My Quest for the Middle Ages

This book is based on a series of interviews of the French medievalist Jacques Le Goff, conducted by the journalist Jean-Maurice de Montremy in 2002. In these interviews, Le Goff offers a synthesis of his work as a historian, and talks about how he came to write history in the way that he does. The first chapter opens with Le Goff's discovery of the middle ages in 1936, when he read Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, and goes on to discuss his studies and early career, and the nature of the sources used by medievalists. Chapter Two addresses the concept of the middle ages as a period: the invention of the notion of a ‘middle age’ by Renaissance humanists, the nineteenth-century fascination with the middle ages, and the Carolingian and Twelfth-Century ‘Renaissances’ that break up the period. However, Le Goff himself argues that there was no sudden transition in either the fifth or the sixteenth centuries that contemporaries would have seen as the end of an age. The three subsequent chapters offer a survey of Le Goff's thoughts on themes that his work has addressed. In Chapter Three, he discusses merchants, bankers and intellectuals, outlining the emergence of specialist merchant-bankers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He argues that the Church was not hostile to merchants as a rule, but accepted money-making as long as it was done morally. He draws parallels, too, between merchant-bankers and intellectuals: both were new social categories, initially regarded with suspicion, but both managed to justify their position in society and left their mark on the economic, institutional and religious culture of the middle ages. Chapter Four takes a broad look at medieval civilisation: its Christian framework, social hierarchies, Purgatory, Heaven and Hell, geographical awareness, and the development of monarchies and states. Le Goff stresses particularly the importance of concepts of space and time in defining medieval civilisation (p. 79). Also important, however, was the idea that Christian society should be one harmonious body; the dark side of this was the persecution of heretics, who were seen as threatening because they were not part of that body. The fifth and final chapter focuses on ‘medieval humanism’, arguing that medieval people believed that life was worth living and should be enjoyed, even while they also prepared for death. Covering a wide range of subjects, including ideas about God, individuality, crusades, warfare, angels and demons, the Virgin Mary and death, Le Goff explores both the positive and the negative aspects of medieval civilisation, arguing on the one hand that medieval people did not live in an atmosphere of fear; but on the other, that the reverse side of this optimism was the persecution of heretics and other minority groups. In the epilogue, Le Goff picks up several broader themes that are obviously close to his heart, in particular the debt that European civilisation owes to the middle ages, and the idea that this period of history was not exclusively dark and depressing but also an ‘age of hope’. This book thus serves as a lively and readable introduction to Le Goff's work, and offers many snippets about medieval studies in France and abroad during his lifetime. It also includes stimulating ideas about a wide range of issues in medieval cultural history, some of which one wishes could have been developed a little more. All in all, this book is a stimulating way into the work of a distinguished and influential historian, and a passionate demonstration of why medieval history is interesting

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