Although researchers within the history of mentalities have highlighted the
importance of text and interpretation, few have accorded the text status as the
historian’s real object of study. It is behind the text—in “reality”—that most historians
define their object. The text is not an integral part of the ontology of
the history of mentalities, i.e., the definition of reality upon which the history of
mentalities is built. This paper claims that the linguistic turn has been reductively
interpreted by historians as a question of epistemology and it discusses the analytical
implications of dealing with the text as an integral part of history of mentalities’
ontology. The article first describes Derrida’s text ontology and argues
that the history of mentalities can learn more from this approach. Secondly, this
perspective is concretized through the analysis of a modern classic within the
field—Robert Darnton’s study of the cat massacre. Unlike Darnton, who uses the
“little narrative” about a cat massacre as input to describe a cultural grammar
behind the text, this article emphasizes the study of the text itself as a venue
for local cultural negotiations. This leads to a critique of Darnton’s conclusions:
the story of the cat massacre does not give grounds to see the cat as a symbol of
greater distance between master and journeymen. The text is a stage for complex
intertextual references in which master and journeymen are both played
off against each other and united through their relations to cats and the cat’s
symbolic significance.
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