Jacques Le Goff is a magician from Toulon. Jacques Le Goff and the “new historical science” in France

A small book by the famous French medieval historian caught my eye. Jacques Le Goff's "The History of Europe Told to Children" , written in 1998.

It became very interesting how it presented Russia, and is it represented at all?
I read it. It turned out that there is a little about Russia in it, but there is.

But here The most interesting , what image of Russia is this very authoritative historian trying to put into the heads of little Frenchmen?

Jacques Le Goff (1924 - 2014)

HEADLINES inside the post made by me (S.V.), quotes from Le Goff are in quotes and highlighted bold italic , my notes to them are in regular font.
I quote from the following edition: Le Goff J. History of Europe, told to children. Per. from fr. N. Kudryakova. - M.: Text, 1998 - 142 p.

GENERAL IMAGE OF RUSSIA

"In Russia they speak Russian (that’s really unexpected, right?) , among strong drinks they prefer vodka, they are very fond of tea, which is prepared in huge metal teapots - samovars(actually, tea is not prepared in samovars, but only water is boiled, but oh well, the question is different: can you remember the last time you used a samovar and whether you ever used it at all?) ; Thin flat cakes - pancakes - are baked from liquid dough.

This “masterpiece” of ethnographic description of modern (!) Russia is located at the very beginning of the book and, according to the author, apparently this is all a little Frenchman needs to know about a huge country, which is larger in size than the whole of Europe. Wonderful, isn't it? What familiar clichés: vodka, samovar, pancakes, cold, fur coat... It’s a pity that it’s not said that in Russia bears walk the streets and everyone (including bears) plays balalaikas!

And, of course, there are always severe frosts in Russia!
Is it then any wonder that some conversations with Europeans resemble dialogues from the repertoire of the theater of the absurd? For example, like this:
A conversation with a taxi driver who took me in July the year before last from the Rome airport to a hotel in Lido di Ostia.
- Hello! You are from Russia?
- Hello! Yes, from Russia, from Moscow.
- Well, how is it so cold in Russia?
- Why is it cold? Not at all - almost thirty degrees.
- Oh, Mama Mia, thirty degrees below zero! And isn’t that cold for you?!
In vain I tried to convince the Italian taxi driver that it was hot in Moscow now, and that there was nothing unusual about it. Judging by his facial expression, he still didn’t believe me. Then the conversation switched, of course, to football (the World Cup was just going on in Brazil, in which neither the Russian team nor the Italian team could even qualify from the group).
- Well, how do you like our Fabio Capello?
- Yes, somehow not very much.
- Actually, he’s a good coach, but how can he coach if you have constant frost and snow?
- ??? Oh, yes, of course....

It’s already good that he considers Russia (at least up to the Urals) part of Europe. Apparently, Charles de Gaulle’s idea of ​​a united Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals” remained close to him in the 90s of the twentieth century.
But let's see what he writes about Russia next. However, mostly it is completely negative.

PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS

Thus, speaking about the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages, Le Goff writes:

“From the end of the 12th century, Jews began to be persecuted and killed, Christian rulers expelled them from their kingdoms. This happened in Great Britain, France, Spain and Portugal.
Only after the Great French Revolution were the rights of Jews equal to the rights of other peoples - first in France, and then in other European states.
During World War II, millions of Jews died in concentration camps and gas chambers. Auschwitz will forever remain a symbol of war and human cruelty.
In eastern Europe, Jewish settlements survived, but even there Jews were repeatedly persecuted and exterminated. A striking example is the bloody pogroms that swept across Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century.
This is one of the most vile pages in the history of Europe." (p.53-54)

So, what conclusion should French children draw from this text? Obviously this: the French are great - they were the first to abandon anti-Semitism. But the Russians persecuted Jews and destroyed them even in the twentieth century, including in Auschwitz. Shame on Russia!!!
The fact that the concentration camp was located on the territory of German-occupied Poland, that it was not the Russians who burned Jews in the ovens of Auschwitz, as well as the fact that its surviving prisoners were liberated by soldiers of the Red Army, of course, is not mentioned.

NEW TIME

In Le Goff's presentation of the events of European history, Russia is not mentioned even once before the 18th century. And then only sporadically:

“In 1776, Great Britain lost its American colonies, and a new state appeared on the world map: the United States of America. Founded by Europeans, by the twentieth century they had become Europe's main competitors.
In Europe itself, in the northeast, three new states quickly gained strength: the Russian Empire, which Tsar Peter the Great, the same one who worked at the shipyards in Holland, tried to remake in the European style, as well as Sweden and Prussia, two small kingdoms with strong armies." (p. 76, chapter "New states in Europe and beyond" )

Great, right?
It turns out, according to Le Goff, before Peter I, no state existed in Russia (after all, that’s how he writes “new states”). Is it any wonder that in his book Russia is not mentioned even once before the 18th century?
And Peter the Great is known primarily for the fact that he “worked in shipyards in Holland”!

However, the fact that “two small kingdoms with strong armies” were beaten by Russia in the same 18th century (Sweden in the Northern War, after which it forever lost its status as a great power, and Prussia in the Seven Years’ War, when the Russian army entered the to Berlin), the French historian also does not mention it.

And why? Indeed, in the same Seven Years' War, Prussia, in alliance with England, nevertheless won a victory over Austria and France, but only because Russia withdrew from this unnecessary war. How can we admit that “great” France was defeated by “weak” Prussia? So we have to call it “a small kingdom with a strong army.”

“There are magnificent examples of Baroque in Russia - first of all, the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.” (p.78)

The Winter Palace is far from the best example of Baroque in Russia, but why should French children know about this?

“In the first half of the 19th century, a new literary and artistic style was born in Europe - romanticism. Its origins were the Genevan Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like the Baroque style, like the ideas of humanism and the Enlightenment, this new passion swept the entire continent. For example, in Russia's great poet Alexander Pushkin was a representative of the romantic school."(p.95)

Thanks to Jacques Le Goff! After all, I didn’t know that Pushkin, it turns out, was a follower of Rousseau and a “representative of the romantic school”! It seems that Pushkin himself would also be quite surprised and indignant at this.

Yes, but the French were not disappointed and got the revolution of 1789, which Le Goff evaluates positively, although he criticizes the terror of the Jacobins and Napoleon, who "took the path of nationalism and the desire for world domination." (p.90-94)

“As soon as Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in France, he immediately unleashed a war on the entire European continent. His initial plans were excellent, he wanted to bring the gains of the revolution: freedom, equality and justice to the peoples of Europe. Napoleon was joyfully greeted in Poland, divided between its powerful neighbors: Russia, Austria and Prussia - in Dalmatia, oppressed by Austria, and in Naples, where they did not like the kings of the Bourbon dynasty. The rest of Europe united against him. The Russians were the first to rise up to fight Napoleonic Europe - they forced Napoleon, who took Moscow, to flee from Russia in the bitter cold. The Spaniards did not give up either, and they began a guerrilla war against the invaders. Here the French were opposed not by a regular army, but by numerous detachments of volunteers.
In the 19th century, Napoleonic Europe fell, and in the 20th century, the same fate befell an even more monstrous monster - Hitler’s Europe." . (p. 94-95)

Well, there’s nothing special to comment on here! But still...
For some reason, Le Goff bashfully prefers to remain silent about how Suvorov and Ushakov beat the French in Italy in 1799.

But, of course, the Russians defeated Napoleon solely thanks to the “bitter frost”!

And of course, there is no need to mention the fact that the Russians took Paris in 1814, because this could lead to the fact that little Frenchmen simply develop an inferiority complex.

"The rough sketch of Europe was made at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Allies: Russia, Austria-Hungary (nothing that at that time such a state did not exist, but there was an Austrian Empire? Or does the historian Le Goff not know about this?), Prussia and their supporting Great Britain - the victors of Napoleon, who destroyed his empire built on blood - decided to make the peoples of Europe forget about freedom.
The Poles were the most oppressed people in Europe (really? But what about the Constitution of Poland, bestowed upon them by the complacent Alexander I?). In 1831 they began the struggle for independence (actually, in 1830), and in 1863 the liberation movement was brutally suppressed by the Russians" . (p. 103-104)

How did Le Goff forget that “Russia is the gendarme of Europe”? A serious omission on his part!

Well, of course, Russia was the main colonialist in the 19th century! Do you feel the fear of the French historian: “It was huge and united”?
Islam, perhaps, was still something alien for France in 1998, but what would Le Goff say now, when there are almost more Muslims in Paris than French Catholics, not to mention Marseille? And just the other day a Muslim became mayor of London, although the historian did not live to see this.
Well, yes, Siberia is a terrible word for Europeans, because it is one huge “GULAG”, from the 19th century to the present day! Solzhenitsyn - foreva!!! By the way, Le Goff didn’t forget to mention Solzhenitsyn, but how could it be otherwise:

"The twins of the German concentration camps - the Soviet camps - were filled with millions of prisoners who lived in inhumane conditions and did hard work. Don't forget about the Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent several years in Stalin's camps, wrote about its horrors."(p. 127).

"The 19th century is the century of the heyday of the Russian novel. The names of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky are known throughout the world. Performances are staged and films are made based on their works both in Russia and in other countries. For example, a film was made in the USA based on the most famous novel by Leo Tolstoy" War and Peace". (p. 110-111)

I don’t know of a single film adaptation of any of the novels by Russian writers, filmed in the USA, that would not be overflowing with “cranberries”. But for Jacques Le Goff, apparently, the very fact that Leo Tolstoy’s novel was filmed in the USA is the highest sign of the quality of a literary work! How do you like, for example, Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova (1956):

“You need to know your past well in order to prepare the future, help develop good traditions and not repeat previous mistakes and crimes. But you cannot manipulate history by creating new nationalist myths. History should not be a burden or a bad adviser who will justify any violence. It must speak truth and serve progress". (p. 110)

I think you have already been able to see how Jacques Le Goff himself follows the principle he set out that history “must tell the truth.” But I saved the most interesting for second part of this post, in which the French historian tells about the role of Russia in European history of the twentieth century.

So, to be continued.
Sergey Vorobiev.

"Another Middle Ages" is a collection of essays reflecting various aspects of medieval life and mentality. The Middle Ages are different, not only because Le Goff refuses to consider it a “barren period of history.” It is different thanks to the approach of the author himself, who chooses for his research unexpected angles of the topics studied, it would seem, along and across. Peasants, universities, monks, labor and craft - all these are already common places in medieval studies. Le Goff manages to be original here too: he talks about peasants in the context of literature of the early Middle Ages, where these peasants are simply... absent; studies not the place of the university in society, but how the university itself understood itself in it; among numerous clerics he chooses Saint Marcel with his dragon; in search of information about professions and crafts, he searches medieval manuals for confessors. This is what Le Goff is all about: his learning and awareness are so high that he is bored by taking on more obvious topics. But, unfortunately, this does not always seem to be as undoubted an advantage as when choosing non-trivial issues for study.

I'll start with something pleasant. Firstly, Le Goff really reveals the world of the Middle Ages, filled with life. This period was not timeless - “it gave birth to a city, a nation, a state, universities, machines and mills, clocks and time, a book, a fork, underwear, personality, consciousness and, finally, a revolution.” The Middle Ages, contrary to popular belief, was not at all a dark failure of history. On the contrary, it is a necessary link of times, as, one must assume, any era. Secondly, the author’s thoughts on the topic of professions are very interesting: honest and dishonest, respected and shameful. In addition to the predictable moneylenders and prostitutes, the medieval list of despised professions included today's more than respected surgeons (taboo on blood) and today's fashionable cooks (taboo on uncleanliness). The main thing here is not even the information painstakingly extracted from ancient manuscripts, but the tools that help to understand the mentality of medieval man and the reasons for its slow but steady change. Thirdly, Le Goff’s folklore and fairy-tale essays exude great charm. Saint Marcel and his dragon are such a delight. The author's academic seriousness is especially touching when listing famous saints and their cute pets. The snake woman Melusine is less catchy, but there is a different interest here: you can easily find a familiar structure in the much closer fairy tale about the Frog Princess.

Now about what I didn't like. Le Goff is often highbrow to the point of oblivion. Complexity is his strong point, many cumbersome sentences overloaded with explanations, parentheses, various “however,” “on the other hand,” and “in any case.” Sometimes one gets the impression that the author is conducting an interesting dialogue exclusively with himself and for himself (I fully admit that this is so and this is normal). More than once I caught myself thinking that the words seemed to be all familiar and understandable, but the meaning was slipping away. It would not hurt to slightly clear the text of almost metaphysical reasoning and add clarity of presentation. There were also a few disappointing essays. For example, “Dreams in the culture and collective psychology of the medieval West” is such a loud and promising title, but the text is 3 pages long, and even that is meager and inarticulate.

Bottom line: sometimes unexpected, sometimes useful and often yawningly highbrow.

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Compiler of the book series “The Formation of Europe” about European history.

Scientific interests and position

A specialist in the 13th century, author of biographies of Louis IX of Saint and Francis of Assisi. The agnostic Le Goff takes a neutral position between religious apology and atheistic criticism of the Middle Ages. A supporter of the concept of the Middle Ages as a special civilization, different from both ancient and modern European ones.

Bibliography

• Faut-il vraiment découper l"histoire en tranches?, ed. Seuil, 2014
• À la recherche du temps sacré, Jacques de Voragine et la Légende dorée, Paris, Perrin, 2011
• Le Moyen Âge et l'argent: Essai d'anthropologie historique, Paris, Perrin, 2010

• Avec Hanka, Gallimard, 2008
• L'Europe expliquée aux jeunes, Seuil, 2007
• Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Âge, Paris, PUF, 2006
• Héros et merveilles du Moyen-âge, Seuil, 2005

• Un long Moyen Âge, Paris, Tallandier, 2004, ISBN 2-84734-179-X
• Héros du Moyen Âge, Le roi, le saint, au Moyen Âge, Gallimard Quarto, 2004
• À la recherche du Moyen Âge, Louis Audibert, 2003
• Une histoire du corps au Moyen Âge(avec Nicolas Truong), Liana Levi, 2003

• Le Dieu du Moyen Âge Bayard, 2003
• L'Europe est-elle née au Moyen Âge?, Seuil, 2003

• De la pertinence de mettre une œuvre contemporaine dans un lieu chargé d’histoire, Le Pérégrinateur, 2003
• Cinq personnages d'hier pour aujourd'hui: Bouddha, Abélard, saint François, Michelet, Bloch, La Fabrique, 2001
• Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Âge, PUF, 2001
• Le sacre royal à l'époque de Saint-Louis Gallimard, 2001
• Un Moyen Âge en images, Hazan, 2000
• Dictionnaire raisonné de l'Occident médiéval(en collaboration avec Jean-Claude Schmidt), Fayard, 1999
• Saint François d'Assise, Gallimard, collection "à voix haute", 1999 (CD)
• Un autre Moyen Âge, Gallimard, 1999
• Le Moyen Âge aujourd'hui, Leopard d'Or, 1998
• La bourse et la vie, Hachette Litteratures, 1986
• Pour l'amour des villes(en collaboration avec Jean Lebrun), Textuel, 1997
• La civilization de l'Occident Médiéval, Flammarion, 1997

• Une vie pour l'histoire(entretiens avec Marc Heurgon), La Découverte, 1996
• L'Europe racontée aux jeunes, Seuil, 1996

• Saint Louis, Gallimard, 1995

• L'Homme Medieval(dir.), Seuil, 1994
• La vieille Europe et la notre, Seuil, 1994
• Le XIIIe siècle: l’apogée de la chrétienté, Bordas, 1992
• Gallard, passeport 91-92: une œuvre d’art à la rencontre de…, Fragments, 1992
• Histoire de la France religieuse(dir., avec René Rémond), 4 volumes, Seuil, 1988-1992
• L'État et les pouvoirs, (dir.), Seuil, 1989
• Histoire et mémoire, Gallimard, 1988
• Faire de l'histoire(dir., avec Pierre Nora), 3 volumes, Gallimard, 1986
• Intellectuels français, intellectuels hongrois, XIIe-XXe siècle, Editions du CNRS, 1986
• Crise de l'urbain, futur de la ville: acts, Economica, 1986
• L'imaginaire medieval Gallimard, 1985
• La naissance du purgatoire, Gallimard, 1981

• La nouvelle histoire(en collaboration avec Jacques Revel), Editions Retz, 1978
• Pour un autre Moyen Âge, Gallimard, 1977

• Les propos de Saint Louis, Gallimard, 1974
• Hérésie et sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle, XIe-XVIIIe siècle: communications et débats du colloque de Royaumont, EHESS, 1968
• Marchands et banquiers au Moyen Âge Le Seuil, 1957
• Les intellectuels au Moyen Âge Le Seuil, 1957

Translations

• (co-authored with Nicolas Truon)

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Excerpt characterizing Le Goff, Jacques

Historical science in our country is experiencing a deep and protracted crisis. Its reasons are manifold. For decades, Soviet historians were under the constant and vigilant control of totalitarian party-state inquisitors, control that seriously limited and often excluded independent scientific research. Free thought was suppressed and persecuted, archives were closed, acquaintance with the latest foreign scientific literature was significantly difficult both due to the imprisonment of a considerable part of it in the notorious “special depositories”, and due to the fact that our libraries, poor in currency, were deprived of the opportunity to receive new publications in proper volume. The works of “bourgeois historians” were almost never translated into Russian. International scientific cooperation was reduced to a minimum and acquired such ugly forms that the bulk of domestic historians were practically cut off from world historical science. All this doomed them to provincial backwardness. Those scientific schools of historians that were still preserved in the first post-war years collapsed.

But the matter was by no means reduced to external obstacles. The main thing that prevented our historians from reaching the level of world scientific standards was internal, organic obstacles. The monopoly of Marxism, moreover, understood narrowly dogmatically, in a simplifying Leninist-Stalinist interpretation, left an indelible imprint on historical thought. Many historians saw their task in illustrating the theses of historical materialism, and not at all in obtaining objective new knowledge of living history. The theoretical schemes that guided historians were narrow and one-sided. The teaching of history was structured accordingly - both in general education and in higher education. The result is a deeply distorted historical consciousness of society. True knowledge has been replaced by myths. All these are symptoms of a deep illness of social consciousness, for without an open view of history it is doomed to remain distorted. Without knowing the past, it is impossible to navigate the present correctly or plan the future.

Overcoming backwardness and sectarian isolation is just as difficult as getting rid of old stereotypes. In conditions of a deep, landslide crisis of Marxism, on which the thought of Soviet social scientists was slavishly dependent, it is necessary to turn again to understanding the epistemological problems of history, to freely and impartially discuss the general and special methods of historical science. The main task in this regard, in my opinion, is to master the huge research “backlog” of modern world historiography. Our historians, as well as the entire reading society, need to finally get acquainted with all that valuable that has been created in the field of historical knowledge over the past decades.

And a lot has been created. Among the areas of historiography that are recognized by scientists, the French “new historical science” (La Nouvelle Histoire) occupies a special place. In fact, it is no longer new at all - it has passed the sixth decade of its existence. It is new - according to the principles of research, according to the epistemology it developed, and according to the problems it develops. At the origins of this scientific movement stood two great historians of the 20th century. Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. In 1929 they founded a historical journal, now called “Annals. Economies, societies, civilizations" (“Annales. Economies. Societes. Civilisations”). This was an event that had a huge impact on the further development of historical science in France, and then in other countries, and therefore the “new historical science” is often called the “Annals school”, although the “Annalists” themselves prefer to talk not about the “school ", which presupposes adherence to certain scientific canons and a unified methodology, but about the "spirit of the Annals."

In place of narrative historical writing, which slavishly followed historical texts and focused on reconstructing the course of political events, Febvre and Blok put forward the principle of “history is a problem.” The historian formulates the problem and, in the light of it, selects those monuments, the analysis of which can serve as a source of knowledge on this problem. The problems of history are dictated by modernity to the researcher; but she dictates them to him not in some opportunistic, momentary sense, but in the sense that the historian asks the past those questions that are essential for modernity and the asking of which makes it possible to initiate a productive dialogue with people of another era.

Thus, the path of studying history does not go from the past to the present, but on the contrary - from the present to the past. Thus, Blok and Febvre emphasized the importance of the researcher’s creative activity. In a sense, he "creates" his sources. What does this mean? A monument of the past, a text or material remains are in themselves mute and uninformative. They become historical sources only insofar as they are included by the historian in the sphere of his analysis, insofar as appropriate questions are asked of them, and insofar as the historian has been able to develop principles for their analysis. Putting forward new problems of historical research, the founders of the “Annals” turned to categories of monuments that had remained little studied or not studied at all before them, and, most importantly, they re-approached the study of monuments that were already in scientific circulation. In the laboratories of the founders of the Annals and their followers, the source base of history has undergone significant updating and expansion.

Having substantiated the new principles of historical research, the creators of the Annals brought to the fore the creative activity of the historian. The revision of the methods of historical science they carried out was rightfully subsequently regarded as a “Copernican revolution”, as a “revolution in historical knowledge”.

Blok and Febvre emphasized: modernity should not “overwhelm” history; a historian asking people of the past in no way imposes answers on them - he listens carefully to their voice and tries to reconstruct their social and spiritual world. I repeat: the study of history is nothing more than a dialogue between modernity and the past, a dialogue in which the historian turns to the creator of the monument he is studying, be it a chronicle, a poem, a legal document, a tool or the configuration of an arable field. In order to understand the meaning of a statement contained in a historical source, that is, to correctly decipher the message of its author, one must proceed not from the idea that people have always, throughout history, thought and felt the same way, just as we ourselves feel and think, but on the contrary , incomparably more productive is the hypothesis that the historical source captures a different consciousness, that before us is the “Other”.

Having uttered this word, we thereby approached the very essence of the work of the author of “The Civilization of the Medieval West.” For the pathos of Jacques Le Goff’s diverse scientific interests lies precisely in the study of the problem: what was man like in a distant era of history, what is the secret of his originality, the dissimilarity from us of the one who was our predecessor? The book offered to the reader was written more than a quarter of a century ago, in the early 60s. But he also concludes the article, published in 1972, with the words that the historian, like the ethnologist, must “recognize the other,” and adds: “and show respect for him.” And more recently, in the 80s, the collective work “The Man of the Middle Ages”, published on the initiative and edited by Le Goff, is devoted to the same problem.

But who is this “Other”? In his first book, “The Intellectuals of the Middle Ages,” Le Goff gives an outline of the history of those people of the medieval era who devoted themselves to mental activity - scientists - monks and clergy, and then laymen, theologians and philosophers, university professors. However, in the future he focuses his attention not so much on the educated elite (although he does not stop studying their work, because through him, in fact, the historian is only able to study the Middle Ages, an era when the majority remained illiterate), but on the “everyday person” (l` homme quotation). This “simpleton”, “ordinary man”, who did not know Latin and lived in the element of oral culture, was perceived as “other” in that era: learned people treated him with condescension and suspicion, because his morals and beliefs (“superstitions” ), the behavior and appearance of this idiota did not meet the standards of the elite. The historian's attention should be directed to discovering what Caesar and the last soldier in his legions had in common, Saint Louis and the peasant who toiled in his domain, Columbus and the sailor on his caravels. With this approach, the historian has to work using the methods of “archeopsychology,” getting to the bottom of hidden meanings and meanings. Here the study of inertial forces in history, traditions, and habits of consciousness becomes especially significant.

Le Goff's focus is on mass consciousness, collective ideas, and the image of the world that dominated the masses of society. Like many other representatives of the “new historical science,” Le Goff is a historian of mentalities (whisperlites), not clearly formulated and not fully conscious (or not at all conscious) ways of thinking, sometimes devoid of logic mental images that are inherent in a given era or a particular social group. These ways of orientation in the social and natural world represent a kind of automatisms of thought; people use them without thinking about them and without noticing them, like Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain, who spoke in prose without realizing its existence. Value systems are not always and not fully formulated by moralists or preachers - they can be implicit in human behavior without being reduced to a coherent and thoughtful moral code. But these extra-personal attitudes of consciousness are all the more compulsory in nature because they are not realized. The history of mentalities is the history of “slowdowns in history.”

Until recently, historians did not pay attention to mentality, imagining that spiritual life is exhausted by philosophical, religious, political, aesthetic doctrines and that the content of the ideas of thinkers and theorists can supposedly be extended to the entire society. Meanwhile, the truth is that these ideas and teachings remain the property of the intellectual elite, and to the extent that they are introduced into the minds of the masses, they are inevitably processed, transformed, and often beyond recognition. In this sense, we can talk about the “social history of ideas”: they fall on a certain mental soil and are perceived in accordance with the content of the mentality of certain strata of society. Moreover, the mental attitudes of the social environment of their creators take an active part in the genesis of the doctrines themselves. Thus, ideas influence mental attitudes, and these in turn exert their influence on them.

Ideas represent only the visible part of the “iceberg” of the spiritual life of society. The image of the world, given by language, tradition, education, religious ideas, and the entire social practice of people, is a stable formation that changes slowly and gradually, imperceptibly for those who possess it. One can imagine a person devoid of a certain worldview, but not an individual who would not have an image of the world, albeit ill-conceived and unconscious, but powerfully determining (in particular, precisely due to its unconsciousness) the actions of the individual, all his behavior.

The study of mentalities is a great achievement of the “new historical science”, which opened up a new dimension of history, a path to understanding the consciousness of the “silent majority” of society, those people who form its basis, but who, in fact, were excluded from history. They were expelled from it twice. For the first time - by medieval authors, who focused all their attention on the “powers of this world”, monarchs, aristocrats, educated (the people appear in their works mainly in the guise of the mob, following the heroes of the foreground or senselessly and godlessly rebelling against them, but in any case of being deprived of one's own voice). For the second time, this “silent majority” was excluded from history by modern scholars, who trusted the sources created by the educated, and imagined that these people on the street, nameless workers of the village and city, were indeed deprived of their own view of the world and lived exclusively vulgarized and simplified “leftovers” from the banquet table of intellectuals.

Le Goff showed that there are historical sources from which, despite all the “resistance of the material,” it is nevertheless possible to extract valuable information about the “common man” of the Middle Ages, about his worldview and emotionality - you just need to correctly pose the problem and develop an adequate research methodology. The problem of blocking by the learned culture and the written tradition, monopolized by the educated, the cultural traditions of the people and oral folklore, as well as the problem of the interaction of both traditions in the general context of medieval culture, is one of the central topics of research by Le Goff and his students.

The study of the history of mentalities, begun by Blok and Febvre in the 30s and 40s. and continued since the 60s. Georges Duby, Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie, Jacques Le Goff and other medievalists and “modernists”, opened the way to a more in-depth study of history and marked a great victory for the principle of historicism.

Jacques Le Goff was born into the family of an English teacher in Toulon in 1924. In his own words, the upbringing he received as a child later played a role in determining his interests as a historian. His father's anti-clericalism and his mother's fear-of-hell piety determined his negative attitude toward religion and his greater interest in the study of religious imagination and feeling rather than in theology as such. He admits that even as a child he experienced something similar to structuralist inclinations ("children's prestructuralism") when meditating on fairy tales and legends, and this early experience prepared his later interest in the work of LéviStrauss. In history, writes Le Goff, he is inclined not so much to plot and narration, but to ordering and explanation, to the search for deep and long-term processes. Le Goff emphasizes the liberating influence of Marx's ideas that he experienced in his youth, liberating him from positivism. Sympathizing with the socialists, he is not closely associated with politics, but at the same time emphasizes: “I want to be a citizen in order to be a good historian, and to be a man of my time, in order to be more fully absorbed in the past.”

A follower of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, Le Goff, as a student, was influenced by the lectures of Maurice Lombard and absorbed Fernand Braudel's ideas about “time of great duration.” He realized early on that a historian cannot limit himself only to knowledge of the historical “craft”; multidisciplinary approaches are needed that would give him the opportunity to explore the phenomena of spiritual life in connection with social structures. The French anthropological school, from Marcel Mauss to Claude Levi-Strauss, offered him a new questionnaire with which he turns to historical sources and new methods for studying them. He received lessons in the comparative method from the works of Bloch and Dumezil.

In his autobiographical essay entitled “An Appetite for History,” Le Goff notes that the “ethereal history of ideas” is alien to him; like Blok, he strives to study spiritual life at the level of the masses and focus on their mentalities (without in any way reducing the history of society to the history of mentalities, because, as he put it, “while societies dream, the historian must remain awake"!) and latent value systems. “I have always preferred human beings to abstractions, but the historian is unable to understand them except in the depths of the historical systems in which they lived. History is all about this interaction of structures with people over time.”

His approach to the study of French history is, he claims, that of a consistent “Europeanist,” a pan-European approach. The peoples on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Le Goff wrote in 1986, also belong to Europe; history, he is convinced, will lead them to liberation, and “the current tyrants will end up in the dustbin of history.” His prophecy came true almost immediately! One cannot ignore Le Goff’s close connections with historians of Poland, the Czechoslovak Republic, our country, and his keen interest in the work of scientists from Eastern Europe. Together with a number of his colleagues, he took part in an international conference dedicated to the “Annals School”; it took place in Moscow in the fall of 1989 and marked the beginning of cooperation between historians of France and our country.

As for his scientific and pedagogical “career,” Le Goff rejected the routine path for a French scientist: he did not want to prepare a plump doctoral dissertation that would meet the university canons of a professional “masterpiece” filled with ostentatious erudition and scientific apparatus, and preferred to write books and articles in which he poses and explores new problems of historical knowledge. These problems are also the focus of attention in those published in the 70s. under his editorship, collective works in which the experience of the “new historical science” was generalized and systematized.

Since 1969, Le Goff has been a member of the editorial board of the Annals. In 1972–1977 - President of the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences, its third head after Febvre and Braudel. He leads the school's group studying the historical anthropology of the medieval West.

This tall, heavyset man with big, kind eyes and an invariable pipe in his mouth is one of the greatest medievalists of our time.

The Civilization of the Medieval West is Le Goff's first major monograph. However, a general outline of medieval culture was prepared by a number of previous studies by the scientist. Among them, it is necessary to highlight, first of all, his articles on the “time of the church” and “the time of the merchants” and on the transition in the West from the medieval perception of time to the perception characteristic of the subsequent era. In these articles, Le Goff addresses the problem of the perception of time by people of the Middle Ages. Historians had written about the unique attitude to time in that era before him. In particular, Blok noted the “indifference” of medieval people to time. They showed no interest in accurately counting it, determining the hours of the day by the position of the sun in the sky and being content with a sundial or hourglass. The hagiography indicated the day of the saint’s death, since it was celebrated as a church holiday, but did not know either his birthday or age. But people sometimes did not know exactly their own age. The same approximation that was generally inherent in that era in relation to number and measure was manifested here. They poorly distinguished or even merged the past, present and future into a single continuum. Time was not valued, because the time of mortal earthly life lost its significance against the background of eternity, towards which religious consciousness was directed. The dominant concept of time was liturgical, dictated by religion.

Le Goff also notes these features of attitudes in relation to time, but interprets the problem of time in a new key. Time is not just one aspect of mentality, it was a tool of social control. This control belonged to the church. Parts of the day were marked by the ringing of bells; the church established days of labor and holidays on which work was prohibited; she dictated on which days it was necessary to fast and when it was forbidden to have sex. Time was considered the property of God, not man, and therefore among the main arguments used by theologians and preachers to condemn usury was this: the usurer receives income from the money he lent without working, but relying only on the passage of time, because even when he sleeps , his “oxen”, that is, the money that was put into growth, continues to “plow” - bringing him unjust profit; therefore, he encroaches on the time that belongs to the Creator and is subject to condemnation to hellish torment.

In short, through their monopoly, the clergy temporarily controlled the industrial and family life of the faithful. Therefore, it is understandable that those social groups and religious movements that opposed the domination of the official church put forward their own concepts of time. In contrast to the teaching that the completion of human history will occur in an indefinite future known only to God, the millenarian heretics and chiliasts preached the speedy second coming of Christ and the advent of the Kingdom of God on earth; they “hurried” the end of the world and the Last Judgment. These prophecies expressed social dissatisfaction with the feudal order; under the influence of these prophecies, people renounced property and family ties; some left the world into hermitage or monasteries, while others united in sects that were hostile to the church and did not obey the authorities. Under the sign of such eschatological sentiments, social struggle took place in medieval society.

However, conflicts between heretics and the official church did not go beyond the traditional concept of time as the property of the Creator. Meanwhile, a new force was maturing in medieval European society, which encroached on the church monopoly for a time - entrepreneurs and merchants. The rise of cities, the development of trade and crafts were accompanied by a deep reorientation of the interests and views of the urban population, which perceived nature and its cycles differently, differently from the rural population. A merchant and a craftsman cannot help but value time, the wise use of which gives them income and the opportunity to manage labor more effectively. At the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, mechanical clocks were installed on the towers of cathedrals and town halls in major Western cities. From now on, the passage of time is not chimed by church bells, but by mechanisms symbolizing the independence of the city and its population. “The time of the merchant” as opposed to the “time of the church” - this is how Le Goff formulates the problem.

So, what is new in his study of the attitude of medieval people to time is, first of all, that he considers the perception of time not just as one of many categories of mentality, but as a subject of social analysis. The interpretation of time in a society is controlled by the dominant social and spiritual force in that society, and a change in the balance of social forces leads to a change in attitudes towards time and to the gradual transfer of control over it to new social groups.

Mentality, as Le Goff understands it, is not one of the ways of seeing the world that is inherent in a particular society (Fevre and Bloch already attached great importance to the analysis of the ways people of the era under study perceived the world around them), its study answers not only the question: how did people perceive reality? For this perception and experience formed an integral part of their social behavior. Their mental reactions and the mental images that arose in their consciousness were directly included in their life practice. Thus, the problem of mentalities ceases to be a problem of historical psychology alone and becomes part of social history. The human imagination is considered by Le Goff as the most important aspect of social analysis, enriched by the human dimension.

Thus, Le Goff’s new approach to discussing time as a component of the “model of the world” of medieval people is associated with the new methodology of social research developed by him and a number of other representatives of the “Annals school”. Social history, traditionally understood as the history of societies, classes, estates and social groups, social, industrial relations and conflicts, is enriched by including human subjectivity. The spiritual world of people, the content of which remained the property of historians of literature, religion, art, philosophy, social thought, ethics, usually working separately from historians of society and economics, becomes an integral part of social history, since the experiences of people, their imagination, ideas about nature and society, about God and man, no matter how fantastic they may sometimes be, are included in their life practice; this subjective world, the content of which is transformed under the influence of material existence, at the same time constantly influences the way of thinking of members of social groups, determining their social behavior and coloring it in peculiar tones, specific for each stage of history. Social history in the works of Le Goff, as well as a number of other scientists (Georges Duby, Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie, Roger Chartier, Jean-Claude Schmitt), expands into the field of social psychology, the history of feelings, fantasies and even dreams.

In other words, the sociological abstractness of socio-historical analysis is overcome, and its subject - social groups - is filled with human content. As we see, we are not talking at all about “florishing” social history with psychological portraits or colorful anecdotes; we are talking about an attempt to understand the inner meaning of human behavior of the era under study, to see society not only in its external outlines, but from the inside, to penetrate into the motivations factors in the actions of individuals and groups. After all, people act not only in accordance with the impulses that they receive from the outside world; these impulses are processed in their consciousness (in a broad sense, including their subconscious), and human actions are the result of this most complex processing, which the historian can judge only by the results.

It is in this new approach to socio-historical analysis that I see the “Copernican revolution” that the historians of the “Annals” school produced. Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre called history “the science of man,” about man in society and in time. Modern representatives of the school talk about an anthropological approach to the study of history. He calls the direction of historical research that Le Goff develops “historical anthropology” or “anthropologically oriented history.” Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it “socio-historical anthropology.”

The study of medieval people's relationship to time is only one example of the approach described. In Le Goff's sphere of attention, along with time, there are the most diverse manifestations of the mentalities of the era - the perception of miracles, the value system, the assessment of labor activity and its various types, the attitude of the educated towards the peasantry and their work, laughter in medieval emotional life, the contrast between scientific culture and folklore and folk culture. their interaction, ideas about death and the other world, understanding of social structure and monarchical power and much more. My eyes are wide open at this abundance of topics and their unexpectedness!

Le Goff's role in modern medieval studies can be fully assessed only if we understand that he is, first of all, a pathfinder, a pioneer, a scout of new paths of historical research. In fact, he tirelessly searches for new problems and new angles for studying old problems. Not all of the questions he posed find detailed and comprehensive coverage in his own works, but the important thing is that he boldly poses them, attracting the attention of historians. It may seem that he is scattered. But, in my opinion, this is not so. Whatever aspect of social life Le Goff touches on, he is essentially occupied with the same thing: he is Diogenes in search of man. He is invariably faithful to the principles of the socio-anthropological approach.

It is these principles that form the basis for Le Goff’s study of the problem of folk, or “folklore,” culture, which is new to historians. The scientific relevance of the problem is indirectly confirmed by the fact that simultaneously and independently of each other this problem was posed in French and Russian science. Apparently, in the modern world some incentives, new interests have arisen, which dictated Le Goff and M. M. Bakhtin to turn to this topic.

Bakhtin came to it as a result of a new reading of Rabelais's novel, in which he found a powerful layer of unofficial folk culture - in his opinion, far from the official religious ideology and invariably hostile to it. The opposition between official and folk cultures, in Bakhtin’s view, is precisely the opposition of ideology and mentality: the scientific culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which denies or devalues ​​the earthly world, is thoroughly ideological, theological and motionless to the point of frozenness, while folk culture is extremely relaxed, fluid and expresses unformulated explicitly mental attitudes, completely devoid of one-sided seriousness; This is a culture of laughter, carnival, fearlessness, rejecting and conquering death - in contrast to the official ideology based on fear and intimidation. The playful nature of Rabelais's novel, reflecting the carnival-ludicrous mood of the time of its creation, Bakhtin extrapolates to the entire previous era; he believes that laughter culture can be traced back to archaic times. Popular culture, obscured by the official façade of the dominant scientific culture, breaks to the surface during the Renaissance and enters the “big” literature.

Le Goff is not inclined to such extrapolations and does not build a comprehensive model of popular culture. He studies its specific manifestations during the early and high Middle Ages and, not limiting himself, like Bakhtin, to stating the confrontation between two cultures, he pays special attention to the processes of interaction between scientific and folk cultural traditions. Thus, antagonism was combined with interaction, mutual borrowing and “acculturation.” The Church, which treated folklore with suspicion or open hostility, at the same time tried to adapt some of its elements to official ideology and ritual. She sought a common language with the mass of believers; without this, the shepherds would not have been able to lead their flock. Le Goff and his students strive to uncover the mechanisms of this interaction between both cultural traditions. In those genres of church literature that were addressed to believers and, accordingly, used a system of images and concepts accessible to the consciousness of the uneducated and not initiated into the subtleties of theology - in the lives and legends of saints, in sermons, in moralizing “examples” (exempla), in “visions,” one can hear the voice of ordinary Christians, of course reflected and muffled, partly even distorted.

These indirect methods make it possible to get somewhat closer to the level of popular consciousness. In the now named genres of church literature, one can identify significant features of the medieval picture of the world, usually escaping the field of view of historians who study the esoteric creativity of the “highbrows.” The people acquire their own language, although it can only be heard with the help of sophisticated research techniques, because such phenomena do not lie on the surface of the sources.

Silences and pronunciations of sources, caused by the peculiarities of the worldview and vision of the world of their authors, acquire special significance in the context of the study of folk culture. For example, Le Goff shows that the peasantry as the main producing stratum of society, which appeared in late antique Latin literature under the “respectable” name of agricolae (“farmers”), disappeared from historical monuments in the early period of the Middle Ages. But he can be found under a kind of “pseudonyms”: pagani (“pagans”), pauperes (“poor”), rustici (“boobs”). All these designations in one way or another have a pejorative connotation: the peasant is hostile or alien to the true faith, he is socially humiliated (for the term pauper indicated not so much material poverty as subservience to the master), and he is a low, ignorant person of rude disposition; he is “mean,” and this connotation of meaning becomes dominant when in France vilain became a general designation for people of low birth and social status.

It should be noted that the thesis about medieval folk culture was not unanimously supported in historiography. Some authors found this problem to be false and dictated either by Marxist reminiscences or nostalgia for long and irretrievably bygone times, when folklore and folk values ​​were incomparably more important than in an industrial society. Opponents of the idea of ​​popular culture emphasized the fact that throughout most of the Middle Ages the clergy and educated laity maintained a monopoly on writing, and therefore only the point of view of the masters can be found in it. The people are silent and supposedly impossible to hear. According to this point of view, value systems in feudal society were formed almost exclusively at its top and then spread to other levels.

Research by Le Goff and other scientists showed their opponents were wrong. Despite the specificity of the sources, one can find in them indications of that layer of culture that was not completely absorbed or suppressed by the official ideology. The latter perceived certain impulses coming “from below,” and the interaction of different pictures of the world ultimately determined the uniqueness of medieval culture as a kind of internally contradictory integrity. In particular, in the 13th century, which, according to Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt, was the century of the “sounding word,” oral tradition comes to the surface with particular force and can be studied by historians.

But another objection was also put forward: how to define the very concept of “folk culture”? Do the people include only the lower classes, as opposed to the knighthood and clergy? Does “folk culture” represent folklore, the creativity of the nameless masses, or is it a culture created by learned people for the people? The concept of “folk culture” is indeed vulnerable and vague to the point of ambiguity. Le Goff acknowledges this, but maintains the belief that the problem of popular culture nevertheless has considerable heuristic value.

And one cannot but agree with this. It should be noted that the concepts of historical science (and other humanities), as a rule, are vague and ambiguous and need clarification in the context of a specific study. As for “folk culture,” I would say that it acquires its meaning provided that we agree not only on the content of the concept “people,” but also on what, in fact, we mean by “culture.” If we adhere to the traditional, generally accepted understanding of culture as the totality of spiritual achievements of individual creativity in the field of literature, art, music, religion, philosophy, then a modest and subordinate place will remain for folk culture. But Le Goff and other scholars working on problems of popular culture are guided by a clearly different model. It was borrowed from ethnologists and cultural anthropologists. Here “culture” is a way of human existence, a system of worldview, a set of pictures of the world that are clearly or latently present in the minds of members of society and determine their social behavior. “Culture” in this understanding primarily involves patterns of human behavior.

This formulation of the question radically changes the entire vision of culture. Indeed, with the mentioned traditional approach to it, culture is divided into different sciences; it is dealt with in the history of religion and the history of philosophy, philology and history of art and other separate disciplines. Meanwhile, the cultural-anthropological approach is aimed at comprehending the whole, and individual aspects of culture for it are nothing more than epiphenomena of this whole. Not only that, culture is traditionally viewed in isolation from social life (for no spells about the dependence of the “superstructure” on the “base” explain anything), and remains an independent and self-reproducing entity. On the contrary, the pathos of the anthropological approach to culture is to build a holistic (but not at all contradictory) socio-cultural model that would explain this totality. This approach has already been mentioned above, and here it only needs to be emphasized that the concept of “folk culture” is important primarily in the above-mentioned formulation of the question in terms of sociohistorical anthropology.

However, it seems to me that there is another important aspect to the “folk culture/scholarly culture” problem. Opponents of the theory of “folk culture” are right in the sense that it is indeed sometimes very difficult to isolate both hypostases of culture - popular (“folklore”) and scientific, they are so closely and inextricably intertwined. I believe that along with the “distribution” of values ​​in accordance with the social or educational status of the bearers of culture, another hypothesis must be assumed, namely: in the consciousness of any member of society, different levels coexisted, and if one of them corresponds to what historians qualify as “ scientific" culture, then at another level of the same consciousness one can find elements of "folk" culture. Thus, in the didactic “exempla”, or “visions” of the other world, folklore motifs appear and there are models of mythological consciousness - but these works were written by clergy. In the formulas of blessings and curses, which throughout the Middle Ages were used by the clergy in a variety of situations, including the blessing of crops and livestock, tools and holy water, or the excommunication of a heretic and the expulsion of insects, birds or animals that harm people, Christian and non-Christian motives are intricately intertwined. What cultural tradition do they belong to? Apparently, to both.

Human consciousness is not a monolith, it is multi-level, and educated monks and clerics were not at all alien to the ideas and beliefs that were generated by folk consciousness. In other words, when distinguishing between “scientific” and “folklore” traditions in medieval culture, one should not lose sight of the fact that they not only opposed one another, but were also attributes (in different “proportions” and combinations) of the same consciousness.

We were introduced to some aspects of Le Goff's scientific methodology. Its originality is also evidenced by his approach to the periodization of the history of the Middle Ages. In the book “The Civilization of the Medieval West,” he still adhered to the scheme familiar to Western historiography and completed the presentation with the 14th century. But then he puts forward the concept of the “long Middle Ages.” It begins, in his opinion, in the first centuries of the Christian calendar and lasts until the end of the 18th or, more often, the beginning of the 19th century. Of course, this huge era is not monolithic, it is divided by significant shifts and turning points (about the year 1000, 1200, 1500, 1680), which can be conventionally designated respectively as the “rise of the West”, “the descent of values ​​from heaven to earth”, “secularization” history”, “the birth of the idea of ​​progress”.

How to explain such a “stretching” of the Middle Ages not only during the Renaissance, but also during the Baroque and even the Enlightenment? Le Goff notes that if relatively recently the tone for understanding the historical destinies of medieval Europe was set by historians who studied cities and trade, the rise of the burghers and the emergence of the bourgeoisie, now the contribution of agrarian historians who studied the countryside and peasantry seems more significant. The thought of urban historians was oriented by the idea of ​​progress to highlight the sprouts of modern society that arose in the depths of the feudal system, while specialists in the history of the rural Middle Ages rather concentrated their attention on the features of the era, regardless of the future. The former emphasized the dynamism of development inherent in the urban economy, while agrarians deal with more conservative and traditional structures.

The village, according to Le Goff, dominated the city spiritually. Of course, new theological and philosophical ideas, dialectics and scholasticism, Romanesque and Gothic styles and literature were cultivated in monasteries, palaces and cities with their schools and universities, and, nevertheless, the fundamental models of consciousness, ways of perceiving the world, vision of the world, that “mental tools”, which were used by the bulk of medieval people, were formed in an agrarian society. Their beliefs and habits of mind showed great resistance to change. Is this not where the exceptional conservatism, commitment to antiquity, tendency to stereotypes, fear of innovations that characterized not only peasant life, but also religious and philosophical thought come from?

As for peasant beliefs, it is enough to refer to a case studied by Le Goff’s student J.-C. Schmitt. 13th century monk Etienne de Bourbon encountered the following superstition in the countryside near Lyon: peasant women worshiped Saint Guinefort, who supposedly granted recovery to newborns. In fact, it turned out that Guinefort was a greyhound dog, with which the legend about her saving a child was associated. Etienne de Bourbon strictly prohibited this unholy cult. More than half a millennium passed, and in the 70s. XIX century A Lyon lover of local antiquities found that the inhabitants of the same area still worship Saint Guinefort!

Such is the tenacious stability of folk beliefs and rituals. But behind these “superstitions” lay something different and more significant, from the historian’s point of view - a peculiar picture of the world, which dissected reality in its own way: if, according to official Christianity, between a human being and an animal there lies a border as impenetrable as between a person and an angel or a man and a demon, then in the picture of the world of “folk Christianity” these boundaries are violated and the dog may turn out to be a saint.

The idea of ​​a “very long Middle Ages” undoubtedly arose from Le Goff under the influence of Fernand Braudel’s theory of “long time” (la longue duree), which generally had a significant impact on French historiography. Braudel developed the idea of ​​a multiplicity of temporal rhythms that govern development at different levels of historical reality: the very long process of processes in the natural environment of man and in his relations with nature; long cycles of economic change; “nervous”, short period of events in political history. Braudel emphasized the need to include in the field of view of historians not only dynamic changes, but also static states, when history seems to be motionless.

The rhythms of change in spiritual life are very heterogeneous. However, “mentalities are prisons in which time of great duration is enclosed.” If I understand Le Goff’s thought correctly, then, speaking about the “very long Middle Ages,” he meant primarily mentality. Indeed, what a striking contrast will appear to our eyes if we compare the two approaches to the history of culture! Appreciating it from a traditional point of view and focusing on the highest achievements of the human spirit, we will naturally see dynamism. But it is limited, if we talk about the Middle Ages and the first centuries of the Modern Age (XVI-XVIII centuries), mainly and even exclusively by the intellectual elite. In the lower classes, in the broad mass of society, nothing like this is observed. Isn’t it significant that the study of the literature that was distributed among the people in France in the 17th and 18th centuries (the brochures of the so-called “Blue Library” in Troyes) indicates that these popular brochures had nothing to do with the ideas of the Enlightenment and intellectual innovations in general? and the reader of the books of the “Blue Library” remained in the world of fairy tales, legends, chivalric novels, that is, in the Middle Ages. The mentality of the rural population was least subject to radical change. As long as the peasantry remained the basis of society, medieval traditions and behavioral stereotypes remained in force.

But Le Goff is devoid of any nostalgia for the bygone Middle Ages and emphasizes that he is by no means inclined to replace the “black legend” of this era with a “golden legend.” It was, in his words, “an era of violence and hunger (or its threat), epidemics, doubts, the dominance of “authorities” and hierarchies, an era only at the end of which freedom arises, but at the same time an era of high creative creativity and ingenuity, gradually mastering space and time."

The medieval image of the world is based on religion, and it is natural that ideas about death and the afterlife occupied a huge place in this worldview system. Throughout the 60-80s. “New historical science” has created a large number of works devoted to this problem. Le Goff's largest work is called "The Birth of Purgatory." He raises the question of how in Western Christianity there was a transition from a dualistic model of the other world (hell and heaven) to a ternary model (hell - purgatory - heaven). Why did purgatory appear on the map of the afterlife, a place where the souls of sinners are subjected to torment, but not forever, as in hell, but for a certain period of time, after which the gates of heaven open before them? The question that occupied theologians and church historians was posed by a historian of mentalities and social relations.

Le Goff considers this issue in an extremely broad context. The rise of cities and the development of urban populations led to significantly new spiritual orientations. The intellectual exploration of time and space, the increased desire for accuracy, and the growing need for education and knowledge have changed the picture of the world. The value system of these new social strata began to reorient “from heaven to earth.” At the same time, the townspeople associated with the money economy felt the need to reconsider their relations with the other world. After all, rich people, and especially moneylenders, were inevitably threatened with hell. The emergence of the idea of ​​purgatory gave them hope for salvation: having atone for their earthly sins with torment, they could earn God’s forgiveness and avoid fiery Gehenna.

Le Goff shows how the “topography” of the underworld, which had remained unchanged for more than a thousand years, was revised by Parisian theologians in the 1980s. XII century. In church literature, before, from time to time, “purifying fire” was mentioned, burning in some compartments of hell; now, for the first time in medieval texts, the noun purgatorium appears, and the emergence of the term, according to Le Goff, is an important symptom that indicates the establishment of a new concept in the minds. Over the next century, the idea of ​​purgatory spread rapidly, and in the middle of the 13th century. The papacy accepts the dogma of purgatory.

Thus, the essence of Le Goff's concept, if expressed in the most succinct way, is that changes in the production and social structure of the West served as the basis and stimulus for a new development of theological thought, which corresponded to the needs of urban residents engaged in trade, finance and crafts and the needy in the highest justification of these professions. Changes in theology turn out to be associated with changes in society and its mentality and, in turn, favor economic development. I repeat, I have outlined the concept of the book “The Birth of Purgatory” telegraphically briefly, but I hope I have not simplified anything.

An attempt to unite into some kind of semantic unity such distant phenomena as theology and ideas about the other world, on the one hand, and economic and social life, on the other, deserves the most serious attention. This approach was used by Le Goff before when he studied the issue of theologians' assessment of different urban professions.

In this regard, I would like to express the following considerations. Le Goff, as already mentioned, developed as a historian in the 40s and 50s, when Marxism was very influential in France; historians who belonged to the new generation of the “Annals school”, which came to science in those years, experienced his undoubted influence. Rejecting its dogmatic aspects, they adopted a number of concepts and principles of research, which enriched the “new historical science.” Le Goff's approach to the study of mentalities and, in particular, to the problem of the emergence of purgatory, has a Marxist heritage.

At first glance, Le Goff's construction seems convincing. The book draws on insightful analysis of a large number of theological texts. The author never simplifies or “straightens out” the connections between the movement of theological thought and changes in society. However, I have some doubts.

The fact is that purgatory appears in medieval church literature long before the 80s. XII century. It already appears in the “visions” of the early Middle Ages, but does not appear in them as a clearly defined region of the other world. However, in the “visions” (visiones) of that period, the other world is generally depicted vaguely and rather incoherently, as a collection of disparate “places”. So, in the early “visions” purgatory (the term itself, as we know, did not yet exist) appears as a compartment of hell, a compartment from which a purified soul is ultimately able to free itself.

What happened at the end of the 12th century was not the “birth” of purgatory, but rather the formalization of its “legal” existence, recognized by theologians. That vague image of purgatory that appeared from time to time in the early “visions” now receives conceptual clarity and ambiguity. In other words, from the presentiment of believers, purgatory turns into a dogmatically tested compartment of the other world. This is an important, even revolutionary step, but since purgatory had already figured much earlier, there is, in my opinion, no compelling reason to assume that it arose as a result of those intellectual and social changes that we read about in Le Goff's book. The need of believers for hope of salvation is what, one must believe, gave rise to the image of purgatory long before cities and the burghers became an influential social force.

But if this is so, then the history of the dogma can be placed not only in the context of the development of cities and the urban class, but also in the context of the history of popular mentalities. I am not at all inclined to deny the possibility of a connection between the rise of urban culture in the 11th-13th centuries and the formulation of the idea of ​​​​purgatory in the 80s. XII century; There can hardly be any doubt that the Parisian theologians were influenced by the urban environment. But the correlations Le Goff postulated were, in my opinion, more complex. It is strange that Le Goff, the initiator of the study of folk culture, did not pay due attention to this aspect of the matter, although in his book, along with theological texts, “visions” and “lives” were studied. The desire to discover connections between the processes of urban life and the intellectual climate in medieval France is already embodied in his early books about intellectuals and merchants and bankers of the Middle Ages. However, I am afraid that, despite Le Goff’s repeated fair objections to the simplifying “base/superstructure” model, he is sometimes inclined to link the phenomena of religious life and mentality with socio-economic development with excessive straightforwardness.

Explanation remains the most difficult problem of historical science.

I consider it unnecessary to dwell in detail here on the analysis of “The Civilization of the Medieval West” - the book has finally become accessible to the Russian reader, and I am sure he will understand it on his own. Of course, it is very unfortunate that the achievements of foreign historical science come to us with such a delay (if they come at all!), and the impression that Le Goff’s book will make in the early 90s, of course, may not be the same as what it made in mid-60s Back then it was, without exaggeration, stunning. We saw a new picture of the Middle Ages - not traditional, but innovative. This impression is due to the fact that Le Goff chose a new and unexpected angle for research - a look at the life of the medieval era not “from the outside,” but “from the inside.” Using a huge and varied material from monuments, he recreates the image of the world of the people of the Middle Ages. The most interesting thing is that these sources “speaked” in a new way and gave out new information. This happened because Le Goff asked them new questions. “The inquisitive spirit is always at the beginning” - these words of Marc Bloch are fully applicable to Le Goff.

Medieval Europe begins with barbarian invasions that led to the creation of a “new map of the West” and the emergence of new social structures. In them, the old, inherited from Roman antiquity, entered into a synthesis with the new, introduced by the Germans and other “young” peoples. Probably, due to the role that the barbarians played in this synthesis, the author should have taken a closer look at their value systems and ideas about the world. For Christianity, which gradually spread to these peoples, entered into a complex interaction with their paganism, but did not destroy the powerful spiritual potential inherent in it. Evidence of this is the Scandinavian songs about the gods and heroes of the Elder Edda, the heroic poetry of other Germanic peoples, which later gave such masterpieces as the Song of the Nibelungs. Unfortunately, these aspects of medieval culture are almost not at all included in the circle of interests of the representatives of the “Annals school”, who are distinguished by their well-known “Francocentrism”. But insufficient attention to the German world creates, in my opinion, certain “distortions” in the depiction of the spiritual and social life of the West in the Middle Ages.

But the reader of Le Goff’s book receives a detailed picture of the culture of Europe during its heyday in the 10th–13th centuries, the central centuries of the Middle Ages. This culture does not “hang” somewhere, but is based on “spatio-temporal structures”; it is connected with the specific relationship of man to nature, with the material life of society and its constituent groups, and only after Le Goff outlines these starting points “ parameters,” he proceeds to characterize the mentalities of the people who lived in that era.

Le Goff masterfully combines two methods, two approaches to the study of culture: synchronic, aimed at revealing its general picture, all aspects of which are interconnected and form a kind of stable and contradictory system, and diachronic, which makes it possible to trace changes over time. The reader can clearly see the colossal changes that took place in Europe over the course of a millennium, and at the same time be convinced of the difficulty and how unevenly these changes were accomplished. The statics and dynamics of the historical process appear in the book with great clarity, in their interweaving and confrontation...

As an example of historical and anthropological research, the book has not become outdated in a quarter of a century, and when I asked Le Goff which of his works he would prefer to present to Russian readers, he without hesitation named “The Civilization of the Medieval West.” And I guess he was right. I am afraid that our domestic historical science has not produced anything similar, comparable in breadth of coverage and depth of penetration into the essence of the subject. The same books on the history of the Western European Middle Ages that appeared in Russian in the 70s undoubtedly owe their appearance to a greater or lesser extent to this classic work of Le Goff.

Under the influence of Le Goff, many works were created abroad devoted to certain aspects of the medieval picture of the world and mentality. The scientific direction, the origins of which this book stands, is firmly established in historiography. Much of what he discovered became public domain.

The author of this afterword saw his task as introducing domestic readers to the work of Jacques Le Goff and thereby outlining the scientific context in which his book is included. The reader will not fail to notice that in the work on medieval culture, man appears not as homo economicus, or homo religiosus, or homo politicus - not in some one-sided hypostasis, but as a full-blooded individual, a participant in the historical process. The “total” or “global history” of people, members of society, the creation of which Febvre and Blok wrote, finds its embodiment in this work of Jacques Le Goff.

A. Ya. Gurevich October 1991

Franz. 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 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 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.

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 XII-XI-I centuries) // Odysseus. 1991: Man in history. M. , 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