Loading field map
The history of mentalities emerged as a distinct subfield within Cultural History through the work of the Annales School, which sought to move beyond event-oriented political history. Pioneered by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, this approach focused on reconstructing the collective, often unconscious, attitudes, beliefs, and emotional structures—the mentalités—of past societies over long temporal spans (longue durée). It relied on aggregating diffuse evidence from diverse sources, including folklore, legal records, and iconography, to identify deep-seated, slow-changing psychological frameworks.
The paradigm matured in the second and third generations of Annales scholarship, particularly under historians like Michel Vovelle, who combined the qualitative study of collective attitudes with quantitative serial analysis of documents, such as wills, to trace evolving attitudes toward death. This phase emphasized structuralist underpinnings, viewing mentalities as coherent, collective systems that could be mapped over centuries. However, internal critiques arose regarding the method's potential to homogenize experience and overlook conflict and individual agency within these collective psychological constructs.
A significant revisionist challenge came from Narrativism and Microhistory. Narrativist philosophers of history questioned the possibility of accessing impersonal, collective mental structures through historical evidence, arguing that all historical understanding is mediated through narrative forms. Concurrently, Microhistory, through its intensive case-study method, directly contested the Annales' aggregate approach by demonstrating how individual actions and local contingencies could deviate from or fracture presumed collective mentalities, reintroducing agency and anomaly.
Further critique emerged from poststructuralist and discourse-analytical approaches, which rejected the notion of a stable, underlying mental “structure” accessible to the historian. Instead, they argued that the phenomena studied as mentalities were themselves products of discursive practices and power relations, not transparent windows into a collective psyche. This shifted the focus from reconstructing attitudes to analyzing the linguistic and symbolic formations that constituted them.
The field subsequently evolved into more specialized studies of emotions, sensibilities, and the history of the self, often integrating anthropological and psychological theories. While the classical Annales framework remains a foundational methodological reference, the subfield now operates within a pluralistic landscape where the investigation of collective psychological patterns is balanced by approaches emphasizing representation, performance, and discursive construction.