In the middle of the 1970s, there appeared two works which together would establish the genre. While both were devoted to what previous generations of historians would have considered mere footnotes to history, their broad implications, impressive literary qualities, and refusal to emulate the model of social scientific case studies made them anything but hyperspecialized or inaccessible. In 1975, the indefatigable Le Roy Ladurie published Montaillou, the study of a southern French village in the high middle ages.12 The Albigensian heresy had flourished in this small, remote location, and in the early fourtheenth century a rigid and domineering Inquisitor, Jacques Fournier, had taken the extraordinary step of arresting virtually the entire population and subjecting them to detailed interrogations. The resulting, lengthy records were well known, but Le Roy Laduire read them in a new, ingenious way. Instead of focusing yet again on the heresy and its repression, he carefully picked out the small, banal details of daily life that emerged in the course of the prisoners' responses, and used them to reconstruct a picture of the village as a whole. As he himself put it, he treated the interrogatories as anthropological reports from the field. Women exchanging gossip while delousing each other, a priest preying sexually on his parishioners, a shepherd leading his flock on long, patient treks through the Pyrenees: with great skill, Le Roy Ladurie wove such vignettes into a brilliant tapestry, centered on the mundane image of the ostal, or household, which dominated the villagers' economic and social lives, and also their thoughts of heaven. It is true that, except in its choice of scale, the book did not offer a particularly sharp challenge to the Annales paradigm. As in the earlier treatment of the Carnival at Romans, Le Roy Ladurie presented his subjects as evocative, but still somewhat passive illustrations of much larger general patterns. Yet the extraordinarily vivid portrayals of forgotten individuals went beyond the analysis of social structures, won Montaillou a large audience, and opened up new vistas for the profession as a whole.