Edward Everett Root Publishers Co. Ltd.
EER
About this book
Professor Le Roy Ladurie is the leading exponent of the ‘new’ history of the French school. His achievement has set an example to historians in all other countries. As the diverse studies in this volume show, he has particularly revolutionised the study of population change, offering new techniques and posing new questions. In mapping new territory he insists upon measurement together with insight into social and psychological issues. These he studies in his unique style. He urges that demography is a fundamental determinant of economic change. He calls this the source of ‘the immense, slow-moving fluctuations’ and the huge cycles of rising and falling pressures on supply. ‘History that is not quantitative cannot claim to be scientific,’ says Ladurie.
About the author
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a French historian whose work is mainly focused upon Languedoc in the Ancien Régime, particularly the history of the peasantry. His landmark book Montaillou - which was published in 1975 to wide acclaim - had a huge impact on historical studies and remains a classic.
Reviews
“This collection illuminates the work of a truly remarkable scholar….singularly enjoyable and intellectually stimulating.” – IAIN STEVENSON. Journal of historical Geography.
“Exhilarating and humane.” NICHOLAS HYMAN, Tribune.
“No one has secured such international eminence nor has enjoyed such wide popular appeal… His particular virtuosity centres upon his readability, his superb imaginative talents and an uncanny knack of being to the fore of changing historical fashion. Sex, violence, religiosity, village sociability, climatic change, famine, sterility, literacy, death are but a few of the subjects he has explored in a dazzling career and which are reflected in this book.” – OLWEN HUFTON, The Times Higher Education Supplement.
“Any new book by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is an event.” – DOUGLAS JOHNSON, New Society.
“An ingenious and successful combination of narrative and analysis, micro-history and macro-history…reveals the immense intellectual appetite of Le Roy Ladurie….” – PETER BURKE, New Statesman.
The Territory of the Historian
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Translated from the French by Ben and Siân Reynolds.