“…and anyhow, no-one can take away my fate”

[ewx]

Montaillou, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ISBN 0-14-00-5471-5

Montaillou is a village in southwestern France. In the early 14th century many of its inhabitants were Cathars - a variety of Christian heresy - and as such came to the attention of the Inquisition. What makes it particularly special is that the written record of the resulting interrogations, made under the aegis of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers and later Pope Benedict XII, survives to this day. The book at hand is a study of that record and its subjects.

The villagers were farmers, woodcutters and shepherds, the latter roaming around the Pyrenees with their flocks; they were not on the whole rich in material terms and of course it is this that makes the records of their lives so unusual - almost all ancient writing concerns the lives of the rich and powerful, not the peasantry, and yet here we have the bottom rung of medieval society in their own words (or at least, their own words translated from Occitan or Gascon into Latin).

Despite their relative poverty the inhabitants of Montaillou do not seem to have had especially hard lives, economically speaking; their land and their flocks readily supply subsistence with time spare for naps, gossip, etc; the shepherd-for-hire Pierre Maury, the focus of a substantial chunk of the book, can afford to skip out on an employer and easily find another job - the author remarks that migrant shepherds changed their master more often that their shirt.

Other areas of live are darker. The Inquisition of course ordered punishments up to and including exceution. Domestic violence seems to have been routine: Prades Tavernier’s first guess at the cause of Guillemette Clergue’s black eye is that her husband had beaten her. We also read of Maury spiriting his sister - also a Guillemette - away from her violent husband in Laroque.

The peripatetic heretic parfaits - essentially, their priests - do not come across as very sympathetic. In theory they abstained from meat and women and in various ways assisted others to salvation. In practice they come across as fundamentally parasitical (something that admittedly they share with their orthodox opponents). For instance Guillaume Bélibaste talks Maury into entering a fake marriage in order to cover up the ancestry of his child. While they strike a chord by denying the efficacy of indulgences¹ (among other things - these are not just early Lutherans), they nevertheless take alms for the spiritual services that they provide. It doesn’t seem unfair to observe that they exploited anti-clericalism to supplant the clerics.

¹ The Pope of the day would sell tens of thousands of days worth of indulgences, which he caused to exist presumably by no more than virtue of his office, for about half the price of a house; travelling retailers would then divide them up and sell them on. Spiritual quantitative easing, in modern terms.

Since many were heretics Montaillou must be considered somewhat exceptional; and of course, peasant life in each part of Europe will have had its own unique characteristics. But this is a fascinating insight into even that one corner of life seven centuries ago.

Comments

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Oh, I read a grail quest book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(novel)) that was vaguely about all this once. Err, in a similar way to The Da Vinci Code being a book about Opus Dei

[gerald_duck]

I was fascinated (though also horrified) by The Perfect Heresy a few years ago. Then I loaned it to some people who I was trying to entice into going to Pays Cathare with me and I say I never got it back. So I bought another copy. Which I've not yet re-read. And I still want to go to Pays Cathare.

It sounds as though the book you read is rather more negative about the parfaits than mine. I should probably read it too, for balance.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Having read a few too many Cathar-orientated novels I thought I'd try to educate myself about actual facts by reading The Yellow Cross (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Yellow-Cross-Story-Cathars-1290-1329/dp/0140276696/), but found it borderline unreadable.

I spent some time (before giving up on the thing) trying to work out why I was finding it so hard to read, and eventually decided that it was trying, badly, to be a novel.

So rather than setting out at the beginning what it was going to tell you and what it was going to cover, it just started in on the story and limped from one random chunk of fact to another, without ever really appearing to go anywhere or joing anything up.

Now I have nearly two hours of commuting time on a train every day, perhaps I should give it another go. Or maybe I should just try Montaillou instead.

[em788.livejournal.com]

The lives and opinions of the characters are fascinating but I found it very hard to understand what the Cathar beliefs actually were. It seemed that you could live as bad a life as you liked as long as you were 'hereticated' on your deathbed and from then on ate nothing, so starving to death if it turned out that you were further from death than everyone had thought.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The introduction and chapter XIX seems to be the best places for this; the theory behind the parfaits was that they lived the “Apostolic life”, and that this was the origin of their own salvation and their ability to absolve the sins of others. Presumably the need for the final endura of the rank and file was that they hadn’t lived such a life, though I can’t find a clear statement about this.

[twigletzone.livejournal.com]

Ooh, interesting... *sigh* when I have the time...