Jacques Le Goff, author of Intellectuals in the Middle Ages (1993) and The Medieval Imagination (1988), among many other books and scholarly articles, is one of the most prominent of contemporary French medievalists. Indeed, as editor since 1972 of both Ethnologie Francaise and the historical journal Annales: Economies, societies, civalizations, he may legitimately be called the doyen of French medieval studies at the present date. As such, an evaluation of his work and of its relationship to his background and career is of interest not only in itself, as a discussion of a prominent medievalist, but for what it says about the whole development of medieval studies in recent decades, at least (or especially) in France.
The argument of the following essay is that Le Goff's work shows serious defects. These defects extend from his interpretation of specific events and trends, to the framework in which he attempts to place his subject matter, and ultimately to the approachability and utility of his work. We will, in brief, suggest that his work not only forces peculiar interpretations upon specific events, but is so closely bound up within contemporary French intellectual trends that it is largely unintelligible to the reader who is not intimately attuned to those trends. We will further suggest that these characteristics are not ideosyncracies of Le Goff, but a consequence of his background, education, and experience, and more broadly to the intellectual condition of modern France.
Why are these strictures relevant and important? It may be argued that the interpretation of historical events and trends is always in some degree subjective. History is an art, not a science. History is always a matter of interpretation, and it is always subject to re-interpretation. Moreover, no historian can be isolated from his circumstances. The reader of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, is continually a...