Among Schmitt's best known works translated in English are The Holy Greyhound (1983), about the strange cult of a holy dog in medieval France, and Ghosts in the Middle Ages (1998) about notions of death, the afterlife and paranormal visions in medieval culture. Both works are considered important examples of "historical anthropology," or the use of methods and approaches borrowed from anthropology and other social sciences to investigate the past. Schmitt has argued that this has helped correct for the tendency among medievalists in the past to focus on elites, political institutions and narrative history to the exclusion of the lower classes and their less well-documented experiences of life.
Until 2014 Schmitt was Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and directed the society of professional historians, Groupe d'Anthropologie Historique de l'Occident Médiéval.
Select bibliography
Le Saint Lévrier. Guinefort, guérisseur d’enfants depuis le XIIIe siècle (Flammarion, 1979)
La Raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval (Gallimard, 1990)
Les Revenants: les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale (Gallimard, 1994)
(Editor) L’Histoire des jeunes en Occident (Seuil, 1996)
Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps : Essais d’anthropologie médiévale (Gallimard, 2001).
(Contributing editor) Dictionnaire raisonné de l'Occident médiéval
La Conversion d’Hermann le juif : Autobiographie, histoire et fiction 2004
