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 cure 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 tithe is a levy characteristic of the agrarian ancien regime, and is of great interest to historians of traditional societies such as pre-1789 France and other countries of Europe and Latin America until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Measured and recorded from year to year, the tithe forms an indicator which, albeit very approximate, is nevertheless extremely valuable in revealing the trends in agricultural production (grain, wine, stockbreeding, etc.) over periods of years, decades or centuries. The book is in two parts. The first, by Joseph Goy, deals with theoretical questions and the methods used for research on the tithe and other associated dues. The second part, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in collaboration with Marie-Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide, presents an overview of the conclusions reached from the study of secular fluctuations in the product of the tithe and in other revenues from the land. These results, relating to the long period from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, were obtained from the work of nearly a hundred historians in many countries; their help was an essential element in the writing of the book.

The village of Montaillou was the last stronghold of the cult of Catharism in medieval France. Under the inquisition of Bishop Fournier members of this sect were persecuted and some burnt at the stake, and the interrogations about the way they lived were chronicled in a Register. From this document Ladurie has reconstructed an intriguing account of everyday peasant life in a medieval village. Montaillou gives us a unique glimpse into how people really lived 700 years ago: from their homes and the food they ate to their body language and attitudes to sex.

"There cannot be much serious doubt that in the last twenty years Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has been one of the most - if not the most - original, versatile, and imaginative historians in the world...he has acquired an almost unique capacity to capture the imagination of a mass audience, while still retaining the respect and admiration of his professional colleagues." - LAWRENCE STONE, New York Review of Books. "In addition to being a gifted storyteller, Ladurie is a committed student of the 100-odd places historians must go to piece together the stories of the unwashed and unnoticed, of the techniques to weave incomplete and various kinds of evidence into the cloth of history...The essays share an interest in discovering what life itself, and not just the 'events' of life, was like in the past; how people lived, loved, took sick or didn't take sick - what they ate, who they listened to, the weather, the crops, status and the long-term trends of such things that give us a picture of aggregate life." - ROBERT DAWIDOFF, Los Angeles Times. ..".makes for provocative and interesting reading even for those who might consider themselves devotees of an older style of history...Ladurie is one of those unusual scholars who, even as he fulfils the typical expectation of his calling, is also transforming it with his own vision of what it might be." - STANLEY J. IDZERDA, Review of Politics.

In a tour de force, Colin Jones gives a gripping, superbly and intelligently illustrated account of the political, social and cultural history of France, placing an innovatory emphasis on the impact of regionalism, class, gender and race in French heritage. Ranging from prehistoric menhirs to the Pompidou Centre, from Louis XIV's Versailles to twentieth-century highrises, from Marie Antoinette to Marie Claire, The Cambridge Illustrated History of France is host to lively and penetrating new insights that take us through the shaping of France from the earliest times to the brink of a new millennium. Combining superb illustration with outstanding scholarship, the diversity of the French heritage--scientific and artistic, national and regional--is explored with an engrossing and accessible style. Special features on places, people and events, a glossary, and a further reading section enhance this engaging book that will appeal to history buffs and students of French history and culture. Colin Jones is also the author of the Longman Companion to the French Revolution and The Cultural Atlas of France.

"This collection illuminates the work of a truly remarkable scholar....singularly enjoyable and intellectually stimulating." - IAIN STEVENSON. Journal of historical Geography. "Exhilarating and humane." NICHOLAS HYMAN, Tribune. "No one has secured such international eminence nor has enjoyed such wide popular appeal... His particular virtuosity centres upon his readability, his superb imaginative talents and an uncanny knack of being to the fore of changing historical fashion. Sex, violence, religiosity, village sociability, climatic change, famine, sterility, literacy, death are but a few of the subjects he has explored in a dazzling career and which are reflected in this book." - OLWEN HUFTON, The Times Higher Education Supplement. "Any new book by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is an event." - DOUGLAS JOHNSON, New Society. "An ingenious and successful combination of narrative and analysis, micro-history and macro-history...reveals the immense intellectual appetite of Le Roy Ladurie...." - PETER BURKE, New Statesman.