History of mentalities
A historical approach that studies shared beliefs, assumptions, emotions, and habits of thought characteristic of a society or group.
Collective mentality: Shared assumptions, feelings, and habits of thought that shape how a group interprets experience. This is the central object the history of mentalities sets out to reconstruct.
Historical source: A surviving trace used to investigate the past, including texts, objects, images, and testimony. Mentality historians depend on sources that reveal assumptions without stating them directly.
Marc Bloch: A French historian and co-founder of the Annales School, known for comparative and social history. His work on belief and collective behavior helped establish the study of historical mental worlds.
The Royal Touch: A belief that European monarchs could cure scrofula through ritual touch. Marc Bloch used this practice to investigate the social life of sacred kingship.
Intellectual history: The study of ideas and arguments, often through the works of identifiable thinkers. Unlike many studies of mentalities, it often centers explicit ideas and named authors.
Annales School: A French historical movement that emphasized long-term social structures and interdisciplinary methods. Its historians made collective mental worlds a sustained subject of historical inquiry.
Serial history: The analysis of repeated data across time to identify historical patterns and change. Repeated records can expose habits and expectations too widespread to stand out individually.
Lucien Febvre: A French historian who co-founded the Annales School and promoted interdisciplinary history. He argued that historians must recover the intellectual possibilities of past societies.
The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: Lucien Febvre’s study of whether religious unbelief was conceptually possible in sixteenth-century France. It demonstrates how historians can test the limits of what a period could think.
History of emotions: The historical study of how emotions were understood, expressed, and regulated. It isolates emotional norms that histories of mentalities may treat as part of a wider pattern.