Volume 36, Number 17 · November 9, 1989
Behind Closed Doors
By Keith Thomas
A History of Private Life Volume III: Passions of the Renaissance
edited by Roger Chartier, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 645 pp., $39.50
In the late 1920s, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the founders of what would soon become known at the Annales school of historians, fired the opening shots of their campaign against traditional historiography. They deliberately rejected what had, since classical times, been regarded as the primary subject matter of history, namely the study of public affairs, wars and diplomacy, politics and administration. To them, this was merely the history of events (l'histoire événementielle), a trivial activity concerned only with the surface of history. In its place, they sought to put the study of enduring structures (la longue durée) and abiding attitudes (mentalités). What mattered were not events, but the deeper structural determinants of human behavior, like the physical habitat in which people lived or the mental assumptions on which they drew.
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