ware that Gibbon writes from the perspective of, and with the prejudices of, the Enlightenment. Indeed, part of the pleasure of Gibbon for the modern reader is that he or she learns much about the Enlightenment from seeing late antiquity and the early Middle Ages through Enlightenment eyes.
Gibbon, however, is not so bound up within the Enlightenment that one has to be an Enlightenment specialist to comprehend his meaning; we are still able to read him after two hundred years. By contrast, consider the following lines from Le Goff's essay, "Levi-Strauss in Broceliande" (1988): "thus we see here what Levi-Strauss has called the 'culinary triangle,' with roast meat in the mediating role, though boiled meat is present only metaphorically: (1988, p. 115). One wonders what the medievalist of the late twenty-second century will be able to make of such a passage.
Le Goff is himself aware of the problem. In the introduction to The Medieval Imagination, he admits that
A jaundiced observer might feel that the
essays collected here have been unduly influenced
by recent intellectual fashions in France. Like
Roland Barthes, I am prepared to come to fashion's
defense. An interest in novelty ... can be an
instrument of renewal, an historical agent ...
fashion is an expression of the spirit of the
time, the visible manifestation of underlying
historical change. Carefully analysed,
fashion is a key to understanding the secrets
Certainly it is true that every historian interprets the past in terms of the historian's present. But it should be incumbent upon the historian who wishes to make a lasting contribution to make some effort to transcend the fashions of the day.
Apart from such specific references to the contemporary French intellectual scene, we must take note of perhaps be broadest if least easily pinned-down difficulty in Le Goff's work, namely that it is highly abstract and far...