After 1968, the French historiographical current known as the Annales School suffered a rupture that gave rise to the so called history of mentalities , which from the beginning focused on the study of mental attitudes, collective perceptions of various phenomena, cultural universes, and the feelings and beliefs of a society with fixed spatial and temporal coordinates. Yet this history of mentalities was never clearly defined; a comparison of the diverse and at times highly ambiguous definitions of the mentalities approach elaborated by historians such as George Duby, Michel Vovelle and Jacques Le Goff suffices to demonstrate the theoretical weakness of the term. Le Goff himself characterizes the term history of mentalities as ambiguous , which has served as a catch-all term for a variety of research of questionable relevance and little depth. In light of the ambiguity of the so-called history of mentalities , an alternative concept has come to the fore that takes into account the collective representations of the past, which are understood as inventions/constructions. This concept is known as the history of social imaginaries .