Mentalitätsgeschichte

Mentalitätsgeschichte, or the history of mentalities, is a field in historiography that studies the collective mental dispositions—beliefs, attitudes, values, emotions—that shape a society’s behavior, institutions, and social order in a given period. It seeks to reconstruct how people understood themselves and their world, what they considered normal, and how these mindsets influenced everyday life and political change. The approach emphasizes longue durée analyses over episodic political narratives, focusing on collective representations, religious sensibilities, and everyday practices.

It developed from the French Annales School in the early 20th century, particularly through works by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who proposed studying long-term mental structures rather than isolated ideas. In German-speaking historiography the term Mentalitätsgeschichte gained traction in the later 20th century as part of cultural and social history, often overlapping with Kulturgeschichte and long-duration analyses.

Methodologically, it relies on a wide range of sources—sermons, court records, diaries, literature, iconography, ritual texts, and material culture—to infer the prevailing climate of thought. Analysts look for patterns in language, symbols, norms, and practices that reveal shared ways of living and judging the world. Changes in mentalities are seen as drivers or precursors of social, religious, or political transformation.

Critics caution against over-psychologizing or presenting uniform national mentalities; they emphasize pluralism within societies and the need to triangulate evidence. Mentalitätsgeschichte is frequently used in conjunction with cultural history, social history, and the study of memory and symbolism to illuminate how past generations perceived reality. Related topics include cultural history, the Annales School, and conceptual history.