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11 UN DEBAT : LES MENTAUTES COLLECTIYES 583

therefore a morę nuanced and morę comples understanding of hifeiiory, ja® a, whąle, irl the contexti of presenfrday tepdencies towards an ^<toverall” or allcomprising history.

Aetuallyy materiał add mentol aire twd inseparable aspects of one and the same historical prbceśs. Each problem, each historical fact implićs bdth aspects. Even the most subtle. afchievementó of the mind have a materiał basis, as the processes whieh peem to be eiblusively eeonomici, materiał, haUe, to thd extent to whioh they are human processes, a mental substratuim In Oirilisotion matćrielle, óeonomie et capitalismó, for instance, Eemand Braudel haS wtfitten tediarkable pages óh the history of alimen-tation, defined not only as a morę economic problem, but also as a mental attitudei The sanie modality bf analysis is to be met concerning theevolution of loadgings and furhiture, eostumes and fashion as a whole. Another example along this linę is Georges Duby’s book, Guorrier» et rpaysans (1073), which make an analysis of the Id id dl e Ages concerning both the materiał and the mental life. Medieval economy (with its threefold formula f‘prendre, dopner, consacrer”) gets specific forms precisely because it is molded by the mentality of an epoch. Kot less interestiiig isthe way in which, in the same work, G. Duby presents the evolution of alimentary habits in the early Middle Ages, the way in which the two alimentary and agricultural fij-stems, the Eoman and the S-barbarian” one, blended in a process whiełb is to the same extent economic, materiał and mental.

As a well-marked border field, the history of mentalities aronses complex problems concerning doeumentation. and the inteipretation of Sources. On the one hand, a different analysis of traditional sources is required, on the other, the integration of new categories of atixiliary sources within the historical researeh. Along this linę, the reevaluation of literary and artistic sources seems to be of great impoitance. These should not appear as annexes of literary or artistic history, or as separate sections of a complete, encyclopaedic history, but as starting points to the writing of history regarded in the light of the literary and artistic phenomenon. Any work of art is a mirror of its time, morę valuable to the knowledge of what is essential in that epoch than so many other traditional documents. In this way, Georges Duby’s work Le leitrps des cathćdrales. Vart et la societó_} 9#0—1420 (1976), seems to be of greąt sigńificance. This is actually^ d history of the"Westerii Middle-Ages (under its mental^spect* but not y^cjmjiyely są)* fdarting from tfye artistic testi-mony. To those who have found the proper device of inteipretation, a Got hic cathedral is an incomparable historical source. At the same time a systematie apptóach to literatuie from the angle of history and to its benefit is to give lemai kable results. In the recent years, many French historians and literary historians aTe fascinated with the personality and work of Jules Yerne. Formeily regarded rather as a writer for children aDd teemagers, his work is nowt considered as an extremely ■fertile grbund lor the analysis of the mind-sets and the ideology of a certain societyy at a certain historical moment. Gut of an impressive bibliography, we mention only some titles closer to the historical problem : Jean Chesneaux, Une leeture politigue de Jules Verne, 1,971; Marie-Helene Huetj ISHistoire des voyages eortraordinaires-, 1973; Marc Soriano^ Jules Verne, 1978. There is nothing sirrprising in that, for, as it is already knowrn, each writer