The Mind and Method of the Historian

4.2/5 ( ratings)

There cannot be much serious doubt that in the last twenty years Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has been one of the most—if not the roost—original, versatile, and imaginative historians in the world.... He has acquired an almost unique capacity to capture the imagination of a mass audience, while still retaining the respect and admiration of his professional colleagues."
—Lawrence Stone, New York Review of Books

"Many years ago, Le Roy Ladurie described himself as an 'agricultural historian.' .... But what a rural historian! He seems most often a retrospective cultural anthropologist-cum-demographer, for he seeks out or notices large areas of social or cultural data and brings to it a powerful, intensely imaginative analysis. He is willing to push his data or illuminate his findings with speculation about their meaning and thus makes for provocative and interesting reading even for those who might consider themselves devotees of an older style history that offered a straightforward narrative of political or military events.... Ladurie is one of those unusual scholars who, even as he fulfills the typical expectations of his calling, is also transforming it with his own vision of what it might be."
—Stanley J. Idzerda, Review of Politics

"In addition to being a gifted storyteller, Ladurie is a committed student of the 100-odd places historians must go to piece together the stories of the unwashed and unnoticed, of the techniques to weave in¬complete and various kinds of evidence into the cloth of history.... The essays share an interest in discovering what life itself, and not just the 'events' of life, was like in the past; how people lived, loved, took sick or didn't take sick—what they ate, who they listened to, the weather, the crops, status and the long-term trends of such things that give us a picture of aggregate life."
-Robert Dawidoff, Los Angeles Times

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, professor of history at the College de France, is the author of Montaillou, Carnival in Romans, and many other books and articles. A translation of the first volume of his essays, The Territory of the Historian, is also published by the University of Chicago Press.