Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village ranks with John Campbell's study of northern Greek shepherds as one of the two best books written about Greece in this [last] century, at least in our language . . . There is an honesty and a curiosity about her writing that are somehow the measure of a love-affair of the mind. Lucky village . . . to have so sympathetic, so patient, and so clear-eyed a scholar. --Peter Levi in The Times Literary Supplement
. . . until the 1960s the village was an embodiment and, one feels, a continuity of a very ancient way of life, the rural community creating and defining its territory over centuries of customary agricultural and craft usages. . . . Dr du Boulay's work, fascinating for any student of the contemporary Mediterranean way of life, is of yet richer value for insights into its past. No student of Aegean history could read the book without profit. --Peter Warren in Antiquity
Juliet du Boulay analyses [the] poignant moment in the last days of a traditional village. It is not romantic of her to emphasize that in the change something is lost which is not replaced by higher levels of consumption. . . . Few will match [her] eloquence and perception.
--Peter Loisos in The Times Educational Supplement
Juliet du Boulay has an MA in English Literature and Language and a D. Phil. in Social Anthropology. After her first degree she worked on a newspaper in London for two years, and then in 1961 she went to Greece and remained there, with some breaks, until 1973. During 1961-64 she travelled extensively in the villages in mainland Greece and Evia (Euboea), and also spent some months walking with a donkey in the mountainous areas of Western Crete. She returned to England to study social anthropology at Oxford, after which in the period between 1966-1973 she lived chiefly in a mountain village of northern Evia, at first collecting material on the customs and institutions of the village, and then paying especial attention to the people's cosmological and religious ideas. These studies were written up in book form as Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village (1974) and Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village (forthcoming, Denise Harvey Publisher). She has also published various articles in anthropological journals.
In 1968 she was received into the Orthodox Church, and in 1976 she married and went with her husband to live in Scotland. There they formed the centre of a small Orthodox Community, at first in Aberdeen and then in Dunblane near Stirling, and it was to serve the community in Dunblane that her husband was in 1992 asked to be ordained first as deacon and then as priest.