Vast numbers of readers around the world who would never have expected to read a scholarly monograph on the life of a Pyrenean village in the 14th century did so thanks to the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who has died aged 94. The book was Montaillou, Village Occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975).
It was published in English as Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1978), and for those readers the work was like a French, real-life Canterbury Tales. Here were racy descriptions of the lives and loves, the intrigues and the attitudes of people who had really existed.
