Le Roy Ladurie Research Articles

The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga

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.

Tales from the German underworld: crime and punishment in the nineteenth century

Evans, Richard J. Tales from German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.278 pp. 21 illustrations. $37.00. Tales from German Underworld by distinguished social historian Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, is result of research spanning over a decade and a half in archives and libraries in London, Berlin, Munich, Hanover, Bremen, Hamburg, Lubeck, Karlsruhe, Coburg, Frankfurt am Main, Braunschweig, and Schwerin. Evans's panorama of crime and punishment in nineteenth-century Germany takes form of four micro-studies (in line of Natalie Zemon Davis and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie)-intriguing and fragmentary underworld stories of a forger, a vagrant, a con man, and a prostitute--that disclose insights into contemporary discourses of criminality, incarceration, surveillance, and, not least of all, bourgeois identity. Rather than establishing facts via quantitative methods as was trend in 1960s and 1970s, Evans seeks the human dimension that had been buried beneath statistics and that, he implies, holds real key to our understanding. Chapter one, which makes up about a third of book, opens and ends with autobiography, published in 1804, of art teacher Wilhelm Aschenbrenner, a talented man who turns to forgery because of poverty. After escaping from a prison fortress in Konigsberg, Aschenbrenner pursues a series of epic adventures in which, to name a few highlights, he rescues a prostitute (who dons men's clothing in order to remain his loyal companion), engages in military espionage, suffers shipwreck, and finally finds himself serving a twenty-seven-year sentence in Spandau. What captures Evans's attention is Aschenbrenner's deportation in 1802 with fifty-seven Prussian felons to silver mines of Nerchinsk in Siberia. This focal study of Aschenbrenner's fate becomes occasion for a rich and detailed accounting of vagabondage, poverty, property crime, legal codes, carceral conditions, and prison reform, and of bizarrely amusing efforts on part of several German states to empty their overcrowded prisons by deporting criminals to Siberia, Brazil, and, especially, United States. The second chapter tells story of Gesche Rudolph, a poor prostitute who, at age of forty-eight, had spent eighteen years in prison and received nearly nine hundred strokes of cane for repeatedly returning to city of Bremen after she had been expelled. Evans's contextualization, indebted to work of Reinhart Koselleck, sets changing discourse surrounding corporal punishment (abolished as a result of liberal reform in last half of nineteenth century) within larger shift from a feudal or patriarchal status-bound world to a class society based on principles of legal equality and free enterprise. However, Evans argues, this picture also involves separation of a bourgeois public sphere from a private realm in which corporal punishment of women, children, and convicted criminals remained legitimate; corporal punishment was not abolished but simply banished from public view. This raises fascinating questions regarding fantasies of violence that inhabit private (sexual) imagination around turn of century. While Evans points to such works as Heinrich Mann's Professor Unrat and Wedekind's Pandora's Box as well as to Maria Tatar's book on sexual murder in Weimar Germany and Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, connections he makes are loose and quick-within space of a single page-between abolition of corporal punishment, release of violent impulses in fantasy, actual sexual violence, and fascism of Freikorps. …

The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga

Reviewed by: The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga A. Lloyd Moote Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga. Originally published as Le siècle des Platter, 1499–1628, vol. 1, Le mendiant et le professeur, 1995. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. vii + 407 pp. Ill. $29.95. Professor Le Roy Ladurie is well known for fashioning brilliant “total history” out of social-economic-cultural subjects. Along the way he has been drawn to the broad context of premodern health, famine, and epidemic disease. The book under review here continues that interest, being the English translation of the first half of a new two-volume work on the medically oriented Platter family of sixteenth-century Switzerland. In leisurely style, Le Roy Ladurie chronicles the career paths, travels, and family life of a Platter father and son, with occasional asides on the life of another son from a late, second marriage. Thomas Platter (1499–1582), self-made “Renaissance man” and “médecin manqué” (pp. 55, 63), rose meteorically from mere country cowherd to ropemaker, printer of Calvin’s greatest work, and schoolteacher/professor of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek at the University of Basel. His more privileged son, Felix (1536–1614), spent five formative years in training at the eminent medical center of the University of Montpellier, and later became town physician at Basel. The two men wrote copiously about everything and everyone they met at their various Swiss locales and on the road in Germany, Austria, and France. So focused was their attention on the health, illnesses, and medical practices of family, friends, and acquaintances that one would have wished for an extended, probing discussion instead of a meandering narrative. Thomas Platter, Sr., devoted 7 percent of his lengthy autobiography to the description of a plague outbreak in 1531, which has fascinating material—even for those of us who have studied that disease extensively. Le Roy Ladurie apportions [End Page 541] six pages to the episode, with the curious comment that “these few plague-ridden weeks . . . occupy a disproportionate place in Thomas’s narrative” (p. 55). Fortunately, the detailed index accompanying Arthur Goldhammer’s colloquial translation will guide the reader to nuggets of information on the many plague epidemics that swirled around the lives of the Platter families, on Thomas’s indirect encounters with medical lore through association with physician, surgeon, and apothecary friends, and on Felix’s formal training at Montpellier and five-stage examination for his medical degree at Basel. (See the index entries for Medicine, Plague, Epiphanius, Jeckelmann, Oporinus, Paracelsus, Vesalius, and the many subheadings under Thomas Platter, Sr., and Felix Platter.) The Platters’ journals, memoirs, and letters can also be consulted in their original German dialect and in a wide range of translations into various languages, as noted in Le Roy Ladurie’s impressive notes and exhaustive bibliography. Several reflections on how early modern people looked at disease come from my reading of this book. First, practical medical education was as important as formal university training, and Le Roy Ladurie provides considerable information on both—with only a trace of the curt dismissal of popular and learned medical cures found in his earlier work (see p. 49). Second, the social-professional networks of the Platter father and son are fascinating and important, though the author’s overarching (and unsubstantiated) postulate that the Platters favored the medical profession primarily for its entrée to high society and wealth is undercut by Thomas’s innate medical curiosity and love of dissecting (p. 114). Third, the presence of plague was a frequent feature of life, and the most moving parts of this book evoke harrowing plague scares and Platter family tragedies. Fourth, there is the ambivalence of people in the shadow of plague—those who stayed and helped, those who fled; but was there personal cowardice, as Le Roy Ladurie claims? On the disease of plague itself, some of the author’s narration requires an explication de texte. For example, he reports several buboes on thighs, and once on Thomas’s knee (p. 273), rather than the lymph-adjacent groin, neck, and armpits. Young Margretlin...

Hayden White: Beyond Irony

A crisis of our age that is usually identified with the loss of the sacred was one of the causes of the fall into irony in the nineteenth century. In the case of historians, asHayden White has shown in Metahistory, this irony was caused by a“bitterness” stemming from the failure of reality to fulfill their expectations. Anironic apprehension of the world arose in an atmosphere of social breakdown or cultural decline.A current stage of irony manifests itself in a doubt as to the capacity of language to grasp reality. Thus we live in a “prison house of language.” An intellectual parlor‐gameproduces “second‐hand knowledge” that cannot satisfy the needs of post‐postmodern men and women still looking for another metanarrative. Therefore, the main purpose of this essay is to answer the question: how can we go beyond irony?This text is a “post‐postmodern post mortem topostmodernism.” I am grateful to postmodernism for many things, especially for giving me an alternative apprehension of the world in terms of difference and continuity rather than binary oppositions, but I am tired of ontological insecurity and epistemological chaos. I need order. I miss metanarrative.In trying to break with some modern/postmodern “principles” andretain within my discourse the premodernist perspective, I follow the current trend in thehumanities. We observe at present the breakdown of methodology and the rise of a more poeticapproach in the human sciences. Evidence of this phenomenon is the more autobiographical formof writing in anthropology (James Clifford, Clifford Geertz) and a more literary style inhistorical writing (Natalie Zemon Davis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Simon Schama). This trendis associated with a revaluation of the subjective aspects of research. Perhaps, and I wouldwelcome it, it also could be identified with a reappearance of a Collingwoodian idea of history ashuman self‐knowledge, knowledge about human nature, knowledge about “what it is to be a man . . . what it is to be the kind of man you are . . . and what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is.”

Labour, Science, and Technology in France, 1500–1620 by Henry Heller

322 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and open spaces, is a constant theme. That this character is not the product of a conscious, comprehensive design goes without saying. The legacy of Irish political and economic fortunes, Dublin has sur­ vived until the late twentieth century with much of its nineteenthcentury environment intact, not all of it attractive but much of it meaningful nonetheless. Dublin is now one of the most dynamic European cities, with considerable investment that translates into rising property values, especially in the older parts of the city. In the process, some of old Dublin can survive better, but other parts will disappear. Clearly Osborough is concerned that change in the city will, on balance, weaken the strong sense of place that is familiar to every reader of Ulysses. The adaptation of the Irish economy to high technology, includ­ ing an emphasis on higher education, is largely responsible for the city’s prosperity and growth in the 1990s. In other words, even when technology is not an obvious factor in the city’s transformation, as in the form of new civil engineering works, public utilities, and so forth, it is a major factor affecting not only the city’s rate of growth but also the social and economic composition of investment. Jobs in technology and the value added by the technology sector are shap­ ing Dublin today by creating demand for space, by generating higher per capita incomes, and by shaping cultural preferences and lifestyles, with an impact probably greater than that of railroads and waterworks in the industrial era. Given the importance of govern­ ment initiatives in facilitating Irish society’s adjustment to the op­ portunities offered by Europe and by the global economy, future historians will likely find material in legal records to understand technology’s role in the development of Dublin in the 1990s and, by implication, in many other cities of the age. Josef W. Konvitz Dr. Konvitz, an urban historian, taught at Michigan State University for two de­ cades. In 1992, hejoined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop­ ment (Paris), where he is now the head of the Urban Affairs Division. He has been responsible for projects on urban environmental policy, housing, distressed urban areas, infrastructures, and economic development. Labour, Science, and Technology inFrance, 1500-1620. By Henry Heller. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+258; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (hardcover). As the title promises, Henry Heller’s book explores the relation­ ship between labor practices, scientific ideology, and technological progress in sixteenth-century France. In fact, however, it also covers economic policy debates in Valois and Bourbon courts, the effect of TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 323 the civil wars on the primitive accumulation of wealth, Huguenot influence on scientific mentality, and a spirited defense of a more dynamic, more strictly Marxian view of ancien régimeFrance than that offered by the Annales school. Indeed the great virtue of this work is to collate these varied elements of sixteenth-century French soci­ ety in a way that engages numerous historiographical issues. Heller has an ax to grind. He challenges the picture of sixteenthcentury France developed by Annales founders such as Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie. In particular, Heller hopes to employ the history of sixteenth-century technology to counter LeRoy Ladurie’s contention that before large-scale industrialization in the nineteenth century, life was bounded by a limited horizon of goods, and that history in effect “stands still” for most people in medieval and early modern Europe. In response to the Amnalistes’ use of demography and geography, Heller mobilizes work on tech­ nological innovation and protoindustrialization. Thus the author hopes to present a more “dynamic,” “interactive” model of French life before the Revolution. Further, he seeks to reintroduce a class analysis into the history of sixteenth-century France, a dimension Heller finds woefully lacking in most current studies. Heller’s partic­ ular interest is in how the organization of labor set the stage for the organization of technologies, and the role of the French wars of religion in the developmental processes of capitalism. If a takehome message can be extracted, it is...

:Labour, Science and Technology in France, 1500-1620

1. The expansion of Parisian merchant capital 2. Labour in Paris in the sixteenth century 3. Civil war and economic experiments 4. Inventions and science in the reign of Charles IX 5. Expropriation, technology and wage labour 6. The Bourbon economic restoration 7. Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie and the inertia of history.

:Creating French Culture: Treasures from the Bibliotheque nationale de France

From monastic cloisters in the time of Charlemagne to the book-lined studies of 20th-century authors, this study presents an overview of the literary and artistic world in France. The Bibliotheque nationale de France, rich in collections of illuminated manuscripts, books, medals, maps and prints, had its beginnings when Charles V established his library in the falcon tower of the Louvre. During the Middle Ages, culture was the handmaiden of church and government; during the absolute monarchy, it became an instrument of propaganda; in the 18th century it developed an independent voice. This book explores the changing relationship between power and culture in France as seen in the history of its national library. Four American scholars - Peter Gay, Orest Ranum, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, and John J. Contreni - write about the connection between French cultural expression and political power from medieval to modern times. Four French experts from the Bibliotheque national de France - Florence Callu, Antoine Coron, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Marie-Helene Tesniere - discuss more than 200 of the objects in the library, almost all of which are pictured in the book, exploring their historical significance and their relationship to the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Among these objects are: a 9th-century liturgical manuscript, entirely written in gold and silver on purple parchment; the bronze throne of Dagobert on which Napoleon sat at the founding of the Order of the Legion d'Honneur; Marguerite d'Orleans's 15th-century book of hours with its delicate illuminated borders; a heart shaped world map, published in 1536, showing the newly discovered lands of America; a sonata composed by Mozart when he was seven years old and dedicated to the daughter of Louis XV; a symphony by Berlioz written for the inauguration of the Bastille column; Zola's J'accuse!; and more. The book serves as the catalogue for a major exhibition at the Library of Congress that presents a selection of the Bibliotheque nationale de France's treasures. The exhibition opened in September 1995.

The Cambridge Illustrated History of France

Preface Foreword E. Le Roy Ladurie Introduction 1. France before the Romans 2. Roman Gaul 55 BC to c. AD 500 3. From Frankish Gaul to the kingdom of West Francia c. 500 to 987 4. The Middle Ages 987 to 1328 5. Valois France: the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance c. 1300 to c. 1600 6. From Counter-Reformation to Enlightenment c. 1610 to c. 1780 7. The Revolution and beyond c. 1780 to 1851 8. From the Second Empire to World War I 1852 to 1914 9. France in transition: World War I to the Liberation 1914 to 1944 10. Post-war France: expansion and beyond 1945 to 1981 11. France after 1981: the Mitterand years Chronology Picture acknowledgements Bibliography Index.

Small Mammal Fossil Assemblages as Indicators of Environmental Change in Northern Corsica during the Last 2500 Years

The small Monte di Tuda cave is filled with a slightly disturbed, 2 m thick deposit. Very rich small vertebrate bone assemblages from barn owl pellets have been sampled extensively using special techniques to avoid contamination. Stratigraphical analysis and accelerator radiocarbon dating on the bones themselves both point to a rapid sedimentation rate during the last 2500 years, with a break in the building up of sediment between 1960 and 610 bp. Multivariate analyses of the frequencies of the small mammal species show that modern species had approximately the same ecology throughout the time sequence, and give, for the first time, an idea of the ecological preferences of the extinct endemic species of Corsica. The general development of the faunal spectra shows a general increase in human impact (clearance of the vegetation), through the sediment sequence. Other multivariate analyses indicate a sequence of at least three agricultural cycles: the first one during the Early Roman period, the second one between the Late Roman period (2 –5th centuries ad) and the Pisa Peace (11 –13th centuries ad), and the last one during the 14 –19th centuries ad. The two earlier ones were mainly concerned with cereal cultivation, the later with tree cultivation. Whilst most of these cycles have only a local significance, two phenomena have a more extensive significance: (1) the immigration of Rattus rattusto Corsica and probably to the whole North-Western Mediterranean Basin, dated between the 4th –2nd centuries cal- bc; and (2) the mass extinction of the small endemic species, dating either to the Late Roman period or to the 11 –13th centuries adand probably resulting from large scale agricultural deforestation. In addition, the small mammal assemblages recovered appear to reflect a wetter climate at both the beginning of the sediment sequence (the “small alpine glacial age ”) and at the end (14 –18th centuries: “ Petit Âge Glaciaire” of Le Roy Ladurie). This paper gives an example of the importance of small mammal assemblages for reconstructing the environment in the historical period.

Medieval heresy: popular movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (review)

Short notices 307 I especially enjoyed 'St John on Pattnos' and 'Moses and the burning bush', complete with Yahweh as a cat, and the delightful domestic scene 'Attending at a birth'. There is no text in this book apart from a witty onepage preface which reports the 'sensational discovery' by a group of workmen in 1991 of the paintings. This postmodern jokiness, familiar to all through Umberto Eco's The name ofthe rose and sundry other works, has not yet lost its charm. The astounding conclusion reached, 'that some of the greatest masterpieces of miniature painting and illumination hadfirstbeen sketched with cats as stand-ins for the characters in thefinalpaintings . . . [leading] to a complete reassessment of the role of the cat in medieval life' (p. 5) has one chuckling. For cat lovers of all ages. Carole Cusack School of Studies in Religion University of Sydney Lambert, Malcolm, Medieval heresy: popular movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, Oxford and Cambridge Mass., Blackwell, 1992; 2nd ed. paper; pp. xv, 449, 12 maps, 11 illustrations; R.R.P. AUS$49.95. Malcolm Lambertfirstpublished his survey of medieval heresy in 1977. This second edition is still the best guide to all the many varieties of heterodox belief in the Middle Ages. Once more Lambert summarizes scholarship, from the very old to the very new, not only in the Anglophone world but also in countries as obvious as France and as neglected as Croatia. In his long, but never gratuitous, footnotes he gives succindy what he thinks is the good and the bad of almost two hundred years of research into unorthodoxy and persecution. H e also takes account of the importance that anthropology and other disciplines have had on how we now view medieval heretics. This was far from obvious fifteen years ago. The bibliography, though idiosyncratic and somewhat limited, remains the most convenient starting point for student and teacher alike if coming to the study of medieval heresy for thefirsttime. Lambert now begins his survey with the elevendi-century heretics at Orleans, running through the Cathars and Waldensians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,toend with the Lollards and the Hussites of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. He has also narrowed his geographic vision to 308 Short notices concentrate more on western and central Europe rather dian on the lands of the Byzantine empire. The dualist Bogomil heresy of die Balkans no longer has a chapter to itself and is only mentioned in relation to the dualist Cathar heresy of northern Italy and southern France. Nevertheless, the second edition, like the first, still has an odd intellectualist and somewhat aliistorical feel to it. Lambert does assume, and he is not alone in this, diat if two heresies look die same, such as the Bogomils and the Cathars,tiiensome connection must have existed between them. Indeed, one dualist idea must have caused the other. Some Cathars do seem to have possessed certain Bogomil texts but it is necessary to determine what caused medieval men and women to consider something like the Bogomil Vision of Isaiah to have relevance for diem. The question is not whether a community can understand unordiodox ideas. Almost any group of individuals can do that. It is why some men and women adopt heretical notions despite coercion or torture whereas other individuals, right next door, do not. Lambert now stresses the importance of specific economic, political, and social rhythms in understanding medieval heresy. This must owe something to the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie or Robert Moore. But it is more lip-service than conviction. Throughout die booktiiereis still an assumption that heretical ideas drift over the landscape of Europe affecting individuals regardless of the centuries or die communities in which they live. As a consequence, an institution such as die Inquisition and its role in identifying heretics is never seriously considered. The historical specificity of why one would be a heretic in either the eleventh or fourteenth centuries is not addressed by Lambert, except in a rather romantic appeal to the inner nature of humans and our yearning for die spiritual. By intellectualizing heresy, and therefore the study of it, one never has to think, except...

Reviews and Short Notices: Early Modern

The Royal French State 1460–1610. By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Les Étrangers en France, XVIe siècle 1789: guide des recherches aux Archives Nationales. By J.F. Dubost. Factional Politics and the English Reformation, 1520–1540. By Joseph S. Block. The History of the British Coal Industry, Volume 1: Before 1700.By John Hatcher. Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580–1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State. By Joanne M. Ferraro. Tyrone's Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland. By Hiram Morgan. The Conversion of Henri IV: Politics, Power and Religious Belief In Early Modern France. By Michael Wolfe. Francis Bacon: History, Politics and Science, 1561–1626. By B. H. G. Wormald. Going to Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638–1651. By Charles Carlton. The Old Service: Royalist Regimental Colonels and the Civil War, 1642–46. By P. R. Newman. Colonel Joseph Bampfield's Apology. Edited by John Loftis and Paul H. Hardacre. The Puritan Gentry Besieged. 1650–1700. By J. T. Cliffe. Sir Jonas Moore: Practical Mathematics and Restoration Science. By Frances Willmoth. Charges to the Grand Jury, 1689–1803. Edited by Georges Lamoine. The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain, 1660–1722. By Geoffrey Holmes. The Age of Oligarchy: Pre‐industrial Britain, 1722–1783. By Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi. Subverting Scotland's Past. By Colin Kidd. The Politics of Britain, 1688–1800. By Jeremy Black. Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth‐century England. By David H. Solkin. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth‐century England. By Marcia Pointon. From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain c. 1760–1830. By J. J. Sack.

Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier

Exploring the works of Braudel, Duby, Aries, Le Roy Ladurie and many others, this book asks whether the new problems, approaches, and objects that are supposedly specific to the "Annales" school may be connected to new strategies of writing. Whereas most studies of historiography focus on plot structures exclusively, the book is also concerned with the minutiae of writing.

Reviews of Books

Reviews of Books Get access The Royal French State, 1460–1610 By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Translated by Juliet Vale. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1994. x + 320pp. £45. ISBN 0 631 17027 8. STUART CARROLL STUART CARROLL University of York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, Volume 8, Issue 4, December 1994, Pages 474–475, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/8.4.474 Published: 01 December 1994

Time- and Age-Awareness in Early Modern Russia

Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie has observed that in medieval Montaillou ”time was always vague,” so that “history was absent or almost absent from Montaillou culture.” According to the inquisition record on which LeRoy Ladurie depended, Montaillou villagers often found it difficult to determine exactly how long ago a given event had occurred. They described past events as having happened “three or four years ago,” “seventeen or eighteen years ago,” “twenty or twenty-four years since.” Others quantified the past by referring to “the time when the heretics predominated in Montaillou, before the round-up by the Inquisition in Carcassonne.” Unsurprisingly, the same imprecision governed their sense of age. In rural Montaillou, the rhythm of transhumance more readily marked time than did any abstract calendar (LeRoy Ladurie 1979:280–1).

Historical anthropology of the Middle Ages (review)

148 Reviews Gurevich, Aaron, Historical anthropology of the Middle Ages, ed. Jana Howlett, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1992; cloth; pp. xv, 247; R.R.P. AUS$95.00 [distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin]. Aaron Gurevich's editorial hybrid of old and new articles is less historical anthropology, or ethno-history, than the illustration of an intellect which for more than three decades has struggled to imbue his working methods, gleaned from anthropology, folklore studies, linguistic research, and the example of the Annales school, with a deep sense of morality and humanity when trying to understand people in the past. Gurevich's book is also one more thing: a crude fishing trip by the editor Jana Howlett, in which any article of Gurevich's that has not seen the light of an Anglophone day over the past thirty years or more is thrown into a stew named 'historical anthropology' without regard for the content and purpose of the original essay. In short, Howlett has not served Gurevich well and, although this book has a title which would suggest it to be methodologically groovier-than-thou, it is not. The reader should rather see this book as providing some insights into Gurevich's historical thinking and how this thinking came to fruition in his more interesting Categories of medieval culture and Medieval popular culture. Gurevich's moral humanism (for want of a better term) is the underlying rhythm that unites the two parts: 'Methodology' and 'Case Studies'. He emphasizes that all history is nothing but a reflection of the present and so the historian must always be morally alert in not forgetting the humanity of humans. In contrast to the passion evident in Gurevich's warm humanism, the anthropology mentioned in the eleven chapters is weak, poorly digested, and oldfashioned . More importantly, it not only produces a history that comes close to being ahistorical at times but a history which is at odds with the morality that Gurevich wants to recommend. What Gurevich labels as 'historical anthropology', and he does use this term in thetitleof thefirstchapter, is rather the plea of a scholar educated in the closed system of the former Soviet Union, unable to travel to archives or colleagues. This is most painfully brought out in the second chapter where Gurevich writes about the Annales school and laments not having actually met any Annalistes. Deeply learned in the printed sources he has access to, limited in theoretical orientation, and longing to be part of a wider academic world, Gurevich, condemns all historical endeavours that leave out human sympathy and moral judgment in the pursuit of making history an impersonal science and the historian a scientific automaton. The first five chapters that make up Part I were all written relatively recently, in the eighties or the seventies, yet all of them are not only now dated but were so even at the times they were written. This is especially so in the two best essays in this section: chapters 1 ('Historical anthropology and the science Reviews 149 of history') and 2 ('Medieval culture and mentaliti according to the new French historiography'), where some lucid comments on history, especially that associated with the Annales, is mixed with intellectual simplicity and, absurdly in a book with the title this one has, an understanding of anthropology that borders on no understanding at all. Throughout the book, the references to anthropology refer not only to a small number of names, but also possess a confusion as to what anthropology is or might be. For example, Gurevich appears to consider folklore studies in general, or the work of Mikhail Bakhtin in particular, to be anthropological. Indeed, one learns more about Gurevich's understanding of anthropology through his just and valuable criticism of historians such as Jacques Le Goff, Philippe Aries, Georges Duby, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie than through any of his discussions of anthropology. It must be added that Gurevich's criticism of the Annalistes is not anthropological in nature, it is rather historical, Marxist, and moved by his earnest moral humanism. Nevertheless, Gurevich's discussion does highlight one thing about the Annales school: its knowledge of anthropology was, and still is, quite mediocre and half-formed...

Jean-Pierre Goubert, The conquest of water: the advent of health in the industrial age, with an Introduction by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, trans. Andrew Wilson, Princeton University Press and Oxford, Polity Press, 1989, 8vo, pp. iv, 293, illus., £29.50.

Jean-Pierre Goubert, The conquest of water: the advent of health in the industrial age, with an Introduction by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, trans. Andrew Wilson, Princeton University Press and Oxford, Polity Press, 1989, 8vo, pp. iv, 293, illus., £29.50. - Volume 34 Issue 4

Peasants Protest: The Claims of Lord, Church, and State in theCahiers de doléancesof 1789

For all the attention the rural insurrection of 1789 has received, there is still a great deal to learn. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has suggested that the revolts provide us with a window into a great transformation of the French countryside. He is struck by the contrast with the great seventeenth-century movements of violent resistance to the fiscal pressures of the growing state. After a long interval in which the defeated peasantry raised no major challenge, the distinctive target of the rural upheavals of the early revolution had switched from the claims of the state to those of the lord. Understanding this shift, Le Roy Ladurie suggests, should illuminate the rural history of France in modern times. Why do peasants rise against one target rather than another? To date there is little scholarly consensus on the forms and significance of the rural insurrection.

The Earth’s climate and variability of the Sun over recent millennia: geophysical, astronomical and archaeological aspects -

Glacier. d'Argentiere in (a) (ca.) 1850 60, and (b) 1966. The engraving (a) and the photograph (b) (taken by Madeleine Le Roy Ladune) are both taken from Histoire du climat depuis l'an mil by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and reproduced courtesy of Libraire Flammarion, Paris.

Reflections on an Old “New History” Quantitative Social Science History in Postmodern Middle Age

Not very long ago quantitative historians were on the offensive. Only a decade back the eminent “Annales School” French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie stated in the English language translation of a work he had published a decade earlier in his native language that “tomorrow's historian will have to be able to program a computer in order to survive,” and that “history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific.” In America, where even more champions of quantitative work resided, several new journals were founded in the 1970s such as the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Historical Methods, and Social Science History which were explicitly devoted to new social scientific approaches to the study of history and above all to quantitative approaches. And even in Germany, which seemed the most immune to the quantitative contagion of all the major western lands, owing perhaps to its long entrenched historicist traditions and to its historians' preoccupations with the tragic happenings of its still recent past, the decade of the seventies saw the development of several new outlets for quantitative and social scientific historical research such as Geschichte und Gesellschaft and Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung. Hence to most professional historians, whether they liked it or not, quantitative history appeared to be the wave of the future, and ignoring the new possibilities offered by the computer appeared to risk being relegated to the proverbial dustbin.

Some Reflections on the New History

WHEN THIS SUBJECT, THE NEW HISTORY, WAS FIRST PROPOSED to me, I thought I understood what it meant. I am no longer so sure. The varieties of have proliferated so rapidly, the rhetoric and rationale have become so bold, and the entire discipline has gone so far beyond the old new history that one is tempted to speak of the new Twenty years ago, one of the great masters of the history, Le Roy Ladurie, could confidently pronounce, Tomorrow's historian will have to be able to programme a computer in order to survive; History that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific.'I Six years after issuing those dicta, two years after reprinting them, and, ironically, four years before they appeared in an English edition, Le Roy Ladurie published another work that is as remote from that kind of quantitative, scientific as is imaginable. His Montaillou was immediately acclaimed the classic of mentalite history. And so it has been with other varieties of the history. While one school of neo-Marxists is rewriting the old Marxist in the light of a humanistic Marx, another school is revising the revisionists by reaffirming a rigorously determninistic and materialistic Marx.2 One group of social historians insists that the essence of the historical enterprise lies in elucidating Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons,< while another insists that the true reality of can be found only in the small, intimate details of everyday life. Annalistes who once confidently asserted the primacy of long term forces in history-demography, geographv, ecology-have had to mute their claims in deference not only to their colleagues of the mentalite school but also to those who have rediscovered the importance of mere political events.4 Social historians devoted to the study of the working class are being criticized by feminist