Lucien Febvre, Ecclesiastical Historian?

Abstract

Every ecclesiastical historian knows, or, dare I say, should know, Lucien Febvre's incisive and polemical article, ‘Une question mal posée’, first published in 1929, in which, beginning with a critique of recent work on the origins of the Reformation, the author ended by calling ecclesiastical history into question. The aim of this article is to place this famous article in context by examining Febvre's main contributions to the history of the Church, or as he preferred to say, the history of religion. Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) was a prolific writer and, although he has not been studied as intensively as his junior colleagues Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel, his scholarly work has often been discussed. A bibliography published in 1990 listed 2,143 items either by or about Febvre which had been published up to that time. Since the history of religion was one of Febvre's main interests, it follows that this article will have to be rigorously selective, discussing his major contributions to the field together with a few studies of his achievement.In order to give some sense of his intellectual development, Febvre's books and articles on religious history will be discussed in chronological order of publication, before any attempt at an assessment of his reception, cool or warm, or the significance of his work. These books and articles appeared in three clusters, published in 1901–11, 1925–30, and 1941–9 respectively.