history of mentalities


history of mentalities

an approach to historical study (as seen, for example, in the work of the French historians Fernand BRAUDEL, 1949, and Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 1978) in which the goal is the historical recovery and reconstruction of the ideas, emotions and mental structures of historical persons, especially the ideas of ordinary persons as well as the great and famous. In the work of Phillipe Aries (1962), the focus is on psychological investigation of the past, i.e. on PSYCHOHISTORY. In the work of Braudel, the mentalities are the mind sets, paradigms and points of view embedded in institutions which give coherence to, and make up the ‘totality’ of, a historical epoch. see also ANNALES SCHOOL.