A historian reconstructs daily life, belief, sex and the Cathar heresy in a small Pyrenean village around 1300, using testimony from an Inquisition register.
A person can perform an institution's duties faithfully in public while secretly backing its enemies and breaking its rules for personal gain. Outward office says little about inner loyalty or conduct, as with a priest who said Mass while sheltering heretics and seducing his parishioners.
In a tight village, a new faith or heresy moves through whole households at once rather than winning people one at a time. The house, not the individual, is the unit that converts, because family members share a roof, a hearth and loyalties.
Examined at the level of one small community, ordinary life may show little of what big theories of historical development predict, such as class conflict or class solidarity. Theories built from the top down can miss how people actually lived.
Seen up close, people from a remote past share many of our mental attitudes and social habits, not just our basic human appetites. Their sociability, pleasures and private irreverence look strikingly familiar.