152 journal of social history

believe that the proportion of marginal men - e.g, tramps - increased inPhiladelphia during the latter part of the nineteenth century, though maybe not asmuch as elsewhere.? Perhaps they were the ones learning to curb their aggression,and not disciplined factory workers?

Violent Death in the City is a piece with Eric Monkkonen's study of crime innineteenth-century Columbus, Ohio.3 Both subject conventional theories aboutcrime to rigorous statistical testing. To Monkkonen's findings thatindustrialization affected the quality but not the quantity of urban crime we cannow add Lane's about urban growth and violent death. This is the new socialhistory in its purest form - the analysis and interpretation of statistical data thathistorians in the past ignored or thought irrelevant. From such data historiansnow offer the most profound conclusions about the nature of society. It is excitingand engaging history, but no doubt some historians are still put off by it. This isespecially likely when so much of the text, as in Violent Death in the City, must ofnecessity be taken up with explanations of the evidence and justification for theway it was used.

A more legitimate question to be raised about Lane's study is that in histheoretical forays he seems to have missed many opportunities to go beyond aneconomic perspective and employ other contributions of the new social history,particularly those dealing with urban ecology and demography - spatial andhousehold patterns. Even if the nature of his data prevents much conclusivetesting, Lane might have theorized more fully about how industrializationinteracted with the urban environment in affecting social behavior. Where somepeople lived and worked in relation to others in the city at large, and whom theylived with, or more precisely whom they boarded or lodged with, are mattersworth considering. As it stands, not all that Lane conjectures about hisPhiladelphia data even implies a truly urban setting. The Chicago School, for all itsinadequacies, at least tried to grasp what the city itself meant as a place to live andwork.

However critical this may sound, it is intended as a compliment. Violent Death inthe City is a provocative book. It raises important questions and kindles thehistorical imagination. Sometimes a book's value is measured not by itsdefinitiveness as much as by its capacity to reorient scholars and redirect theirinvestigations along more fruitful lines. Violent Death in the City has this quality.

University 0/Nebraska-Lincoln

FOOTNOTES

John C. Schneider

1. Policing the City: Boston, 1822-1885 (Cambridge, 1967); "Crime and Criminal Statistics inNineteenth-Century Massachusetts," JournalofSocialHistory, 2 (Winter, 1968), 156-163.

2. lames F. Rooney, "Societal Forces and the Unattached Male: An Historical Review," inHoward M. Bahr, ed., Disaffiliated Man: Essaysand Bibliography on Skid Row, Vagrancy, andOutsiders (Toronto, 1970), pp. 13-38.

3. TheDangerous Class: Crimeand Poverty in Columbus, Ohio, 1860-1885(Cambridge, 1975).

An Unfortunate Construct: A comment on Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie'sMontai/lou.

REVIEW 153

In 1975 Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie's Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 a1324was published in Paris and achieved critical success, and somewhat improbably,popular success as well; it became a best seller. Its great length did not deter theFrench, nor did the author's Annales school blend of history and anthropology.The Inquisition Register of Jacques Fournier, Bishop ofPamiers, on which it wasbased, revealed the most intimate facts and feelings of the lives of the medievalvillagers, and modern French readers were given an entirely new vision of theirroots, salted with enough village gossip and scandalous pranks to renew againtheir wry cynicism concerning la condition humaine. Word of the study spreadswiftly; Charles Wood's critique of it for the American Historical Review was asenthusastic as any review in that sober journal in the past half century. 1 LawrenceStone was equally laudatory in his general review of LeRoy Ladurie's works forthe New York Reviewof Booksafter the abbreviated English version, translated byBarbara Bray and published by George Braziller, appeared in 1979.2 The work willprobably not become a best seller among English reading audiences as it hasamong the French, but it is likely to become a classic of European history. When ascholar inquires of a medievalist which one work would they recommend thatencapsulates the new scholarship on the medieval period they are likely to be told:Montaillou. And, the medievalist is likely to add, it is a good yarn. Moreover, itsays a great deal about the position of women.

This seems all to the good, given LeRoy Ladurie's superb grasp of the technicalaspects of historical research and his mastery of the ethnographer's craft. Heshows skill in addressing the bias of the inquisitorial report, and his basic approachto the registers is to treat the material as a reasonably adequate field report. Heerects a society step by step and returns repeatedly to the principals of his cast andthe critical events of their lives as meaning is layered on meaning. This is atrustworthy technique of ethnography which creates comprehensible order butnot at the price of complexity. Certainly LeRoy Ladurie owes much to hisintellectual home, l'ecole pratique des hautes-etudes, and to his medievalistcolleagues who encouraged and assisted him. But he has another debt to structuralanthropology and the work ofClaude Levi-Strauss. He adopts Levi-Strauss's basicunderstanding of society, namely that a society possess three languages or meansof exchange: messages, goods or services, and women.' LeRoy Ladurie seizes onthe households of Montaillou to serve as basic structures and, as the conventiondictates, households are male by definition, their intercommunication servedthrough accepting or expelling women along with messages, goods and services.Women are treated not as an integral part of the social order but rather as a meansof facilitating exchange between social units. LeRoy Ladurie can only do this bymanipulating the evidence of the registers, in rather tortuous ways, I believe. Hiswork, therefore, tends to perpetuate the medieval stereotype of women ratherthan reinterpret it in the light of the new historical thinking.

Take, for example, the role of older women in Montaillou. Certain of them,particularly those with Na (mother) appended familiarly to their names, headedhouseholds, arranged marriages and other aspects of villagers' lives, traded andadministered land and goods, willed and inherited property. LeRoy Ladurie issomewhat at a loss to account for their authority and power and speculates aboutmstriarchy. He refers to their "comparative emancipation" which is less thanuseful in a medieval context when men were not emancipated." He finds a role formaternal brothers of female heads of households, but then must qualify thatprinciple of lateral male dominance in matriarchal theory by noting that the femalehead of household exerted major authority independent of her brother. His factsbelie the principles borrowed from Levi-Strauss's structural anthropology, yet the

154 journal of social history

construct continues to be employed. How much simpler to state that in Montaillousex and age determined power and authority, and whereas males tended todominate over females, in the last analysis age was a greater determinant ofauthority than sex. Older males were likely to dominate over younger females andmost typically did, but it was possible for older females to dominate younger malesand this occurred frequently enough to qualify the patriarchal order and tointroduce the diversity and complexity of social relationships which is our culturalheritage from our medieval past. Men were violent and misogynous but womenkicked husbands out of house, successfully the registers reveal, and sons tookmatronyms or patronyms sometimes sequentially or alternatively. Women wereintimidated but Leroy Ladurie gives us fine examples of women who intimidated.The author fails to explain the latter except to say that women had "occasionalsuccesses." 5

One great loss for the reader is that while vivid portraits of women emerge, theyare of inexplicable characters whose vigor, defiance of orthodox churchauthorities, and fundamental faith in their own capabilities remain a mystery.Strong women like Na Roqua and the chate/aine of Montaillou, Beatrice dePlanissoles, would not emerge from conditions of extreme dependence,"weakness" and constant intimidation. While these conditions might exist attimes, other factors must have come into to play to create the sense of adequacywhich helped these women withstand inquistorial or familial male coercion andsurvive to manage power and authority effectively, even, on occasion,magnanimously.

Take, for example, the noblewoman Beatrice de Planissoles. Her sexual liaisonsread like a pot-boiler romance; her life in this remote village was adventurous, fullof variety, her values fascinating." Noble, often married, she was revered by herfour daughters7 and totally at ease with women on all levels of society in hercommunity. In fact the relations among women, of which the author gives only aglimpse, seemed designed to deny class differences rather than affirm them, anissue we need to understand better. I mistrust an author who refers to Beatrice'srape by Pathau Clergue as a "minor infraction" of her marriage; she did notcommit the crime.f Can he treat her fairly when it comes to her trial by theInquisition? There she protects her lover and daughters' tutor, Barthelmy. Earliershe had left her former lover, the rascally priest Pierre Clergue, because of hisheresy, and resisted his, and the entire community's, remonstrances against hermarriage outside the village. She was aware of Pierre Clergue's own unsavoryrecord as a double agent but remained steadfast in not naming him before theInquisition. She was released from prison after a year but condemned to wear thedouble yellow cross of the heretic. The Florentine Beatrice, whom Danteapotheosized into ideal womanhood, pales before her exemplary behavior in themost trying times.

There is danger in perceiving women as a means of exchange rather than acomponent part of the social order. In the case of Grazide Lizier, from anillegitimate line of the Clergue domus and another mistress of Pierre Clergue, thisproves true. At first her life appears to warrant the positoin which LeRoy Laduriegives her, near the lowest rung of the village social ladder. Yet she was eventuallymarried to a peasant land owner, much older than she, from whom she wouldinherit. Clearly from illegitimate origins, she had climbed the social ladder and herassociates and family had conspired to help her do so. In truth the lowest rung ofthe social ladder was reserved for men, who could fall so low they were excludedfrom the society of Montaillou, becoming messengers or shepherds who did notpossess property nor marry nor participate regularly in communal life. Men

REVIEW 155

reached higher levels of power and authority but they also fell lower than womenat Montaillou. This distinction between male and female experience warrantsinvestigation, and investigation is blocked by the poorly composed construct thatmasks this significant social phenomenon.?

The best that can be said of LeRoy Ladurie is that he recognizes the exceptionsand notes the qualifications to his construct like a good historian. Unfortunatelyhe maintains the construct despite it all. It is a matter of some consequence. Amajor turning point occurred in the High Middle Ages, whose closing decades arecovered by Bishop Fournier's registers, in regard to the status and power ofwomen. Hidden within these registers may be some valuable clues forunderstanding why women lost authority and were reduced in their social status.A superior study would have resulted if LeRoy Ladurie had seen both women andmen as basic components of Montaillou's society, rather than viewing women asexternal to the social order, a language or means of exchange.

SUNY Brockport

FOOTNOTES

Susan Stuard

1. Charles Wood, review, Montaillou village occitan de 1294 ai324 by Emmanuel LeRoyLadurie, American Historical Review, il (I 976), 1090.

2. Lawrence Stone, "In the Alleys of Mentalite, " New YorkReviewofBooks (Nov. 8, 1979),p.20ff.

3. Claude Levi-Strauss, L 'Anthropologie structurale (Paris, 1958), p. 31. This is popular withother Annales scholars as well; see in particular Fernand Braudel, "History and the SocialSciences" in P. Burke, Economy and Society in EarlyModern Europe (New York, 1972), pp.11-42.

4. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Montaillou, trans. by Barbara Bray (New York, 1978), p. 196­97. The review focuses on the even newer and comparable study by LeRoy Ladurie, TheCarnival at Romans.

5. Ibid., p. 194.

6. The record of her sexual liaisons is traced rather incongruously under the generalheading, "The Libido of the Clergues." This is another example of the awkwardness of theconstruct, because, without a doubt, Beatrice's libido is being discussed. lbid., p. 167-169.

7. The daughters of Beatrice de Plainissoles were literate but she was not. It would beinteresting to know why, and how, she provided the opportunity for all her daughters tobecome literate although she lacked that ability herself. ibid., p. 240.

8. Ibid., p. 177, he evidently means this as a compliment.

9. Claude Levi-Strauss has come under attack by feminist scholarship before. See forexample Eleanor Leacock, "The Changing Family and Levi-Strauss, or Whatever Happenedto Eathers? ," SocialResearch (Summer, 1977), 235-59.