The history of mentalities, from the French term histoire des mentalités (lit. 'history of attitudes'), is an approach to cultural history which aims to describe and analyze the ways in which historical people thought about, interacted with, and classified the world around them, as opposed to the history of particular events or of economic trends. The history of mentalities has been used as a historical tool by several historians and scholars from various schools of history. Notably, the historians of the Annales School helped to develop the history of mentalities and construct a methodology from which to operate. In establishing this methodology, they sought to limit their analysis to a particular place and a particular time. This approach lends itself to the intensive study that characterizes microhistory, another field which adopted the history of mentalities as a tool of historical analysis.
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👉 History of mentalities in the context of Annales school
The Annales school (French pronunciation: [a'nal]) is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century to stress long-term social history. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and monographs. The school has been influential in setting the agenda for historiography in France and numerous other countries, especially regarding the use of social scientific methods by historians, emphasizing social and economic rather than political or diplomatic themes.
The school deals primarily with late medieval and early modern Europe (before the French Revolution), with little interest in later topics. It has dominated French social history and heavily influenced historiography in Europe and Latin America. Prominent leaders include co-founders Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Henri Hauser (1866–1946) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944). The second generation was led by Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) and included Georges Duby (1919–1996), Pierre Goubert (1915–2012), Robert Mandrou (1921–1984), Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009), Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), and Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988). Institutionally it is based on the Annales journal, the SEVPEN publishing house, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme (FMSH), and especially the 6th Section of the École pratique des hautes études, all based in Paris. A third generation was led by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929–2023) and includes Jacques Revel, and Philippe Ariès (1914–1984), who joined the group in 1978. The third generation stressed history from the point of view of mentalities, or mentalités. The fourth generation of Annales historians, led by Roger Chartier (born 1945), clearly distanced itself from the mentalités approach, replaced by the cultural and linguistic turn, which emphasizes the social history of cultural practices.
History of mentalities in the context of Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales is a French academic journal covering social history that was established in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. The journal gave rise to an approach to history known as the Annales School. The journal began in Strasbourg as Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, but moved to Paris in 1929 and kept the same name from 1929 to 1939. It was successively renamed Annales d'histoire sociale (1939–1942, 1945), Mélanges d'histoire sociale (1942–1944), Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations (1946–1994), and, finally, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales in 1994. In 2013 it began publication of an English language edition, with all the articles translated.
The scope of topics covered by the journal is wide, but the emphasis is on social history and long-term trends (longue durée), often using quantification and paying special attention to geography and to the intellectual world view of common people, or "mentality" (mentalité). Less attention is paid to political, diplomatic, or military history, or to biographies of famous men. Instead, the Annales focused attention on the synthesizing of historical patterns identified from social, economic, and cultural history, statistics, medical reports, family studies, and even psychoanalysis. It is one of the main French outlets for research in historical anthropology.
History of mentalities in the context of Robert Mandrou
Robert Mandrou (French: [ʁɔbɛʁ mɑ̃dʁu]; 31 January 1921 – 16 June 1984), was a French historian, one of the members of the Annales School and the secretary to its journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale ("Annals of economic and social history") . He was also, with Georges Duby one of the pioneers of what Annaliste historians in the 1970s and 80's came to call the "history of mentalities".
History of mentalities in the context of Historical anthropology
Historical anthropology is a historiographical movement which applies methodologies and objectives from social and cultural anthropology to the study of historical societies. Like most such movements, it is understood in different ways by different scholars, and to some may be synonymous with the history of mentalities, cultural history, ethnohistory, microhistory, history from below or Alltagsgeschichte. Anthropologists whose work has been particularly inspirational to historical anthropology include Emile Durkheim, Heinrich Schurtz, Arnold van Gennep, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, Jack Goody, and Victor Turner.
Peter Burke has contrasted historical anthropology with social history, finding that historical anthropology tends to focus on qualitative rather than quantitative data, smaller communities, and symbolic aspects of culture. Thus it reflects a turn in 1960s Marxist historiography away from 'the orthodox Marxist approach to human behaviour in which actors are seen as motivated in the first instance by economics, and only secondarily by culture or ideology', in the work of historians such as E. P. Thompson.