Editing Annales school (section)

=={{lang|fr|Mentalités}}==
Bloch's {{lang|fr|[[Les Rois thaumaturges]]}} (1924)<ref>Translated as ''The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England'' (1990)</ref> looked at the long-standing folk belief that the king could cure [[scrofula]] by his [[royal touch|thaumaturgic touch]]. The kings of France and England indeed regularly practiced the ritual. Bloch was not concerned with the effectiveness of the royal touch—he acted instead like an anthropologist in asking why people believed it and how it shaped relations between king and commoner. The book was highly influential in introducing comparative studies (in this case France and England), as well as long durations ("longue durée") studies spanning several centuries, even up to a thousand years, downplaying short-term events. Bloch's revolutionary charting of mentalities, or {{lang|fr|mentalités}}, resonated with scholars who were reading [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]] and [[Marcel Proust|Proust]]. In the 1960s, [[Robert Mandrou]] and [[Georges Duby]] harmonized the concept of {{lang|fr|mentalité}} history with [[Fernand Braudel]]'s structures of historical time and linked mentalities with changing social conditions. A flood of {{lang|fr|mentalité}} studies based on these approaches appeared during the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, however, {{lang|fr|mentalité}} history had become interdisciplinary to the point of fragmentation, but still lacked a solid theoretical basis. While not explicitly rejecting {{lang|fr|mentalité}} history, younger historians increasingly turned to other approaches.