Georges Duby, a French medieval historian of some repute in France, offered up a slim autobiographical account of his life’s work in History Continues. In the discussion of his career, he recounted the historiographical milieus and historians he worked with, how they affected his scholarship and, more importantly perhaps, how the sources he researched shaped the direction of his career. History Continues differs from other such memoirs, John W. Baldwin tells us in the forward, because it is silent on the personal points of his life that are not pertinent to his career in academe.

After he passed the agrégation in 1942, Duby began telling his scholarly history and the route from teaching at a provincial lycée to the hallowed doctorat d'etat and a seat in the Académie française. He thus started with the search for a patron (roughly equivalent, it seems, to the head of a dissertation committee in the United States) and, once that was found in Edmond Perrin, he discussed the background inquiry necessary to both acquire and master a topic in the chapters “Building Blocks” and “The Treatment.” Duby apologized for what he considers the crude term “building blocks,” but his description of the vast amount of reading in sources and theory that goes into a cogent argument is, he said, “a huge pile of written words freshly fetched up from the historian's quarry and waiting to be sorted, cut, and fit together to construct an edifice from what was at that point only a provisional plan”

The decipherment of his sources and construction of his topic is fetchingly recounted in the next few intriguing chapters. Through his rigorous analysis of documents left by monks and officials in and around Cluny, Duby pieced together what he considered his finest work: a look into the society of the Mâconnaise in the eleventh and twelfth century. Duby admitted, as some historians are either afraid or dishonest to do, that his goal was to discover the distance between his sources and the “always elusive truth, which the historian covets.” The screen between the truth and the sources, he decided, is always there no matter how careful the historian tries to get past it.

His work too reflected the historiographical environment of mid-twentieth century France. He narrated his encounters, both physical and via the written word, with such luminaries as Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Braudel, all of the ever-popular (still) Annales School, which placed stress on first economic and then social structures in history. Along with the framework to discuss economics provided by Marx and his ilk, Duby acknowledged his debt to such approaches. Braudel was one of Duby’s guiding lights, and like Braudel, geography provided a rich jumping off point for his research of Medieval French society. Duby did, however, recognize these methods are an inadequate method of divining the ideas, thoughts, and motivations, what he termed mentalités, of the populace – and he believed that these mentalités could trump the deterministic structures of the early Annalistes and Marxists. Of course, later Annalistes adopted the idea of mentalités, but presented them as another slow-changing structure to be studied over the longue durée, but it was Duby’s major contribution to the Annales School.

In the remainder of History Continues Duby told of his various projects, books, and academic positions, culminating in his celebrity as best-selling author, television personality, and lecturer with a seat on the French Academy. The title given to these memoirs, History Continues, reflected the role he envisioned for the future of history, as he advocated that subaltern groups heretofore missing from history should be engaged, a step he aided with his work into the history of women. This, at first glance unprepossessing volume, is a serious discussion by a formidable scholar of the roads that research can take the student down and a recognition of how everyone’s work is influenced by their surroundings. ( )

Georges Duby provided a charming yet scholarly account of his career as a historian. He generously shared important and insightful details of his professional life while remaining totally reticent on any personal points that were not germane to his being an academic.

Duby outlined his career in a chronological order, with occasional glimpses ahead or back to draw a parallel or make a point. He began with what he apparently considered his first major work, a detailed study of documents of the monastery at Cluny. He told how he came to choose the subject, how he narrowed and refined his scope, how he explored the information to elicit various kinds of questions to be answered. This narration of his approach to the material became a framework on which he draped his views on how one should approach history. Ever modest, he never blatantly extolled the virtues of his work; nor was he particularly critical of the shortcomings of others. He merely expressed what he did, what he liked about his work, where he felt he did an adequate job and what parts he would do differently if he were pursuing that study at the time of writing this memoir.

In chapters titled, “Treatment�€?, “Readingâ€?, and “Constructionâ€? he elaborated on how he mined the Cluny documents for information. He showed that the historian is part detective, part logician and all-around student of human nature. He illustrated how the historian must often use educated inference to extract those elusive fragments of data lying beneath the surface of the obvious. The data must be connected, related and matched, then examined for what it does and does not reveal. From there, extrapolations may be proffered while being cautious to remain close to the sources. Duby did not suggest speculation for its own sake served any good purpose.
After the rather close examination of his earlier work, Duby moved on to touch on the high points of his career; he consistently presented the events of his life not so much as to commend what he accomplished rather to use the experience as a jumping off point to discuss some topic. For example, he referred to his work in television primarily to discuss his thoughts on how the medium can be used to further the study and pursuit of history. Similarly he mentioned his travels; but what he was most excited about was how he felt travel could expose the student of history to opportunities to expand his or her grasp of times past.

As he approached the end of his memoir and concentrated on recent or current projects, he revealed what he saw as his faults or omissions. He believed that women had been short-changed in their treatment by historians; he felt he should have observed that earlier and would strive to redeem this oversight in future work. Duby implied his current students would not be allowed to neglect disenfranchised groups or write the same type of Euro-centric history that he and his generation had done.
Duby avoided bragging and ostentation about his personal achievements yet his pride and loyalty to his country’s band of scholars and their reputations was unequivocal. He admired the work of his earlier countrymen and yearned for French historians to retain or regain their place among the premiere practitioners in the field. He had no illusions about that place being taken for granted; he appeared to feel some vicarious embarrassment on behalf of some of his colleagues who behaved as if French historians held the top honors exclusively. One has the feeling that Duby was being very generous in refusing to abandon his countrymen, since there seemed to be no reason why he personally should not be held in the highest regard.

In this same gracious tone, he concluded by passing the torch to a younger generation of scholars. After surveying topics still to be explored and mistakes to be rectified, Duby remarked that it was more likely that they, not he, would be the ones to continue the challenge. Duby left one hoping that future historians can equal him, not only in scholarship, but in style and grace as well.

Alex Hunnicutt ( )