Volume 25, Number 15 · October 12, 1978
The Wizard of Oc
By Keith Thomas
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, translated by Barbara Bray
Braziller, 383 pp., $30.00
Life in Renaissance France
by Lucien Febvre, edited and translated by Marian Rothstein
Harvard University Press, 163 pp., $8.95
The Community of the Village: A Study in the History of the Family and Village Life in Fourteenth-Century England
by Edward Britton
Macmillan (Canada), 291 pp., $22.50
If an academic historian today were to enter the offices of a commercial publisher bearing a learned monograph nearly 300,000 words long, he would be coolly received. If he were to explain that his work was based on a single Latin source and that it related exclusively to the fortunes of an obscure Pyrenean village of some 250 inhabitants in the early fourteenth century, then it is a virtual certainty that he would be firmly shown the door. Yet this is the improbable formula underlying the success of what now looks like being one of the great historical best sellers of the century. In France Montaillou has become almost a household name since its original publication in 1975, and its author, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, professor at the Collège de France, is now perhaps the most fashionable living historian in the Western world.
Review, 3767 words
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