Books by Jacques Le Goff

A history of the fabled heroes and miracles of the Middle Ages.

It is impossible to understand the late Middle Ages without grasping the importance of The Golden Legend, the most popular medieval collection of saints' lives. Assembled for clerical use in the thirteenth century by Genoese archbishop Jacobus de Voragine, the book became the medieval equivalent of a best seller. This title deals with this book.

We have long thought of the Renaissance as a luminous era that marked a decisive break with the past, but the idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period arose only during the nineteenth century. Though the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of unreason has softened somewhat, we still locate the advent of modern rationality in the Italian thought and culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jacques Le Goff pleads for a strikingly different view. In this, his last book, he argues persuasively that many of the innovations we associate with the Renaissance have medieval roots, and that many of the most deplorable aspects of medieval society continued to flourish during the Renaissance. We should instead view Western civilization as undergoing several "e;renaissances"e; following the fall of Rome, over the course of a long Middle Ages that lasted until the mid-eighteenth century. While it is indeed necessary to divide history into periods, Le Goff maintains, the meaningful continuities of human development only become clear when historians adopt a long perspective. Genuine revolutions-the shifts that signal the end of one period and the beginning of the next-are much rarer than we think.

In "The Birth of Purgatory," Jacques Le Goff, the brilliant medievalist and renowned "Annales" historian, is concerned not with theological discussion but with the growth of an idea, with the relation between belief and society, with mental structures, and with the historical role of the imagination. Le Goff argues that the doctrine of Purgatory did not appear in the Latin theology of the West before the late twelfth century, that the word "purgatorium" did not exist until then. He shows that the growth of a belief in an intermediate place between Heaven and Hell was closely bound up with profound changes in the social and intellectual reality of the Middle Ages. Throughout, Le Goff makes use of a wealth of archival material, much of which he has translated for the first time, inviting readers to examine evidence from the writings of great, obscure, or anonymous theologians.

These essays by eleven internationally renowned historians present nuanced profiles of the major social and professional groups of the Middle Ages. They provide vivid descriptions of what life was like for warrior knights, monks, high churchmen, criminals, lepers, shepherds, and prostitutes, among others.

In this fascinating book, which takes the form of a series of edited interviews with noted journalist Jean-Maurice de Montremy, Jacques Le Goff offers us a synthesis of his work on the Middle Ages.

Locating Francis in the feudal world of the 12th and 13th centuries and exploring the social and political changes taking place at the time, Le Goff assesses the dramatic influence of the saint on the medieval church and celebrates his role in the spiritual revival of the Catholic Church.

In this brillant meditation on conceptions of history, Le Goff traces the evolution of the historian's craft. Examining real and imagined oppositions between past and present, ancient and modern, oral and written history, History and Memory reveals the strands of continuity that have characterized historiography from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Europe.