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Resumé

The article presents the work of the French historian Jacques Le Goff centred on his 1981 study on the birth of the Purgatory. Though working within a largely Marxist conception of class structure, his main interest has always been the history of mentalities, which he increasingly threats in an approach inspired by Michel Foucault. His main interest has been the interaction of the development of the towns in the Middle Ages with the institutions of the Christian religion. The Purgatory, which represented an intermediate, measurable punishment between Heaven and Hell, he sees as a part of the Church’s reaction to the new morality of the cities. It now gave hope for Salvation for increasingly prominent urban sins like usury by punishing it not by total damnation, but by a limited, though certainly painfully long, stay in Purgatory.