Europe News: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a French historian at the forefront of a scholarly movement that sought to understand the past from the bottom up, by probing
Professor Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who has died aged 94, was director of the French Bibliothèque nationale, Professor at the Collège de France and a leading exponent of the “annales” school of history; he was best-known for Montaillou (1975), a reconstruction of 15th-century peasant life in a Pyrenean village that became an international bestseller.
He led a movement that rejected historiography’s traditional emphasis on great events and leaders in favor of mining the “mental universe” of peasants, merchants and clergymen.