Talk:History of mentalities

Peter Burke's article

In the reference section, the title of Peter Burke's article is not:

'Strengths and Weaknesses in the History of Boners' - the page has been vandalized.

It should read, 'Strength and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities'.

24.108.6.62 (talk) 01:30, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Bibliography for this article for future editing

Outline for improvement to this article

• Introduce the history of the History of Mentalities, including the origin of the term and those that developed the methodology behind the History of Mentalities. Namely, discuss the works of Georges Duby and Roger Chartier and their importance as historians of the Annales school, which helped develop and idea of total history that might encompass the history of mentalities. Here it is also important to introduce Michael Harsgor's article and analyze the development of the total history that would provide the backdrop to the history of mentalities.
• The article has some definitional aspects regarding the history of mentalities, but it would be useful to improve or expand upon that definition and also describe the importance and meaning of the term culture in describing the history of mentalities.
• Discuss the work of Carlo Ginzburg (The Cheese and the Worms) as well as the work of Robert Darnton in providing a more focused methodological setting in which the history of mentalities could develop. It might be prudent to bring up the influence of Clifford Geertz and of ethnographic methodology taken from the field of anthropology and its influence on Robert Darnton's work. This will provide another methodological component (along with the Annales) that will solidify the methodological framework in which the history of mentalities developed.
• Here it will be important to provide the response among historians to the history of mentalities and the impact of anthropology on the field of history. Specifically, I would like to incorporate aspects of Dominick LaCapra and Roger Chartier's criticisms of Darnton as well as less favorable reviews of Ginzburg's work. I believe this is important to add because it will provide real historical debates that are occurring and situate the history of mentalities within the methodological arguments of the historical profession at large. Michael Harsgor's article has some interesting insight into this debate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bnmallard (talk • contribs) 21:47, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

    The history of mentalities, or histoire des mentalités, is a term used to describe works of history aimed at describing and analyzing the ways in which people of a given time period thought about, interacted with, and classified the world around them. 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.
    The origin of the term history of mentalities lies in the writings of the Annales historians such as Georges Duby and Roger Chartier. In seeking to create works of total history, Annales historians tended not to simply rely on the political or event oriented history of past generations. Michael Harsgor points out in that the challenge of the Annales historians was not to create this deterministic history that appeared to rely heavily on teleological conclusions, such as the Marxist forms of history being written at the time. Rather, Harsgor writes that the Annales historians tasked themselves with the creation of social structures, “which means covering the skeleton of the basic economic analysis with the flesh of demographic, cultural, mental, and event psychoanalytical data.”  It has also been said that Annales historians, in their attempts at the creation of total history, considered the history of mentalities a single aspect in the creation of that history.  Simply put, they were attempting to reconstruct the world of whatever time period they were examining. In Duby’s works, such as The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined and his work on William Marshal, Duby focused on the development of ideologies within the structures that permeated the various aspects of an individual’s life. 
    This development in methodology would prove crucial for other historians who would use the history of mentalities to attempt to reconstruct the worldviews of individuals and extrapolate their findings to the population at large in the form of microhistories. These historians would largely concern themselves with social and cultural history in order to form their history of mentalities, narrowing their realm historical inquiry by not concerning themselves with the broad economic serialization that had become so important for the Annales historians. Carlo Ginzburg’s book, The Cheese and the Worms, is archetypical of the microhistories that emerged with the history of mentalities in mind. Ginzburg attempted to reconstruct peasant mentalities in sixteenth century Italy by examining the trial records of a single miller, Domenico Scandella, called Menocchio, and trying to find currents or similarities in otherwise fragmentary and obscure evidence.
    Similar techniques can be seen in Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre, which uses microhistory to establish the mentalities of groups at different social levels of French society. Darnton concerns himself greatly with the ways in which people viewed the world around them. He interprets the symbolic significance of journeymen printers massacring neighborhood cats as a display of frustration with the growing bourgeoisie class. Similarly, and in keeping with the tradition of the history of mentalities, Darnton devotes a chapter to an analysis of a bourgeoisie’s description of his city, in an effort to determine how an individual in a given social situation would interpret and make sense of the world around them. Darnton uses this description to demonstrate that the ways in which events might be portrayed might be completely unsupported by the ways in which individuals of the time might have interpreted those events.
    Criticisms have emerged regarding the history of mentalities at all stages of its development. In particular, Marxist historians were quick to criticize Annales historians for “attempts to include the study of mentalities in a general synthesis, which can only lead to the publication of articles reflecting a basic reliance upon faith accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason.” Carlo Ginzburg himself has criticized the methods of the history of mentalities for its “decidedly classless character.”

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Untitled comment

Hey Brian!

Great article. Are you editing one or did you make an entirely new article? If you are editing, I assume what you added was the part on Darnton's book. You mentioned how Darnton included different chapters on the different social classes and their mentalites and I'd like to suggest maybe elaborating on that part a little bit. Perhaps including the different stories and how they were symbolic, such as the fables that were told to the peasants. I realize that your article isn't about Darnton but seeing as his book is about the mentalites of the people, I think elaborating on the different stories and symbols would allow the reader to better understand those mentalites and how the different estates understood things in different ways. Does that make sense? This could be a separate section on its own within the article. Peasants: Bourgeois: Nobles:

Also, maybe try organizing the page better, perhaps separating different thoughts or different authors and what they have to say about the History of Mentalites

Does that make sense? Maybe I can better explain my self in class later

This article is very well thought out and written, I just think a few changes would make it a little more interesting and appealing to those who have never studied this ares before!

-Monique :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Moniquebrianna (talk • contribs) 21:06, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

false statement about wars & great men

Unsourced and false to assert "The history of mentalities focuses not on the wars or great men which have been the subject matter of most European history-writing since ancient times," -- the French historians were far beyond the notion that wars and great men made history. The Enlightenment had dropped those old themes and emphasized society and culture. Here's a recent quote: Led by Michelet (1798-1874) "19th-century French historians no longer saw history as the chronicling of royal dynasties, armies, treaties, and great men of state, but as the history of ordinary French people and the landscape of France" Gayana Jurkevich (1999). In Pursuit of the Natural Sign. p. 42. Rjensen (talk) 15:59, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

With respect, that's only a part of your edit. You also deleted a chunk of content that had nothing to do with the historiographical point you refer to here - under a frankly misleading edit summary. As it happens, I agree that the phrase you take issue with here should probably be removed. The rest of the content you removed, however, is perfectly useful and should be kept. —Brigade Piron (talk) 16:27, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

OK we now seem to be in general agreement  :) Rjensen (talk) 16:38, 2 August 2016 (UTC)