The history without the imaginary constitutes a sterile history, argues the leading French historian Jacques Le Goff in the essays collected in this seminal work.

He delves into the search for a renewed understanding of medieval history and studies the imaginary and the collective representations of medieval society from the 5th to the 16th century. Le Goff explains why the imaginary is a multifaceted and difficult-to-define concept.

He refers to the literary and artistic production of medieval times to highlight its fundamental role in the personal and collective unconscious. He examines its interconnection with the concepts of representation, ideology, and symbolism.

Starting from the concept of the marvelous, as a system of reading the supernatural, he develops key themes such as medieval space-time, the relationships between high culture and folk culture, and dreams, a crucial point between clerical culture and popular culture.

The space of forests and feudal lands, places of work and social practices, journeys to the beyond, dietary and clothing codes, the bodily and dream-like imaginary, and the way medieval Western society projected its fears and desires onto these elements constitute the components of the captivating universe that Le Goff offers us through his analyses.

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