Жизнь и смерть в Средние века. Очерки демографической истории Франции

This concern, caused by the epistemological problems facing historians at present, is fully shared by Russian scholars, at least those of them who cherish the idea of developing historical knowledge unrestricted by ideological barriers.

The present author supposes that the essence of the problems, in a nutshell, may be put as follows: it goes without saying that in the process of social development, the effect of the objective conditions in society, and the effect of the subjective intentions and activities of the people living in it are inevitably interwoven. The historian, as a cognizing subject belonging to an epoch completely different from the one under study, stumbles over great difficulties when he tries to follow the inter-action of these two sides of historical reality. Besides, the sources nearly never reveal subjective concepts of the people of the past in relation to the development of objective social processes of the period. Meantime, every sensible historian knows that choosing between different lines of behavior, people make their choice conforming not so much to the reality as it is, as to their own vision of the reality. This makes understanding and elucidation of subjective concepts characteristic of an epoch under study an imperative condition of historical synthesis. A scholar, in search of the way to the synthesis, should first of all find a proper angle of analysis which could at the utmost enable him to embrace the both sides of historical reality, and, second, choose the way of research allowing the sources under study to reveal the information they carry on these two aspects of historical reality.

The approach chosen by the present author is an analysis of demographic concepts, demographic behavior and objective demographic processes in medieval France, in their interrelation. The «demographic concepts» mean here French attitudes to marriage, family, childhood, old age, illness, life and death, and other key subjects of human existence, characteristic of various social groups in various medieval periods. The term «demographic behavior» is used here to refer to the collective stereotypes of behavior that directly influenced human actions in the demographic sphere during different periods of the Middle Ages, while these actions, in turn, shaped objective demographic processes that were intricately intertwined with socioeconomic, political, and cultural processes in society as a whole.

The analysis of all these intertwined objective and subjective structures opens up a possibility to understand anew and more deeply the relation and interrelation of various phenomena in history. It seems the more interesting, as the demographic development in the medieval West as a whole, and in France in particular, has nearly never been studied in the way here suggested. One of the reasons of the lack of such studies lies in the laconism of medieval sources, which very seldom hold direct information on demographic phenomena. The researcher is therefore forced to focus his attention upon revealing indirect and implicit information carried by the sources. In this task he may be very efficiently assisted by the analysis of demographic concepts as a product of people’s subjective perception of the objective processes in the society they lived in, and in the demographic sphere in particular.

In this sense, the direct and indirect data on demographic concepts and the changes the concepts were undergoing, can be used for a mediated characterization of the very demographic processes themselves. And vice versa, the data on some specific variants of demographic behaviour, appearing from time to time in the sources, can be used in order to find in them information on the demographic concepts of the time. Last but not least, elucidation of the system of demographic concepts in one or other period of the Middle Ages will help to form a balanced assessment of fragmentary evidence, scattered in the sources, of demographic processes as they were.

The complex character of the research required a great variety of sources to be used; among them were treatises on theology and morals, penitentiaries, chronicles, acts, coutumes, church council, statutes, polyptiques, censiers, hagiographic texts, genealogical materials, biographies, literary works.