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Overview edit
Bibliography
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(1990)
Sculpture: From Antiquity to the Present Day
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(1988)
A History of Private Life
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(1987)
A History of Private Life
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(1985)
William Marshall
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(1980)
The chivalrous society
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Georges Duby (Paris, October 7, 1919 - Aix-en-Provence, December 3, 1996) was a French historian specializing in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages. He ranks among the most influential medieval historians of the twentieth century and was one of France's most prominent public intellectuals from the 1970s until his death in 1996.
Born in 1919 to a family of Provençal craftsmen living in Paris, Duby was initially educated in the field of historical geography before moving into history. He earned an undergraduate degree at Lyon in 1942 and completed his graduate thesis at the Sorbonne under Charles-Edmond Perrin in 1952. He taught first at Besançon, and then at the University of Aix-en-Provence before being appointed in 1970 to the Chair of the History of Medieval Society in the Collège de France. He remained attached to the Collège until his retirement in 1991. Duby was elected to the Academie Française in 1987.
Duby was also a pioneer in what he and other Annaliste historians in the 1970s and 80's came to call the "history of mentalities," or the study of not just what people did, but their value systems and how they imagined their world. In books like The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined and The Age of Cathedrals, Duby showed how ideals and social reality existed in dynamic relationship to one another.
Duby's interest in the idea of historical "mentalities" extended to thinking about the position of contemporary society vis-a-vis its past. In Le Dimanche de Bouvines (1973) on the pivotal 1214 battle of Bouvines, Duby chose not to analyze the battle itself, but the ways it had been represented and remembered over time and the role its memory had played in the formation of French ideas about its medieval past. The book remains a classic of Annales-style historiography, eschewing the "great man" and event-oriented theories of political history in favor of asking questions about the evolution of historical perceptions and ideas over the long term. Duby also wrote frequently in newspapers and popular journals and was a regular guest on radio and television programs promoting historical awareness and support for the arts and social sciences in France. He served as the first director of Société d'édition de programmes de télévision (aka La Sept), a French broadcast network dedicated to educational programing.
His last book, L'histoire continue (History Continues), is an intellectual autobiography. In it, Duby stresses the importance of the historian as a public figure who can make the past relevant and exciting to those in the present.
Born in 1919 to a family of Provençal craftsmen living in Paris, Duby was initially educated in the field of historical geography before moving into history. He earned an undergraduate degree at Lyon in 1942 and completed his graduate thesis at the Sorbonne under Charles-Edmond Perrin in 1952. He taught first at Besançon, and then at the University of Aix-en-Provence before being appointed in 1970 to the Chair of the History of Medieval Society in the Collège de France. He remained attached to the Collège until his retirement in 1991. Duby was elected to the Academie Française in 1987.
Histoire des mentalités
Duby was also a pioneer in what he and other Annaliste historians in the 1970s and 80's came to call the "history of mentalities," or the study of not just what people did, but their value systems and how they imagined their world. In books like The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined and The Age of Cathedrals, Duby showed how ideals and social reality existed in dynamic relationship to one another.
Duby's interest in the idea of historical "mentalities" extended to thinking about the position of contemporary society vis-a-vis its past. In Le Dimanche de Bouvines (1973) on the pivotal 1214 battle of Bouvines, Duby chose not to analyze the battle itself, but the ways it had been represented and remembered over time and the role its memory had played in the formation of French ideas about its medieval past. The book remains a classic of Annales-style historiography, eschewing the "great man" and event-oriented theories of political history in favor of asking questions about the evolution of historical perceptions and ideas over the long term. Duby also wrote frequently in newspapers and popular journals and was a regular guest on radio and television programs promoting historical awareness and support for the arts and social sciences in France. He served as the first director of Société d'édition de programmes de télévision (aka La Sept), a French broadcast network dedicated to educational programing.
His last book, L'histoire continue (History Continues), is an intellectual autobiography. In it, Duby stresses the importance of the historian as a public figure who can make the past relevant and exciting to those in the present.
Works
- La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (portions translated in The Chivalrous Society (1978; repr. 1981)
- Le Dimanche de Bouvines (1973) (Translated in English as The Legend of Bouvines (1990) ISBN 0-520-06238-8)
- The Year 1000 (1974).
- The Age of the Cathedrals (1976).
- The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (1978).
- The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest (1981).
- William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry (1984).
- L'histoire continue (1991)
