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Jacques Le Goff

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Jacques Le Goff
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Jacques Le Goff

Jacques Le Goff (born January 1st, 1924 in Toulon) is a French historian specializing in the Middle Ages, particularly the 12th and 13th centuries.

A prolific medievalist of international renown, Le Goff is the principal heir and continuator of the movement known as Annales School (Ecole des Annales), founded by his master Marc Bloch. He succeeded Fernand Braudel in 1972 at the head of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and was succeeded by François Furet in 1977. Since then he has dedicated himself to studies on the historical anthropology of Western Europe during medieval times.

An agnostic, Le Goff presents an equidistant position between the detractors and the apologists of the Middle Ages. His opinion is that the Middle Ages formed a civilization of its own, distinct of both the Greco-Roman antiquity and the modern world.

Among his recent works are two biographies, a genre his school did not give much relevance for, which attained wide repercussion and public acceptance: the life of Louis IX of France, the only French king to be canonized, and the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, the Italian mendicant monk.

In 2004 Le Goff received the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. ([Press release at KNAW website])

Selected bibliography

Sources

Reference

Miri Rubin, ed. The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History (Cambridge: Boydell, 1997)

External links

 


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