George duby and jaques le goff

One of Jacques le Goff's last books is translated as 'Must We Divide History into Periods?'. It is well under 200 pages in a small format book. You can read the thing in under two hours. If you like what he has to say about the medieval period as more like the renaissance than is popularly imagined (and the renaissance more like the popular imagining of the medieval) and enjoy his style of justifying the points then you should read more. It isn't the most original theme but it isn't intended as such - it's an old scholar's popularly-aimed plea, not an original investigation.
His most famous work in English - Medieval Civilization, 400-1500 - is going to be very textbook-like because he wrote it as a textbook. I'd instead recommend his Birth of Purgatory as a starting point. Even though it would seem a more specialized topic he does a very good job of moving from the minor and relating it to the major. His biographies of Saint Francis and Saint Louis are excellent but long and often bog down in minor points, especially the latter. The Birth of Europe seems well received but I haven't read it.

I understand this can be annoying, but they didn't do that because they wanted to destroy Western civilization by denying the role of great men. They wanted to make history a science and thought the best way to do that was to use a lot of economic data that for us is really boring to read because fuck I'm not always that interested in the price of bread during 18th century France no matter how important that is to the later revolution.

That said, they were definitely not Marxists and I don't think they were propagandists either.

Le Goff is still bragging about "muh crusades" in his books. A very pathetic thing to do.

What does that even mean?

I mean, he was bitching and complaining about the crusades.

I’m sorry, but in what way?

>In any case, they left nothing positive! (the crusades) They were very costly in human means and lives, and aroused strong resentment among Muslims, who are still alive today.

This is a straight quote from one of his books. The words of a brainlet.

After having read some of those trashy pop history books on the crusades, didn’t you get the feeling that it was a long costly slog for ground gained and lost?
Maybe you saw it as a tragedy, or that people should be thinking we should have some payback time, but overall don’t you think Le Goff is right?
You fucking microcephalic

No he is not right you fucking brainlet. Some of the crusades were a failure, but thanks to others like the ones in Spain the entery territory was recovered from muslims.

Brain stem, that was not part of the crusades

Don't tell me you brainlet.
>However, it was the Second Crusade that placed it within the context of Crusading. In Eugenius III named Iberia as a target, the Genoese provided logistic support, a mixed band of Crusaders captured Lisbon and Bernard of Clairveaux preached for the campaign in the same terms as he did against the Wends of Denmark.[103] The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa was won in 1212 with the support of 70,000 non-Spanish combatants responding to a crusade preached by Innocent III.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

They are the two best medievalists there is. But yes they lived in France during a period where marxism influenced all of academia. They still did amazing work and you can complement reading them with a few more modern books.

Iberia is not in the Bible. Jesus did not see Spain. The crusades proper are about Europeans invading the “holy land”

The Crusades were, at first, not about removing Muslims or regaining territory. The Abbasids (Muslims) were in control of Jerusalem for a long time, but then lost against the Turks (also Muslims). And the Turks didn't allow Christian pilgrims to come to Jerusalem anymore. The Crusades were about protecting these pilgrims, against the Turks. But the Crusades then evolved into some weird reconquista, which mostly didn't work since it wasn't really formally organised, but based on volunteers.

Regine Pernoud

They're both pretty good, I like Duby better. They're a bit materialist, especially le goff, but that's simply their mentality. Im not sure what you want to read about so it's hard to say anything specific. Duby focused a lot on the medieval mentality. Annales thought is fundamental to medieval study.
>Instead of trying to understand the medieval society,
That's literally what the second gen annales school did, particularly duby. What book did you read?
Crusade indulgences were issued for numerous places outside of the levant you fucking brainlet. Why do you arbitrarily decide which crusades are proper, despite the crusading fervor and ideal being applied in numerous instances by people of the past? Read Crusade literature, especially the poetry. One of the oldest crusade poems is specifically about fighting in Spain.