It is hard to place ourselves into the minds of medieval peasants and understand how they viewed the landscape and their relationship to it, or indeed how they lived worked and socialized together. There are very few historical sources that give an authentic voice to this period. One of the most remarkable are the records of Catholic Inquisition of the Cathar village of Montaillou, high in the hills of the Midi in the Ariège department in southwestern France. In the late 13th century the local bishop Jacques Fournier, later Pope Benedict XII, launched an inquistion against the Albigensian belief also known as Catharism, considered heresy by the dominant Roman Catholic powers. The records of the inquisition, dozens of interviews with the 250 odd inhabitance of the village, preserve the minute details of life in Medieval France and were taken to the Vatican Library by Fournier when he became pope. A fascinating precis of the records was published in 1975 by radical French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie as Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324. Translated into English a new edition of the book was published in 2005 and is widely available second hand from Amazon. Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou is a fascinating glimpse into the medieval mind that reads like a good historical novel. History is rarely more satisfying or more accessible than this.
