Georges Duby

Although Duby authored dozens of books, articles and reviews during his prolific career—for academic as well as popular audiences—his reputation and legacy as a scholar will always be attached to his first monograph, a published version of his 1952 doctoral thesis entitled La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Society in the 11th and 12th centuries in the Mâconnais region). La société exerted a profound influence on medieval scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, placing the study of medieval feudal society on an entirely new footing. Working from the extensive documentary sources surviving from the Burgundian monastery of Cluny, as well as the dioceses of Mâcon and Dijon, Duby excavated the complex social and economic relationships among the individuals and institutions of the Mâconnais region, charting a profound shift in the social structures of medieval society around the year 1000.

Duby argued that in early eleventh century, governing institutions—particularly comital courts established under the Carolingian monarchy—that had represented public justice and order in Burgundy during the ninth and tenth centuries receded and gave way to a new feudal order wherein independent aristocratic knights wielded power over peasant communities through strong-arm tactics and threats of violence. The emergence of this new, decentralized society of dynastic lords could then explain such later eleventh-century phenomena as the Peace of God, the Gregorian reform movement and the Crusades.

Following upon this, Duby formulated a famous theory about the Crusades: that the tremendous response to the idea of Holy War against the Muslims can be traced to the desire of iuvenes, knights, mostly young and with little prospect of becoming lords, to make their fortunes by venturing abroad and seeking fame in the Levant. While Duby's theory had long-lasting influence, later scholars such as Jonathan Riley-Smith argued against it, arguing that there was no large-scale shortage of land in Western Europe at the time, that knights actually lost money going on crusade, and that lay religious sentiment was their primary motivation. Not all modern scholars follow Riley-Smith in this regard.[1]

Duby's intensive and rigorous examination of a local society based on archival sources and a broad understanding of the social, environmental and economic bases of daily life became a standard model for medieval historical research in France for decades after the appearance of La société. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, French doctoral students investigated their own corners of medieval France, Italy and Spain in a similar way, hoping to compare and contrast their own results with those of Duby's Mâconnais and its thesis about the transformation of European society at the end of the first millennium.

Although he was never formally a student in the circle of scholars around Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre that came to be known as the Annales School, Duby was in many ways the most visible exponent of the Annaliste tradition, emphasizing the need to place people and their daily lives at the center of historical inquiry.

Duby was also a pioneer in what he and other Annaliste historians in the 1970s and 80s came to call the "history of mentalities", or the study of not just what people did, but their value systems and how they imagined their world. In books like The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined and The Age of Cathedrals, Duby showed how ideals and social reality existed in dynamic relationship to one another. His distilled biographical essay on William Marshal set the knight's career in the context of feudal loyalties, honour and the chivalric frame of mind.

Duby's interest in the idea of historical "mentalities" extended to thinking about the position of contemporary society vis-a-vis its past. In Le Dimanche de Bouvines (1973) on the pivotal 1214 battle of Bouvines, Duby chose not to analyze the battle itself, but the ways it had been represented and remembered over time and the role its memory had played in the formation of French ideas about its medieval past. The book remains a classic of Annales-style historiography, eschewing the "great man" and event-oriented theories of political history in favor of asking questions about the evolution of historical perceptions and ideas over the long term, the longue durée. Duby also wrote frequently in newspapers and popular journals and was a regular guest on radio and television programs promoting historical awareness and support for the arts and social sciences in France. He served as the first director of Société d'édition de programmes de télévision (aka La Sept), a French broadcast network dedicated to educational programming.

His last book, L'histoire continue (History Continues) (1991; Engl. trans. 1994), is an intellectual autobiography. In it, Duby stresses the importance of the historian as a public figure who can make the past relevant and exciting to those in the present. 'Make no mistake: the first function of historical literature had always been to entertain.'[2]

• A History of French Civilization (with Robert Mandrou) (New York: Random House) 1964
• The Making of the Christian West: 980–1140; The Europe of the Cathedrals: 1140–1280; Foundations of a New Humanism: 1280–1440 (Geneva: Skira) 1966–67
• Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West ((Columbia: University of South Carolina Press) 1968
• The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (Ithaca: Cornell) University Press) 1974
• La Société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (portions translated in The Chivalrous Society (1978; repr. 1981))
• Le Dimanche de Bouvines (1973) (Translated in English as The Legend of Bouvines (1990) ISBN 0-520-06238-8)
• The Year 1000 (1974).
• The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 980–1420 (1976).
• The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1981.
• Dialogues, with Guy Lardreau, Paris, Flammarion, 1981, repr. Les petits Platons, 2013.
• The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France (New York: Pantheon) 1981.
• Guillaume le Maréchal (Paris: Fayard), 1983, tr. as William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry (1984).
• L'histoire continue (1991)

• George Duby profile; accessed 19 June 2015.
• Catalogue des ouvrages: « Fonds Georges DUBY » - Duby's personal research library
• "Pour une révision du « mâle » Moyen Âge de Georges Duby (États-Unis)", books.google.com; accessed 19 June 2015. (in French)