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Social Mentalities and the case of Medieval Scepticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Susan Reynolds
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Extract

The history of mentalities has now become so widely accepted that even British historians sometimes refer to it: one hardly needs to talk about mentalités any more, though the French word still sounds more modish. But the subject goes back at least to Vico. Although Weltanschauung and Zeitgeist sound old hat by comparison with mentalités the words remind us that nineteenth-century German historians were interested in the different ways past societies may have viewed the world, while F. W. Maitland and Henry Adams are obvious examples of Anglophones who in their different ways tried to understand medieval ways of thought. In 1933 Jean Guitton, a Frenchman, it is true, but one who presumably came out of that older tradition of intellectual history against which Lucien Febvre set himself, wrote about the need to study the mentalité of an age and summed up what he meant by this as ‘the totality of those implicit assumptions which are imposed on us by our environment and which rule our judgements.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 1 , December 1991 , pp. 21 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1991

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References

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44 Dronke, P., Women writers of the middle ages (Cambridge, 1984). 267, 271 and cf. 204–15Google Scholar; as Dronke points out, Le Roy Ladurie, E.Montaillou (Paris, 1975), 474, 491–2, 532–4),Google Scholarconflates Aude Faure's disbelief in God with her disbelief in transubstantiation. Although Le Roy Ladurie discusses belief, denies the ‘immense appétit du divin’ which Febvre (Probléme, 528–35) attributed to the middle ages, and ostensibly plays down the element of magic in medieval beliefs ibid. 465–8, 579–84), the book as a whole seems to stress what is strange and ‘folklorique’ about the people of Montaillou (and their sex lives) rather than their rationality: cf. Boyle, L. E., ‘Montaillou Revisited’ in Pathways to Peasants, ed. Raftis, J. A. (Toronto 1981), 119–40, at 124, 126–7Google Scholar.

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