Rather, Harsgor writes that the Annales historians tasked themselves with the creation of social structures, "which means covering the skeleton of the basic economic analysis with the flesh of demographic, cultural, mental, and even psychoanalytical data.
In his works, such as The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined and his writings on William Marshal, Duby focused on the development of ideologies within the structures that permeated the various aspects of an individual's life.
Ginzburg attempted to reconstruct peasant mentalities in sixteenth century Italy by examining the trial records of a single miller, Domenico Scandella, called Menocchio, and trying to find currents or similarities in otherwise fragmentary and obscure evidence.
[4]: 119 Similar techniques can be seen in Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre, which uses microhistory to establish the mentalities of groups at different social levels of French society.
[5]: 101 Similarly, and in keeping with the tradition of the history of mentalities, Darnton devotes a chapter to an analysis of a bourgeoisie's description of his city, in an effort to determine how an individual in a given social situation would interpret and make sense of the world around them.