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
Methodologically, it relies on a wide range of sources—sermons, court records, diaries, literature, iconography, ritual texts,
Critics caution against over-psychologizing or presenting uniform national mentalities; they emphasize pluralism within societies and the