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