Tuesday, December 13, 2022
A Great Deal of Work
Lucien Febvre (1878-1956), The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, tr. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 201:
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We have thus seen once more that we should not read a sixteenth-century work with the eyes of a twentieth-century man and then utter a frightened cry and proclaim the work shocking. Only one thing is shocking: forgetting the small fact that a proposition stated by a man of 1538 does not sound the same when stated by a man of 1938. And that a great deal of work must be done, important and highly intricate work, if we wish to restore to opinions we think we can understand without further investigation the very special meaning they had for the people who held them four centuries ago.
