The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History

Ante el V centenario de las Comunidades: de la cultura política y jurídica en las Cortes de Santiago-La Coruña al parlamentarismo contemporáneo

“…Este cúmulo de percepciones sobre el papel de los procuradores en las Cortes y de los representantes ciudadanos entre las oligarquías locales, ya fuesen élites nobiliarias, ya grupos destacados en las filas del clero conventual o la creciente burguesía comercial, podría comprenderse mejor desde otra perspectiva diferente a la ligada a la ideología y más relacionada con las mentalidades (Hutton, 1980), cual es la cultura política, que lo es de una época más que de un bando. Se emplea el término en su concepción más puramente politológica como disposición psicológica hacia un objeto político (Almond y Verba, 1963), complementaria de una visión más historiográfica (Ranum, 1973).…”

The Recursive Nature of Institutional Change

“…Bloch’s and Febvre’s studies led to a new form of history: a history of mentalities, or the attitudes, values, and beliefs of social groups (Hutton, 1981; Le Goff, 1996). 3 Mentalities are formally defined as “what is distinctive about the thought process and the set of beliefs of groups and societies” (Lloyd, 1990, p. 1).…”

Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Is it Time to Move Beyond Charges of Anachronism?

“…Founded in the late 1920s by Marc Bloch, a medieval scholar, and Lucien Febvre, a sixteenth‐century scholar, the Annales school ambitiously sought to transform the ‘human’ sciences (sociology, anthropology) into a true social science annexing new territories of social experience and, in the process, extending the range of history’s objects of study (not autonomous ‘events’ but rather attitudes toward food, childhood, witchcraft, death, etc.). As histories of the school have often noted, the term mentalités has remained virtually untranslatable – as Patrick Hutton observes, ‘awkward in French and infelicitous in English’ (237). Generally, the term investigated deep trends in collective behavior – the mental tools, sensibilities, collective mindsets, collective consciences, common sets of beliefs, mental scaffoldings, and habits of thought that helped to define the material reality of particular eras in Western Europe (hence, Greenblatt’s interest in collectivities, the ‘communal judgment’ that was the final determination of Martin’s identity).…”