11 Facts About Georges Duby

Georges Duby is one of the rare historians to benefit from such an honor, with Herodotus, Thucydides, Ibn Khaldoun, Froissart and Michelet.

Georges Duby earned an undergraduate degree at Lyon in 1942 and completed his graduate thesis at the Sorbonne under Charles-Edmond Perrin in 1952.

Georges Duby taught first at Besancon and then at the University of Aix-en-Provence before he was appointed in 1970 to the Chair of the History of Medieval Society in the College de France.

Georges Duby remained attached to the College until his retirement in 1991.

Georges Duby was elected to the Academie francaise in 1987.

Georges Duby was a pioneer in what he and other Annaliste historians in the 1970s and 80s came to call the "history of mentalities", or the study of not just what people did, but their value systems and how they imagined their world.

In books like The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined and The Age of Cathedrals, Georges Duby showed how ideals and social reality existed in dynamic relationship to one another.

Georges Duby's distilled biographical essay on William Marshal set the knight's career in the context of feudal loyalties, honour and the chivalric frame of mind.

In Le Dimanche de Bouvines on the pivotal 1214 battle of Bouvines, Georges Duby chose not to analyze the battle itself, but the ways it had been represented and remembered over time and the role its memory had played in the formation of French ideas about its medieval past.

Georges Duby wrote frequently in newspapers and popular journals and was a regular guest on radio and television programs promoting historical awareness and support for the arts and social sciences in France.

Georges Duby served as the first director of Societe d'edition de programmes de television, a French broadcast network dedicated to educational programming.