Robert Fossier

Last updated

Robert Fossier (4 September 1927 – 25 May 2012) [1] was a French Historian, specializing in the Western Middle Ages.

Contents

Biography

Family and Education

Robert Fossier was born into Catholicism. His father, a soldier who served in World War I, was angered by the Munich Agreement. His mother, a piano teacher, encouraged an interest in history and fiction. He did his secondary education in Paris, first at the lycée Janson-de-Sailly, then at the lycée Henri-IV, where he prepped for the entrance exam of the École des chartes.

He graduated with a thesis on The economic life of the abbey of Clairvaux, from its beginning to the sixteenth century (1949), and passed the teaching exam (agrégation) in history.

University career

Robert Fossier began his career as an archivist in the historical library of Paris (1949–1953). He then became a teacher at the lycée de Fontainebleau (1953–1955), then at the lycée Carnot in Paris (1955–1957).

In 1957, he became assistant at the Sorbonne, then chargé de cours at Nancy II university from 1961. Ten years later, he became professor at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he was several times chair of the history department, and then in 1993, professor emeritus.

In 1971, he received the CNRS Silver Medal. He was president of the Société de l'École des chartes from 1990 to 1991.

He died on May 25, 2012, at Meudon.

Historian of the Middle Ages

As one of the spiritual successors of Marc Bloch and the École des Annales (in his work on society and economics rather than religion and culture), Robert Fossier dealt almost exclusively with the rural societies of northwestern Europe, from Charlemagne to the Hundred Years' War.

In 1968, he published his doctoral thesis entitled La Terre et les hommes en Picardie jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe siècle (The Land and People of Picardy to the End of the 13th Century).

In the 1970s, he began to focus his research and publications on the peasantry and feudalism (a term he refuses to use) between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

He is the inventor of the concept of encellulement, which expands on Pierre Toubert's concept of incastellamento. According to Robert Fossier, the grouping of the village in the north of the French kingdom was due not only to incastellamento, but rather to lordly initiative in general.

In his latest book, Ces gens du Moyen Age (translated as The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages), Robert Fossier deemphasises the aspect of medieval society which we are most familiar, the aristocracy, in order to concentrate on that less spoken-of aspect, the people. In his own words of summary, "I am persuaded that medieval man is us". [2]

The works of Robert Fossier have gained considerable fame (including at least 37 translations in North and South America, Japan, Germany, and Great Britain).

Robert Fossier Bibliography (French)

Works in English

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">François Simiand</span>

François Joseph Charles Simiand was a French sociologist and economist best known as a participant in the Année Sociologique. As a member of the French Historical School of economics, Simiand predicated a rigorous factual and statistical basis for theoretical models and policies. His contribution to French social science was recognized in 1931 when, at the age of 58, he was elected to the faculty of the Collège de France and accepted the chair in labor history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Émile Mâle</span> French art historian

Émile Mâle was a French art historian, one of the first to study medieval, mostly sacral French art and the influence of Eastern European iconography thereon. He was a member of the Académie française, and a director of the Académie de France à Rome.

Régine Pernoud was a French historian and archivist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Favier</span> French historian (1932–2014)

Jean Favier was a French historian, who specialized in Medieval history. From 1975 to 1994, he was director of the French National Archives. From 1994 to 1997, he was president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Pierre Chaunu was a French historian. His specialty was Latin American history; he also studied French social and religious history of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. A leading figure in French quantitative history as the founder of "serial history", he was professor emeritus at Paris IV-Sorbonne, a member of the Institut de France, and a commander of the Légion d'Honneur. A convert to Protestantism from Roman Catholicism, he defended his Gaullist views most notably in a longtime column in Le Figaro and on Radio Courtoisie.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">André Vauchez</span>

André Vauchez FBA is a French medievalist specialising in the history of Christian spirituality. He has studied at the École normale supérieure and the École française de Rome. His thesis, defended in 1978, was published in English as Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages in 1987 and has become a standard reference work.

Louis-Fernand Flutre was a French academic.

Geneviève Hasenohr is a French philologist and prolific scholar of medieval and Renaissance French literature. She has authored or contributed to more than forty books, written at least fifty academic articles and reviews, and prepared numerous scholarly editions.

Louis Carolus-Barré was a 20th-century French librarian and medievalist.

Robert Marichal, was a 20th-century French palaeographer and archivist.

Jean-Philippe Genet is a French medievalist, specialist of England.

Olivier Guyotjeannin is a French medievalist and diplomatist.

Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq was a 20th-century French medievalist historian.

Pierre Toubert is a French historian. He is a professor of medieval history at the University of Paris and the Collège de France. Focusing on medieval history, his most monumental work is Les structures du Latium médiéval : Le Latium méridional et la Sabine du IXe siècle à la fin du XIIe siècle (1973), in which he outlines an influential, in-depth study of incastellamento in the Lazio region of Italy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alain Erlande-Brandenburg</span> French art historian (1937–2020)

Alain Erlande-Brandenburg was a French art historian and honorary general curator for heritage, a specialist on Gothic and Romanesque art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michel Zink</span>

Michel Zink is a French writer, medievalist, philologist, and professor of French literature, particularly that of the Middle Ages. He is the Permanent Secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, a title he has held since 2011, and was elected to the Académie française in 2017. In addition to his academic work, he has also written historical crime novels, one of which continues the story of Arsène Lupin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claude Gauvard</span> French medievalist historian & academic

Claude Gauvard is a French historian and Middle Ages specialist. She has been the President of Société de l'histoire de France since 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michel Parisse</span> French historian (1936–2020)

Michel Parisse was a French historian who specialized in medieval studies. He was a professor emeritus at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.

Joseph-Marie-Antoine Delaville Le Roulx was a French historian whose speciality was the Knights Hospitaller. He was a knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xavier Dectot</span> French curator and art historian

Xavier Dectot, born on June 8, 1973 in Pithiviers, is a French museum curator and art historian.

References

Relevant articles

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.