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Paper Abstract: Life, career, theories & major works of 20th Cent. French medievalist. Paper Introduction: Jacques Le Goff, author of Intellectuals in the Middle Ages (1993) and The Medieval Imagination (1988), among many other books and scholarly articles, is one of the most prominent of contemporary French medievalists. Indeed, as editor since 1972 of both Ethnologie Francaise and the historical journal Annales: Economies, societies, civalizations, he may legitimately be called the doyen of French medieval studies at the present date. As such, an evaluation of his work and of its relationship to his background and career is of interest not only in itself, as a discussion of a prominent medievalist, but for what it says about the whole development of medieval studies in recent decades, at least (or especially) in France. The argument of the following essay is that Le Goff's work shows serious defects. These defects extend from his Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Like Roland Barthes, I am prepared to come to fashion's defense. But it should be incumbent upon the historian whowishes to make a lasting contribution to make some effort to transcend thefashions of the day. (1972). Jacques Le Goff, author of Intellectuals in the Middle Ages (1993)and The Medieval Imagination (1988), among many other books and scholarlyarticles, is one of the most prominent of contemporary French medievalists. If events aresimply a froth on the surface of historical forces--if the Avignon Papacyhad nothing to do with the ambitions of the Kings of France, and its endwith the response to those ambitions--then we need not dwell on Churchillor Petain, or on the French Army and the Royal Air Force. can be an instrument of renewal, an historical agent ... The available sources do not specify his religious background nor hispolitical ideology. His education and early academicexperience were entirely French, his first direct exposure to foreignintellectual influences being when he was a visiting scholar at Oxford in195 . We offer the proposition that the French experience in the SecondWorld War had a profound if subtle impact upon the French intellectuals wholived through it. The outstanding work associated with this school has beenFernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Ageof Philip II (1972). The very structure of this work tends to relegate the"adventitious" to a secondary role. S. An interest in novelty ... The world hasbeen largely shaped by such "adventitious" events. History is always amatter of interpretation, and it is always subject to re-interpretation.Moreover, no historian can be isolated from his circumstances. He admits thatthe new center of gravity did not "take," because Rome "remained thesymbolic center of the Christian world" (1988, p. 65). This is not ofcourse surprising, nor any inherent cause for concern. It ended France's centuries-long career as a great power--more often than not, the dominate power ofEurope--in the most painful possible manner. As such, an evaluation of his work and of its relationship to hisbackground and career is of interest not only in itself, as a discussion ofa prominent medievalist, but for what it says about the whole developmentof medieval studies in recent decades, at least (or especially) in France. What is deconstructionism, totake a fashion in literary criticism that has its roots largely in France,but an argument that writers are not really in conscious control of theirown texts? 65). We will, in brief, suggest that his work not only forces peculiarinterpretations upon specific events, but is so closely bound up withincontemporary French intellectual trends that it is largely unintelligibleto the reader who is not intimately attuned to those trends. We willfurther suggest that these characteristics are not ideosyncracies of LeGoff, but a consequence of his background, education, and experience, andmore broadly to the intellectual condition of modern France. However, Paris was distinctly exceptionalamong medieval university cities in being one of the largest of Europeancities, and moreover a political center. Fagan, trans.Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.International Who's Who, 1993-94 (1994). This can only reflect highlyindividual differences in their attitudes and outlooks. However, the problem in Le Goff's work do notappear to be simply a matter of rendering French into English, or ofsparkling prose style. Even to the present days, theexperience of 194 -44 remains an extraordinary difficult one for the Frenchto examine. Events, politics, and people donot make history, in the view of the Annales school of thought. Reynolds, trans. In the introduction to TheMedieval Imagination, he admits that A jaundiced observer might feel that the essays collected here have been unduly influenced by recent intellectual fashions in France. Because France is overwhelmingly a Catholiccountry, it is more than likely that Le Goff is of Catholic background.Evidence of this background can be found in his work, which also showsstriking evidence of how this background, uncorrected by consideration ofother experiences, can impose intellectual blinders. It may be arguedthat the interpretation of historical events and trends is always in somedegree subjective. 11) may hint at arelatively leftist political outlook, but some European conservatives mightwell also use the phrase. It is probably futile to argue whether or notthe University of Paris was the most important of medieval universities;the case may well be granted. London: Europa Press.----------------------- 11 Fernand Braudel, coming out of the samemilieu, exalts in his own way in the concrete and the specific; he bringsthe dusty accounts of sixteenth-century merchant ships alive. History ismade by underlying trends, to which nations and their leaders can onlyrespond. fashion is an expression of the spirit of the time, the visible manifestation of underlying historical change. His intellectual career continued to develop in France, however, andby 1972 he had risen to the highest ranks in the French historicalcommunity as editor of Annales and of Ethnologie Francaise. 2 ). The Second World Warended Britain's day as a Great Power as surely as it ended that of France.It did so, however, in an utterly different manner; whereas France hadcollaborationists and Petain, Britain had Churchill and the Finest Hour.It may be that Britain's postwar transition to a reduced world role hasbeen in some ways more difficult precisely because its imperial era endedin so glorious a fashion. Why are these strictures relevant and important? Likewise, in Italy we find universities at Bologna and Padua, notat Florence or Venice. History is an art, not a science. Indeed, part of the pleasure of Gibbonfor the modern reader is that he or she learns much about the Enlightenmentfrom seeing late antiquity and the early Middle Ages through Enlightenmenteyes. Apart from such specific references to the contemporary Frenchintellectual scene, we must take note of perhaps be broadest if leasteasily pinned-down difficulty in Le Goff's work, namely that it is highlyabstract and far from accessible. It was bound up inan intensely political issue: would the Papacy, having previously resistedthe attempted domination by the German emperors, fall under that of theFrench monarchy, or would it retain its independence? A reference to "American imperialism" in theintroduction to The Medieval Imagination (1988, p. An English-speaker may makeimmediate contrast to Oxford and Cambridge, provincial towns that were puton the map, so to speak, largely by the universities that were establishedthere. (1988, pp. But the removal of the Papacy to Avignon and its subsequent return toRome did not take place in an abstract, symbolic world. 1 ). Intellectuals in the Middle Ages. New York: Harper& Row.Le Goff, J. Yet Luther and Calvin are invisible to Le Goff, whodirects his contrast only to the Tridentine response they evoked. 914). Literary works, like political and military events, are only"adventitiously" the consequences of particular decisions by particularindividuals. By contrast, consider thefollowing lines from Le Goff's essay, "Levi-Strauss in Broceliande" (1988):"thus we see here what Levi-Strauss has called the 'culinary triangle,'with roast meat in the mediating role, though boiled meat is present onlymetaphorically: (1988, p. In his workwe find the vitality that Le Goff's lacks. It will be noticed that both of the above passages deal in one way oranother with France. Gibbon, however, is not so bound up within the Enlightenment that onehas to be an Enlightenment specialist to comprehend his meaning; we arestill able to read him after two hundred years. L. In pursuing this line of analysis, we must be careful not to fallinto the same error. The leading contribution of recent French historians has been theAnnales school, named for the journal which Le Goff himself has editedsince 1972. Carefully analysed, fashion is a key to understanding the secrets of history. Jacques Le Goff is a distinctive individual, notsimply a consequence of the political and intellectual experience ofwartime and postwar France. The book is organized into threedivisions, "The Role of the Environment," "Collective Destinies and GeneralTrends," and only lastly "Events, Politics and People." Braudel's work hasthe solidity and clarity that Le Goff's lacks, but the ideologicalimplication of this organization is clear. One wonders what the medievalist of thelate twenty-second century will be able to make of such a passage. But the point is that Britain departed in glory,France in shame. A contrast may be made here to another experience of the same time,more familiar to Americans: that of Great Britain. To relegate thefacts of the Avignon papacy to the status of "adventitious reasons" is verynearly to remove history itself from the study of history. But of course the Council ofTrent was itself a response to the Protestant Reformation, which profoundlytransformed the religious life and character of half of Western Europe. Goldhammer, trans.Chicago: University of Chicago.________ (1993). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in theAge of Philip II. Before proceeding to a discussion of how "recent intellectual fashionin France" has shaped--and limited--Le Goff, both in content and inapproach, it may be useful to point to some more specific difficulties inhis work. The argument of the following essay is that Le Goff's work showsserious defects. Jacques Le Goff was born in Toulon New Years Day of 1924(International Who's Who, 1994, p. 15-16)Certainly it is true that every historian interprets the past in terms ofthe historian's present. To take a rather different issue, in Intellectuals and the MiddleAges (1988), Le Goff lays great stress upon the distinctly urban characterof the universities. One leaves his work perplexed rather than illuminated. T. It isentirely plausible that a thoughtful Frenchman, passing through lateadolescence during the time of blitzkrieg, Vichy, and liberation at foreignhands, might find himself drawn to seek underlying stabilities instead ofthe shock of events. In two volumes. It was the culminating blow of a series of humiliations thatFrance endured at German hands since 187 . 115). But we will find muchreason to identify the characteristics of his work as stemming from theFrench intellectual and national experience, especially that of hisformative years. This may well betrue; we are not concerned here with how much the Tridentine reformschanged the face of Catholic Christendom. To the deconstructionist critic, they too are ultimately theproduct of unconscious cultural forces, and have no meanings but those thatreaders--with their own unconscious biases--bring into them. Indeed, as editor since 1972 of both Ethnologie Francaise and thehistorical journal Annales: Economies, societies, civalizations, he maylegitimately be called the doyen of French medieval studies at the presentdate. The high-medieval university was certainly notisolated and cloistered as earlier monastery schools had been, but nor wasthe university life of the Middle Ages simply the Left Bank writ large. In a discussion of the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, Le Goffreaches the following startling conclusion regarding the subsequent "exile"of the Papacy to Avignon: it was "a move that occured, in my view, not somuch for adventitious reasons as because of a profound need for a newcenter of gravity in the Christian world" (1988, p. ReferencesBraudel, F. It is perhaps not entirely fair to judgethe style of works read in translation, nor to judge intellectual work bythe grace of its style. Le Goff is himself aware of the problem. This was a shattering experience in modern Frenchhistory, perhaps the most wrenching France had undergone since theRevolution. (1988). The concrete and "adventitious" in history--that is,specific historical events and the actions of specific individuals--became,for a French historian, almost unbearably painful to contemplate. This, in fact, is precisely what we find in modern French historicalthought. Jacques Le Goff was sixteen years old, an age at which we are justforming our moral and intellectual identities, when German panzer divisionsrolled around France's defenses, and he came of age in the time ofOccupation and Vichy. The Medieval Imagination. These defects extend from his interpretation of specificevents and trends, to the framework in which he attempts to place hissubject matter, and ultimately to the approachability and utility of hiswork. Le Goff is of course a Frenchman, and a contemporaryFrenchman, and it is to his background and experience that we now may turn. In Le Goff's treatment of the Avignon, the Frenchmonarchy and its relationship to the rest of Europe disappears; in hisdiscussion of university culture, it is the rest of Europe itself thatdisappears. The same general trend has been found in French thought well outsidethe bounds of historical studies per se. "Of all those [urban] centers," he writes, "Paris,favored by the growing prestige of the Ceptian monarchy, was the mostoutstanding" (1993, p. The readerof Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, iscontinually aware that Gibbon writes from the perspective of, and with theprejudices of, the Enlightenment. French scholars asnaturally find their intellectual home in France as English scholars do inBritain or American scholars in the United States. Rather, it is that of a certain isolation from theconcrete. Inthe Protestant world the mendicant orders were themselves swept away, alongwith much else. In the introduction to The Medieval Imagination, Le Goff questionsthe concept of the Renaissance as a distinct period, and remarks that "asfor religion, the mendicant orders introduced greater changes toChristianity than the Council of Trent" (1988, p. Now, the debate between the "Great Man" and "historical forces"schools of historical thought is a very old one, and there is much of meritthat can be said on both sides of the argument. Nevertheless, LeGoff's shortcomings as a medievalist may be attributed, in important ways,to the circumstances of his time and place. But when we find thatintellectual fashion overwhelmingly supports one or the other, we arejustified in inquiring as to whether that fashion is itself the result insome way of "historical forces." In France, we may suspect, this view ofthe remote past makes the recent past much easier to accept. A. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.