The history of mentalities (histoire des mentalités) studies how people in the past thought, felt, and understood the world—their collective psychologies, anxieties, and worldviews. Unlike intellectual history focused on elite thinkers, mentalité history examines ordinary consciousness: beliefs about magic, death, sexuality, and authority. This approach reveals what seemed 'natural' or 'obvious' to past people.
Your prerequisite in historiography philosophy gave you the tools to think critically about how historians construct knowledge and what assumptions shape their interpretive frameworks. Your familiarity with the Annales School — if you encountered it — introduced the idea of *longue durée* history focused on slow-moving structures rather than political events. The history of mentalities grows directly from this Annales tradition, taking its commitment to structure and asking: what are the deepest structures of all, the ones that shape not just economies and social arrangements but the very categories through which people perceive the world?
Mentalité — a French term for collective mental framework or worldview — refers to the unexamined assumptions that people in a given time and place shared without articulating them. The medieval peasant who genuinely feared demons, who understood illness as divine punishment, who experienced time as cyclical rather than linear and organized by the liturgical calendar — this person inhabited a mental world so different from our own that even translating their words requires caution. The *histoire des mentalités* approach, associated with historians like Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Georges Duby, and later Philippe Ariès and Michel Vovelle, tried to reconstruct these collective psychologies systematically. Febvre's famous claim that 16th-century people were psychologically incapable of atheism — not because they were stupid, but because the conceptual tools for it were unavailable — is a canonical example of the approach. He was not claiming people consciously believed; he was arguing about what was thinkable.
The sources required for mentalité history are often unconventional. Elite intellectual texts tell you what trained thinkers argued; they don't necessarily tell you what ordinary people assumed. Historians of mentalities turned instead to wills (what did people fear about death?), trial records (what did accusers and accused take for granted about the supernatural?), images and iconography (how did a culture visualize death, the body, the sacred?), sermons (what anxieties did preachers address repeatedly, suggesting they were widespread?), and folklore. Philippe Ariès's history of childhood argued that medieval and early modern people did not recognize childhood as a distinct phase of life with its own psychological character — a claim derived from art historical evidence about how children were depicted. Whether or not every specific claim holds up, the method opened an enormous new range of historical questions.
The relationship to structural history is important. Mentalités are not individual psychology — they are collective frameworks that operate at the level of whole communities or periods and change very slowly, on the longue durée timescale. This is both the approach's strength and its limitation. It reveals patterns invisible to event-focused history, capturing how entire populations understood their world. But it can flatten internal diversity, obscure dissent and heterodoxy, and make past people seem more uniform than they were. The history of mentalities and intellectual history (which you may encounter through the Cambridge School) represent opposite poles: one focuses on shared unreflective assumptions, the other on the deliberate, contested use of ideas by specific actors. Neither alone is sufficient; the most sophisticated historical analysis draws on both.
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