are told, as well as more thematic topics like attitudes to family, home, and time. Perhaps the most memorable personage is the erstwhile village priest, Pierre Clerge, a heretic and womaniser.
He and his brother Bernard were for a while the most powerful people in the village. The detailed nature of the accounts quoted allows an insight into the personalities involved. These quotations feel, in fact, like a little window to a very different time, one that is difficult to imagine today. The best analogy I could come up with was that heresy as a discussion topic filled the space now taken up by politics, history, and all forms of media.
All philosophical, scientific, or metaphysical talk was essentially religious. Of particular note to me was the insight that in a situation of near-total illiteracy and complete absence of schooling, men and women conversed from the same level of knowledge.
The brief period in the early 14th century covered here seems to have been quite comfortable for the villagers, until the inquisition turned up and arrested them en masse. However, it was a distinctly different kind of life to that found in nearby towns, let alone other countries, at the same time.
Thank you Rae for recommending this to me! View 2 comments. One day, sunning themselves outside the Moulinex ostal, he said to Bernard Maur brother-in-law of the bayle, Bernard Lesse : 'You people are a curious, often likeable lot.
I get the draw of that Cathar stuff - it does at least allow you to have a bit of a laugh while you're alive. Those shepherds are basically proto-hippies 'quasi-boomerati irritandi'. Not sure about the sleeping with your close relatives and not washing though. You really need to wash more, you know. The clergy sure as hell haven't changed much, either. Sleazy fuckers". To which the parfait, Raymond Alazais replied "Can you give me a hand with my lice?
But you know what I mean about the really micro genealogical detail about who is who, and who is married to who? It sure goes on a bit, brother" "Cousin. Of your aunt's brother-in-law.
From Gaufrette Saint-Gilles" "Sorry, cousin. I adore this book - it is one of the great texts of history from below and a real lesson in use of an archive to read through official records to find the stories of the people.
Le Roy Ladurie uses the official court, legal and church archives to explore the Albigensian heresy - the Cathars - in the Pyrenees during the late 13th and early 14th centuries. His reading of the archives is so subtle and insightful that we find family stories and detailed accounts of the lives of the peasant inhabitan I adore this book - it is one of the great texts of history from below and a real lesson in use of an archive to read through official records to find the stories of the people.
His reading of the archives is so subtle and insightful that we find family stories and detailed accounts of the lives of the peasant inhabitants of Montaillou, the last village to support the 'heresy' and the recipients of special attention form the Inquisition as the church set out to reassert its authority.
Quite brilliant. A micro-history of a medieval Pyrenean village under the scrutiny of an Inquisitor who will one day be Pope. A lascivious priest who not only seduces half his flock, but also instructs them in the heterodox traditions of the Cathars, that extinct and bizarre sect of Christianity whose philosophy sometimes seemed to hold truck with Zoroaster and Pythagoras more than it did the early Church fathers.
Sex, death and delousing--sounds too good to be true. Unfortunately, it is a bit. While the subject A micro-history of a medieval Pyrenean village under the scrutiny of an Inquisitor who will one day be Pope. While the subject matter cannot help but engage, the writing or the English translation and abridgement, at any rate leaves a little to be desired.
This could be overlooked, but sloppy prose may here indicate sloppy process all round. But ultimately history does not depend upon how far one can springboard off the historical sources into the murky--and often perilous--waters of these as-yet unfathomed disciplines which only the keenest of scholars are able to navigate with any success ; it depends on a —thorough- familiarity with and understanding of the primary sources themselves.
It might appear at first glance that this book was about just another dry religious sect or schism, in this case concerning the Cathars or Albingensians back in the Fourteenth Century, that had long since vanished and was of little lasting importance. However, as strange as their beliefs might seem to us now, this is not the case. We might scoff at metempyschosis - the belief that souls could travel from humans to animals and back again - but when the individual testimonies of the people of Mont It might appear at first glance that this book was about just another dry religious sect or schism, in this case concerning the Cathars or Albingensians back in the Fourteenth Century, that had long since vanished and was of little lasting importance.
We might scoff at metempyschosis - the belief that souls could travel from humans to animals and back again - but when the individual testimonies of the people of Montaillou grilled by the Catholic Inquisition are looked at we can see astonishing parallels with our own times. Some of the characters are so familiar that pretty soon Montaillou starts to read like a soap opera or a medieval version of Dynasty. There is the parish priest Pierre Clergue, the most powerful man in the village who tries to run with the hare and the hounds, occasionally shielding his Cathar neighbours from the fury of the Inquisition.
However, most of his time is spent rutting with the female members of his congregation, the younger the better. He has affairs like other men have breakfast - with the local member of the nobility on one occasion - or he relishes a quickie with some poor peasant girl or penniless bastard on another. Pierre isn't choosy and is a one-man Second Coming. Then there is Pierre Maury the shepherd who also hedges his religious bets, even if his heart is with the 'good men'.
He is full of simple wisdom and he really knows how to enjoy life even if he feels like many a shepherd that he was far too poor to ever get married. There was always female company to be had in the local taverns. Most of the time he spends bonding with his fellow shepherds in their mountain huts and is so popular he becomes their virtual leader.
Like many in Montaillou he feels that the established church is far too rich and that their supposed poor clergy and monks eat far too well. There are several major families in Montaillou and they all try to maintain the wealth and integrity of their domus or household.
Some even say aloud that incest is preferable to letting one of the girls of the family go to another domus and take her dowry with her.
Their religious beliefs are very plastic and flexible especially when the future of their domus is at stake. Far from being downtrodden peasants at the mercy of the feudal system, many of the peasants of Montaillou had time to waste and spent hours delousing each other in the doorway of their domus while sharing the latest gossip.
And this is how the heresy spread: "all the evidence we have emphasises the mystical, religious and central significance of the domus for the people of Montaillou. Conversely, 'as one measly pig contaminates the whole sty', an individual infected with dogmatic deviation soon spread the disease to all his domus.
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