Jacques Le Goff: “The work of the medieval master was an homage to God.” Jacques Le Goff and the “new historical science” in France

Franz. historian. Since 1969 - member of the editorial board of the journal “Annals”, in 1972-88 - president of the School of Higher Studies in the field social sciences(until 1972 - VI section of the School of Higher Practical Research), until 1994 - head of the group for the study of history. anthropology of the Middle Ages. West. Rep. editor of the series “Creating Europe”. Ed. L. published collective works on general methods. and specifically research. character: “Writing history” (Vol. 1-3, 1974), “New history. science” (1978), “Man of the Middle Ages” (1978).

L. - specialist in the history of Western Europe. Middle-century civilization. The center of his research is the picture of the world of the Middle Ages. person. L. approaches the concept of “mentality” very carefully, highlighting in it both the unconscious layers of collective psychology - mentality itself - and the partially reflected “imaginary” and “values”. Basic the object of L.'s research is the problems of perception of time and space, labor and wealth, the relationship between science and folk culture.

L. was one of the first to pose the problem of folk culture, contrasting it (but also recognizing a very complex interaction) with the culture of the enlightened elite, and substantiated the methodology for studying sources that reflect, at least partially and indirectly, the ideas of the unliterate, “silent” majority of the population of the Middle Ages. West.

The study of collective ideas is not an end in itself for L.: “The era can dream, but the historian must stay awake,” he says, “and strives to link the “world of the imaginary” with social structure. Connected with this is his dual approach to the Middle Ages. L. defends the idea of ​​the “long Middle Ages”: cf. centuries begin approx. 3rd century and end not with the Renaissance or Reformation, but with the end. 18 and even the beginning. 19th century The Middle Ages were primarily an agrarian society, the era of Christianity as a religion and an ideology at the same time, the time of the dominance of a three-functional model of society, divided into “praying”, “fighting” and “working”, in which a person is understood as field of struggle between God and the Devil. All the changes that took place during the “long Middle Ages” almost did not affect the “everyday person”; the changes in mentality were slow and unnoticeable.

But L. also puts forward another proposition about drastic changes in the mentality and value system in the period of the 12-13th centuries. These changes consist, in particular, in changes in attitude towards time. Before this era, control over time was in the hands of the church; time was divided into sacredly marked events - holidays and church services. From the 12th-13th centuries. Along with the “time of the church”, the “time of merchants”, “the time of the commune” appears and spreads more and more, a time divided into equal intervals, marked not by the sound of church bells, but by those that appeared at the end. 13th century mechanical for hours; this is desacralized, de-anthropomorphized time of labor costs or money turnover. Then, in the 12-13th centuries. The attitude towards work also changes - it becomes not a consequence of original sin, but the fulfillment of the commandments, the attitude towards the body - from the disgusting “prison of the soul” to the recognition of bodily beauty and health, a tendency to count appears, incl. calculation of sins and merits, which gives rise to the idea of ​​Purgatory and many others. etc. All this indicates the growth of individualism.

Many modern historians, noting the fruitfulness of studying periods of more or less rapid changes in mentality, in the picture of the world, still find that L. discovered these changes in the upper strata of society, incl. in the city elite, and this did not affect the bulk of the people.

Works: Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Age. P., 1956; Les intellectuels au Moyen Age. P., 1957; Le Moyen Age. P., 1962; Pour un autre Moyen Age: temps, travail et culture en Occident: 18 essays. P., 1977; La naissance du Purgatoire.

R., 1981; L "imaginaire medieval. P., 1985; Histoire et memoire. P., 1988; Le bourse et la vie. P., 1987; Geschichte und Gedachtnis. Fr.; N.Y.; P., 1992; Was there a French historical. school “Annales”? // French yearbook 1968. M., 1970; From heaven to earth: (Changes in the system of value orientations in the Christian West of the 12th-11th centuries) // Odysseus. , 1991; medieval West. M., 1992.

Lit.: Gurevich A.Ya. Histor. synthesis and school of “Annals”. M., 1993.

AND I. Gurevich, D.E. Kharitonovich

Jacques Le Goff, médaille d'or du CNRS en 1991. (c) CNRS Photothèque / M. ESLINE

INTERVIEW WITH JACQUES LE GOFF

O.S. Voskoboynikov: On the eve of his eightieth birthday, Professor Le Goff met me in his small office on the Rue Thionville, sitting at a table littered with books, drafts, letters and smoking pipes. To the usual greeting “Comment allez-vous?” followed the traditional response of the Parisian scientist: “Thank you, I have my neck full of work.” I came in the evening, a couple of hours after Jacques Le Goff finished another book (not the first this year): “An Essay on the History of the Body in the Middle Ages.” Despite the unbearable heat, he was in an extremely working mood. Time seems to have no power over the irrepressible curiosity and hard work of this man, who spent so much energy studying the history of time, and whose quick, interested gaze is free from any mentoring condescension. The text offered here may seem somewhat untidy. I have tried as much as possible to preserve the flavor of oral speech, following the principle of good medieval translators: verborum fideliter servata virginitate.

O.V. Mr. Le Goff, I see on your table a prospectus for a future exhibition of works of medieval art in Parma, in the preparation of which you are taking an active part. I know that the Italian organizers specially selected from European museums those objects that are especially dear to you and that have accompanied your path as a researcher for several decades. What does medieval art mean to you? What was a “work of art” in the Middle Ages? Do you agree with those who, following Hans Belting, speak of the Middle Ages as “the era before art”?

Jacques Le Goff. I consider myself one of those historians who advocate expanding the field of historical documents. Until about 1950, historical scholarship studied almost exclusively texts. Much has changed over the past half century: there is increasing interest in literary monuments and subjects formally related to the study of art history. But a work of art is not perceived by a historian as aesthetic value, namely as an object, as historical document. You quite reasonably mentioned Belting, with whom I completely agree. The artist of modern times bears little resemblance to the medieval craftsman. They have absolutely different tasks. This does not mean at all that the Middle Ages did not have their own idea of ​​beauty (I will take this opportunity to refer you to Umberto Eco’s wonderful study on how the Middle Ages understood beauty). But what the art of modern times considers beautiful, the medieval master rather attributed to the realm of the divine. His work was an homage to the Lord, a sign of gratitude for the inspiration received from him.

O.V. I often notice that among your students who are actively working with visual material, with all their attention and respect for the works of art historians, they always maintain a distance in relation to this discipline in general and to the history of styles in particular. What is this connected with? Isn't it stylistic features of a particular work cannot, upon careful study, force our historical source to “let it slip”?

Jacques Le Goff. Perhaps my students are following what I myself taught them. I have always been suspicious of the concept of style and consider it an invention of art historians. Of course, there may be a certain set of forms, on the basis of which we can talk about the connection and similarity of a number of works. But what is, for example, Gothic? Style? Forms? Or maybe also feelings? I am very close to what Panofsky wrote about Abbot Suger and the metaphysics of light, about the connection between scholastic thought and Gothic art, as well as Roland Recht’s recently published book “Believing and Seeing”1. But I am full of skepticism towards such ambiguous and dangerous metaphors for the historian as “ Gothic style" It is much more important to deeply study the symbolism of art. There is realism too special shape symbolic thinking. Pure “realism” does not exist at all. And the Middle Ages in particular were immersed in symbolism, since the earthly was perceived as a kind of echo of the heavenly.

O.V. In the introductory article to the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Medieval West”2 and in other programmatic works recent years You often talk about abandoning such an important research paradigm as mentality in favor of “representations” and “images”. This change is reflected in the books and seminars of the “fourth generation” of annalists. Please explain this change.

Jacques Le Goff. The interest in mentalities was enormous, since this concept helped turn it into a new direction traditional history ideas. But, as you probably know, already in the 70s, in a book that Pierre Nora and I published, I expressed doubts about the possibility of using this term in historical research: it is too abstract and therefore dangerous for the historian. The same applies to ideas: I am not a philosopher, but for me the idea and the history of ideas are too closely connected with Platonic philosophy, which I dislike for its aristocratic and even reactionary character. At the same time, it cannot be denied that Christianity is imbued with it through and through. The form in which Plato's treatises were written, of course, produced a very vivid impression, and I am afraid that all the medieval thinkers fascinated by it were at heart Platonists. Aristotle's legacy was more fruitful, but Stagirite was not such a talented writer, and for a long time his corpus could not achieve real influence on the minds of Christian thinkers, although for the progress of human thought the Aristotelian corpus is more important.

But this is a scientific culture. The subject of the history of mentalities was ways of thinking (methodes de pensee) that were much more common: everyday thinking (pensee commune), ideas and modes of behavior. Our school has always been interested in this. To the “ideas” and “images” that you named, I would also add “values” - a term that interests me more and more. Just like mentality, it relates to the masses. Values ​​live in mentalities. They are that deep, most important thing that makes thoughts and conclusions alive. A conversation about values ​​seems to me more precise and less abstract than a conversation about ideology. Using the concept of “values” one can reconstruct the hierarchy of things in a particular society.

Let's take, for example, the ancient “good”, “beautiful”, “utility” - medieval society was built on their rethinking. By studying the history of such values, we will understand the history of the Middle Ages. Probably the main one is “utility”: for both thinkers and merchants it was equivalent to “economics” itself. What did medieval people find “beautiful”? The answer may seem surprising to us: the city. Its walls, towers and others directed upward architectural monuments, a kind of medieval “Manhattan” - this is what delighted the European; he saw beauty in this, and not in nature ( modern ecology, frankly speaking, is devoid of medieval roots). Unlike the city, nature was not considered beautiful. Let us also add that beauty was perceived as belonging to the upper strata of society and therefore could become the subject of class struggle (perhaps the only concept that I borrowed from Marx). Speaking further about beauty, a very attractive subject of study is the face and body (I just finished a book on the body in the Middle Ages, co-authored with a young journalist).

Christianity teaches that God created the world and man. In this picture of the world of medieval man, what was probably most striking was the sky, hence - great value astrology. The man was in second place. I do not want to seem like a Hegelian in my explanation, but I see in this teaching about the world and man the point of tension of the entire medieval civilization: the body is at the same time a container of sin and death, the body is guilty, it is sick, it is destroyed and finally decomposes. But at the same time it is beautiful, since only Christianity created the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh (which has nothing to do with Buddhist metempsychosis). In scenes Last Judgment we see how these beautiful bodies come out of their tombs. Let us also note that in the Middle Ages Adam and Eve are often depicted before the Fall, which emphasizes the dignity of human flesh, not yet subject to decay.

I continue to pay great attention to ideas about work, because they determined character traits a civilization that always remembered that God gave Adam Paradise “ut operaretur eum”, “so that he could cultivate it.” Labor was a value common to men and women: medieval society, while remaining predominantly male, nevertheless managed to give women a completely new dignity, which was reflected in the cult of the Virgin Mary. Labor was the common participation of man and woman in the great work of Creation and at the same time repentance. Labor was the subject of class struggle, since the ruling class tried to highly value physical work, laying claim to its results, but also emphasized its distance from it. It is possible that the Industrial Revolution reduced the value placed on manual labor by associating it with the machine. Probably something similar can be found if you examine the Slavic concepts of “work” and “worker”.

O.V. How would you today characterize the science in the creation of which you took an active part: historical anthropology?

Jacques Le Goff. This is a huge problem, about which I will offer only a few brief thoughts. Historical anthropology, apparently, has become fully established both in the scientific vocabulary and in the working methods of historians. Historical anthropology needs man in all his manifestations. Historian-anthropologists preserve main feature the profession of a historian - the awareness that human society develops. This is their main difference from anthropologists. But the historian must also be an ethnologist: he is interested in how a person ate, how he arranged his home, he studies a person’s feelings (sensibilite) and his techniques du corps, if we take into account the term proposed by Marcel Mauss, if I’m not mistaken, in 1924, those. how a person sleeps, what dreams he sees and how he interprets them, how he dies, etc. Historian-anthropologists try to exchange experiences with sociologists and anthropologists. They often talk about the “crisis of history”... Probably in Russia too?

O.V. Lately seems smaller. Maybe you're tired?

Jacques Le Goff. Be that as it may, we need to talk not about the crisis of history, but about the crisis of society, since history is a social science. Deeper problems, it seems, lie in our neighboring sciences, which are even more closely related to society, primarily in sociology. She is overreacting to the media, which has profoundly changed the nature of society. There are sociologists who reacted too harshly to the introduction of mass media, and, in my opinion, Pierre Bourdieu was wrong to criticize them so much. It's useless. The consequences of this media influence for historical scholarship are an exaggerated attention to modern history, in which Scientific research failed to prevail over journalism, which is very clearly visible in the way “novists” often treat criticism of sources. Modern documentation is too often relegated to the realm of the media. We are so accustomed to this kind of information that we forget about the need to use it critically.

Ethnology has its own problems. Starting with the works of Lévi-Strauss, we have become accustomed to calling it anthropology, since “ethnology” is associated with a number of unpleasant memories for modern Western society, about which it, like any society, does not like to talk much. French or American anthropologists were not colonialists, quite the contrary, but they worked under colonialism, and most of them were never able to forget about it and rebuild themselves. It was difficult for them to change anything in their work and at the same time they had a huge feeling of guilt. As a result, it is not possible to create anthropology on a new, non-colonial basis, which I would so like to finally see! Another major defeat of the Annales school, for which I am also to blame, is the loss of contact with economists. Medievalists have a great weapon - their scientific tradition, which can be debated, which can be accepted not completely, but with which each of us relates ourselves in one way or another. But one story is not enough, it does not need to be repeated. We need methods economic analysis, but economists left history for politics and...

O.V. Mathematicians?

Jacques LeGoff. Yes, mathematics, calculations. But the main thing is for the sake of power, which is very clearly visible in the composition of the modern political elite.

O.V. You have more than once named the names of people, books, scientific trends that influenced the Annales school and you personally. Among them, I have not come across one direction, the tasks of which are in many ways similar to those that were formulated by the first generation of annalists and were solved in the works of their students and followers. I'm talking about Abi Warburg and his school. Is it possible to talk about some kind of connection or mutual influence?

Jacques Le Goff. Personally, this tradition has not had much influence on me, although I am familiar with it. But in connection with it, this is what needs to be said. The “third generation” of annalists probably turned too sharply towards ethnology, for which I blame both them and myself. We have forgotten about the purely “historical” that exists in not entirely “historical” disciplines: art, literature, law. Just look at the gulf that lies between historians and literary critics. The exceptions can be counted on one hand: perhaps with Jean Dufournet we managed to conduct several joint interdisciplinary dissertations. Paul Zumthor was also open to cross-shop work. We were very friendly with Andre Chastel, an amazingly erudite man, but a typical representative of his caste, a closed guild of art historians who stubbornly did not open their doors to outsiders. In this corporation, the exception is Roland Recht, who recently became a professor at the College de France. I'm also very glad that Jean-Claude Schmitt is in High school social research actively works on the history of images, which is different from the history of art, but opens up new horizons for students. In order for interdisciplinary research, which both our school and Warburg have always advocated, to truly become the norm, we must create an institutional basis.

O.V. As far as I know, of all your books, the most dear to you is “The Civilization of the Medieval West,” written forty years ago. You proposed in it your Middle Ages, a different Middle Ages, the “world of the imaginary,” but most importantly, complete picture civilization that lasted for about a millennium. Do you believe today in the possibility of reconstructing the medieval world, or, in order to protect ourselves from criticism, in a book with this title we will always be forced to use the indefinite article?

Jacques Le Goff. Your last clarification is very important: we can reconstruct medieval ideas about the world, about man, about work, about time, but it will always be our reconstruction. A reconstruction relating to a certain era, social structure, perhaps country. We cannot ignore all the typological differences within a great civilization. What we are recreating is the world of the historian, “the Middle Ages in images”4, “the experience of the Middle Ages.” But we can be sure that every medieval person had a comprehensive understanding of the vast world in which he lived. This task was set before him by his religion - Christianity. It gave the believer an excellent opportunity to grasp the connection between various elements of the world around him: rational and unreasonable, real and imaginary. Let me emphasize once again: this vision of the world was completely symbolic.

1 Recht R. Le croire et le voir. L'art des cathedrales. XIIe-XVe siecles. P., 1999.
2 Dictionnaire raisonne de Г Occident medievale / Dir. J. Le Goff, J.-Cl. Schmitl
P., 1999. P. I-IX.
3 Faire de l'histoire / Dir. J. Le Goff, P. Nora. P., 1974. Vol. 1-3.
4 Le Goff J. Le Moyen a ge en images. P., 2000.

Jacques Le Goff

Le Goff, Jacques (b. 1924) - French medievalist historian, since the 2nd half of the 1980s - head of the Annales school. Sharing the basic epistemological values ​​of the Annales school, Le Goff paid special attention to the study of history in his work mentalities .

Philosophical Dictionary / author's comp. S. Ya. Podoprigora, A. S. Podoprigora. - Ed. 2nd, erased - Rostov n/d: Phoenix, 2013, pp. 188-189.

Le Goff Jacques (b. 1924) is a French midian historian, and since the second half of the 1980s has been the head of the Annales school. Main works: "Merchants and Bankers of the Middle Ages" (1956), "Medieval Intellectuals" (1957), "The Civilization of the Medieval West" (1965), "For a New Study of the Middle Ages" (1977), "The Birth of Purgatory" (1981), " Medieval world Imagination" (1985), "History and Memory" (1986), "Purse and Life: Economics and Religion in the Middle Ages" (1986), "Appetite for History" (1987), "Man of the Middle Ages" (collective work, ed. L., 1987), etc. Professor of the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences (Paris), its president (1972-1977, third after Febvre and Braudel). Member of the editorial board of the Annales (since 1969), sharing the basic epistemological values ​​of the school. "Annals", L. in his work paid special attention to the study of the history of mentalities.

According to L., mentalities are not clearly formulated and not fully (sometimes not at all) conscious stereotypical thinking procedures, as well as mental images devoid of logic that are inherent in a specific era or a specific social group. Mentalities as ways of orientation in the social and natural world act as original automatisms. According to L., these sets of patterns and values, as a rule, are not articulated by the conductors of official morality and ideology - they implicitly determine people’s behavior without being constituted into a systemic moral or ideological code. (Culture is thus interpreted by L. not as a system of spiritual achievements of individual creativity, but as a way of spiritual existence of people, as a system of worldview and a set of pictures of the world, clearly or latently present in the minds of individuals and producing programs and models of behavior of the latter.) From the point of view of L. ., these traditionally conservative and (in essence) extra-personal attitudes of consciousness are all the more coercive in nature, since they are not realized by individuals. The reconstruction of the evolution of mentalities in this context represents the history of various “slowdowns in history.” Social history ideas from the perspective of L.'s scheme is a highly contradictory process: on the one hand, having been developed intellectual elite, they, penetrating into the masses and interacting with the mental attitudes of the environment, are significantly transformed - sometimes beyond recognition.

On the other hand, according to L.’s observations, cultural traditions people and folklore creativity in historical retrospect are blocked by “scientific culture” and written tradition, which significantly complicates the procedures for adequate reconstruction of the folk culture of bygone eras. In general, according to L.’s scheme, historical reality “represents the unity material conditions and the world of imagination in which members of every society live: earth and sky, forest, clearing, land and sea roads, the plurality of social times, dreams of the end of the world and otherworldly existence...” The concept of total history as its own subject field should , from L.’s point of view, include “not only what other traditions of thought call culture and civilization,” it also implies the study of “ material culture- technology, economics, everyday life... as well as intellectual and artistic culture, without establishing between them any relations of determinism or even hierarchy." It is especially important, says L., to avoid the concepts of "base" and "superstructure" which “violate the comprehension of historical structures and their interaction.” Denying models of rigid economic determinism the right to truth, L. expresses a clear preference for multifactorial approaches to historical explanation, overcoming the harmful voluntaristic potential of human-centered methodological schemes: “I have invariably preferred human beings to abstractions, but the historian does not able to understand them differently than in the depths of the historical systems in which they lived. All history lies in this interaction of structures with people over time."

Thus, in particular, L. analyzes the evolution of the phenomenon of social time in the Middle Ages. The dogma of Eternity, which emotionally suppresses a person, coupled with the dominance of the natural rhythms of agricultural activity, produced indifference medieval people to the time of everyday life. By dictating all the basic rhythms of the latter (including the sanctioning of periods for sexual intercourse between individuals), the church used the control of time as a tool social control. In the same context, usury was condemned as an area for extracting income: considering time to be the property of God did not allow such acts. Thus, the monopoly on time calculation made it possible to control both production and family life believers. On the contrary, heresies that preached the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ, according to L., “hurried time,” “snatching” it from the church, and thus acted as a type of social struggle in society. It is not surprising, therefore, according to L., that city dwellers, merchants and entrepreneurs considered the legitimation of their own time as one of the leading repertoires of the pathetic declaration of their own autonomy as opposed to the time of the church: mechanical tower clocks at the turn of the 13th-14th centuries. became attributes of European cities. Historical concept L. not only played a significant role in the modernization of the “Annals” of the School at the end of the 20th century, but also (along with the more “economically motivated” model of understanding and reconstruction of history belonging to Braudel) acted as a successful alternative to one-dimensional explanations of history of the orthodox Marxist persuasion.

A.A. Gritsanov

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"Jacques Le Goff "The Civilization of the Medieval West": Publishing group"Progress" "Progress Academy"; Moscow; 1992

annotation

This publication was carried out with the participation of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French Embassy in Moscow

The author focuses on Space and Time in the life and perception of the then European population, their material life, characteristics of their social system and, most importantly, an analysis of their mentality, collective psychology, ways of feeling and thinking.

Jacques Le Goff

Civilization of the Medieval West

General editing by Yu.L. Immortal

Editor E. N. Samoilo.

Translators: E.I. Lebedeva, Yu.P. Malinin, V.I. Raitses, P.Yu. Uvarov

Preface to the Russian translation

I am proud and happy that my book “The Civilization of the Medieval West” will be read by a Russian reader. I warmly thank the translators and colleagues whose help made the publication of the book possible, and first of all professors Yuri Bessmertny and Aron Gurevich.

The book first appeared in 1964 with numerous illustrations accompanied by detailed explanations - these, unfortunately, are partially missing from the revised and updated edition of 1984. This book meets the objectives of the Great Civilizations series and my concept of history, in particular the history of civilization. In it I trace the main lines of evolution of the West between the 5th and 15th centuries, for history is movement and change, highlighting the following significant points: the emergence of new kingdoms born from the synthesis of two cultures, barbarian and Roman; an attempt by the Germans to create a new organization - the Carolingian world, a hasty attempt to unite Europe (VIII - X centuries); and, finally, the formation of a united and diverse Christian Europe - a period of internal and external upsurge in the 10th - 13th centuries, when economic, demographic, religious, intellectual and artistic progress seems to me more important than the vicissitudes of political life with its struggle between popes and emperors, hiding a great political innovation - the formation of modern states that emerged from the feudal system and coexisted with it without destroying it (as it seemed to traditional historiography). And in conclusion, I dwell on the crisis of the 14th - 15th centuries, which, as often happens in history, was more of a mutation and transformation than a decline.

I had to take into account the chronological framework determined by participation in a collective endeavor. Although today I would insist on expanding the time frame, on the “long” Middle Ages, covering the era starting from the 2nd - 3rd centuries of late Antiquity (about which the volume provided for by the series plan was never written) and not ending with the Renaissance (XV - XVI centuries), whose connection with the New Age, in my opinion, is exaggerated. The Middle Ages lasted essentially until the 18th century, gradually becoming obsolete in the face of the French Revolution and the industrial revolution of the 19th century. and the great changes of the twentieth century. We live among the last material and intellectual remnants of the Middle Ages.

I believe that I was better successful in the second part, dedicated to medieval civilization itself, where I tried to describe and explain what it was like in central period X - XIV centuries I understand it broadly, following the concept of total history, which I perceived in the spirit of the journal Annals, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. The concept of total history includes not only what other traditions of thought call culture or civilization - it also implies material culture - technology, economics, everyday life (for people in the process of history build houses, eat, dress and generally function), as well as intellectual and artistic culture, without establishing between them any relations of determinism, or even hierarchy. In particular, she avoids the concepts of “base” and “superstructure”, which force the comprehension of historical structures and their interaction. Total history must be based on social history, which is the true content of history, as Mark Bloch rightly understood it.

At the beginning I outlined not the “origin” (according to Marc Bloch, “the dangerous idol of historians”), but the heritage that the civilization that transforms itself receives and takes away, the heritage of the previous societies of Europe - Celtic-Germanic, Slavic, etc., the heritage of the Greco-Roman, the heritage of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Beginning my research with a consideration of the space-time structures that frame every society and every culture, I studied both the material aspects of space and time and the representations through which the men and women of the Middle Ages perceived historical reality. After all, this reality represents the unity of material conditions and the world of imagination in which members of any society live: earth and sky, forest, clearing, land and sea roads, the plurality of social times, dreams of the end of the world and of an otherworldly existence, characteristic of the civilization of the medieval West .

At the same time, I also tried to show the internal connections between real social structures and their functioning (“class struggle”, a term difficult to apply to the Middle Ages), processes of marginalization and exclusion from society, on the one hand, and the schemes by which people of that era - mainly intellectuals, clergy - tried to comprehend society: “clergy and laity”, “powerful and poor”, three “estates” or three “categories”, according to the Indo-European three-functional concept, a plurality of “estates” and “social ranks”, etc.

Most of all, I wanted to depict all these aspects of medieval civilization, demonstrating mentality, emotionality and behavioral attitudes, which are by no means superficial or unnecessary “decorations” of history, for they are

that is what gave it all its colorfulness, originality and depth: symbolic thinking, a sense of uncertainty or belief in miracles would tell us more about the Middle Ages than sophisticatedly constructed dogmas and ideological anachronistic abstractions.

If my book can give Russian readers some clues for a better understanding of another Middle Ages - the Middle Ages of their ancestors, the Middle Ages of the other half of Christianity, Eastern Christianity, I will be happy. For what the Europeans of East and West now have to accomplish is the unification of both halves, who emerged from a common, I would say, fraternal heritage a single civilization, respecting the differences generated by history.

Finally, I want to express my great joy in seeing my book translated into Russian, made possible by new conditions created by the exceptional courage with which the citizens inhabiting this country change their own history. Of course, historical science in Eastern Europe was not destroyed in 1917, and many of the Russian Soviet historians, at the risk of their lives, continued to work in line with their great historiographical tradition. But the freedom that the work of the historian in search of truth requires was suppressed. Now we can resume the dialogue we all need.

Jacques Le Goff Paris, October 1991

LE GOFF

The study of collective ideas is not an end in itself for L.: “The era can dream, but the historian must stay awake,” he says, “and strives to link the “world of the imaginary” with the social structure. Connected with this is his dual approach to the Middle Ages. L. defends the idea of ​​the “long Middle Ages”: cf. centuries begin approx. 3rd century and end not with the Renaissance or Reformation, but with the end. 18 and even the beginning. 19th century The Middle Ages were primarily an agrarian society, the era of Christianity as a religion and ideology at the same time, the time of the dominance of the three-functional model of society, divided into “praying”, “fighting” and “working”, in which a person is understood as field of struggle between God and the Devil. All the changes that took place during the “long Middle Ages” almost did not affect the “everyday person”; the changes in mentality were slow and unnoticeable.

But L. also puts forward another proposition about drastic changes in the mentality and value system in the period of the 12-13th centuries. These changes consist, in particular, in changes in attitude towards time. Before this era, control over time was in the hands of the church; time was divided into sacredly marked events - holidays and church services. From the 12th-13th centuries. Along with the “time of the church”, the “time of merchants”, “the time of the commune” appears and spreads more and more, a time divided into equal intervals, marked not by the sound of church bells, but by those that appeared at the end. 13th century mechanical for hours; this is desacralized, de-anthropomorphized time of labor costs or money turnover. Then, in the 12-13th centuries. The attitude towards work also changes - it becomes not a consequence of original sin, but the fulfillment of the commandments, the attitude towards the body - from the disgusting “prison of the soul” to the recognition of bodily beauty and health, a tendency to count appears, incl. calculation of sins and merits, which gives rise to the idea of ​​Purgatory and many others. etc. All this indicates the growth of individualism.

Many modern historians, noting the fruitfulness of studying periods of more or less rapid changes in mentality, in the picture of the world, still find that L. discovered these changes in the upper strata of society, incl. in the city elite, and this did not affect the bulk of the people.

Op.: Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Age. P., 1956; Les intellectuels au Moyen Age. P., 1957; Le Moyen Age. P., 1962; Pour un autre Moyen Age: temps, travail et culture en Occident: 18 essays. P., 1977; La naissance du Purgatoire. R., 1981; L "imaginaire medieval. P., 1985; Histoire et memoire. P., 1988; Le bourse et la vie. P., 1987; Geschichte und Gedachtnis. Fr.; N.Y.; P., 1992; Was there a French historical. school “Annales”? // French yearbook 1968. M., 1970; From heaven to earth: (Changes in the system of value orientations in the Christian West of the 12th-11th centuries) // Odysseus. , 1991; Civilization of the medieval West. M., 1992.

Lit.: Gurevich A.Ya. Histor. synthesis and school of “Annals”. M., 1993.

AND I. Gurevich, D.E. Kharitonovich

Culturology. XX century Encyclopedia. 1998 .

Le Goff

Jacques Le Goff(b. 1924)

French historian. Since 1969 - member of the editorial board of the journal “Annals”, in 1972-88 - president of the School of Higher Research in the Social Sciences (until 1972 - VI section of the School of Higher Practical Research), until 1994 - head of the group for the study of history. anthropology of the Middle Ages. West. Rep. editor of the series “Creating Europe”. Ed. L. published collective works on general methods. and specifically research. character: “Writing history” (Vol. 1-3, 1974), “New history. science” (1978), “Man of the Middle Ages” (1978).

L. - specialist in the history of Western Europe. Middle-century civilization. The center of his research is the picture of the world of the Middle Ages. person. L. approaches the concept of “Mentality” very carefully, highlighting in it both the unconscious layers of collective psychology - mentality itself - and the partially reflected “imaginary” and “values”. Basic The object of L.'s research is the problems of perception of time and space, labor and wealth, the relationship between scientific and popular culture.

L. was one of the first to pose the problem of folk culture, contrasting it (but also recognizing a very complex interaction) with the culture of the enlightened elite, and substantiated the methodology for studying sources that reflect, at least partially and indirectly, the ideas of the unliterate, “silent” majority of the population of the Middle Ages. West.

The study of collective ideas is not an end in itself for L.: “The era can dream, but the historian must stay awake,” he says, “and strives to link the “world of the imaginary” with the social structure. Connected with this is his dual approach to the Middle Ages. L. defends the idea of ​​the “long Middle Ages”: cf. centuries begin approx. 3rd century and end not with the Renaissance or Reformation, but with the end. 18 and even the beginning. 19th century The Middle Ages were primarily an agrarian society, the era of Christianity as a religion and an ideology at the same time, the time of the dominance of a three-functional model of society, divided into “praying”, “fighting” and “working”, in which a person is understood as field of struggle between God and the Devil. All the changes that took place during the “long Middle Ages” almost did not affect the “everyday person”; the changes in mentality were slow and unnoticeable.

But L. also puts forward another proposition about drastic changes in the mentality and value system in the period of the 12-13th centuries. These changes consist, in particular, in changes in attitude towards time. Before this era, control over time was in the hands of the church; time was divided into sacredly marked events - holidays and church services. From the 12th-13th centuries. Along with the “time of the church”, the “time of merchants”, “the time of the commune” appears and spreads more and more, a time divided into equal intervals, marked not by the sound of church bells, but by those that appeared at the end. 13th century mechanical for hours; this is desacralized, de-anthropomorphized time of labor costs or money turnover. Then, in the 12-13th centuries. The attitude towards work also changes - it becomes not a consequence of original sin, but the fulfillment of the commandments, the attitude towards the body - from the disgusting “prison of the soul” to the recognition of bodily beauty and health, a tendency to count appears, incl. calculation of sins and merits, which gives rise to the idea of ​​Purgatory and many others. etc. All this indicates the growth of individualism.

Many modern historians, noting the fruitfulness of studying periods of more or less rapid changes in mentality, in the picture of the world, still find that L. discovered these changes in the upper strata of society, incl. in the city elite, and this did not affect the bulk of the people.

Op.: Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Age. P., 1956; Les intellectuels au Moyen Age. P., 1957; Le Moyen Age. P., 1962; Pour un autre Moyen Age: temps, travail et culture en Occident: 18 essays. P., 1977; La naissance du Purgatoire. R., 1981; L "imaginaire medieval. P., 1985; Histoire et memoire. P., 1988; Le bourse et la vie. P., 1987; Geschichte und Gedachtnis. Fr.; N.Y.; P., 1992; Was there a French historical. school “Annales”? // French yearbook 1968. M., 1970; From heaven to earth: (Changes in the system of value orientations in the Christian West of the 12th-11th centuries) // Odysseus. , 1991; Civilization of the medieval West. M., 1992.

AND I. Gurevich, D.E. Kharitonovich.

Cultural studies of the twentieth century. Encyclopedia. M.1996

Big Dictionary in cultural studies.. Kononenko B.I. . 2003.

See what "LE GOFF" is in other dictionaries:

- (French Goff) surname: Goff, Inna Anatolyevna Jacques le Goff ... Wikipedia

Inna Goff Birth name: Inna Anatolyevna Goff Date of birth: October 24, 1928 (1928 10 24) Place of birth: Kharkov Date of death: April 26, 1991 ... Wikipedia

Inna Anatolyevna Goff (October 24, 1928, Kharkov April 26, 1991) Russian Soviet writer and poetess, co-author of the popular song “Russian Field” and many others. Born into the family of a phthisiatrician (Anatoly Ilyich Goff) and a teacher... ... Wikipedia

Inna Anatolyevna Goff (October 24, 1928, Kharkov April 26, 1991) Russian Soviet writer and poetess, co-author of the popular song “Russian Field” and many others. Born into the family of a phthisiatrician (Anatoly Ilyich Goff) and a teacher... ... Wikipedia

Inna Anatolyevna Goff (October 24, 1928, Kharkov April 26, 1991) Russian Soviet writer and poetess, co-author of the popular song “Russian Field” and many others. Born into the family of a phthisiatrician (Anatoly Ilyich Goff) and a teacher... ... Wikipedia

Inna Anatolyevna Goff (October 24, 1928, Kharkov April 26, 1991) Russian Soviet writer and poetess, co-author of the popular song “Russian Field” and many others. Born into the family of a phthisiatrician (Anatoly Ilyich Goff) and a teacher... ... Wikipedia