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Mentalities: A new field for historians

Jacques Le Goff
Social Science Information 1974 13: 81
DOI: 10.1177/053901847401300105

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JACQUES LE GOFF

Mentalities: A new field for historians*

"Mentalité me plait. Il y a comme

cela des mots nouveaux qu’on
lance."
Marcel Proust

For the historian today, mentality is still new and already debased. A great
deal is said about the history of mentalities, few are the cogent examples that
have been given. At a time when what is involved still represents unfamiliar
territory across which a trail has yet to be blazed, the question arises as to
whether the expression refers to a scientific reality, contains any conceptual
coherence or has any real epistemological function. Taken up by fashion,
it already seems to have gone out of fashion. Should it be given a helping
hand on its way in or on its way out?

1. A corradial history
The immediate appeal of the history of mentalities lies in its very imprecision,
in its innate capacity to designate the residues of historical analysis, the je ne
sais quoi of history.
1095 marks the beginning of a vast upheaval in Western Christendom in
which men, individually and in bodies, set off to take part in the great adven-
ture of the Crusade. In looking for causes one can refer to demographic
growth and the beginning of the population boom, to the merchants in Italian
towns with their eyes set on gain, to papal policy at a time when, Christendom
being divided against itself, the Infidel seemed to provide a much-desired
opportunity for presenting a united front: but all these causes do not explain
everything, and perhaps not the essential. One must take into account the
indispensable attraction of a terrestrial Jerusalem which mirrors that which is
in heaven, the impetus of images in the collective mind formed around the idea
of Jerusalem. What is the Crusade if a certain religious mentality is lacking?1

*
This text (translated by Michael Fineberg) is an excerpt from a book to be pub-
lished in 1974 : J. Le Goff and P. Nora (eds.), Le travail de 1’histoire, Paris, GaUimard.
1. Cf. Alphandéry and Dupront (1954-1959), and A. Dupront, 1961.

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81
 82

What is feudality? Institutions, a mode of production, a social system,

a type of military organization? According to George Duby, one must go
further, &dquo;extending the scope of economic history by way of the history of
mentalities&dquo;, bringing into the picture &dquo;the feudal conception of service&dquo;.
What is feudality? &dquo;A medieval mentality&dquo; 2.
Since the 16th century, a new society has been developing in the West -
capitalist society. Is this the product of a new mode of production, the
outcome of monetary economy, the creation of the bourgeoisie? Doubtless
so, but it is also the result of new attitudes towards work and money, the
consequence of a mentality which since Max Weber has been seen in terms of
the protestant ethic 3.
To speak of mentality then is to go beyond history, is to endeavour to
satisfy the curiosity of historians bent on going further than heretofore and
who have decided to start off by taking a look at the other human sciences.
Marc Bloch, attempting to grasp &dquo;the religious mentality&dquo; of the Middle
Ages, found himself faced with &dquo;a multitude of beliefs and practices [...]the
inheritance of the millenial pursuit of magic or, on the contrary, produced,
at a relatively recent period, within a civilization in which myths still proli-
ferate and which sustain it&dquo; 4. The historian of mentalities will therefore
have much in common with the ethnologist, seeking like him to attain the
most stable and least shifting level of societies. In the words of Ernest
Labrousse, &dquo;behind the economic lags the social, and behind the social the
mental&dquo; 5. Keith Thomas studying in his turn the religious mentality of the
men of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance makes no bones about applying
an ethnological method, derived principally from Evans-Pritchard 6. Star-
ting off with the study of rites and ceremonial practices, the ethnologist pene-
trates into the realm of beliefs and systems of values. Thus, the historians of
the Middle Ages - following Marc Bloch, Percy Ernst Schramm, Ernst
Kantorovicz and Bernard Guen6e 1, by studying coronations, miraculous
-

cures, the insignia of power and the entrances of kings, discover a monarchic

2. G. Duby, "La féodalité, une mentalité médiévale", Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civi-
lisations, pp. 765-771.
3. Classic works of M. Weber, L’éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme, 1904-1905,
French translation 1964; R. Tawney, La religion et l’essor du capitalisme, 1926, French trans-
lation 1951; H. Lüthy, La banque protestante en France de la Révocation de l’Édit de Nantes
à la Revolution, Paris, 1959-1960, 2 vol. Cf. J. Delumeau, Naissance et affirmation de la Ré-
forme, Paris, 1968, 2nd ed., especially "Capitalisme et mentalité capitaliste", pp. 301 ff.
4. M. Bloch, La société féodale, Paris, 1968, p. 129 (last edition).
5. E. Labrousse, Preface to G. Dupeux’s book, Aspects de l’histoire sociale et politique du
Loir-et-Cher : 1848-1914, Paris, 1962, p. 11.
6. K. Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic, London, 1971; E. Evans-Pritchard, Anthro-
pology and history, Cambridge, 1961.
7. P.E. Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik, Stuttgart, 1954, 3 vol.; E. Kan-
torowicz, The King’s two bodies: A study in medieval political thought, Princeton, NJ, 1957;
B. Guenée and F. Lehoux, Les entrées royales françaises de 1328 à 1515, Paris, 1968.
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 83

mystique, a political mentality, and thereby make it possible to approach the

political history of the Middle Ages in a new way. Early specialists in hagio-
graphy focussed their attention on the saint, the modern ones are concerned
with saintliness, with that on which saintliness is grounded in the minds of the
faithful, with the psychology of the credulous, with the mentality of the hagio-
grapher 8. Thus, under the impact of religious anthropology, religious
history undergoes a radical conversion in its perspectives 9.
Not only must the historian of mentalities resemble the ethnologist, he
must also don the sociologist’s mantle. From the very beginning he is concer-
ned with the collective level. The mentality of an historical figure, no matter
how great, is precisely that which he has in common with other men of his
time. Take Charles V of France. All historians praise him for his economic,
administrative and political sense. He is the wise king, the student of Aristotle
setting the finances of the kingdom in order, waging an unsparing war of
usury against the English, calculating everything to within a hair’s breadth.
In 1380, on his death bed, he abolished a part of the taxes, the_foiiages or hearth-
taxes. And at this point historians find themselves in a quandary, uncertain
whether to see some abstruse political motive behind the king’s disconcerting
gesture or to interpret it simply as a moment of aberration in the mind of a
man whose wits were already wandering. And why not the simplest expla-
nation of all, the one which was subscribed to in the 14th century, the one
which sees the king as being afraid of death and unwilling to appear at the
Last Judgement bowed down beneath the weight of his people’s hatred?
Is it not possible that the king, at the last moment, allowed his mentality to
override his politics, let common belief prevail over a personal political ideo-
logy ?
The historian of mentalities finds that he has particular affinities with the
social psychologist. For both of them the notions of behaviour or attitude
are essential ones. Moreover, as social psychologists such as C. Kluckhohn lo
insist on the role of cultural control in respect of biological behaviour, so
social psychology inclines towards ethnology and beyond, towards history.
There are two areas in which this mutual attraction between the history of
mentalities and social psychology is to be seen: the development of studies

8. H. Delehaye, Sanctus : Essai sur le culte des saints dans l’Antiquité, Brussels, 1927;
B. de Gaiffier, "Mentalité de l’hagiographe médiéval d’après quelques travaux récents",
Analecta bollandiana, 1968, pp. 391-399; A. Vauchez, "Sainteté laïque au 13 e siècle : La vie
du bienheureux Facio de Crémone 1196-1272", pp. 13-53 in: Mélanges de l’École Française
de Rome, 1972.
9. Cf. D. Julia in the present work and in: Recherches de science religieuse, 1970, pp. 575 ff.
and A. Dupront in the present work and in: "Vie et création religieuse dans la France modeme
)", in: M. François (ed.), La France et les Français, Paris, Encyclopédie de la
e
(XIV-XVIII
Pléiade, 1972, pp. 491-577.
10. C. Kluckhohn, "Culture and behavior", in : G. Lindzey (ed.), Handbook of social psy-
chology, Cambridge, Mass., 1954.
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84

concerned with criminality and marginal and deviant behaviours in periods

gone by and the simultaneous spread of interest in opinion polls and historical
analyses of electoral behaviour.
It is in this perspective that one of the specific contributions of the history
of mentalities is to be seen: in the possibilities that it affords historical psy-
chology of linking up with another major trend in historical research today:
quantitative history. Despite its appearance of being a science concerned
with small shifts in time, the history of mentalities may, with certain adap-
tations, make use of the quantitative methods developed by social psycho-
logists. The method of scales of attitude which, as Abraham A. Moles points
out u, makes it possible to start with &dquo;a body of facts, opinions or verbal
expressions, initially devoid of any coherence&dquo; and then go on to discover
&dquo;at the end of the analysis both a ’measure’ sufficiently general to fit all the
facts dealt with and, as a direct consequence of this, a ’definition’ of these
facts based on their scale, will perhaps provide a satisfactory definition of the
ambiguous term ’mentality’ along the lines of Binet’s celebrated formula:
‘intelligence is what my test measures’ &dquo;.
In just the same way the common bond between the history of mentalities
and ethnology will make it possible for the former to avail itself of another
powerful range of tools used in the human sciences today, namely, the struc-
turalist methods. Is not mentality itself a structure?
But even more than for the ways in which it links up with the other human
sciences, the appeal of the history of mentalities stems above all from the new
perspective that it provides for those rendered pie-eyed by economic and
social history and especially by crude marxism.
Rescued from the dei ex machina of traditional history in the form of pro-
vidence or great men, uprooted from the feeble concepts of positivist history
hinging on the event or on chance, economic and social history, under the
influence of marxism or not, provided firm foundations for historical expla-
nation. But it proved to be incapable of carrying out the programme assigned
to History by Michelet in the 1869 Preface: &dquo;history [...] still appeared to me
inadequate in its two methods: insufficiently material [...] insufficiently spiri-
tual, referring to laws, to political acts, not to ideas or manners...&dquo;. Within
marxism itself the historians who subscribed to it, after showing the importance
of the mechanism of modes of production and the class struggle, were not
successful in moving on from infrastructures to superstructures in a convin-
cing way. In the mirror held up to societies by the economy what was to be
seen was only the pale reflection of abstract patterns, not faces, not living

people raised from the dead. Man does not live on bread alone and history
was even without bread, drawing its sustenance from skeletons carried along

by a danse macabre of automata. It was necessary to counterbalance these

fleshless mechanisms with something else. It was necessary to find an else-

11. Preface to V. Alexandre, Les échelles d’attitude, Paris, 1971.

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 85

where for history. This something else, this elsewhere, mentalities provided it.
But the history of mentalities is not defined merely on the basis of its points
of contact with the other human sciences and by the emergence of an area of
research kept under by traditional history. It is also the meeting place of
opposing requirements set face to face by the specific dynamic of present day
historical research. It is situated at the junction point of the individual and
the collective, of the long period and the quotidian, of the unconscious and the
intentional, of the structural and the conjunctural, of the marginal and the
general.
The level with which the history of mentalities is concerned is that of the
quotidian and the automatic, that which eludes the individual subjects of
history because it throws a light on the impersonal content of their thought,
that which Caesar and the last soldier of his legions, Saint Louis and the pea-
sant on his land, Christopher Colombus and the sailor in his caravels have in
common. The history of mentalities is to the history of ideas what the history
of material culture is to economic history. The reaction of the men of the
14th century to the plague, which they saw as the punishment of God, is rooted
in their unconscious inheritance of the age-old teachings of the Christian thin-
kers, from Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas Aquinas, it is to be explained by
the equation illness = sin formulated by the clerks of the Early Middle Ages,
but it disregards all the logical connections and all the subtilities of reasoning
behind the equation and retains only the bare husk of the idea. Everyday
ustensils as well as the pauper’s apparel, derive from the glamorous models
created by the superficial movements of the economy, fashion and taste. It
is here that the style of a period is to be grasped, in the depths of the quotidian.
When Huizinga refers to John of Salisbury as &dquo;a pregothic mind&dquo;, whilst
hailing him, by the prefix, as being in advance of historical evolution, by the
expression, in which mind suggests mentality, he makes him the collective
representative of a period, just as Lucien Febvre does with Rabelais, wrenching
him away from the anachronism committed by erudites of ideas in order to
submit him to the concrete historicity of historians of mentalities.
The discourse of men, regardless of the tone that is used, be it that of
conviction, emotion or grandiloquence, is generally nothing more than a
jumble of ready-made ideas, commonplaces and threadbare concepts, the
multifarious outlet of the flotsam of cultures and mentalities of various origins
and various times.
It is here that we see the reason for the method that the history of mentalities
imposes on the historian and which consists, in the first place, in the archaeo-
logical investigation of the strata and fragments of archaeopsychologies -

in the sense that Andr6 Varagnac speaks of archaeo-civilization but, as this -

flotsam has been assembled in mentally, if not logically, coherent patterns,

what follows is the deciphering of mental sytems which resemble the makeshift
intellectualizations (bricologe intellectiteo which Claude Lévi-Strauss sees as
the characteristic of primitive thought.
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 86

In the fourth book of his Dialogues, written between 590 and 600, Pope
Gregory the Great tells the story of one of the monks of the monastery whose
abbot he was in Rome who, on his deathbed, confessed to his brother that
he had hidden three gold pieces, thus breaking the strict rule which lays down
that all the brethren should place everything in common ownership. Gregory,
being told of this, ordered that the dying man be left to die in solitude, without
the benefit of any words of consolation, so that, terrified, he might purge him-
self of his sin and so that his death in anguish might serve as an example to the
other monks. Why did this abbot, who was as cultivated and as enlightened
as it was possible to be at that time, not, on the contrary, betake himself to
the dying sinner’s bedside in order to open the gates of heaven to him by means
of confession and contrition ? The idea forced itself on Gregory that sin must
be paid for by external signs: an ignominious death and burial (the body is
thrown on the dunghill). The barbaric custom of physical punishment
(imported by the Goths or thrown up from the timeless deeps of the mind?)
prevailed over the rule. Mentality triumphed over doctrine.
Thus that which seems devoid of roots, born of improvisation and reflex,
involuntary gestures, unconsidered words, comes from afar and testifies to the
profound reverberations of systems of thought.
The history of mentalities forces the historian to take a closer look at some
of the essential phenomena in his field: heritages, the study of which teaches
continuity, losses, cleavages (from where, from whom, from when do this
mental habit, this expression, this gesture come?); tradition, that is to say the
ways in which societies are mentally reproduced, the dephasing which is the
product of a delay in the minds of men when it comes to adapting to change
and of the unequal speed of evolution of different sectors of history; it is a
privileged field of analysis for the critique of linear conceptions in the craft of
history. Finally inertia, of the utmost importance as an historical force, which
is more the attribute of minds than of matter, for matter is often more liable
to change than minds. Men make use of machines which they invent whilst
still holding onto mentalities which date from before such machines. Moto-
rists use the vocabulary or horsemen, the factory workers of the 19th century
had the same mentality as the peasants that their fathers and grandfathers
were. Mentality is that which changes most slowly. The history of menta-
lities is the history of the gradual in history.

2. Landmarks for the history of the genesis of the history of mentalities

Where does the history of mentalities come from? 12 From the adjective mental
which refers to the mind and which comes from the Latin mens, but the Latin
12. I should like to thank Mr. J. Viet, Director of the Service for the Exchange of Scientific
Information of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris) and Mr. P. Besnard who, at his
instigation, drew up a file on "le mot et le concept de mentalité", from which I have greatly
benefited.

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 87

epithet mentalis, unknown in classical Latin, belongs to the vocabulary of

medieval scholasticism and the five centuries which lie between the appearance
of mental (middle of the 14th century) and that of mentalite (middle of the
19th century) indicate that the substantive responds to other needs, pertains
to another set of circumstances than the adjective.
Mentalité is not derived naturally from mental in French. It was borrowed
from English which, as early as the l7th century, formed mentality from mental.
Mentality is the child of 17th century English philosophy. It designates the
collective coloration of mental activities, the particular way of thinking and
feeling of a people, of a certain group of persons, etc. But in English the
word is confined to the technical language of philosophy 13, whereas in French
it was soon to come into common usage. The notion which was to result in
the concept and the word mentalité seems to have appeared in the 18th century
in the field of science and, more particularly, in the context of a new conception
of history. It inspired Voltaire with the idea behind the book Essai sur les
maeurs et l’esprit des nations (1754), in which the beginning of a repercussion
of the English mind is to be discerned. In 1842, when, according to the dic-
tionnaire Robert, the word appeared, it had the meaning, similar to mentality,
of &dquo;quality of that which is mental&dquo;. But Littr6, in 1877, illustrated the word
by a sentence borrowed from the positivist philosophy of H. Stupuy where it
already has the broader but still &dquo;specialized&dquo; meaning of &dquo;mental outlook&dquo;
(&dquo;forme d’esprit&dquo;) since what is being referred to by chance or quite
-

expressly? -

is the age of enlightenment and the &dquo;change of mentality ushered

in by the encyclopaedists&dquo;. Then, around 1900, when Proust was struck by
the newness of the word and its relevance to his own psychological investi-
gations, it took on its current meaning. It became the vulgar succedaneum
of the German &dquo;Weltanschauung&dquo;, any and everybody’s vision of the world, a
mental universe at once stereotyped and chaotic.
It came to mean above all a perverted vision of the world, a feeble minded
surrendering to instinctive and bad ways of thinking. There is in the word a
sort of pejorative inevitability. In French this is emphasized in ordinary lan-
guage by the word being accompanied by a plainly pejorative epithet or by an
antiphrasis: &dquo;une vilaine mentalit6&dquo;, or &dquo;une belle mentalit6&dquo;, or in an
absolute use: &dquo;quelle mentalite&dquo;. Moreover, in English, this tendency of the
word has become quite pronounced with regard to the adjective: mental
(deficient being understood) takes on the sense of retarded or &dquo;loony&dquo;.

13. In relation to mentalité, mentality has a much more intellectual, cognitive connotation.
A borderline case is to be seen in the title of W. Kohler’s book, The mentality of apes (1925),
which is the English translation of the German title, Intelligenzprüfungen an Menschenaffen
(1921). In contrast, affective connotations are very pronounced in the French mentalité
as is to be seen, somewhat paradoxically, in E. Rignano’s article, "Les diverses mentalités
logiques", Scientia 1917, pp. 95-125 which is a study of the "fundamental predominance of
affective elements over intellective ones" in the two main categories of mentality made out by
the author: the synthetic and the analytical.
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88

This shade of meaning that the word has acquired in everyday language has
sustained or has been sustained by two developments in scientific thought.
One is ethnology. At the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of
the 20th, mentalité signified the mental behaviour of &dquo;primitives&dquo; which appea-
red to the observer to be a collective phenomenon (within which no individual
mental behaviour was to be discerned) peculiar to individuals whose mental life
was made up of reflexes and mechanical routines and which may be reduced
to a collective mind in which personality is practically excluded. In 1922
Lucien Levy-Bruhl published La mentalité primitive.
The other is child psychology. Here again if the child is no longer consid-
ered to be simply a small version of the adult, it is in order to make him mental-
ly a minor. Whereas French technical dictionaries of philosophy, psychology
and psychoanalysis ignore the word mentalité, the most recent vocabulary
of Psychopédagogie et psychiatrie de 1’enfant (1970) defines a mentalité infantile.
As early as 1928 Henri Wallon had, in the Revue philosophique, made the
connection by devoting an article to La mentalité primitive et celle de 1’enfant
(a parallel which is of course vigorously condemned by Claude L6vi-Strauss
in a famous passage of Structures élémentaires de la parenti (Elementary
structures of kinship).
Before proceeding any further in the analysis of the history of mentalities
it is important to remove two obstacles which stand in the way.
The first consists in the doubt which might be born of the observation that
mentality plays practically no role in psychology, that it does not belong to the
technical vocabulary of the psychologist. The study conducted by Philippe
Besnard on the frequency of the term mentality in the index of psychological
bibliographies has shown that, already rare in the Psychological abstracts
between 1927 and 19431~’, the word now seems to have fallen into disuse in
psychology 15. How might psychological history (or rather the history of
collective psychologies) be able to make profitable use of a term, and of a
concept behind the term, which has been rejected by psychology ?
The history of science abounds in examples of transferred notions and
concepts. A word or concept that languishes in the field where it cropped
up, transplanted to an adjoining area revives and prospers. Why should not
mentality give proof in history of the success which has not been granted it in
psychology? And in this event, will not psychology which, by way of lin-

14. It is worth pointing out the more or less pejorative connotations of the expressions
noted: "mentalité arabe", "hindoue", "du criminel danois", "du prisonnier", "German
mentality" in 1943. An interesting expression: "levels of mentality".
15. Mentality is hardly referred to any more in recent bibliographies of Anthropology
(with occasional references to "primitive mentality" or "indigenous mentality") and in
those of Sociology (out of 7 references in the Bibliographie internationale de sociologie be-
tween 1963 and 1969, 4 refer to a series of articles by R. Lenoir which appeared in Spanish in
the Revista Mexicana de Sociologia between 1956 and 1961 and dealing with various primi-
tive or civilized mentalidades).
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 89

guistics and structuralism, has witnessed an upward trend in the fortune of

Gestalt belatedly discover the good use to which it can put the word mentality?
In any case, it is clear that in the domain of science what has saved the word is
the histoire des mentalités and that it is its use in French which has reintroduced
the word into English and transmitted it to German, Spanish and Italian (men-
tality, Mentalitdt, melldalidad, mentalità). Here, quite exceptionally, the
prowess of the new French shool of history has been responsible for the success
of the word, the expression and the genre the three &dquo;theoreticians&dquo; of the
-

history of mentalities are Lucien Febvre (1938), Georges Duby (1961) and
Robert Mandrou (1968).
The second obstacle is that which might be placed in the way of the history
of mentalities by the pejorative turn of the expression. Certainly Levy-
Bruhl declared, for instance, that there was no difference in nature between
the mentality of primitives and that of the members of advanced societies.
But he created from the outset an unfavourable climate for mentalités by
writing in 1911 Les _jonctions mentales dans les societes illférieures. And it
is true that the historian of mentalities, whilst not relegating this word to the
inferno of the collective memory, pursues it in the troubled waters of margi-
nality, abnormality and social pathology. Mentality seems more inclined to
reveal itself in the context of the irrational and the extravagant than anywhere
else. Hence the proliferation of studies some of which are remarkable
- -

dealing with witchcraft, heresy, millenarianism. Hence the preference of the

historian of mentalities, when he brings his attention to bear on common
sentiments or integrated social groups, for borderline themes (attitudes to
miracles or to death) or newly established categories (merchants in feudal
society). From a similar angle a psychosociologist like Ralph H. Turner 16,31
in order to study mass behaviour, chooses to make disaster, as a generator of
panic, the object of his field observations and uses the data collected by a
Disaster Research Group.

3. TIDe practice of the history of mentalities and its pitfalls

As a craftsman, the historian first of all seeks out his material. Where is the
material for the history of mentalities?
To practise the history of mentalities is first of all to bring to bear a certain
vision in the reading of any document. Everything is a source of instruction
for the historian of mentalities. Here is a document of an administrative and
fiscal nature, a register of royal revenue in the 13th or 14th century. What
are the headings, what is the vision of power and administration that they

reflect, what attitude to number do the methods of enumeration reveal?

16. R.H. Turner, "Collective behavior", in R.L. Faris (ed.), Handbook of modern sociology,
Chicago, Ill., 1964.
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90

Here are the furnishings of a 7th century tomb: objects of ornamentation

(needle, ring, buckle of a belt), silver coins including a small coin placed in
the dead person’s mouth at the time of burial, weapons (axe, sword, lance,
large knife), a bundle of tools (hammers, pincers, gouges, chisels, files, scissors,
etc.) 17. These funeral rites instruct us about the beliefs (the pagan rite of the
obolus for Charon, the ferryman of the dead) and the attitude of Merovingian
society with regard to a craftsman possessed of an almost sacred prestige:
the ironsmith-cum-goldsmith (who is also a warrior) who both forges and
wields the sword.
This reading of documents will focus especially on the traditional, almost
mechanical parts of texts and monuments: the fixed wording and preambles
of charters stating the real or surface reasons underlying decisions, topoi
which are the ossature of mentalities. Whilst not emerging into the history of
mentalities, Ernst Robert Curtius perceived the importance of this substratum
not only, as he thought, of the literature of a period, but also of its mentality:
&dquo;If rhetoric produces on modern man the effect of a grimacing spectre, how
can one pretend to interest him in topics, the name of which is almost unknown,
even to the specialist in literature who deliberately avoids the underground

passages
-

alas also the foundations! of European literature ?&dquo; 18 And the

-

word alas escapes from the pen of this brilliant lover of quality who cannot
bring himself to take an interest in the quantifiable aspect of culture, which is
the very meat of the history of mentalities. This necessary and mechanical
type of diction -

in which things seem to be said for their own sake, in which,

in certain periods, God and the devil, in others anything that fits are invoked
without rhyme or reason is the profound chorusing of mentalities, the con-
-

nective tissue and lifeblood of societies, the most precious pabulum of a history
which is more interested in the basso continuo than in the key note of the music
of the past.
But the history of mentalities has its own special sources, those which more
and better than any others provide a way into the collective psychology of
societies. The drawing up of an inventory of these sources is one of the
first tasks of the historian of mentalities.
Firstly there are documents which bear witness to these paroxysmal or
marginal types of feeling or of behaviour which, by their deviation shed light
on the common mentality. To refer still to the Middle Ages, hagiography
reveals basic mental structures: the possibility of interpenetration between the
tangible world and the supernatural world, the identical nature of the corporal
and the mental - whence the possibility of miracles and more generally of the
marvellous. The marginality of the saint which sets him in a position to see
-

to the heart of things is, by direct implication, matched by the exemplary

-

17. J. Decaens, "Un nouveau cimetière du haut Moyen Age en Normandie, Hérouvillette
(Calvados)", Archéologie médiévale 1, 1971, pp. 83 ff.
18. E.R. Curtius, La littérature européenne et le Moyen Age latin, Paris, 1956, p. 99.
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 91

marginality of those who are on the devil’s side: heretics, criminals and those
possessed. Whence the particular documentary relevance of all that gives
access to these spokesmen: confessions of heretics and records of inquisitions,
letters of remission granted to criminals detailing their crimes, legal documents
and more generally monuments of repression.
Another category of specifically relevant sources for the history of mentalities
is constituted by literary and artistic documents. The history of mentalities
being a history not of &dquo;objective&dquo; phenomena but of the representation of
these phenomena, it naturally finds its material in documents testifying to the
world of the imagination. Huizinga in his famous Diclin du Moyen Age
[Decline of the Middle Ages] has shown the extent to which the use of literary
texts (and herein lies both the strength and the weakness of this book) may add
to our knowledge of the sensibility and the mentality of a period. But litera-
ture and art convey forms and themes derived from a past which is not necessa-
rily that of the collective consciousness. The excesses of traditional historians
of ideas and forms who see them as coming into existence by a sort of parthe-
nogenesis which pays no heed to the non-literary or non-artistic context of
their appearance should not blind us to the fact that literary and artistic works
obey codes which are more or less independent of their temporal environment.
The painting of the Quattrocento seems to us to provide evidence of a new
attitude towards space, the architectural setting and man’s place in the universe:
the line of development of the &dquo;precapitalist&dquo; mentality seems to have passed
through here. But Pierre Francastel who better than anyone has recognized
the pictorial system of the Quattrocento as being part of a larger system also
warns us of &dquo;the specificity of painting, a mode of mental expression and com-
munication which is irreducible to any other&dquo; 19.
It is important not to separate the analysis of mentalities from the study of
its places and means of production. Lucien Febvre who was the great pre-
cursor in this field has provided the pattern for inventories of what he called
mental equipment (‘‘outillage mental&dquo;): vocabulary, syntax, commonplaces,
conceptions of space and time, patterns of logic. Philologists have observed
that, at the time of the destructuration of classical Latin in the early Middle
Ages, co-ordinating conjunctions passed through a disconcerting evolution.
But the reason for this is that the logical nodes of spoken or written language
became radically changed. Autem, ergo, igitur and the others passed into a
new and differently arranged system of thought.
Certain partial systems play a particularly important role as regards men-
talities. For a long time these &dquo;models&dquo; established themselves as poles of
attraction for mentalities. In the early Middle Ages for instance a monastic
model was formed which was organized around notions of solitude and asce-
ticism ; following this, aristocratic models appeared which were centred around

19. P. Francastel, La figure et le lieu : L’ordre visuel du Quattrocento, Paris, 1967, p. 172.

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 92

concepts of largesse, prowess, beauty and fidelity: one of these was to be

passed down through the centuries to our own time courtesy. -

Although they draw on very ancient traditions, these mentalities are to be

explained neither by the murky mists of time nor by the mysteries of the collec-
tive mind. The genesis and dissemination of these mentalities is seen to stem
from centres where creators and popularizers and intermediary groups and
professions gave them form. Palace, monastery, castle, schools and courses
were, throughout the Middle Ages, centres where mentalities were forged.
The common people shaped or received its models in its own efformative
centres: the mill, the forge and the tavern. Mass media were the favoured
vehicles and matrices of mentalities: the sermon, the painted or sculptured
image, were, in the days before the Gutemberg galaxy, the nebulae from which
mentalities crystallized.
Mentalities harbour complex relationships with social structures and are
not detached from them. Is there, for each society, at each of the periods that
history distinguishes in its evolution, one dominant mentality or several
mentalities? Man of the Middle Ages or of the Renaissance has been denoun-
ced by Lucien Febvre as an abstraction devoid of historical reality. The still
inarticulate history of mentalities seizes hold of abstractions which are scar-
cely more concrete and which have to do with cultural heritages, social strati-
fication and periodization. As a working hypothesis we shall use, for instance,
still in connection with the Middle Ages, the notions of barbaric, courtly,
Romanesque, Gothic and scholastic mentalities. Different things can be
rewardingly grouped together under such headings. Erwin Panofsky has shown
a link between Gothic art and Scholasticism in that they both partake of the
same mental structures. Robert Marechal has also seen a connection with
the handwriting of the period: &dquo;Gothic script may be considered as the Gothic
expression of a certain dialectic. The analogies which can be seen between
handwriting and architecture are not, or are only incidentally, visual, they are
intellectual: they result from the application to writing of a way of reasoning
which is to be found in all works of the mind&dquo;2°. The coexistence of several
mentalities at the same period and in the same mind is one of the bedevilling
but essential elements of the history of mentalities. Louis XI who, in politics,
gives proof of a modern, &dquo;machiavellian&dquo; mentality, reveals, in religion, a
very traditional and superstitious mentality.
Just as difficult to grasp are the transformations of mentalities. When does
one mentality break down and another one appear? In this field in which
permanence and resistance are the rule, it is not easy to come to grips with the
process of substitution. It is here that the study of topoi should provide a
decisive contribution. When does a commonplace appear or disappear and,

20. R. Maréchal, "L’écriture latine et la civilisation occidentale du 1 e siècle", in:

er au 16
L’écriture et la psychologie des peuples, Paris, 1963, p. 243; E. Panofsky, Architecture gothique
et pensée scholastique, 1957, French translation 1967.

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 93

more difficult to determine but no less crucial, when is it no more than a

leftover from the past, part of the living dead? This parrotry of mentalities
should be carefully scrutinized in order for the historian to be able to spot
when the commonplace is no longer in step with the real and becomes
inoperative. But are there any pure flatus vocis ?
Born to a large extent of a reaction to the imperialism of economic history,
the history of mentalities should not serve as an excuse for the resurgence of
an outmoded spiritualism in, for instance, the vague and illusory shape of an
indefinable collective mind, nor should it be the attempt to prolong the life
of crude marxism by seeking at little cost the definition of superstructures
mechanically produced by socio-economic infrastructures. Mentality is
not a mirror-image.
The history of mentalities should be distinguished from the history of ideas
in reaction to which it was in part derived. The ideas of Saint Thomas of
Aquinas or Saint Bonaventura were not what guided the minds of men from
the 13th century onwards; they were guided rather by mental nebulae in
which distorted echoes of these thinkers’ doctrines, bits and pieces devoid
of their original wealth of meaning, and words stranded from their context
played a role. But it is necessary to do more than simply spot the presence
of debased ideas at the centre of mentalities. The history of mentalities is
not feasible unless it is closely linked to the history of cultural systems, systems
of beliefs, values and intellectual equipment within which they were given
shape, lived and evolved. It is, moreover, in this respect that the lessons that
history can learn from ethnology will be able to prove their worth.
This link with the history of culture should make it possible for the history
of mentalities to avoid other epistemological pitfalls.
Bound up as it is with gestures, behaviour and attitudes 21 through which
-

it hinges onto psychology, on a borderline where one day historians and psy-
chologists are bound to meet and collaborate the history of mentalities should
-

not, however, fall prey to a behaviourism which would reduce them to auto-
matic routines without any reference to systems of thought and which would
-

eliminate one of the most important aspects of its area of concern, namely,
the role and forcefulness of the conscious mind and of the awakening of
consciousness (prise de conscience) in this history.
Eminently collective, mentality seems to be removed from the vicissitudes
of social struggles. It would, however, be a great mistake to isolate it from
social structures and dynamics. It is, on the contrary, a crucial element in
social tensions and struggles. Social history is dotted with myths which
reveal the role of mentalities in a history which is neither unanimous nor
immobile: &dquo;blue nails&dquo;, &dquo;white collars&dquo;, &dquo;two hundred families&dquo;... Alongside
mentalities common to everyone there exist class mentalities. Their interplay
remains to be studied.

21. Cf. in particular M. Jahoda and N. Warren (eds.), Attitudes, Harmondsworth, 1966.
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94

Finally, despite its being the history of the gradual in history, the history
of mentalities is nonetheless a history of transformations, the most crucial one
that exists. In the Middle Ages, from the 1 lth to the 13th century, the Western
world was disrupted by a new phenomenon: urban growth. A new society was
to emerge, possessed of a new mentality inclined towards security, exchange,
frugality, based on new forms of sociability and solidarity the conjugal -

family, the guild, the brotherhood, the company, the neighbourhood... What,
in terms of a total history, is the place of mentalities in these transformations?
Despite or rather because of its vague character, the history of mentalities
is beginning to come into its own in the field of historiology. If steps are
taken to ensure that it does not become a convenient dumping ground for
every kind of problem, serving as an alibi for epistemological laziness, if it
is provided with its own tools and methods, it should now play the role which
falls to it and which is that of a different history which, in its search for expla-
nations, ventures to the other side of the looking glass. -

Jacques Le Goff (born 1924) is Président of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, VI
eSec-
Recent publications : "The town as an agent of civilization", The
tion, Paris, France.
Fontana economic history of Europe (1972) ; "Le christianisme médiéval", Histoire des
religions (1972).
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 95

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Dumas, G.
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1961 "Problèmes ct méthodes d’une histoire de la psychologie collective", Annales
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Dhondt, J.
1957 e siècle : Galbert de Bruges", Revue du Nord : 101-109.
"Une mentalité du 12

Febvre, L.
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15
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