Volume 32, Number 12 · July 18, 1985
Happy Endings
By Natalie Zemon Davis
The Birth of Purgatory
by Jacques Le Goff, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
University of Chicago Press, 624 pp., $25.00
If the Annales School of French historical writing has become influential throughout the world, no small part of this is owing to the exuberant and erudite medievalist Jacques Le Goff. As a successor to the celebrated Fernand Braudel, he presided over the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales between 1972 and 1977, and he has long been a guiding spirit of the widely read Annales. At the same time, in an important series of essays and monographs, he has been showing how the study of mentalités—of cultural forms and categories in their social setting—can point medieval history in new directions.
Review, 3383 words
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