The History of Mentalities

The New Map of Cultural History

Bibliographic Data

ID4495862
AuthorsPatrick H Hutton (0009-0006-5768-8725, corresponding author)
Year1981
Volume20
Issue3
Pages237
Publication date1981-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2504556
OpenAlexW2334484327
LanguageEN
Citations received37

A few years ago, French historians began using the expression of to characterize their work in the field of intellectual history. While awkward in French and infelicitous in English translation, the phrase has survived; for it expresses a need to assign autonomy to a kind of historical inquiry which offers new perspectives on the civilizing process. Briefly stated, the history of considers the attitudes of ordinary people toward everyday life. Ideas concerning childhood, sexuality, family, and death, as they have developed in European civilization, are the stuff of this new kind of history. Work in the history of is closely identified with the long-standing investigations of the Annales school, which portrays the history of as but one dimension of the total history it is their ambition to write.1 But the history of mentalities, even among its Annales practitioners, does have its own specific concerns. While Annales historians are most likely to address the material realities conditioning man through economic processes, social structures, and environmental influences, those historians investigating prefer to consider the psychological realities underpinning human conceptions of intimate relationships, basic habits of mind, and attitudes toward the elemental passages of life. The history of mentalities, moreover, has obvious affinities with approaches to intellectual history developed before the arrival of the French school. In effect, mentalities is a code name for what used to be called culture. It takes up again themes pursued by idealist historians such as Burckhardt in the nineteenth century and Huizinga early in the twentieth. For these historians, problems of culture were essentially problems of world-views and their interpretation. They took pains to evaluate these in their social and political context. But the history of ideas served as their basic frame of reference. Culture in this historiographical tradition meant high culture, and for this reason these historians directed their attention toward the role of valueforming elites. Though they did not treat culture as the exclusive preserve of

Aesthetics · Epistemology · European Political History Analysis · History · History, Culture, and Diplomacy · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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