Jacques Le Goff

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Jacques Le Goff

Jacques Le Goff (born January 1, 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, the only King of France 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)

1 Selected bibliography
- 1.1 Sources
- 1.2 Reference
2 External links

[edit] Selected bibliography

[edit] Sources

Time, Work, & Culture in the Middle Ages, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, edited by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
The Medieval Imagination, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1988)
Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages, translated by Patricia Ranum. (New York : Zone Books, 1988)
Medieval Civilization, 400-1500, translated by Julia Barrow. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988)
The Medieval World, edited by Jacques Le Goff, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. (London: Parkgate, 1990)
The Birth of Purgatory, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990)
History and Memory, translated by Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)
Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)
Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996)
Saint Francis of Assisi, trans. Christine Rhone (London: Routledge, 2003)
The Birth of Europe, translated by Janet Lloyd. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)