Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel (b. 1929). French historian. In his doctoral thesis, Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966), which covered the period from 1450 to 1750, Le Roy Ladurie continued the Annales tradition of studying both material determinants and collective mental attitudes in a long-term perspective. He combined an emphasis on quantitative methods with an interest in historical geography (Histoire du climat, 1967), and moved towards historical anthropology in the best-selling Montaillou, village occitan, 1294-1324 (1975), a vivid reconstruction, based on an innovative interpretation of traditional source material, of the ecology, customs, beliefs, and kinship networks of a single community.

[Rhiannon Goldthorpe]

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