About the book: 2001 / The world of the imaginary is present in all societies, in all eras, but at times, thanks to the properties attributed to it, it takes on a special sound. It was this unique, immeasurably important world of the imaginary that surrounded the men and women of the medieval West. The invisible reality was much more reliable and tangible for them than the one they perceived with the help of their senses; they lived immersed in the realm of imagination, striving to comprehend the inner meaning of the world around them, in which, as the Church claimed, the messages of the Lord addressed to them were encrypted - of course, unless their meaning was distorted by Satan. The “long” Middle Ages, which, according to Jacques Le Goff, comes into close contact with our time, will appear before us as a multifaceted and contradictory world of the wonderful. We will learn how at that time people imagined time and space, how they thought about the earthly world and the afterlife, what their ideas about the body were and why they were limited by the rigid framework of ideology, in what symbolic systems and literary metaphors the world and society were conceptualized. Here, following the author of “The Wonderworking Kings,” the historian Marc Bloch, Le Goff poses the question: what place should be given to the world of the imaginary in the process of returning to a renewed political history—to historical and political anthropology? Is it possible to comprehend the world of the imagination using scientific methods, without allowing it to become distorted, or dissolve in vague concepts, or get lost in the labyrinths of the irrational, or fall under the influence of capricious fashion? How to separate the imaginary from the symbolic and ideological, how to clearly define the niche it occupies, and what tools does a historian have to study it? The answers to these questions are contained in the book published today by the French medievalist Jacques Le Goff, who tirelessly advocates for a “different” Middle Ages, to which he devoted all his research talent as a scientist..