Reddit reviews Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error

I can reccommend Richard Hoffman or Jeffrey Foreng for a good general overview. For a more popular science/easy read experience there's Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie who is known for easy reading and entertainment value while still being historically accurate.

Links:
http://books.google.se/books?id=ZhYmAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Richard+Hoffmann%22&hl=sv&sa=X&ei=ik1NU5KgJZP14QT1jIGAAQ&ved=0CFQQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.se/books?id=SOdNT0xFnJsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Jeffrey+L.+Forgeng%22&hl=sv&sa=X&ei=hU1NU7j0IOa34ASE6IHIDQ&ved=0CEIQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://www.amazon.com/Montaillou-The-Promised-Land-Error/dp/0807615986

Hope that helps, if you have any follow up questions just ask!

The book Monatillou has a chapter on Time and Space-- which discusses how the peasants, clergy, shepherds and craftspeople measured their day, year, life and history--

SMITHSONIAN:
>Montaillou is a tiny quiet village in the roughest and most inaccessible part of the backward out-of-the-way Ariège department in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The village has existed since at least the time of Charlemagne, but it has never played any part in history, never been on any beaten track, never had a famous son, and its contribution to the national economy has always been close to zero. "The end of the earth," one of its older inhabitants calls it, with a certain affection....

>a source of pure joy to modern historians and readers....For they come as near as anything can to satisfying the curiosity at the heart of our interest in history: what was life really like in the old days? What did people do all their livelong days, what did they talk about, what did they think about?... The track led back and forth through the whole physical, economic, emotional, spiritual life of Montaillou.

>I think it important to also note that in the past it has been considerably more difficult to actually be an atheist--not simply because of persecution-- but also because former generations didn't have the benefit of knowledge regarding scientific explanations of the diversity of life or origins of the cosmos.
Modern science offered the first real alternative to religion.


I don't buy it. The Gods of the Gaps argument isn't any more rational just because the gaps are bigger, and there were plenty of people who challenged the religious orthodoxy. Just this quarter I read a book about a small village in southern France during the early 1300s and there were plenty of people in that tiny, rural community who didn't believe in the Christian God or any other, saying things like "the soul is nothing but blood".

I liked this, but it took me a little longer to get because of the reversed order in the middle.

The first sentence has "Jesuits...Dominicans", the last sentence has "Jesuits...Dominicans", so the middle one should be "the Jesuits to fight the Protestants, and the Dominicans to fight the Albigensians."

Side note: A really interesting book I read about the common Cathars in France was Montaillou. Definitely check it out if you're interested in that period.

If it's mediaeval Europe you're after, and first-person in particular, the Paston Letters might be a good place to start. That particular edition uses modern spelling and has explanatory notes, but you can also play on hard mode for free here.

Montaillou is third person, but rich in detail - an amazing book about an inquisition into heresy in fourteenth-century France. I can't recommend it enough.

Thank you for this answer! This is exactly the kind of information I was looking for!

Yesterday, while still mulling it over, I actually was able dig up the name of a French historian named Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie who has written about Middle Age French peasants from surviving records. In the index of his books "The Peasants of Languedoc" and "Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error", the peasants almost all seem to have fixed family names. The first book covers the period of 1500 to 1750 and the second book covers 1294 to 1324, which reaches the same conclusion you did, i.e. that French peasants were using fixed last names by the end of the 13th Century.

As for some of the peasants having two different last names, the Wikipedia page on the name of Joan of Arc sheds some light. So even as late as the 15th Century, surnames in France weren't strictly hereditary, but it seems that many if not most such surnames had certainly begun to "stick" with the lower classes sometime between the 13th and 15th centuries.

Thanks again for your help!

Interested in Cathars? You should read this.

It has some of the oldest primary source material on the lives of normal Europeans known to exist.