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How did ordinary people in the past make sense of their world? What unspoken assumptions, fears, and habits of thought shaped their daily lives? These questions lie at the heart of the history of mentalities, a subfield that emerged from the conviction that intellectual history—focused on elite ideas—missed the collective mental equipment of the majority. Over the past century, historians have developed eight distinct frameworks to study these shared mental structures, each responding to the limitations of its predecessors and often coexisting in productive tension.
The history of mentalities was born within the Annales school, founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch in 1929. Rejecting the event-driven political history of their day, Annales historians turned to the longue durée—the slow-moving structures of climate, demography, and collective psychology. Febvre’s call for a “history of feelings” and Bloch’s study of royal healing rituals exemplified a new focus on the mental equipment of ordinary people: their categories of time, space, and the supernatural. The Annales mentalities framework treated these collective representations as stable, almost geological layers beneath the surface of events. Its landmark works, such as Febvre’s The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (1942) and Bloch’s The Royal Touch (1924), showed how deeply ingrained mental frameworks could shape political and religious life. Yet by the 1970s, critics argued that this approach risked homogenizing societies, ignoring individual agency, and treating mentalities as static backdrops rather than dynamic, contested arenas.
Two parallel frameworks emerged in the 1970s that broke with the Annales emphasis on large-scale structures. Historical anthropology, pioneered by scholars such as Peter Burke and Natalie Zemon Davis, borrowed methods from ethnography to study rituals, symbols, and everyday practices as active, meaning-making processes. Instead of mapping collective mentalities onto long durations, historical anthropologists focused on how people used cultural categories in specific contexts—for instance, Davis’s analysis of carnival as a site of social inversion. This framework coexisted with microhistory, which took the opposite tack from the Annales aggregate: it zoomed in on a single event, village, or individual to reveal the hidden logic of a past society. Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976) reconstructed the worldview of a sixteenth-century miller, Menocchio, showing how his heretical ideas emerged from a blend of peasant oral culture and printed texts. Where historical anthropology generalized from close observation, microhistory insisted on the exceptional case as a window into broader mental structures. Both frameworks shared a suspicion of the Annales tendency to flatten diversity, but they differed in method: historical anthropology sought typical patterns, while microhistory prized the anomalous as revelatory.
By the 1980s, the history of mentalities had splintered into several specialized branches. The history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte), developed largely by German historians such as Alf Lüdtke, focused on the routines, material conditions, and tacit knowledge of ordinary people—especially workers and peasants under Nazism. Unlike microhistory’s dramatic cases, everyday life historians examined the mundane: how people navigated factory floors, used tools, or organized domestic space. This framework shared microhistory’s interest in the non-elite but emphasized repetitive practice over exceptional events. At the same time, the history of sensibilities, inspired by Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant (1982), turned to the body and the senses. Corbin argued that smells, sounds, and tactile experiences were not merely biological but historically constructed, shaping how people understood pollution, pleasure, and social hierarchy. Sensibilities historians thus extended the mentalities project into the pre-reflective realm of the senses, a domain that earlier frameworks had largely ignored. Cultural memory studies, emerging around 1984 with works by Jan Assmann and Pierre Nora, added another dimension: how societies remember and forget collectively. Nora’s lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) analyzed how national identity was anchored in monuments, rituals, and archives—a form of collective mentality that was actively constructed rather than passively inherited. These three frameworks—everyday life, sensibilities, and memory—did not replace one another but carved out distinct territories: the routine, the sensory, and the commemorative.
Roger Chartier’s Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (1988) introduced a crucial epistemological caution. Chartier argued that historians could never access mentalities directly; they only ever encountered representations—texts, images, rituals—that mediated past worldviews. The history of representations, as he defined it, analyzed how social groups produced and contested these representations, from printed pamphlets to religious iconography. This framework narrowed the ambitions of earlier mentalities history: instead of claiming to reconstruct a collective psyche, it focused on the discursive and visual strategies through which people made sense of their world. Chartier’s approach coexisted with the practice-oriented frameworks (historical anthropology, everyday life) by insisting that representations were not transparent windows onto mentalities but themselves objects of struggle. The history of representations thus became a methodological caution rather than a dominant research program, reminding historians that their sources were never innocent.
The most recent major framework, the history of emotions, emerged around 2001 with William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling. Reddy introduced the concept of “emotional regimes”—the norms and practices that govern emotional expression in a given society—and argued that emotions were not universal biological responses but historically contingent performances shaped by political and cultural pressures. This framework synthesized earlier concerns: from the Annales interest in collective mental structures, it retained the idea of shared emotional styles; from the history of sensibilities, it took the focus on bodily experience; from microhistory, it borrowed attention to individual emotional navigation; and from the history of representations, it adopted a critical stance toward sources (how do we know what people felt?). The history of emotions has since become one of the most dynamic areas in cultural history, with scholars such as Barbara Rosenwein (emotional communities), Jan Plamper, and Ute Frevert exploring how emotions like fear, love, and anger have changed over time. It did not absorb the history of sensibilities—which continues as a distinct tradition, especially in France with the journal Sensibilités (founded 2017)—but rather complemented it: sensibilities historians study the sensory environment, while emotions historians focus on the articulation and regulation of feeling. The two frameworks often overlap, as in studies of disgust or nostalgia, but they maintain different emphases: the sensory versus the affective.
Today, the history of mentalities is no longer a single project but a family of frameworks that coexist in productive disagreement. The most active are historical anthropology, microhistory, cultural memory studies, and the history of emotions. Historical anthropology continues to offer thick descriptions of ritual and practice; microhistory provides powerful case studies that challenge grand narratives; cultural memory studies has expanded into postcolonial and global contexts; and the history of emotions has become a leading framework for understanding political and social change. These frameworks agree that mentalities are historically constructed, that they are best studied through close reading of sources, and that they cannot be reduced to economic or political determinants. They disagree, however, on the scale of analysis (macro vs. micro), the role of the body (sensory vs. emotional), and the transparency of sources (representations as windows vs. representations as screens). The history of mentalities thus remains a vibrant, pluralistic field, united by its founding question—how did people in the past think and feel?—and divided by the methods it uses to answer it.