Jacques Le Goff is a prominent figure in the tradition of French medieval scholarship, profoundly influenced by the Annales school, notably, Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel, and by the ethnographers and anthropologists Mauss, Dumézil, and Lévi-Strauss. In building his argument for "another Middle Ages" (un autre moyen âge), Le Goff documents the emergence of the collective mentalité from many sources with scholarship both imaginative and exact.

Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages

History

Le Goff, Jacques

Europe

University of Chicago Press

In The Birth of Purgatory, Jacques Le Goff, the brilliant medievalist and renowned Annales historian, is concerned not with theological discussion but with the growth of an idea, with the relation between belief and society, with mental structures, and with the historical role of the imagination. Le Goff argues that the doctrine of Purgatory did not appear in the Latin theology of the West before the late twelfth century, that the word purgatorium did not exist until then. He shows that the growth of a belief in an intermediate place between Heaven and Hell was closely bound up with profound changes in the social and intellectual reality of the Middle Ages. Throughout, Le Goff makes use of a wealth of archival material, much of which he has translated for the first time, inviting readers to examine evidence from the writings of great, obscure, or anonymous theologians.

The Birth of Purgatory

To write this history of the imagination, Le Goff has recreated the mental structures of medieval men and women by analyzing the images of man as microcosm and the Church as mystical body; the symbols of power such as flags and oriflammes; and the contradictory world of dreams, marvels, devils, and wild forests. "Le Goff is one of the most distinguished of the French medieval historians of his generation . . . he has exercised immense influence."â€”Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books "The whole book turns on a fascinating blend of the brutally materialistic and the generously imaginative."â€”Tom Shippey, London Review of Books "The richness, imaginativeness and sheer learning of Le Goff's work . . . demand to be experienced."â€”M. T. Clanchy, Times Literary Supplement

The Medieval Imagination (English and French Edition)

Univ of Chicago Pr

To write this history of the imagination, Le Goff has recreated the mental structures of medieval men and women by analyzing the images of man as microcosm and the Church as mystical body; the symbols of power such as flags and oriflammes; and the contradictory world of dreams, marvels, devils, and wild forests. "Le Goff is one of the most distinguished of the French medieval historians of his generation . . . he has exercised immense influence."—Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books "The whole book turns on a fascinating blend of the brutally materialistic and the generously imaginative."—Tom Shippey, London Review of Books "The richness, imaginativeness and sheer learning of Le Goff's work . . . demand to be experienced."—M. T. Clanchy, Times Literary Supplement

The Medieval Imagination

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

In this brillant meditation on conceptions of history, Le Goff traces the evolution of the historian's craft. Examining real and imagined oppositions between past and present, ancient and modern, oral and written history,History and Memory reveals the strands of continuity that have characterized historiography from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Europe.

History and Memory

Americas

Columbia University Press

In this brillant meditation on conceptions of history, Le Goff traces the evolution of the historian's craft. Examining real and imagined oppositions between past and present, ancient and modern, oral and written history, History and Memory reveals the strands of continuity that have characterized historiography from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Europe.

We have long thought of the Renaissance as a luminous era that marked a decisive break with the past, but the idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period arose only during the nineteenth century. Though the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of unreason has softened somewhat, we still locate the advent of modern rationality in the Italian thought and culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jacques Le Goff pleads for a strikingly different view. In this, his last book, he argues persuasively that many of the innovations we associate with the Renaissance have medieval roots, and that many of the most deplorable aspects of medieval society continued to flourish during the Renaissance. We should instead view Western civilization as undergoing several "renaissances" following the fall of Rome, over the course of a long Middle Ages that lasted until the mid-eighteenth century. While it is indeed necessary to divide history into periods, Le Goff maintains, the meaningful continuities of human development only become clear when historians adopt a long perspective. Genuine revolutions―the shifts that signal the end of one period and the beginning of the next―are much rarer than we think.

Must We Divide History Into Periods? (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

Must We Divide History Into Periods?

“Life of a king, life of a saint, life of a man. In this work, Jacques LeGoff, one of the truly great medieval historians of our times, magisterially plumbs the depths of the fundamental contradiction of Saint Louis: is it possible to be both a king and a saint? St. Louis lies at the intersection of reasons of state and divine reason; he is an individual around whom LeGoff turns like a detective searching for an ever-elusive truth, that of a life and a legend inextricably intertwined. A fine, eminently readable translation. “ ―Robert J. Morrissey, University of Chicago 
Canonized in 1297 as Saint Louis, King Louis IX of France (1214–1270) was the central figure of Christendom in the thirteenth century. He ruled when France was at the height of power; he commanded the largest army in Europe and controlled the wealthiest kingdom. Renowned for his patronage of the arts, Louis was equally famous for his decision to imitate the suffering Christ as a humbly attired, bearded penitent. Armed with the considerable resources of the nouvel historien, Jacques Le Goff mines existing materials about Saint Louis to forge a new historical biography of the king. Part of his ambitious project is to reconstruct the mental universe of the thirteenth century: Le Goff describes the scholastic and intellectual background of Louis’ reign and, most importantly, he discusses methodology and the interpretation of written sources―their composition, provenance, and reliability. Le Goff divides his unconventional biography into three parts. In the first, he gives us the contours of Louis’ life from birth to death in the usual context of family dynamics and genealogy, courtly and regional politics, and shifts in economic, social, and cultural life. In sifting through the historical accounts of the king’s life, Le Goff determines that it is Louis IX’s profound sense of moral and religious purpose―his desire to become the ideal Christian ruler―that colors his every action from boyhood on; it is also, for Le Goff, what renders contemporary accounts problematic and what necessitates further scrutiny. That dissection of sources occupies the second part. Le Goff’s intention is to pare away the layers of homily and anecdote produced by the king’s early biographers to discover the true Saint Louis. Questioning whether Saint Louis was merely the invention of his eulogists, Le Goff penetrates beyond the literary and hagiographical evidence to the human behind the legend. He brilliantly analyzes Louis’ progress toward his unique self-creation and its subsequent mythologizing. In the third part, Le Goff highlights the contradictions within Louis and his historical image that previous chroniclers have elided or overlooked. In the end, he leaves us with the saint, rather than the king, with all the paradoxes embedded in that role.

Saint Louis

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

University of Notre Dame Press

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Books by Le Goff, Jacques

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Le Goff, Jacques. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages

The Birth of Purgatory

The Medieval Imagination (English and French Edition)

The Medieval Imagination

History and Memory

History and Memory

Must We Divide History Into Periods? (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

Must We Divide History Into Periods? (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

Must We Divide History Into Periods?

Saint Louis