Le Roy Ladurie's research began with exactly the sort of “serial” sources advocated by Simiand, notably records of the tithe and landholdings in the large sourthern French province of Languedoc from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. With their help, he traced out what he called a “great agrarian cycle,” as the population rose from its “low water-mark” after the Black Death, to crest and swell and dash itself against the inflexible growth limits imposed by the prevailing agricultural technology, plunging the peasantry into misery, despair, and revolt. Like Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie firmly located this history in geography, evoking in lyrical accents the flow of men and animals over mountains and through valleys. Like Braudel, he carefully delineated patterns of change in trade and industry, and paid due attention to politics as well. But unlike Braudel, he also extended his grasp to the great religious and cultural phenomena of his period, especially the spread of literacy and the penetration of the Reformation into southern France. While eschewing the rigid determinism of much Marxist analysis, he nonetheless showed how Protestantism appealed most strongly to particular social classes (especially artisans), and had its greatest success precisely at a moment of maximum economic misery.