A microhistory of eighteenth-century systemic change that places ordinary French lives alongside global advances
Provincializing Global History explores the subtle transformation of the coastal ...province of the Languedoc in the eighteenth century. Mining a wealth of archival sources, James Livesey unveils how provincial elites and peasant households unwittingly created new practices. Managing local political institutions, establishing new credit systems, building networks of natural historians, and introducing new plants and farm machinery to the region opened up the inhabitants of the province to new norms and standards. The practices were gradually embedded in daily life and allowed the province to negotiate the new worlds of industrial society and capitalism.
InSo Great a Light, So Great a Smoke, Louisa A. Burnham takes us inside the world of a little-known heretical group in the south of France in the early fourteenth century. The Beguins were a small ...sect of priests and lay people allied to (and sharing many of the convictions of) the Spiritual Franciscans. They stressed poverty in their pursuit of a Franciscan evangelical ideal and believed themselves to be living in the Last Days. By the late thirteenth century, the leaders of the order and the popes themselves had begun to discipline the Spirituals, and by 1317 they had been deemed a heresy. The Beguins refused to accept this situation and began to evade and confront the inquisitorial machine.
Burnham follows the lives of nine Beguins as they conceal themselves in cities, construct an "underground railroad," solicit clandestine donations in order to bribe inquisitors, escape from prison, and venerate the burned bones of their martyred fellows as the relics of saints. Their actions brought the Beguins the apocalypse they had long imagined, as the Church's inquisitors pursued them along with the Spirituals and began to arrest them and burn them at the stake. Reconstructing this dramatic history using inquisitorial depositions, notarial records, and the previously unknown Beguin martyrology, Burnham vividly recreates the world in which the Beguins lived and died for their beliefs.
How should historians read sources which record inquisitorial trials in the Middle Ages? How can we understand the fears felt by those on trial? By analysing six volumes of depositions in the trial ...of Cathar and Waldensian heretics in Languedoc between the late twelfth and the fourteenth century, in this book, Caterina Bruschi challenges old methodologies in the study of dissent. She examines the intrinsic narratological problems related to the sources and, using approaches from the social sciences, analyses the different fears felt by deponents and how those fears affected their actions and decisions. In so doing, she sheds light on itinerancy within the ecclesial structure of non-conformist movements and contextualises the problem of itinerancy as a benchmark for the definition of heresy. Focusing on the lives and attitudes of trial witnesses, this innovative account is a major contribution to our understanding of the nature of religious non-conformity in the Middle Ages.
In this seminal book, Johnson writes a full-scale study of the rise and decline of industrialization in the Bas-Languedoc region of France. Working within a broad 200-year time frame, Johnson ...examines the process of how and why a successful industrial region (woollens) transformed itself to agriculture (wine).
This book provides an edition and translation of depositions of heresy suspects interrogated in Toulouse in the 1270s. These depositions plug a large hole in the history of heresy and inquisition, ...and they are reminiscent of Montaillou in their sheer colour and liveliness.
Continuing where William Beik's pathbreaking seventeenth-century study ends, this book sheds new light on the origins of the French Revolution and the social and political developments thereafter.
What should historians do with the words of the dead?Inquisition and Powerreformulates the historiography of heresy and the inquisition by focusing on depositions taken from the Cathars, a religious ...sect that opposed the Catholic church and took root in southern France during the twelfth century. Despite the fact that these depositions were spoken in the vernacular, but recorded in Latin in the third person and rewritten in the past tense, historians have often taken these accounts as verbatim transcriptions of personal testimony. This belief has prompted some historians, including E. Le Roy Ladurie, to go so far as to retranslate the testimonies into the first-person. These testimonies have been a long source of controversy for historians and scholars of the Middle Ages. Arnold enters current theoretical debates about subjectivity and the nature of power to develop reading strategies that will permit a more nuanced reinterpretation of these documents of interrogation. Rather than seeking to recover the true voice of the Cathars from behind the inquisitor's framework, this book shows how the historian is better served by analyzing texts as sites of competing discourses that construct and position a variety of subjectivities. In this critically informed history, Arnold suggests that what we do with the voices of history in fact has as much to do with ourselves as with those we seek to 'rescue' from the silences of past.
In 1209 Simon of Montfort led a war against the Cathars of Languedoc after Pope Innocent III preached a crusade condemning them as heretics. The suppression of heresy became a pretext for a vicious ...war that remains largely unstudied as a military conflict. Laurence Marvin here examines the Albigensian Crusade as military and political history rather than religious history and traces these dimensions of the conflict through to Montfort's death in 1218. He shows how Montfort experienced military success in spite of a hostile populace, impossible military targets, armies that dissolved every forty days, and a pope who often failed to support the crusade morally or financially. He also discusses the supposed brutality of the war, why the inhabitants were for so long unsuccessful at defending themselves against it, and its impact on Occitania. This original account will appeal to scholars of medieval France, the Crusades and medieval military history.
A sophisticated epistemological approach is essential to the use of inquisitorial evidence. Historians have proposed various reading strategies based on the idea that it is possible to distinguish ...excess elements from inquisitorial sources that can be attributed to the deponents. This article uses examples from Languedocian inquisition records to challenge such interpretations. The construction of deposition records is framed in terms of information flow influenced by variables such as selection, interpretation, abstraction, and the reconstructive nature of human memory. Inquisitorial documents are approached as materially embedded amalgamations of abstracted information co-constructed by the deponents, the inquisitors, and the notaries. The argument is that this information originating from multiple sources became entangled and blends seamlessly in the extant documents, due to which the idea of sifting through inquisitorial evidence in search of a distinct excess or surplus is untenable as a methodological guideline. Instead, an holistic and stratified approach is proposed.
Digital Soil Mapping (DSM) products are simplified representations of more complex and partially unknown patterns of soil variations. Therefore, any prediction of a soil property that can be derived ...from these products has an irreducible uncertainty that needs to be mapped. The objective of this study was to compare the most current DSM method – Regression Kriging (RK) – with a new approach derived from RandomForest – Quantile Regression Forest (QRF) – in regard to their ability of predicting the uncertainties of GlobalSoilMap soil property grids. The comparison was performed for three soil properties, pH, organic carbon and clay content at 5–15cm depth in a 27,236km2 Mediterranean French region with sparse sets of measured soil profiles (1/13.5km2) and for a set of environmental covariates characterizing the relief, climate, geology and land use of the region. Apart from classical performance indicators, comparisons involved accuracy plots and the visual examinations of the uncertainty maps provided by the two methods.
The results obtained for the three soil properties showed that QRF provided more accurate and more interpretable predicted patterns of uncertainty than RK did, while having similar performances in predicting soil properties. The use of QRF in operational DSM is therefore recommended, especially when spatial sampling of soil observations are too sparse for applying RK.
•Two methods of uncertainty estimation of 3 GSM products were tested in South France.•100 validations sets were built by iterative sampling of 25% of the sites.•Accuracy plots were proposed for validating uncertainty predictions.•Quantile Regression Forests outperformed Regression Kriging in mapping uncertainty.•Quantile Regression Forests is recommended in situations of sparse soil data.
