These attitudes may be conscious or unconscious. In a period of controversy people may be extremely conscious of their attitudes to religion or the state, while remaining virtually unaware that they hold a particular conception of space or time, reason or necessity. It is not easy to write the history of these attitudes. Historians have stalked their quarry from different directions. One group, the Marxists, have concerned themselves with ‘ideologies’. Aware of the need to explain as well as to describe ideas, they have sometimes ended by reducing them to weapons in the class struggle.1 Another group, the French historians of ‘collective mentalities’, study assumptions and feelings as well as conscious thoughts, but find it difficult to decide where one mentality ends and another begins.2 In this chapter I shall employ the somewhat more neutral term of ‘worldview’, while attempting to include what Raymond Williams calls ‘structures of feeling’ and to avoid the risk inherent in this third approach of providing description without analysis, or remaining at the level of consciously formulated opinions.3 In this chapter an attempt is made to move from the immediate environment of the art and literature of the Renaissance to the study of the surrounding society.
