Lucien Febvre as a Reformer: notes on The Problem of Unbelief in the 16th Century

Abstract

This text has the aim of discussing aspects of the intellectual process that resulted in Lucien Febvre’s classical book Le problem de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: la religion de Rabelais. It makes a supplementary discussion of the answers presented by the author (in terms of pointing out to flaws and weaknesses) and the alternatives that he offered (in terms of creation and usage of concepts) as the established ways of conceiving and writing history in the mid-twentieth century. The book is particularly revealing in relation to these aspects, especially when it comes to the specificities of language in the sixteenth-century literature. Beyond analyzing the principles of Febvre’s interpretative theory and the book’s impact on contemporary historical thought, this text intends to demonstrate that the work not only is not dead, but it is still extremely up-to-date.