Social Mentalities and the case of Medieval Scepticism

Abstract

The history of mentalities has now become so widely accepted that even British historians sometimes refer to it: one hardly needs to talk aboutmentalitésany more, though the French word still sounds more modish. But the subject goes back at least to Vico. AlthoughWeltanschauungandZeitgeistsound old hat by comparison withmentalitésthe words remind us that nineteenth-century German historians were interested in the different ways past societies may have viewed the world, while F. W. Maitland and Henry Adams are obvious examples of Anglophones who in their different ways tried to understand medieval ways of thought. In 1933 Jean Guitton, a Frenchman, it is true, but one who presumably came out of that older tradition of intellectual history against which Lucien Febvre set himself, wrote about the need to study thementalitéof an age and summed up what he meant by this as ‘the totality of those implicit assumptions which are imposed on us by our environment and which rule our judgements.