Le Roy Ladurie Research Articles

The Agrarian Path to Capitalism?

In 1976 an article by the American Marxist historian Robert Brenner inaugurated a debate in Past and Present on the relationship of agrarian conditions and structures to the differing rates and forms of capitalist development in Europe. He was especially concerned to challenge what he termed ‘neo‐Malthusianism’. Exemplified in the work of M.M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie this explained the decline of feudalism in terms of impersonal economic and demographic forces. In stressing instead the role of class struggle between lords and peasants, Brenner brought critical responses not just from this school, but also from Marxists who considered his explanation too ‘super‐structural’. The publication of the critical pieces and of Brenner's response in a single book provided an opportunity to take an overview of a major and stimulating debate which can be considered still very much alive. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre‐Industrial Europe, edited by T.H. Ashton an...

Early Modern

Keepers of the City. The ‘Corregidores’ of Isabella I of Castile (1474–1504). Marvin Lunenfeld The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind. Edited by Angel Alcalá The Earliest Printed Maps 1472–1500. By Tony Campbell The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli. By W.P. Stephens Melchior Hoffman, Social Unrest and Apocalyptic Visions in the Age of Reformation. By Klaus Deppermann, trans. Malcolm Wren, edited by Benjamin Drewery Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany. By R.W. Scribner Economy and Society in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Hungary (1526–1650). By Vera Zimányi The English reformation revised. Edited by C. Haigh Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker. By Peter Lake Christian Humansim and the Puritan Social Order. By Margo Todd Bloodfeud in Scotland 1573–1625: Violence, Justice and Politics in Early Modern Society. By Keith M. Brown Letters of John Holles 1587–1637. Edited by P.R. Seddon Archbishop William Laud. By Charles Carlton Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld. Leadership and Reform in the French Church. By Joseph Bergin Music in the Seventeenth Century, By Lorenzo Bianconi The British Army of William III, 1689–1702. By John Childs The Formation of the British Slate: England, Scotland, and the Union 1603–1707. By Brian P. Levack The Foundations of Modern Wales: Wales 1642–1780 (History of Wales, ed. Glanmor Williams, vol. IV). By Geraint H. Jenkins Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679–1742. By Geoffrey Holmes Britain in the First Age of Party 1680–1750. Essays Presented to Geoffrey Holmes. Edited by Clyve Jones Corsairs and Navies, 1660–1760. By J.S. Bromley Turned to Account: The forms of criminal biography in late seventeenth‐ and early eighteenth‐century England. By Lincoln B. Faller Prison Reform in Lancashire, 1700–1850: a Study in Local Administration. By Margaret DeLacy Lord Bute. Essays in Re‐Interpretation. Edited by K.W. Schweizer Education at Christ Church Oxford 1660–1800. By E.G.W. Bill Berlin 1650–1800. Sozialgeschichte Einer Residenz. By Helga Schultz, mit einem Beitrag von Jügen Wilke Pont‐St‐Pierre 1398–1789: Lordship, Community and Capitalism in Early Modern France. By Jonathan Dewald Policing the poor in eighteenth‐century France. By Robert M. Schwarz Jasmin's Witch. By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment. Edited by G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter Aberdeen and the Enlightenment. Edited by Jenifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock Montesquieu. By Judith N. Shklar Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine. Edited by Ian Dyck

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviews and Short Notices

The Refashioning of Martin Guerre

WHILE MOST RENAISSANCE POPES AND PRINCES HAVE BEEN FORGOTTEN by everyone but the historical specialist, one peasant of the sixteenth century, from a village near Toulouse in the foothills of the Pyrenees, remains well known. Martin Guerre-or rather the impostor who took his wife and birthright-has entered history. This is a remarkable fact, for generally the world of peasants lay outside what the elite of Europe in the past considered significant. Peasants were viewed within the comforting contexts of proverbial wisdom and pastoral buffoonery.' The personalities and perspectives of rural people usually were recorded only when peasants ran into trouble with the law. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's reconstruction of rural life in southern France in the fourteenth century and Carlo Ginzburg's examination of peasant religious beliefs in sixteenth-century Friuli rely on legal records.2 These works have been acclaimed for revealing the motivations and values of ordinary people of the past, hitherto rendered mute by both their illiteracy and ignoble status. Even within this select company, however, Natalie Zemon Davis's Return of Martin Guerre is exceptional. The events she examines were never lost to sight but instead became famous immediately and eventually inspired a play, two novels, and an operetta. The story was irresistible: the impostor, Arnaud du Tilh, posed as Martin Guerre, the husband of Bertrande de Rols, for over three years, thereby gaining a wife and property and fathering a child, only to be exposed by the true husband when he was on the verge of refuting those accusing him of deception. While Davis's book carried this dramatic story to an English-speaking audience, a film, Le Retour de Martin Guerre, the product of collaboration between Davis and the moviemakers, presented it to an international one. No doubt because of the excellence and wide distribution of the film, Davis's book reached a more extensive

The Politics of Divorce in France of the Belle Epoque: The Case of Joseph and Henriette Caillaux

FOR SOME TIME NOW, HISTORIANS OF MEDIEVAL and early modern Europe have been using the records of trials, both religious and secular, to explore cultures and societies obscured by the absence of any other written records. This kind of work, made famous by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Carlo Ginzburg, formed the vanguard of the shift from an economic and social history miscast as histoire totale to what could be called histoire episodique, an approach to the past through one exemplary event or person. The shift from social to anthropological history has not been without its problems, but it has enabled us to glimpse elements of religious belief, family life, sexual practices, and political power that we might otherwise have missed. Curiously, these new episodic techniques have been limited almost exclusively to medieval and early modern history. It may be that this kind of work has been so influenced by cultural anthropology-a discipline oriented toward non-modern societies-that the emerging anthropological history has almost naturally devoted itself to earlier periods. I hope to show, however, that historians of the recent past can also use one or more key trials to gain entry into spheres of culture and politics whose vital meanings tend to escape other methods of enquiry. In these spheres, culture and politics often illuminate each other by dissolving the largely artificial barriers between public and private, male and female, grande histoire and petite histoire. France, moreover, is particularly suitable for episodic analysis, because its centralization brings together government, commerce, the high courts, intellectual life, and the press in ways that permit a singular event involving all these realms to yield new historical insights. The trial considered here is a spectacular murder case, proclaimed the Affaire Caillaux by the giants of Parisian journalism.' The case riveted the capital's

Popular Culture and Politics in the English Revolution. A Review Article

The idea that popular culture and popular politics necessarily impinge on each other is truistic in sociology and social anthropology and already familiar to some of the historians of continental societies in early modem Europe-a notable product being Le Roy Ladurie's Le Carnaval de Romans. If we are going to talk about popular culture as a general system of meanings, attitudes and values, then it would be oddly incomplete without some reference to communitas; and the symbolisms of everyday life always reveal something of the way any community is regulated, preserved, or changed. Conversely, the political attitudes and activities of ordinary people are unthinkable out of cultural context, since their very meaning depends on criteria that have to be publicly shared and understood. In his new survey of the early Quakers Barry Reay reminds us again of the classic instance of humble men and women making political sense by violating language conventions in three key areas of pre-industrial manners: speech itself and the grammars of clothes and gestures. But all these studies offer new and refreshing evidence of the intimate relationship between general cultural forms and concrete political actions-and of the determination of historians of seventeenth-century England to catch up with others working in the field. That Clifford Geertz should find his way into the footnotes of a book (Underdown's) on the politics of Civil War England is symptomatic of the questions now being asked and their delay in coming. From notes on the Balinese cockfight to reflections on the north Wiltshire stoolball game. .. Difficulties arise, however, when attention is focused exclusively on radical politics. For what these studies also show is that popular culture in and

Kinship in the Past: An Anthropology of European Family Life, 1500-1900

Andrejs Plakans builds on the pioneering work of Peter Laslett, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Georges Duby, Lawrence Stone, Jack Goody and Alan Macfarlane, to produce a book that is aimed at historians, sociologists and anthropologists. The book applies the concepts developed by anthropologists working in the field to very different, indeed almost intractable evidence of historical documents. It demonstrates that despite all the problems, it is possible in a realistic and reliable way to develop an analysis of the kinship system as a whole from documents that only describe individual human relationships. Only in this way, Plakans believes, can historians begin to reflect a central element in the experience not of elites but of the masses of ordinary people - the ties of kinship. The book outlines both the difficulties and the advantages of using anthropolgical concepts in historical work in order for the first time to provide a solid basis for important future work.

The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe

Preface Introduction R. H. Hilton 1. Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe Robert Brenner 2. Population and class relations in feudal society M. M. Postan and John Hatcher 3. Agrarian class structure and the development of capitalism: France and England compared Patricia Croot and David Parker 4. Peasant organization and class conflict in Eastern and Western Germany Heide Wunder 5. A reply to Robert Brenner Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie 6. Against the neo-malthusian orthodoxy Guy Bois 7. A crisis of feudalism R. H. Hilton 8. In search of agrarian capitalism J. P. Cooper 9. Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial bohemia Arnost Klima 10. The Agrarian roots of European capitalism Robert Brenner Index.

In Search of the Occitan Village: Regionalist Ideologies and the Ethnography of Southern France

Anthropologists have recently become concerned with writing and text-making, generating critiques of their scholarly discourses. This article shows how a contemporary academic discourse has helped to create the object ofstudy ofsouthern France, an area long studied by historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and literary scholars. This discourse, produced by intellectuals for other intellectuals, is both an expression and a by-product ofregionalism. A reading of studies published after 1968 by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a social historian, Daniel Fabre, afolklorist and ethnohistorian, and Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologis4 shows how these scholars variably conceive of their research sites as and regional This article examines how these three scholars use the term Occitan and ideologies of Occitanism to characterize southern France, and how such ideologies reflect the intellectual traditions in which they write. [intellectuals, Southern France, ideologies, regionalism, discourse]

History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault's Approach to History

Anyone familiar with contemporary French culture could not fail to notice that, in the field of ideas, history and the philosophy of history occupy in France a more central place than in England or North America. The work and concerns—including the methodological concerns—of historians like Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel and the Annalistes, Georges Lefebvre, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Le Goff and Francois Furet, are known, discussed and taken on board by most French intellectuals and academics.

History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault's Approach to History

Anyone familiar with contemporary French culture could not fail to notice that, in the field of ideas, history and the philosophy of history occupy in France a more central place than in England or North America. The work and concerns—including the methodological concerns—of historians like Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel and the Annalistes, Georges Lefebvre, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Le Goff and Francois Furet, are known, discussed and taken on board by most French intellectuals and academics.

Innovation and Obstacles to Growth in the Agriculture of Early Modern France: The Example of Dauphine

It has been thirty-five years since Jean Meuvret, W. G. Hoskins, and B. H. Slicher van Bath called for renewed research in agricultural history at the 1950 International Congress of Historical Studies in Rome.' In France their appeal was taken seriously, and works treating the agrarian history of the early modern period have proliferated. Major contributions by the Annales school and specifically by Pierre Goubert, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Pierre de Saint-Jacob, Jean Jacquart, and Abel Poitrineau have resulted in a new synthesis of sixteenth-, seventeenthand eighteenth-century rural history.2

Recapturing the past

Clio is a demanding muse. Those who pay scant heed to her discipline of context, who pay little attention to the contingency of that context, or who seek to Solomonically separate her s tep-chi ldren--structure and process--f ind themselves in the dark when she spreads her wings. Social historians step warily in this contested terrain, and the most successful have kept a clear eye on the rigours of chronological organization. Indeed, it is probably not tmtrue to say that the historian is inherently conservative and wary of generalization precisely because her /h is training and experience have repeatedly shown overarching formulae and principles to be of little concrete value in explaining the specificity of those innumerable events and episodes that are joined together in the crucible of time and space. Yet, and it is an enormously large qualification, much of the most interesting and stimulating social history borr o w s s o m e t i m e s indiscriminately--from the social sciences. It used to be that sociology mad economics were the fields to be plundered, but now it appears to me that borrowing from social anthropology is in vogue. What historians have gained from these intellectual forays has not been the discipline of other disciplines but rather the new ways of seeing that a theoretical, as opposed to a resolutely empirical, method provides. Nowhere has this trend been more pronounced than the study of early modern European h is tory-I think here of Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Love, M o n e y and Death in the Pays d'Oc as particularly exemplary texts. However, it seems to me that, for all the genius and insight that these two authors, and many others, have displayed in their illumination of sub-literate discourse, this histoire des mental i tes is something of a dead-end. It spotlights extraordinary but hitherto neglected plebeians and raises them to the stature of their more illustrious contemporaries; but, just as biography is an inadequate guide to the history of a time, so, too, and for much the same reasons, is this new vogue of plebeian intellectual biography. We are left, then, propped on what the English would call a cleft stick: how do we begin to accord comparative weights to the centrifugal and centripetal forces and still retain some sense of the representativeness of that experience? I am not sure that there is an answer to this question other than the hackneyed ones that the proof is in the pudding/let 's see what comes out in the wash. It is thus extremely dif-

Bakhtin, Chaucer, Carnival, Lent

Bakhtin, Chaucer, Carnival, Lent John M. Ganim University ofCalifornia, Riverside sometime in the late thirteenth centuty, the author of an entry in The Chronicle o/Lanercost logs a sensational story about a renegade priest: About this time, in Easter week, the parish priest oflnverkeithing, named John, revived rhe profane rites of Priapus, collecting young girls from the villages, and compelling them to dance in circles [to the honour of] Father Bacchus. When he had these females in a troop, out of sheer wantonness, he led the dance, carrying in front on a pole a representation of the human organs of reproduction, and singing and dancing himself like a mime, he viewed them all and stirred them to lust by filrhy language. Those who held respectable matrimony in honour were scandalised by such a shameless performance, although they respected the parson because of the dignity of his rank. If anybody remonstrated kindly with him, he [the priest] became worse [than before], violently reviling him. And [whereas] the iniquity of some men manifestly brings them to justice, [so] in the same year, when his parishioners assembled according to custom in the church at dawn in Penance Week, at the hour of discipline he would insist that certain persons should prick with goads [others] stripped for penance. The burgesses, resenting the indignity inflicted upon them, turned upon its author; who, while he as author was defend­ ing his nefarious work, fell the same night pierced by a knife, God thus awarding him what he deserved for his wickedness. 1 The entry represents all the problems inherent in the use of medieval chronicles to reconstruct political and narrative history, for it is evidence of the peculiar sense ofscale displayed in such chronicles, in which the most minor incidents are paired with nationally significant events. For an earlier generation ofscholars motivated by the great comparative enterprises ofthe nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the entry really is evidence, for it proves what they took to be the survival of pagan, pre1 The Chronicle ofLanercost, trans. Sir Herbert Maxwell (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1913), p. 30. 59 FIFTH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS Christian agrarian fertility practices. In SirJamesFrazer, recordssuch as this (he uses a secondary source and quotes a different anecdote from the Lanercost Chronicle)2 are compiled explicitly to establish such an origin for religious ritual. In E. K. Chambers, who, we might note, is deeply in­ debted to The Golden Bough, the Inverkeithing incident might be yet one more suggestion of the origins of drama itself in such pagan ritual, and evidence also ofthe continuity offolk drama and quasi-dramatic perfor­ mances despite the hegemony ofthe church.3 For slightly later critics, such asJohn Speirs, this pre-Christian survival underliesthe rhythms ofeven the most sophisticated medievalworks, and even accounts for their literary, or preliterary and mythic, power.4 Until quite recently, the uses ofChambers and the implications ofSpeirs were limited by severe criticisms. Chambers's evolutionism had been radi­ cally called into question by the critique of0. B. Hardison's Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages. 5 Speirs's "anthropological ap­ proach" was demolished by C. S. Lewis in a still important essay.6 Moreover, the appropriation as propaganda of folkloric, ritual, and pagan imagery rendered the entire enterprise suspect, a condemnation that would not be necessary had the enterprise itselfnot been associated with social Darwinist and racialist impulses in its manifestations at the turn ofthe last century. But these questions have been opened anew by a remarkable confluence of categories in both social and literary history, and therefore require attention yet again. An interest in popular mentality and culture has been reawakened by a generation ofpost-Anna/es historians, chiefofwhom are Natalie Zemon Davis in America, Carlo Ginzburg in Italy, and Le Roy Ladurie in France.7 At the same time, a keen interest in the work ofM. M. 2 SirJamesFrazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3d ed. (rpt., New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966), 10:286. 3 E. K. Chambers, The MediaevalStage (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), vol. 1. 4JohnSpeirs,MedievalEnglishLiterature: TheNon-Chaucerian Tradition(London: Faber, 1957). 5 0. B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the...

Writing the Past: Le Roy Ladurie and the Voice of the New History

Just as in fiction, discursive strategies in history can reveal the very nature of a project. The positivist historiography that prevailed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries regarded historical facts as givens. Accordingly, it held as its ideal of writing the objective text, that is. the text from which the historian's mediation would be carefully erased. The New History, on the other hand, considers all research to be grounded in a researcher and seeks to indicate by various means that the text does not generate itself. In Carnival in Romans, for example, Le Roy Ladurie explicitly resorts to various facets of the "I": that of the histor, going about the job of uncovering the evidence: that of the commentator, providing historical parallels and explanations; and even that of the emotional self (Barthes' personne passionnelle), making judgments on events and people in the narrative. These changes in writing conventions point to the emergence of a new historical paradigm. At the same time, they overturn the view of the historical text as a non-problematic vehicle for reporting "reality": this text, for the New Historians, becomes a construct, and is presented as such.

Histoire pyrénéenne : Directions de recherches

This article voluntarily has an epistemological character because, for the author, it is a question of specifying the conditions for elaborating a collective research undertaken on the Pyrenean valleys in the present-day department of Haute-Garonne during the reign of Louis XIV. What problems are to be studied ? The questions asked are to be based on what historical and theoretical foundations (E. Le Roy Ladurie, Guy Bois) ? What methods of investigation and elaboration of what is to be studied will be used ?

Contents volume 20, 1984

Contents volume 20, 1984

Quantitative History and People's History: Two Methods in Conflict?*

It was fashionable some years ago for historians to speak of the quantitative revolution in their subject and to look forward, either with hope or with foreboding, to the day when history, like geography, sociology, and other social sciences before it, would be dominated by practitioners skilled in quantitative methods. New questions would be asked, new methods used, new sources exploited, and new discoveries made. In the process, those historians without training in quantitative methods would be swept from the battlegrounds of the subject. They would be forced to retreat either into the antiquarianism within which many quantitative historians, privately, located them or they would be forced to undergo a painful process of retooling in a struggle to avoid technological obsolescence. It was a reasonable expectation in those days that a statistical training would become as essential to a historian as a training in foreign languages or experience in burrowing for sources in the record office: As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie put it in 1968, by the 1980s “the historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing” (Le Roy Ladurie, 1968). As a result, quantitative historians gathering in the early 1970s thought that the quantitative revolution would be largely complete as the world entered the 1980s.

Quantitative History and People’s History: Two Methods in Conflict?

It was fashionable some years ago for historians to speak of the quantitative revolution in their subject and to look forward, either with hope or with foreboding, to the day when history, like geography, sociology, and other social sciences before it, would be dominated by practitioners skilled in quantitative methods. New questions would be asked, new methods used, new sources exploited, and new discoveries made. In the process, those historians without training in quantitative methods would be swept from the battlegrounds of the subject. They would be forced to retreat either into the antiquarianism within which many quantitative historians, privately, located them or they would be forced to undergo a painful process of retooling in a struggle to avoid technological obsolescence. It was a reasonable expectation in those days that a statistical training would become as essential to a historian as a training in foreign languages or experience in burrowing for sources in the record office: As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie put it in 1968, by the 1980s “the historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing” (Le Roy Ladurie, 1968). As a result, quantitative historians gathering in the early 1970s thought that the quantitative revolution would be largely complete as the world entered the 1980s.

Autoconsommation et marchés : Chayanov, Labrousse ou Le Roy Ladurie ?

Toutes les études sur les sociétés rurales d'hier et d'aujourd'hui font la part belle au développement des échanges monétaires et au renforcement volontaire ou imposé des rapports de la paysannerie avec le marché. Explicitement (E. Le Roy Ladurie, 1973) ou non, les historiens reprennent à leur compte l'opposition, classique, des pays du Tiers-Monde, entre agriculture de subsistance et agriculture commercialisée (G. Elwert et D. Wong, 1980). Et ceci avec une netteté toute particulière dans le cas de la France médiévale ou moderne, où l'on s'accorde volontiers à reconnaître le poids, précoce et durable malgré tous les efforts des rassembleurs de parcelles, d'une quasi-propriété paysanne enfin libérée par la Révolution de toutes les charges qui pesaient sur elle. Autoconsommation et marché se présentent ainsi comme les deux pôles autour desquels s'organisent les choix productifs de la majorité des exploitations agricoles.