Jacques Le Goff is a prominent figure in the tradition of French medieval scholarship, profoundly influenced by the
Annales school, notably, Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel, and by the ethnographers and anthropologists Mauss, Dumézil, and Lévi-Strauss. In building his argument for "another Middle Ages" (
un autre moyen âge), Le Goff documents the emergence of the collective
mentalité from many sources with scholarship both imaginative and exact.