A HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE:
Revelations of the Medieval World
George Duby, Editor
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988
650 pp., $39.50
In his romance Cligès, the medieval French poet Chrétien de Troyes describes in a humble metaphor someone whose inner life was as upright and true as his manners: "He had the wood as well as the bark." This ancient bon mot points to a question of interest in every age: the relationship of appearance to reality. Historians in particular used to occupy themselves investigating the ways in which publicly professed ideals were respected or denied by private behavior.
Large-scale public subjects have traditionally stood at the center of history writing. Even before Aristotle called man the "political animal" and defined the effort to order rationally human life in the polis as the highest merely human endeavor (the relationship to a higher being was something that transcended the political), history was mostly a question of governments, politics, wars, social movements, and other events larger than, but cognizant of, the individual.
Several new currents in historiography have come together in this century, however, and threaten to sink history as traditionally written beneath the results of "scientific" contributions of anthropology, archaeology, statistics, psychology, and other disciplines. Traditional history meant the narration of the events that affected people living in a given period, and their contributions and reactions to those events. The new history, as G.M. Trevelyan described it, is "history with the politics left out." Instead of a narration of events, we are presented with scientifically examined slices of time with little indication of where the given conditions come from or lead to.
The French have taken the lead in this movement with a school of historians who deliberately turn away from the traditional study of politics and the history of ideas. For the founders of the annales movement--Marc Bloch, Lucien Fevre, and, above all, Fernand Braudel--abstract ideas and large-scale movements might as well not exist. If they never arrive at what we normally mean by "history," they justify their limited results by arguing that the data do not permit such large-scale conclusions to be drawn.
A related development is so-called mentalité history, which sticks closely to popular thinking, sentiment, behavior, and custom. At its worst, this leads to absurdities. Gertrude Himmelfarb tells of a young historian of late eighteenth-century America who knew a great deal about the life of a New England village, but the limits of his method would not allow him to speculate on the effect of the American Revolution on the villagers.
One of the most ambitious undertakings of this new type of history has been arriving on our shores in regular installments from France. A History of Private Life has now traced the subject in two of a projected five volumes, through the Middle Ages. Philippe Ariès and George Duby, the general editors, say in the foreword to the first volume (From Pagan Rome to Byzantium), "We decided from the outset that we would present our readers
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