Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

"Pearce's translation from the French preserves the flavor of Ladurie's assiduously researched history. The author, internationally praised for such landmark studies as Carnival in Romans, sought the origins of a poem written in 1840 by Jacques Boeknown as Jasminabout "Francouneto," a witch. A version of the ballad follows Laudurie's accounts of the witch's trials, as well as stories of accusations against a couple who work evil through their powerful, magic mandrake. Jasmin's quiet wit touches upon the bigotry among the Gascon villagers, obsessed by "devil-worship." In part three, there are details supporting Ladurie's belief that the witch, "little Francoise," an actual person, lived in the diocese of Condom during the late 17th century, not the mid-16th as the poem suggests. This is a significant distinction, for attitudes on witchcraft had changed by the latter era, which explains the heroine's survival. In a postscript to this edition, Ladurie responds to a French critic who disputes his interpretation."--amazon.com, review Publisher's weekly. "The renowned French historian explores the roots and development of a popular tale of witchcraft accusations retold in 1840 by the Gascon poet Jacques Boe or "Jasmin." In a lively narrative the modern historian examines the place of witchcraft in traditional southern French society, translates Jasmin's "Francouneto," and tracks through archival sources and interviews its probable origins in the lives of late 17th-century villagers. The resultant insights into the minds and culture of Gascon peasants will intrigue patrons of public and college libraries."-- amazon.com, Libr. J. review by Richard C. Hoffmann.

In 1499, high in the remote and bitterly impoverished mountains of the Valais, Thomas Platter was born and quickly abandoned, left to make his way among the crags as a herder of goats and sheep. At the age of ten, mustering the ferocity of will that would serve him throughout his life, Thomas walked barefoot and alone out of the hills and into the glorious turbulence of the sixteenth century. For nearly ten years, he wandered the breadth of Western Europe, throwing in his lot with nomadic gangs of beggars and thieves, scraping and fighting for food and survival, until a chance encounter sparked a stunning humanist conversion, propelling him from illiterate pauper to esteemed professor, printer, and, ultimately, patriarch. From a wealth of vividly autobiographical writings - diaries, travel journals, memoirs - Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons as well. Together their rich careers spanned the entire sixteenth century, and their far-flung and often perilous journeys carried them through countrysides and kingdoms, into cathedrals and plague houses. These personal narratives, among the first to have authors of rural or peasant origin, constitute a rare and intimate portrait of the emergence of early modern European society. With masterful erudition, Le Roy Ladurie deepens and expands the historical contexts of these accounts and, in the process, brings to life the customs, perceptions, and character - the very dialogue - of an age poised at the threshold of modernity.

"Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has had a success which few historians experience and which is usually reserved for the winner of the Prix Goncourt...Montaillou, which is the reconstruction of the social life of a medieval village, has been acclaimed by the experts as a masterpiece of ethnographic history and by the public as a sensational revelation of the thoughts, feelings, and activities of the ordinary people of the past."―Times Literary Supplement. With a new introduction by author Le Roy Ladurie, this special edition offers 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. His portrait of Montaillou is dominated by the personal histories of two men: the curé Pierre Clergue, a brutal and powerful man who placed his enemies in the hands of the inquisitor; and the shepherd Pierre Maury, a friend of the Albigensian perfecti and a fatalist who returned from Spain to disappear in the inquisitor's prison in his own country. Montaillou, which has received even more praise than LeRoy Ladurie's earlier work, provides a portrait of a fascinating place with a dark, intriguing history.

"The Duke of Saint-Simon (1675-1755) was by all accounts, including his own, a sensitive, self-obsessed, ill-tempered man. A courtier and phenomenal chronicler of court life under Louis XIV, he produced the monumental work Memoirs, running to thousands of pages, in which the intrigues, personalities, activities, and gossip of life at Versailles are recorded in acerbic detail. Drawing heavily on these Memoirs, historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, with the collaboration of Jean-Francois Fitou, offers a portrait of life under Louis XIV, focusing on the fundamental issues of hierarchy and rank in this tightly controlled universe."--BOOK JACKET.