Abstract

Braudel's Le Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe Il has been hailed as a classic of twentieth-century scholarship and criticized as "an exhausting treadmill," without coherence, unity, or form. However, Braudel has used a form, that of the Menippean satire, which, though troublesome, is the work's innovation. One characteristic of the genre is its contrast of verse and prose. Braudel altered this by considering verse and prose together and opposing them to quantification. A second characteristic is that the form satirizes abstract ideas and attitudes. Finally, the mode uses facts in an encyclopedic way, thus tending to give the piece a stuffed and saturated quality. The purpose of Braudel's form, from a structuralist's standpoint, is to write a history which will not overemphasize particular events, as does the traditional narrative style