"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.