In the early 1300's the village of Montaillou-and the surrounding mountainous region of Southern France-was full of heretics. When Jacquest Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, launched an elaborate Inquisition to stamp them out, the peasants and shepherds he interrogated revealed, along with their position on official Catholicism, many details of their everyday life. Basing his absorbing study on these vivid, carefully recorded statements of peasants who lived more than 600 years ago-Pierre Clergue, the powerful village priest and shameless womanizer is even heard explaining his techniques of seduction-eminent historian Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the economy and social structure of the community and probes the most intimate aspects of medieval life: love and marriage, gestures and emotions, conversations and gossip, clans and factions, crime and violence, concepts of time and space, attitudes to the past, animals, magic and folklore, death and beliefs about the other world.