Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
The Peasants of Languedoc.
University of Illinois Press, 1974. First US edition. Translation by John Day of "Les paysans de Languedoc" (S.E.V.P.E.N., 1966), with introduction by the translator. 0252004116 xii/370 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.75", is bound in blue cloth, with gilt-lettered black spine compartment. Book shows very light shelfwear. Binding is firm. Previous owner's name at top of front flyleaf has been blacked out. Interior is otherwise clean and bright. Illustrated with map, graphs and tables. Price-clipped dust jacket shows light shelfwear. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"Hailed as a pioneering work of "total" history when it was first published in France in 1966, Le Roy Ladurie's volume combines elements of human geography, historical demography, economic history, and folk culture in a broad depiction of a great agrarian cycle, lasting from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. It describes the conflicts and contradictions of a traditional peasant society in which the rise in population was not matched by increases in wealth and food production.
Le Roy Ladurie is concerned with what is recurrent in history rather than what is unique. And Languedoc as he describes it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries prefigures in many respects the underdeveloped countries of today's Third World.
Critical comments on the French edition include:
"One of the greatest works of French historiography in twenty years. Written with a precise elegance...the best initiation into French historiographic thinking today." M. de Certudes, "Etudes."
"Such books open important perspectives for us. They grasp what is essential in history...A remarkable work that illuminates a whole economic and social chapter of our past." "Historia"
"A major turning point in contemporary historiography." Pierre Chaunu, "Revue Historique."