Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324

"It is a classic book about the Inquisition that dealt with the Cathar heresy . The process of investigation by the Inquisitions was quite common to the Papal inquisitions, and to the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. And you really get a sense of that in this book. There aren’t many books that are accessible to a general reader, which really give a sense of the remorselessness of the process of investigation and the way it could really affect a community. This book really does convey that. It also really reveals what a goldmine the Inquisition records are for social historians. This is the book that, in many ways, began the revolution in microhistory . It’s a good book for thinking about both the inquisitorial process, but also why the records are so fascinating for historians. It wasn’t permanent. When there was a need visits and inquiries were made. Well, that’s a good question. What is permanent? I shouldn’t think when it was founded 1478, that anybody imagined it was still going to be around 350 years later. They must have hoped to deal with those heresies quicker than that."

"Yes, it’s just so fun. There are two reasons for picking it: partly that I find the Annales school of history utterly inspiring and it’s proved so seminal in terms of the ways in which we think about what we’re trying to do as historians now. And Leroy Ladurie is one of the most appealing figures in the Annales school, I think. It’s just a lovely read. The other reason for picking it is that the Cathar heresy is such an intriguing topic. And, I should admit, on some level there’s a sort of romantic element to it. The book tells us about a village called Montaillou in the foothills of the Pyrenees in the early 14th century and the Inquisition came to the village because there was ‘outbreak’ of Catharism there. Catharism is a dualist heresy, possibly originating with the Bogomil heresy much further east. It seems to have come to the south of France via Lombardy and northern Italy. Cathars believed that the entire material world was created by Satan and that the spiritual world was created by God. So, sort of related to Christianity, but quite obviously not the same. Yes, exactly. The main spread of Catharism is in the early 13th century. Then, it appears to disappear in southern France in the second half of the 13th century. But you have this strange reflourishing of it in the early 14th century. The inquisitorial effort against it at this point is led by Bishop Jacques Fournier, who later becomes Benedict XII. Surprisingly for an inquisitor, he is a really appealing figure and truly seems to be driven by curiosity, certainly not a desire to burn heretics. The wish would be to convert them back to the true path of faith, but he’s just fascinated by the lives of the people he’s investigating. Though he could just ask them a series of straightforward questions in the way that an inquisitor’s handbook might tell him to, he lets them go on for hours and hours about all the details of their personal lives. And things like the transhumance, when they take their flocks up to the higher pastures in the summer—he wants to know about that. He wants to know what they ate, who was having an affair with whom in the village—all that. The fact that this book is possible is thanks to this particular inquisitor who allowed the peasants to talk and talk and talk about what they thought and how their little community worked. Yes, I think so. Most obviously, it transforms our way of thinking about this by uncovering what the Annales historians would call the mentalités of medieval peasants. And it reveals them to be highly subjective and highly individualized, or individuated maybe, and very thoughtful, as well. The temptation is to say that Cathars they fit into this box of Cathar heretics and therefore they got burned, but what emerges from these inquisitorial depositions and then from Le Roy Ladurie’s analyses of them is a series of individuals who thought about Catholicism and thought about their Cathar beliefs very, very carefully and very problematically and who really cared about the way in which they interpreted the world around them. My favourite is the shepherd, Pierre Maury. He’s just a humble shepherd and an ordinary Cathar and he talks at great length about the ways in which he understands Catharism and what it means to him personally. There’s this incredible lyrical passage where he describes taking his flocks up into the high pastures for the summer and he looks up at the sky and it’s so blue and he looks at the pastures and they’re so green and beautiful and he’s just overwhelmed by the beauty of the natural world. And when he sees all this, even though he’s a good Cathar, he’s part of this Cathar community and he knows he owes loyalty to his Cathar friends, he sees all this and he just cannot believe that this material world is all created by Satan. It’s a beautiful passage and it’s a passage where a peasant is expressing himself in sophisticated and lyrical terms and he’s not accepting what the Catholic Church is telling him, but he’s not straightforwardly accepting what the Cathars are telling him either. He’s reflecting and being a fully rounded individual in a really inspiring sort of way. Everyone would give you a slightly different answer here, but I would say there are two principal things. Firstly, it was about changing the perspective of historians so that history is not just about the political causes behind certain events. But it’s also about relating larger structural shifts to the physical environment and thinking about history across what they called the longue durée . Then, alongside that comes this interest in mentalités —mentalities—the idea that one can take particular communities or particular societies across pretty broad sweeps of time and try to recover the ways in which they thought about who they were and the world around them—culture writ large, in some ways."