Questions: Mentalities and Structures: Collective Psychologies of the Past

Question 1

Lucien Febvre argued that 16th-century people were psychologically incapable of atheism. What does this claim mean within the mentalité framework?

• A. That 16th-century people consciously believed in God and chose not to doubt
• B. That atheism was illegal and therefore suppressed, not genuinely impossible
• C. That the conceptual tools required to sustain systematic doubt of God's existence were not yet available — atheism was not thinkable, not merely unwilled
• D. That all 16th-century people were psychologically identical and uniformly devout

Answer: (C)

Febvre's claim is not about conscious belief or social pressure — it is about what was cognitively available. Mentalité history examines the collective mental frameworks that define what is thinkable in a given time and place. Febvre argued that 16th-century European culture lacked the philosophical, scientific, and linguistic categories needed to sustain a coherent atheist worldview. The question is not 'did they believe?' but 'could they not-believe?' Option A confuses mentalité with individual piety; option B reduces the claim to social enforcement.

Question 2

A historian wants to understand how ordinary 15th-century French villagers experienced death and the afterlife. Which source type is most consistent with the mentalité approach?

• A. Theological treatises by scholastic philosophers debating the nature of purgatory
• B. Wills, sermons, and burial iconography revealing what anxieties people acted on without articulating
• C. Biographies of prominent clergy and their stated beliefs about salvation
• D. Royal chronicles recording how the aristocracy mourned their dead

Answer: (B)

Mentalité history seeks the unexamined, collective assumptions of ordinary people — what they took for granted without arguing. Theological treatises reflect elite intellectual debate; biographies and chronicles show deliberate positions of prominent individuals. Wills reveal what people feared and valued at death; sermons reveal what anxieties were widespread enough that preachers addressed them repeatedly; iconography shows how a culture visualized death visually rather than argumentatively. These sources capture the unreflective, shared assumptions that mentalité historians prize.

Question 3

The history of mentalities studies what people in the past explicitly believed and argued about — their conscious positions on religion, politics, and social life.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This is a description of intellectual history, not the history of mentalities. Mentalité history examines what people assumed without articulating — the background framework of what seemed 'natural,' 'obvious,' or 'self-evident.' These are precisely the things people do not argue for because they do not occur to them as requiring argument. Intellectual history (especially the Cambridge School approach) focuses on deliberate argumentation by specific actors; mentalité history focuses on collective, unreflective worldviews shared across whole communities or periods.

Question 4

Mentalities operate at the longue durée timescale, meaning they are slow-moving collective frameworks that change over generations rather than in response to individual events.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is a defining feature of the mentalité approach, inherited from the Annales School's commitment to structural over event-based history. A mentalité — such as medieval attitudes toward death, childhood, or the supernatural — is a collective psychology shared by whole communities and typically changes over centuries rather than years. This is both the strength of the approach (revealing patterns invisible to event-focused historians) and its limitation (tending to flatten internal diversity and dissent within a period).

Question 5

Why do historians of mentalities rely on unconventional sources like trial records, wills, and popular images rather than the philosophical and theological texts that intellectual historians typically use?

Model answer: Mentalité historians want to reconstruct what ordinary people assumed without articulating — the background framework of 'obvious' truths. Elite philosophical and theological texts record what trained thinkers argued deliberately, not what masses of people took for granted. Trial records reveal what accusers and accused assumed about the supernatural (without needing to argue it); wills reveal death anxieties that structured behavior; sermons reveal widespread concerns that preachers addressed repeatedly because they were genuinely held; iconography shows how a culture visualized concepts it did not verbalize. These sources document the assumed rather than the argued.

The methodological challenge of mentalité history is that its object — unreflective collective assumptions — is by definition not directly recorded. People do not write down what seems obvious to them. Historians must therefore read obliquely: finding the assumptions embedded in how people acted, litigated, prayed, and depicted their world. This is why Ariès used art-historical evidence about how children were depicted to argue about how childhood was conceptualized — because the depictions record an assumption (children are just small adults) without anyone needing to state it.