Georges Duby
Encyclopedia
Georges Duby 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 Académie française
in 1987.
, as well as the dioceses of Mâcon and Dijon, Duby excavated the complex social and economic relationships among the individuals and institutions of the Mâconnais region, charting a profound shift in the social structures of medieval society around the year 1000. Duby argued that in early eleventh century, governing institutions—particularly comital courts established under the Carolingian
monarchy—that had represented public justice and order in Burgundy during the ninth and tenth centuries receded and gave way to a new feudal order wherein independent aristocratic knights wielded power over peasant communities through strong-arm tactics and threats of violence. Duby suggested that this change coincided with a shift in the way people conceived of themselves and their families in the early Middle Ages, moving away from broader notions of kinship towards a more rigid, patrilineal idea of ancestry and primogeniture inheritance. The emergence of this new, decentralized society of dynastic lords could then explain such later eleventh-century phenomena as the Peace of God, the Gregorian reform movement and the Crusades
.
Following upon this, Duby formulated a famous theory about the Crusades
(which more recent research has since shown to be problematic): that the tremendous response to the idea of holy war against the Muslims can be traced to the desire of disinherited (but well-armed) second and third sons of this French parvenue aristocracy to make their fortunes by venturing abroad and settling in the Levant.
Duby's intensive and rigorous examination of a local society based on archival sources and a broad understanding of the social, environmental and economic bases of daily life became a standard model for medieval historical research in France for decades after the appearance of La société. Throughout the 1970s and 80's, French doctoral students investigated their own corners of medieval France, Italy and Spain in a similar way, hoping to compare and contrast their own results with those of Duby's Mâconnais and its thesis about the transformation of European society at the end of the first millennium.
Although he was never formally a student in the circle of scholars around Marc Bloch
and Lucien Febvre
that came to be known as the Annales School
, Duby was in many ways the most visible exponent of the Annaliste tradition, emphasizing the need to place people and their daily lives at the center of historical inquiry.
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, the longue durée
. 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 programming.
His last book, L'histoire continue (History Continues) (1991; Engl. trans. 1994), 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.
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
. 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
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...
under Charles-Edmond Perrin
Charles-Edmond Perrin
Charles-Edmond Perrin was a French medieval historian, a professor at the University of Strasbourg and then the Sorbonne, and a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, of which he became president....
in 1952. He taught first at Besançon
Besançon
Besançon , is the capital and principal city of the Franche-Comté region in eastern France. It had a population of about 237,000 inhabitants in the metropolitan area in 2008...
, 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
Collège de France
The Collège de France is a higher education and research establishment located in Paris, France, in the 5th arrondissement, or Latin Quarter, across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Écoles...
. He remained attached to the Collège until his retirement in 1991. Duby was elected to the Académie française
Académie française
L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...
in 1987.
The Impact of the Mâconnais book
Although Duby authored dozens of books, articles and reviews during his prolific career—for academic as well as popular audiences—his reputation and legacy as a scholar will always be attached to his first monograph, a published version of his 1952 doctoral thesis entitled La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Society in the 11th and 12th centuries in the Mâconnais region). La société exerted a profound influence on medieval scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, placing the study of medieval feudal society on an entirely new footing. Working from the extensive documentary sources surviving from the Burgundian monastery of ClunyCluny Abbey
Cluny Abbey is a Benedictine monastery in Cluny, Saône-et-Loire, France. It was built in the Romanesque style, with three churches built in succession from the 10th to the early 12th centuries....
, as well as the dioceses of Mâcon and Dijon, Duby excavated the complex social and economic relationships among the individuals and institutions of the Mâconnais region, charting a profound shift in the social structures of medieval society around the year 1000. Duby argued that in early eleventh century, governing institutions—particularly comital courts established under the Carolingian
Carolingian
The Carolingian dynasty was a Frankish noble family with origins in the Arnulfing and Pippinid clans of the 7th century AD. The name "Carolingian", Medieval Latin karolingi, an altered form of an unattested Old High German *karling, kerling The Carolingian dynasty (known variously as the...
monarchy—that had represented public justice and order in Burgundy during the ninth and tenth centuries receded and gave way to a new feudal order wherein independent aristocratic knights wielded power over peasant communities through strong-arm tactics and threats of violence. Duby suggested that this change coincided with a shift in the way people conceived of themselves and their families in the early Middle Ages, moving away from broader notions of kinship towards a more rigid, patrilineal idea of ancestry and primogeniture inheritance. The emergence of this new, decentralized society of dynastic lords could then explain such later eleventh-century phenomena as the Peace of God, the Gregorian reform movement and the Crusades
Crusades
The Crusades were a series of religious wars, blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church with the main goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem...
.
Following upon this, Duby formulated a famous theory about the Crusades
Crusades
The Crusades were a series of religious wars, blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church with the main goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem...
(which more recent research has since shown to be problematic): that the tremendous response to the idea of holy war against the Muslims can be traced to the desire of disinherited (but well-armed) second and third sons of this French parvenue aristocracy to make their fortunes by venturing abroad and settling in the Levant.
Duby's intensive and rigorous examination of a local society based on archival sources and a broad understanding of the social, environmental and economic bases of daily life became a standard model for medieval historical research in France for decades after the appearance of La société. Throughout the 1970s and 80's, French doctoral students investigated their own corners of medieval France, Italy and Spain in a similar way, hoping to compare and contrast their own results with those of Duby's Mâconnais and its thesis about the transformation of European society at the end of the first millennium.
Although he was never formally a student in the circle of scholars around Marc Bloch
Marc Bloch
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian who cofounded the highly influential Annales School of French social history. Bloch was a quintessential modernist. An assimilated Alsatian Jew from an academic family in Paris, he was deeply affected in his youth by the Dreyfus Affair...
and Lucien Febvre
Lucien Febvre
Lucien Febvre was a French historian best known for the role he played in establishing the Annales School of history. He has designed the Encyclopédie française together with Anatole de Monzie.-Biography:...
that came to be known as the Annales School
Annales School
The Annales School is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and...
, Duby was in many ways the most visible exponent of the Annaliste tradition, emphasizing the need to place people and their daily lives at the center of historical inquiry.
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. His distilled biographical essay on William Marshal set the knight's career in the context of feudal loyalties, honour and the chivalric frame of mind.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
Battle of Bouvines
The Battle of Bouvines, 27 July 1214, was a conclusive medieval battle ending the twelve year old Angevin-Flanders War that was important to the early development of both the French state by confirming the French crown's sovereignty over the Angevin lands of Brittany and Normandy.Philip Augustus of...
, 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, the longue durée
Longue durée
The longue durée , is an expression used by the French Annales School of historical writing to designate their approach to the study of history, which gives priority to long-term historical structures over events— what François Simiand called histoire événementielle, "eventual history"— the short...
. 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
La Sept
La Sept was a French television broadcaster and production company created on 23 February 1986 to develop cultural and educational programming for transmission via the TDF 1 satellite...
), a French broadcast network dedicated to educational programming.
His last book, L'histoire continue (History Continues) (1991; Engl. trans. 1994), 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
- A History of French Civilization (with Robert Mandrou) (New York: Random House) 1964
- The Making of the Christian West: 980-1140; The Europe of the Cathedrals: 1140-1280; Foundations of a New Humanism: 1280-1440 (Geneva: Skira) 1966-67
- Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West ((Columbia: University of South Carolina Press) 1968
- The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (Ithaca: Cornell) University Press) 1974
- 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 Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 1974.
- The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 980-1420 (1976).
- The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1981.
- The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France (New York: Pantheon) 1981.
- Guillaume le Maréchale (Paris: ääFayard), 1983, tr. as William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry (1984).
- L'histoire continue (1991)