Methods of Cultural History:
Robert Darnton's "Peasants Tell Tales" (1984)

[Image at right: Little Red Riding Hood, illus. W. Momberger, Aunt Mary's series (New York: McLoughlin Bros., 1856), from The Little Red Riding Hood Project, University of Southern Mississippi]
Purpose: to examine fairy tales as expressions of peasant beliefs, concerns, and lifeways in the late middle ages and early modern period; to address the methods of cultural history through a critical reading of the work of an important cultural historian.

Source: Robert Darnton's "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose," from The Great Cat Massacre And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Press, 1984).

Method: identify and critique the methodology of cultural history.

Fairy tales are a source for understanding the pre-scientific peasant view of the world. Folk stories like Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, or Sleeping Beauty tell us many things about folk concerns, hopes, and fears during the late middle ages and the early modern period. Because few peasants could leave written records of their hopes and concerns during this period, historians must learn to analyze the written versions of oral traditions to shed light on the mentalite of European peasants.
Robert Darnton, a cultural historian who teaches at Princeton University, is one of the leaders in the field of cultural history. His essay, "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose," provides an example of how an historian can carefully read folk tales and thus reveal peasants' lives.
Read Darnton's essay, paying close attention to the way he uses Mother Goose stories to illustrate peasants' concerns. Then think about your memories of having read fairy tales. What can you derive from these stories? What other sorts of information would you want to find in order to "believe" in a critical fashion the history that they represent?

Questions to Think About:

1) According to Darnton, what were peasants' lives like during the late middle ages and early modern period? What were peasants' chief concerns?

2)What sorts of evidence does Darnton identify as sources for reconstructing peasants' lifeways and concerns?

3) What are the main strengths of Darnton's approach? What are the main weaknesses of such an approach?

4) What other kinds of evidence besides that used by Darnton could one find to explain peasants lives during this period? What would be the relative strengths and weaknesses of those kinds of evidence?

5) What is "cultural history"? What are the questions cultural historians ask, and how might they be different from those asked by political or social historians? What is cultural historical method?

6) What is "mentalite"? What is the difference between mentalite and intellectual history?

Further resources and readings:

William S. Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould, The Annotated Mother Goose. New York: Meridian Books, 1962.

Robert Darnton, "Intellectual and Cultural History," in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

John Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York: Routledge, 1988.

National Geographic’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales site: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/grimm/.

Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for courses in The Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, Fall Semester 2001. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Last modified: Wednesday 29 August 2001.