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The history of mentalities is a subfield of cultural history that studies the shared, often unspoken assumptions, beliefs, feelings, and modes of perception that shape how people in a given time and place experience the world. Rather than focusing on the ideas of elite thinkers or the events of high politics, it seeks to reconstruct the collective cognitive and emotional frameworks—the mentalités—that underlie everyday thought and action. Its central question is not "What did people think?" but "What were the taken-for-granted categories through which thinking itself was possible?"
The French term mentalité (plural mentalités) resists precise translation. It refers to something broader than "attitude" or "worldview," encompassing the habitual, often unconscious structures of perception and judgment shared by a social group. These structures include assumptions about time, space, nature, the supernatural, the body, childhood, death, and social hierarchy. They are not usually articulated as doctrines; they are the implicit premises that make explicit statements meaningful.
A historian of mentalities might ask why medieval Europeans readily accepted the reality of demonic possession, or why early modern people understood illness as a moral as well as a physical condition, or why eighteenth-century villagers experienced time through the rhythms of the liturgical calendar rather than the clock. The goal is not to judge these beliefs as errors but to understand their internal coherence and the social conditions that made them plausible. The object of study is thus collective rather than individual, habitual rather than reflective, and ordinary rather than exceptional.
The subfield emerged in early twentieth-century France, rooted in the Annales school of historiography, which sought to move history away from the narration of political events toward the analysis of long-term social structures. The founders of the Annales, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, argued that history should engage with the full range of human experience, including the psychological and the emotional. Febvre's 1942 study of the sixteenth-century French author François Rabelais, in which he argued that Rabelais's apparent atheism was anachronistic because the conceptual tools for unbelief did not yet exist, became a foundational demonstration of the approach. Bloch's work on medieval kingship and the "royal touch"—the belief that kings could cure scrofula by touch—similarly explored the collective beliefs that sustained political power.
The term mentalité itself was popularized by Febvre and later given systematic treatment by the historian Georges Duby and, most influentially, by Philippe Ariès and Jacques Le Goff. Ariès's work on childhood and death argued that fundamental human experiences have histories: the modern concept of childhood as a distinct phase of life, and the modern attitude toward death as a private, medicalized event, were not timeless but emerged over centuries. Le Goff, studying the Middle Ages, examined how categories such as "purgatory" or the distinction between "learned" and "popular" culture structured medieval thought.
The subfield reached its peak of influence in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through the work of the historian Robert Mandrou and the multi-volume Histoire de la France project. It was closely associated with the Annales tradition's broader turn toward "serial history"—the quantitative analysis of long runs of data—though the history of mentalities itself often resisted quantification, dealing as it did with qualitative structures of meaning.
The history of mentalities has never been a single, unified method. It has been practiced in several distinct but overlapping ways, each with its own assumptions and limitations.
One major tendency, exemplified by the work of Jean Delumeau and Carlo Ginzburg, treats past mentalities as a form of cultural difference. Drawing on anthropology, this approach approaches past beliefs as one might approach a foreign culture: with an effort to suspend modern assumptions and reconstruct the internal logic of a worldview. Delumeau's studies of fear and guilt in early modern Europe, and Ginzburg's microhistorical study of a sixteenth-century Italian miller, The Cheese and the Worms, both treat their subjects' beliefs as coherent systems rather than as superstitions or errors. This approach is powerful for recovering the experience of ordinary people, but it risks exoticizing the past, making it seem more alien than it was, and it struggles to explain change over time.
A second tendency, associated with the work of Duby and with the later Annales generation, treats mentalities as the collective representations of social groups. Here the focus is on how social structures—class, status, gender, occupation—generate distinct mental frameworks. The medieval "three orders" of society (those who pray, those who fight, those who work) is a classic example: it was not merely a description of social reality but a mental schema that shaped how people understood hierarchy and obligation. This approach connects mentalities to social history, but it can become reductive, implying that mentalities are simply reflections of social position rather than having their own autonomous logic.
From the 1980s onward, the history of mentalities was increasingly criticized and transformed by the "linguistic turn" in the humanities. Scholars influenced by post-structuralism argued that the concept of mentalité was too vague and too psychological, positing a unified collective mind that did not exist. They proposed instead to study "discourse"—the linguistic and textual systems through which reality is constituted. In this view, the historian should not ask what people believed but how language and representation produced the categories through which belief was possible. This approach, associated with figures such as Michel Foucault and Roger Chartier, shifted attention from mental frameworks to textual practices, from collective psychology to the production of meaning. It also introduced a greater sensitivity to power: discourses are not neutral but are shaped by and reinforce social hierarchies.
This transformation was not a clean break. Many historians continued to use the concept of mentalité while incorporating insights from discourse analysis. The relationship between the two approaches is one of tension and overlap: the history of mentalities tends to assume a relatively stable collective subject, while discourse analysis dissolves that subject into the play of language. Yet both share a commitment to understanding the historical contingency of what seems natural or universal.
The history of mentalities as a self-conscious school has largely dissolved, but its concerns have been absorbed and transformed into several contemporary fields. The history of emotions, which studies how emotional norms and experiences have changed over time, is a direct descendant. The history of the body, of childhood, of death, and of religious belief all carry its imprint. The subfield's insistence that the most basic categories of human experience have histories has become a widespread assumption in cultural history.
At the same time, the concept of mentalité itself has been criticized for its imprecision and its tendency to homogenize. Contemporary historians are more likely to speak of "cultural frameworks," "habits of thought," or "regimes of knowledge," and they are more attentive to variation within a society—by gender, class, region, and confession—than the early practitioners were. The influence of global and postcolonial history has also pushed the field beyond its original European focus, asking how mental frameworks are shaped by cross-cultural encounter and colonial power.
The durable contribution of the history of mentalities is its insistence that the human mind is not a constant but a historical artifact. It taught historians to ask not only what people did and said but what they could imagine doing and saying. That question remains central to cultural history, even as the answers have become more complex and the methods more varied.