Blog your reading is also Yuletide fandom promo, right?

[melannen]

So back in... June, was it June? I said I was going to blog all my reading, and then I got halfway through the month and stopped.

Luckily part of the reason is that I started some heavier books and slowed way down on the reading, so who knows, I may even be able to catch up.

The book I was reading when I stopped was Montaillou, of the many different subtitles. This is a famous history book by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and is usually said to be a classic work of social history that takes advantage of an unprecedented collection of primary narratives to describe the life of medieval peasants in their own words.

This is not untrue. But the reason the primary narratives - the detailed descriptions by 14th century peasants of their own lives - exist is that they were preserved in the records of the Catholic Inquisition.

And the reason the Inquisition interviewed all the residents of Montaillou is that, several generations after the Cathar heresy was, in theory, destroyed, the majority of the people of Montaillou decided that they wanted to be Cathars again.

What I am saying is that Montaillou was not exactly a normal medieval peasant village.

It and its region had a history of heresy, and they were kind of isolated up in the mountains and had a unique political situation, but Montaillou was also not so much isolated as isolationist, and one gets the impression that many of the 14th century heretics who lived there had as much in common with Sovereign Citizens, who thought being hereticated should exempt them from taxes, than with the sincere religious believers of other centuries.

Also, Montaillou, going by what its people told the Inquisition, was a roiling cauldron of some of the most amazing soap opera batshit I have ever encountered in a history book.

Here are some things that are described in the records Ladurie is working from:

• a shepherd and the Last of the Cathar Holy Men, who were so gay for each other that even Ladurie outright ships it, and also the shepherd married the holy man’s mistress for unclear reasons and then almost immediately had it annulled
• some villagers who attempted to hire a hit man to kill a government official and failed due to utter incompetence on all sides
• an actual seven-hundred-year-old unsolved murder most foul
• ghosts who wander on rocky cliffs
• SO MUCH ridiculous cloak-and-dagger hijinks, most of which involve hiding behind casks of beer
• an onsen episode
• a heretical priest and his noblewoman mistress having blasphemous sex in the sanctuary of a church
• old ladies sitting outside houses, gossipping and ruling the town
• A shoemaker who may have been overcome with Cathar religious fervor, or may have just gotten tired of making shoes and decided to run off into the hills, nobody's quite sure
• a nobleman who married the wrong woman because he got her mixed up with a different noblewoman with the same name
• everybody is named either Guillaume, Guillemette, Raymond, Raymonde, Jean or Jeanne, and surnamed either Maurs, Maury, or Marty, so you can kind of see how that happened.
• Incest! Adultery! Bastardry!
• Relatedly, magical birth control charms
• a subculture of people who avidly collect crusts of stale bread as a hobby
• a gay priest, who was definitely gay but not technically a real priest if you want to get legalistic on him, spilling the dirt on how to pull hot twinks in a medieval French cathedral town
• the noblewoman, now much older, attempting to elope with her new, much younger, priest lover

And those were just the first few things that came to mind several months after I read it!

Unfortunately, Ladurie was still writing a very serious book of social history, so it’s all organized based on what he needs in order to describe the milieu to make his important academic arguments, and not in terms of the actual amazing narratives that are all over the place. The plus side is that the book does give a very vivid account of what daily life would have been like for the people involved.

They do, of course, all get rounded up by the Inquisition and questioned, and some of them get imprisoned for awhile and/or lose their property, and a few of them (though not really very many) burn, and one of them gets jailed, dies in jail, and then his corpse is dug up and desecrated, but he deserved it if anyone ever did, and after all, every real-life story has an unhappy ending eventually. And the Catharism and petty feuding goes on a surprisingly long time before the Inquisition actually gets down to business (and even then, a lot of it is the locals manipulating the Inquisition to play out their local disputes - this was before the Inquisition really got rolling later.)

I am sure other work has been done on the sources and in the period, and some of what’s in this book has been argued with, but it’s still taught as a basic text of medieval history; it’s held up fairly well.

Anyway I’m not exactly saying I recommend the book as a light read, but it’s kind of amazing and I’m really glad I read it, and if you have any interest in medievalish worldbuilding I think it would be a pretty valuable resource. And I am definitely requesting some of that 14th century soap opera for Yuletide.

Comments

[marginaliana]

a nobleman who married the wrong woman because he got her mixed up with a different noblewoman with the same name

O... kay...

[melannen]

I *suspect* that may have been a bit of a joke on his part - iirc, his wife wasn't Cathar and he was, which made his marriage something of a trial, and the other woman of the same name he claimed he'd meant to marry *was* Cathar, so it might have just been some bitter irony about how much happier he'd've been if he had married her instead.

On the other hand, most marriages between low-ranking nobles seem to have been long-distance and sight-unseen and fairly hasty, and given the general background level of incompetent hijinks it's entirely possible he really did just get mixed up and send the messengers to the wrong castle and then he couldn't honorably back out, after all.

[ratcreature]

I feel like I should have encountered that name mix-up thing as a trope in a romance novel and/or romantic comedy, but I don't think I've read any with that.

[melannen]

Yeah, it really seems like it *should* be a familiar trope, doesn't it? I feel like I ought to've at least read a fairy tale or something that uses it, but nothing comes to mind.

[dragoness_e]

I'm not totally sure, but it may be found in Shakespeare's comedies. It's the sort of thing he'd totally do.

[melannen]

That does seem like exactly the kind of thing! But I still can't come up with anything. He did tend to go for more visual sorts of comedy mix-ups, though.

[thedivinegoat]

I haven't read it since I was a teenager, but Elizabeth Gouge's Green Dolphin Street, (my twenty year old memory recorded the book as the Island of the Green Dolphin, but wikipedia tells me it's Green Dolphin Street) has a young man writing from New Zealand back to the Channel Islands to ask for his beloved's hand in marriage, but get the wrong sisters name. When she turns up in New Zealand he just sort of shrugs and makes the best of it.

[redbird]

That reminds me of Pride and Prejudice, where Mr. Collins asks Elizabeth Bennett to marry him because she's the oldest daughter, and then asks Charlotte Lucas to marry him, because he thinks he should be married and she's nearby. And Charlotte says yes, knowing all this, because it will get her out of her parents' house.

And also of the 19th century U.S. custom of pioneer men, if their wives died in childbirth, writing back east and asking for a younger sister's hand in marriage. And getting it. Sometimes more than once; I assume there were other women who said "no, he's already killed my two beloved older sisters, I'll take my chances here."

[melannen]

So another almost, but not quite. Hmm. There must be something somewhere!

[skygiants]

This sounds FASCINATING and ... not exactly standard village practice, yes......

[melannen]

I mean, part of the point of this style of "microhistory" is that every village is both super weird an unique, and a perfect microcosm of its society, both at the same time. And I'm sure most every other small village was just as full of adultery and feuds and backbiting if we had records at this scale, and probably even had its own dose of *something* that would count as heresy and/or rebellion.

The whole "the entire town got arrested by the Inquisition - twice, decades apart - and just kind of treated it as 'well, shit happens'" is pretty weird by any standards though I think.

[rushthatspeaks]

Wow. I have to read this now immediately. Thank you.

[melannen]

I mean, most of the things I mentioned just kind of get brought up in passing! And there's a ton of equally soap opera stuff that also gets brought up just in passing. There's a lot more about, like, what room layouts the houses had and exactly how kinship worked, and it gets dense sometimes. But if you find that kind of thing fascinating too it's full of good stuff.

The gay fake priest get a surprising amount of page space, though!

[sheliak]

That sounds AMAZING.

[melannen]

It went right on my yuletide noms list that's for sure!

[daegaer]

Have you read The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg? Because there is some prime 16th century Italian heretical batshit soap opera in that as well! . . . Which is known about due to Inquisition records, again.

[melannen]

I have not! But I happen to know there's a copy on stellar_dust's shelf, and she's the person from whom I 'borrowed' the copy of Montaillou that she is never getting back, so I might have to steal that one next visit.

[rionaleonhart]

This sounds incredible, and I'm so glad you made this entry. I particularly love the blasphemous church sanctuary sex.

I want details on blasphemous church sanctuary sex

[jesse_the_k]

...in particular, is there respectful, sacral sanctuary sex, or is any sex in the sanctuary taboo?

Re: I want details on blasphemous church sanctuary sex

[melannen]

...You know, I have no idea if consensual, loving, procreative (but not part of a fertility spell) missionary sex within a Catholic marriage in an empty church sanctuary would be okay or not! The question has never come up, and it's surprisingly hard to Google. I would assume if a married couple were, say, given long-term sanctuary in a church building, or being sheltered there as refugees, they wouldn't be required to be celibate, even if the building only had the one room? Can't find any actual statements on it, though.

I am pretty sure any already-sinful sex is always made more sinful if you have it on consecrated ground, though. And committing adultery with an ordained priest who gave you a magical birth control amulet and is using Cathar doctrine as dirty talk during the act definitely counts as already-sinful in multiple ways. Though I don't get the impression Father Pierre was very creative with positions, and they did bring a mattress in! So maybe at least it was missionary position.

Re: I want details on blasphemous church sanctuary sex

[melannen]

Apparently the Roman Catholic theologian St. Alphonsus Liguori agrees with me that it's okay in a case of "necessity", and now I am going to climb out of that research pit.

Re: I want details on blasphemous church sanctuary sex

[jesse_the_k]

Thank you for this nuanced answer.

*snort* missionary position *snort*

[melannen]

Most people who read the book tend to come away with blasphemous church sanctuary sex, if nothing else! (Unfortunately Father Pierre was pretty comprehensibly terrible, he's the one who deserved what the Inquisition did to him if anyone ever did, so I can't really ship it, but at least Beatrice de Planissoles was pretty awesome and got to live more or less happily ever after he dropped her.)

[sgac]

I want to know more about the people who collect stale bread crusts.

[melannen]

So, okay, here's the thing: they are are NOT the bread of the sacrament. This is important, because Cathars don't believe in Communion or Mass (or any of the Catholic sacraments.) The bread wasn't even particularly holy, because no material things are holy to Cathars.

HOWEVER, if you sat down for a meal with one of the itinerant Cathar holy men - the Goodmen who travelled around in hiding from the Church, visiting believers - then of course you would break bread with him, and he would bless the bread, and then if you were one of *those* people, you would save a bit of the bread as a memory of when you met the Goodman, and then you would try to get bits of bread blessed by as many of the different Goodmen as you could, and then you would brag about how many different Goodmen you'd collected to other people who also had a hidden collection of deeply illegal and very stale bread (since those Catholics assumed it *was* some kind of holy thing, even though it DEFINITELY wasn't it was just souvenirs.)

I was left wondering if there was a related Catholic tradition of collecting bread that had been blessed by certain bishops or hermits or whatever as extremely perishable holy relics, but Ladurie didn't mention that.

[sgac]

This is fascinating. Now I'm wondering how they labelled them. They'd each have to have their own separate box or bag or you'd get them mixed up. And someone would secretly show off their collection to another collector, who'd go away thinking "I bet they didn't really have Goodman Thomas, it was just last week's supper."

[melannen]

I am pretty sure most of the bread collectors were not literate (although nearly all the Goodmen were! There was a lot more literacy, and a lot more books! than I had expected.) So they probably just knew and loved every single crumb so well that there was no risk of a mixup.

I am 100% sure you are right that they accused each other of faking though. :D

[duckwhatduck]

This sounds FASCINATING and I need it

especially the casks of beer and the twinks and the shepherd

[melannen]

The shepherd actually gets multiple chapters more or less devoted to his life! As well as being gay, it's very anti-capitalist-wage-labor-system - that's where Ladurie gets to talk about how 14th century French peasants actually didn't work that hard and also didn't really care about randomly walking off the job with no warning for several months to hang out with their boyfriend or their sister or whoever and then randomly walking back on, and this didn't stop them from getting promoted and being considered good workers. It sounds nice.

[genarti]

This sounds AMAZING and deeply fascinating! Not exactly typical village life, no, but then no village is really 'typical' when you get right down to it, after all...

[melannen]

It was incredibly fascinating!