© Scandia 2008 www.scandia.hist.lu.se Aaron Gurevich Approaches of the ""AnnaBes School9' From the History of Mentalities to ~istoricaiSynthesis* I would like to dwell on a few aspects of historical methodology, aspects which strike me as most important and which are closely connected with the new trends in our profession. My aim is not so much to speak about the concrete achievements of the representatives of the "Annales school", but rather to ex- press some thoughts inspired by the study of their works. The background to these thoughts consists of my own investigations, as well as of the works of the Tartu school of semiotics and the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin. 1. I would like to begin with an example, and the word example should here be taken literally, since what I have in mind is an exemplum from the thirteenth century, when the literary genre of the medieval exeinpla flourished. As is well known, exempla, short didactic anecdotes, were collected by friars and used in sermons. My exemplum concerns the evil death of a certain lawyer. His colleagues and friends gathered around his death-bed and could converse with him, yet they could hear that he already stood before the supreme Judge of the Last Judg- ment at that very moment. Through his words, they could conclude that he had to answer questions posed by Christ, and they also understood that he was be- ing charged with grave sins and crimes. The lawyer suddenly cried, "My friends, help me, please, appeal (appelate)".They were filled with horror at feeling them- selves quite near the place of Judgment. It is easy to imagine the kind of shock which suck an "effect of presence" must have produced. The dying lawyer re- peated, "Please, hurry, appeal as soon as possible!'' Then, after a few moments of silence, "You have hesitated too long. Now it is too late. A11 is finished. I received the sentence, 1 perish forever." Such was the frightful death of a law- yer whose profession was not too popular at the time. This tale, one of many similar ones, requires comment. First of all, it appears very strange that the Last Judgment should take place * In May 1992, Aaron Gurevich received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lund. Scandia publishes here one of the lectures on the Annales tradition and view of history which Gurevich has delivered in recent years. Due to the nature of the text, there are no notes. © Scandia 2008 www.scandia.hist.lu.se 142 Aaron Gurevich not "at the end of time", but at the very moment of an individual's death. The Church taught that the Judgment will occur after the Second Coming and the Resurrection, and that the whole of mankind will be brought to trial. The scenes of the Last Judgment decorated the West portals of the churches and cathedrals, and everyone could observe them. In my exemplum here, however, we meet quite a different understanding of the Last Judgment. The question concerning the ideas of medieval people on the Last Judgment, its time and form, thus arises. Secondly, we can detect in such stories at least two conceptions of the human personality. At what point is a given person's biography complete and its final page filled, in the unknown future or rather at the moment of the individual's death? Philippe Ari6s demonstrated that this is a highly significant problem. A kind of contradiction exists between great eschatology and individual escha- tology. How to explain this dichotomy? Would it imply that two successive judg- ments will take place? Such an idea makes little sense. There exists a kind of confusion, not merely in the mind of the modern scholar attempting to understand the attitudes of medieval men towards death and the other world, but indeed also in the medieval minds themselves. Another example may be employed. There was a custom according to which friends could decide that the first among them to pass away should return to the living friend in order to inform him about conditions beyond the grave. A learned priest died. When he visited his friend a little later, he told him that at the time of his death, the Last Judgment over all dead people took place. His friend replied, "What are you telling me? You were a man of letters and you know quite well that the Last Judgment will take place at the end of time". The deceased friend answered as follows, "My learning and knowledge were of very little help to me." There thus existed an official Church teaching, yet certain experiences dif- fered from its content. Two distinct versions of death and postmortal fate of the human soul, two contradictory versions of eschatology, and two different con- ceptions of time and human personality meet here, as they do in numerous other exempla, visions of the other world and sermons, i.e. in the Church litera- ture addressed to the mass of believers. The problem which I have here touched upon, although only briefly, is that of the relationship between two different traditions of medieval culture and re- ligiosity, that of the Church and that of the people. The interpretation of some central themes of Christian beliefs and world values was very different in these two traditions of medieval spiritual life. There was, to be sure, mutual interpen- etration and reciprocal influence, as well as contradiction and misunderstand- ing. I say this in order to stress that there exist quite a few new problems to be studied. One of these is the problem of the different strata of culture and reli- giosity, the problem of the divergences inside the medieval world view. These new problems require new mental tools of interpretation, novel approaches as © Scandia 2008 www.scandia.hist.lu.se Approaches of the 'Annales school'. 143 well as quite a new frame of reference. Where can we search for these new ap- proaches and methods? I suppose that there is only one way out of the above mentioned difficulties. 2. As is well known, History, in contrast to the natural sciences, is in search of meaning. Human beings, the real subjects of historical study, behave con- sciously and can therefore not avoid placing a certain meaning into their ac- tions, imparting it to their own lives. The widespread error of traditional historical investigation was that his- torians imagined that people of the past understood meanings as we have done and behaved accordingly. From this point of view it would appear quite easy to understand their actions. The prerequisite of such an attitude was that man and the human mind were constants in the course of history. No problem concern- ing the mentality of people of past eras was therefore raised, since these indi- viduals were thought of in terms of present categories. Contemporary students of the past do not share this position. The meaning which we attempt to decipher in human actions of the past is their own special meaning. It is unique to each particular society and to every given period. Ac- cordingly, it is possible to comprehend this meaning only by studying it in the context of its own culture. Such an attitude changes the whole situation in the humanities. The neces- sary precondition of every historical investigation is to decipher the symbolic language employed by the author of the record under study. The first problem of historical investigation is that of mentality, and only when historians have some preliminary model of the epoch's mentality is it possible to tackle a par- ticular topic, however far from mentality this one may lie. The meaning of human behaviour can naturally be discerned in specific his- torical sources such as autobiographies, diaries, lyric poetry or confession. Yet it is also possible to search for it in any kind of source, since all are human creations and cannot but yield some information about the behaviour of a cer- tain individual or group. It is especially important when historians study periods for which they have none, or few of the above mentioned categories of sources. Such is the case with the Early Middle Ages, the "Dark Ages" in this very sense. However, it seems most important to me to reveal human meaning not only in ideological statements or in other intentional expressions, but also and pri- marily in nonexplicit human orientations. What I have in mind are stereotypes of behaviour, speech, gesture, custom and habit of mind. In studying these stereotypes, we can capture the widespread everyday mentalities. It is here that History meets semiotics. What is crucial to semiotic study is that it pays attent- ion not only to the "level of expression", i.e. deliberately formulated messages, but also, and indeed more so, to the "level of content", that is, such a level of consciousness of which even the author of the message himself may not be aware. A great deal of new information may thus be found. © Scandia 2008 www.scandia.hist.lu.se 144 Aaron Gurevich 3. At this point, History meets Cultural Anthropology and becomes its diligent pupil, for it borrows from Anthropology its concept of culture. Culture is under- stood, in this context, not as a complex of individual achievement~in art, litera- ture, science, philosophy etc., but rather as a system of certain mental and psychological conditions of human behaviour existing in a given society at a given epoch, including the above mentioned attitudes and habits of mind, modes of articulation of the world. It is the soil in which rare and precious in- tellectual flowers grow.