Selections from Quaderni Storici Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, Series Editors Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective Microbistory and the Lost Peoples of EuropeMicrohistory and the ie Lost Peoples of Europe Edited by Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero Translated by Eren Branch lf PAS HY The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London© 1991 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ‘The Johns Hopkins University Press 701 West 40th Street Baltimore, Maryland 21211 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London @® The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Microhistory and the lost peoples of Europe / edited by Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero ; translated by Eren Branch. Pp cm, — (Selections from Quaderni storici) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8018-4182-8. — ISBN 0-8018-4183-6 (pbk.) 1, Europe—History—Miscellanea. 1. Muir, Edward, 1946- Il. Ruggiero, Guido, 1944- IIL. Series. D21.3.M53_— 1991 940—de20 90-27638@ Contents Introduction: Observing Trifles Edward Muir 1. The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographic Marketplace Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni 2. The Dovecote Has Opened Its Eyes Carlo Ginzburg and Marco Ferrari 3. Ritual Pillages: A Preface to Research in Progess The Bologna Seminar, coordinated by Carlo Ginzburg 4, The Ox’s Bones and the Ox’s Hide: A Popular Myth, Part Hagiography and Part Witchcraft Maurizio Bertolotti 5. The Kings of the Dead on the Battlefield of Agnadello Ottavia Niccoli 6. Jews, the Local Church, the “Prince”” and the People: Two Late Fifteenth-Century Episodes Involving the Destruction of Sacred Images Michele Luzzati 20 a7 101vi Contents 7. The Political System of a Community in Liguria: Cervo in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries 119 Edoardo Grendi 8. Unwed Mothers in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Clinical Histories and Life Histories 159 Gianna Pomata? Introduction: Observing Trifles by Edward Muir I’ve tried to get to the essentials and be as precise as possible, always keeping in mind that if the flour’s too refined, the bread loses its flavor. —Danilo Dolci, Creature of Creatures Holmes to Watson: “Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon the details.” —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity” Holmes to Watson: “You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”” —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Bascombe Valley Mystery” Sherlock Holmes’s knack for noticing the apparently trivial was, of course, the wellspring of his many successes in criminal detection, a trait that makes his solutions, when examined in retrospect, so con- vincingly simple.' Historians have long enjoyed pointing out the sim- ilarities between criminal and historical detection, but the comparison has now become central to a debate about historical method that has focused on the genre of microhistory, which evolved in the late 1970s and 1980s. Although it has parallels elsewhere, microhistory was born in northern Italy, especially in Bologna, the same intellectual milieu in which Umberto Eco wrote his best-selling novel, The Name of the Rose. It is not an accident, then, that the central character in Eco’s novel, a fourteenth-century Franciscan hybrid between William of Occam and Sherlock Holmes, exhibits the same fascination with ob- serving trifles as do the microhistorians, who invoke the famous fic- tional detective as a methodological guide. Their work responds to the once-dominant preoccupation among historians with quantitative social science, the longue durée, and immobile history, and it returns to interpreting utterances and beliefs, to describing brief dramatic events, and to envisioning a past characterized more by abrupt changes than by deep structural continuities. These changes in the practice of history are analogous to certain developments in other disciplines. Sociologists have moved toward deciphering through microlinguistics short social encounters. Etholo- gists such as Jane Goodall in her study of chimpanzees insist on the importance of systematic, long-term observation of individual animals viiviii Introduction in their natural habitat. Goodall’s rejection of the laboratory, with its measurements, calculations, and statistical predictions, demonstrates, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it, that “close observation of individual differences can be as powerful a method in science as the quantification of predictable behavior in a zillion identical atoms. . . . When you understand why nature’s complexity can only be unraveled this way, why individuality matters so crucially, then you are in a position to understand what the sciences of history are all about.’ The most important reverberations, however, have been with ethnography. Among anthropologists there is a movement “to stress not just the given nature of society, but also the ways in which human beings continually construct, manipulate, and even recast the social worlds into which they were born and within which they will die.” The various disciplinary byways that have led scholars back to individuals making choices and developing strategies within the constraint’ of their own time and place have been diverse. In this collection of essays from Quaderni storici, the second vol- ume in a series, we propose to follow the path opened by the Italian scholars who coined the term microbistory and who have been the most creative in exploring its potentialities. Italian microhistory has made its claim to novelty in two ways. The first has been to argue for a reduction of the scale of historical research in order to isolate and test the many abstractions of social thought. In terms remarkably similar to those of Stephen Jay Gould, Carlo Ginzburg has argued that, “‘a close reading of a relatively small number of texts, related to a possibly circumscribed belief, can be more rewarding than the mas- sive accumulation of repetitive evidence.” The second way has been to offer an alternative method for the evaluation of historical evidence, a method called the evidential paradigm, which is similar to the theory of abduction the American philosopher Charles Peirce proposed a century ago as a systematic way to sort out fragmentary clues. Italian microhistory has evolved in a series of monographs issued by the Turin publisher, Giulio Einaudi,’ and above all in the journal Quadermi storici. Since 1966 Quaderni storici has played a singular role in the polycentric, highly ideological Italian university world where young scholars can usually find a position only after years of servitude to an academic “baron” who, at least in the past, was in- variably affiliated with one of the major political parties. As Guido Ruggiero pointed out in his introduction to the first volume in this series, Quaderni storici has tried to assure a place for experimentation,Introduction ix for minority approaches to scholarship (especially those of women), and for interdisciplinary methodologies; at the same time, it has es- chewed any explicit ideological or party affiliation.* In a 1977 Quaderni storici article Edoardo Grendi first proposed a research agenda based on microanalysis. Then in 1979 in an essay titled “The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Histo- riographic Marketplace,” Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni outlined a program for microhistory that might make Italian historical scholar- ship more independent from the dominating influence of the French Annales school. While granting that the quantitative and serial data history characteristic of much of French and American historiography would retain the status of “normal science” in the sense established by Thomas Kuhn, a new type of research, Ginzburg and Poni pre- dicted, would create an ethnographic history of everyday life by de- voting itself to extremely circumscribed phenomena such as a single community, a family, or an individual.'® Italy, they thought, is par- ticularly well suited for ethnographic history because the unmatched richness of documentary material—not only in the archives and li- braries, but in land use patterns, the forms of the cities, and the mores of the population—makes the peninsula ‘an immense archiye.”” In advocating a finely focused ethnographic history, Ginzburg and Poni concurred with similar developments in certain circles in Britain, France, and the United States. They wanted to develop a method to trace what Natalie Zemon Davis had labeled “‘the social creativity of the so-called inarticulate.”"" They wanted to escape the traditional overemphasis in Italy on institutional and legal history that preserved Crocean idealism and statism and to redress the newer influences that had led to the cliometric preoccupation with numbers rather than persons and the sociological preference for abstractions as analytical units. In place of these they wanted to substitute a genre that was devoted to social relationships and interactions among historical per- sons who, in contrast to analytic categories, actually existed and who experienced life as a series of events. Their approach was to be nom- inalistic, practical, and rooted in “common sense.” Central to their method is tracing the names of individuals. ‘The lines that converge upon and diverge from the name, creating a kind of closely woven web, provide for the observer a graphic image of the network of social relationships into which the individual is in- serted.”" The ideal result would be a prosopography from below in which the relationships, decisions, restraints, and freedoms faced byx Introduction real people in actual situations would emerge. Once again, in the fashion of nineteenth-century positivism, individual persons make their own histories, but to the microhistorians the makers of history are seldom “great men” but rather the little peoples lost to European history: in the examples in this collection, a charlatan distiller, the anonymous pillagers of ecclesiastical property, an accused witch, peas- ants who had disturbing visions, two Jews who destroyed Christian images on their houses, the inhabitants of a small coral-gathering and olive-culture town, and unwed mothers who sought aid in urban hospitals.'* When the microhistorians have studied great men, such as Galileo or Piero della Francesca, they have focused on obscure clues that have traditionally been ignored or devalued as insignificant. Although by no means the sole originator of the microhistorical method, Carlo Ginzburg is certainly the best known of the micro- historians, especially outside Italy. Long before the term microhistory was coined, Ginzburg explored many of what would become its dis- tinguishing traits in his early studies of witch trials.'* These studies anticipated microhistorical techniques by treating inquisitors’ inter- rogations of suspected witches as a kind of dialogue in which the most revealing interchanges for the historian are those in which the partic- ipants’ misunderstandings of each other offer clues to now-lost ways of thinking. His best-known work, The Cheese and the Worms, ex- plicitly developed the microhistorical approach by analyzing how a sixteenth-century Italian miller named Menocchio creatively “mis- read’ an odd collection of books, including possibly even the Koran, and interpreted them through the filters of the material culture of his peasant heritage to form a private cosmology so distinctive that it utterly mystified the inquisitors who examined him. Ginzburg uses Menocchio’s inquisition trials to trace the reciprocal relationships be- tween popular and elite culture and, on the basis of stray clues found in the miller’s testimony, to reconstruct a “‘millenarian cosmological tradition” that depicted the creation of angels and God out of primal matter just as worms, according to the popular theory of the time, are spontaneously generated out of cheese. The miller’s cosmology is presented as a mutant version of a once-pervasive pantheism that still survived in the sixteenth century within nominally Christian society." The guiding premise in Ginzburg’s work has been that through the intense study of a few revealing documents, especially the records of interrogations, one can recapture the interactions between elite and popular cultures. Related themes appear in several of the articlesIntroduction xi included in this collection, examples of what might be called cultural microhistory. In “The Dovecote Has Opened Its Eyes,” Ginzburg and Marco Ferrari show how elements of medical knowledge circu- lated between literate and nonliterate groups, that is, between print and oral culture, a circulation that has continued into this century in a popular remedy for treating burns. In “Ritual Pillages,” a work produced by Ginzburg’s seminar at the University of Bologna, the survival into the sixteenth century of the practice of pillaging eccle- siastical and personal property after the death of a bishop or pope shows how a primitive tradition, best explained by reference to the anthropological literature on tribal societies, infiltrated the highest levels of Christian society, despite the protests of numerous Church authorities. Explicitly following Ginzburg’s lead into inquisition records, Maurizio Bertolotti in “The Ox’s Bones and the Ox’s Hide: A Popular Myth, Part Hagiography and Part Witchcraft,” examines the interactions between a sixteenth-century witch tutored in an oral tradition and an erudite inquisitor, both of whom shared knowledge of an archaic myth that had been transmitted to them in very different ways and in quite different forms. In a similar fashion Ottavia Niccoli in “The Kings of the Dead on the Battlefield of Agnadello,” shows how an ancient myth about the armies of the dead provided the content for some famously disturbing apparitions observed in 1517. She ana- lyzes how the introduction of print complicated the picture of the interaction among cultures and how reports of the apparitions took on different meanings in different social contexts. Despite the evident similarities between ancient myths and Renaissance practices or be- liefs, similarities that might have suggested to other scholars some kind of formal analysis, these historians argue that meaning can only be found among the specific social groups and named individuals who accepted the practices and beliefs. Therefore, meaning is entirely con- textual. One of the dominant goals of this form of cultural microhistory has been to write history without the taint of anachronism, a task advocated by most historians but difficult to accomplish. To avoid anachronisms the cultural microhistorians begin with the assumption that the past is utterly alien to the present, that the citizens of sixteenth- century Rome or Bologna were as different from us as are the tribes of the New Guinea highlands. The result is an ambivalent relationship between their historical practice and contemporary politics and ide- ologies. Ginzburg, in particular, wants to distance himself from thexii Introduction labels, party cliques, ideological factions, petty quarrels, and ephem- eral movernents that have made Italian intellectual life so reflexive and obscure."” The universities—and not only in Italy—have been partic- ularly vulnerable to a kind of self-referential scholasticism, the ruinous habit of ignoring common sense typical of late medieval angelology and more than one contemporary theoretical school. To him the proper goal of the historian is not to explore the historical implications of a contemporary theory or problem, but to write about things that are totally forgotten and completely irrelevant to the present, to pro- duce a history that is “really dead.” Many critics have obviously been confused by this idiosyncratic voice of reason. In their insistence on categorizing rather than understanding his thought, some have even accused him of right-wing positions despite his left-wing background, but Ginzburg has refused to be provoked into associating his historical work with any ideology." In contrast to the “unmoving history” of the dominant group in the old Annales school or the institutional and intellectual history of Italian scholars on both the Right and the Left who have often presented the past as an unfolding of their own political positions, Ginzburg’s history is rent by vast and abrupt changes that produce psychic and intellectual gaps between the past and the present Historians who worry too much about being relevant to the present, he says, too readily produce anachronistic history, and “anachronism isa kind of conscious or unconscious will to impose your own values and also your own existence on people. So in some way, philology is also rejated to a kind of respect for the dead.’”” The philological concern of the cultural microhistorians for the accurate reconstruction of meanings within their original contexts re- veals one of the most striking characteristics of their methods: they respect the strictest positivist standards in the collection and criticism of evidence but employ that evidence in highly unconventional ways. Again Carlo Ginzburg serves as the best example.” As an explanation for his radical methodological attitude, Ginzburg claims Freud as his intellectual model, despite the fact that his work is often strongly anti- Freudian.” It is not Freudianism itself, however, that interests Ginz~ burg but the distinctive character of Freud’s mind: “the peculiar mix- ture in Freud’s intellectual personality of a very positivistic attitude towards truth and that daring attitude about questions, relevancies, methods, and standards of proof.” = Be — ‘icrohiseorian distinctive combination of evidential creative proofs and esoteric topics can be furtherIntroduction xiii clarified by comparing their work with the late Michel Foucault’s philosophical history. Both the microhistorians and Foucault have written about similar subjects, the objects of persecution such as witches, madmen, and Jews and the institutions of coercion such as inquisitions, hospitals, and prisons. Both have emphasized how mod- ern hegemonic institutions have excluded certain ways of thinking by dismissing them as demonic, irrational, heretical, or criminal, thus narrowing the range of intellectual options available to the culture. Both have consciously inverted the picture of the progressive liberation of modern history, depicting modern cultures as less free in many respects than medieval ones. Yet none of the microhistorians cite Foucault, and Ginzburg, in particular, denies any significant influence from him, calling Les mots et les choses, for example, “not so inter- esting” and “even weak.” Two major aspects of Foucault’s views disturb Ginzburg. First, Foucault’s theories cannot be verified. According to Foucault's own scheme, standards of verification come from a modern scientific dis- cipline that “refamiliarizes” the past to make it conform to the terms of the present rather than to those of the past. Thus, correctness means conformity to an order of things that has been defined by a discipline or institution. Historical truth is what the discipline of history says it is. For Ginzburg this view is a grand evasion; it may not be easy to respect the dead, but one is not inevitably condemned to violate their graves and distort their beliefs. To Ginzburg correctness can be and must be determined by the concrete, physically real evidence the past presents to us—not by the disciplines, which are artificial con- structs. Second, Foucault consciously imposes himself between the past and present in seeking to dissolve the assumed understandings of the coercive disciplines and institutions and thus to ‘“defamiliarize”” the past from the present, to make the past radically alien to our contemporary ways of understanding. Although this process seems to be similar to Ginzburg’s evocation of dead history, it diverts at- tention from the object of study to the act of studying and becomes for Ginzburg a kind of intellectual theft in which the integrity of the past is subordinated not so much to the present as to the activity of the scholar. No matter how critical the microhistorians become about the au- thority of evidence, no matter how fully they appreciate the inter- preter’s dilemma in trying to preserve the foreignness of a subject and yet make it familiar enough to be understood, no matter how awarexiv Introduction influence their own meanings, they are of the ways in which texts they assume that there is a reality external to those historical texts, a reality that can be known.” They certainly accept a kind of historical uncertainty principle, recognizing that history only balances possi- bilities against probabilities; but they also share an assumption with detectives and ethnologists that clues found in documents, at murder scenes, and in informants’ oral accounts point to something other than themselves. Ginzburg wants to employ the primal method of the Paleolithic hunter, that first philologist, who recognized from paw prints that a lion he had never actually seen, heard, touched, or smelled had come his way. The characteristic feature of the hunter’s knowl- edge “was that it permitted the leap from apparently insignificant facts, which could be observed, to a complex reality which—directly at least—could not. And these facts would be ordered by the observer in such a way as to provide a narrative sequence—at its simplest, ‘someone passed this way.’ ”” The hunter’s position was the inverse of Foucault’s: to the hunter the prey was all, he was nothing. However ancient its roots may be, the microhistorical approach raises questions about selectivity and significance. By what criteria are names to be picked out and how representative of broader social trends and collective mentalities are the subjects’ activities and thoughts? What can the few tell about the many, especially when the process of selection is neither random nor statistically rigorous? And how can historians concerned with trifles avoid producing trivial history? Edoardo Grendi has suggested that a response to these questions should rely on the statistical concept of a normal exception.” Since rebels, heretics, and criminals are the most likely candidates from the lower or nonliterate classes to leave sufficient traces to become the subjects of microhistories, their behavior is, by definition, exceptional. However, as Ginzburg and Poni note in “The Name and the Game,” certain kinds of transgressions against authority constitute normal behavior for those on the social periphery, the kinds of behavior sociologists call “self help”—that is, those illegal or socially proscribed actions that were normal for those who had no other means of re- dress." Some transgressors, therefore, might be exceptions to the norms defined by political or ecclesiastical authorities but would be perfectly representative of their own social milieu. _ Understanding what behaviors and ideas were beyond the pale might also help to describe better the characteristics of the dominant group that defined what was considered normal."? Although most ofIntroduction xv the essays in this collection study persons who were exceptional in comparison to dominant groups and dominant values, the three ex- amples of what might be called social microhistory show in particular how the behavior of marginal persons can be used to clarify the nature of authority. In his fascinating account of licensed Jewish “‘icono- clasm” (“Jews, the Local Church, the ‘Prince’ and the People: Two Late Fifteenth-Century Episodes Involving the Destruction of Sacred Images”), Michele Luzzati reconstructs connections within the Italian Jewish community on the one hand and between specific Jews and various Christian ecclesiastical and secular authorities on the other. By finding out everything he can about every participant in the events, including even the career of the mason hired to destroy the Christian images in a Jew’s house, Luzzati shows how much more important are patterns of personal and economic relationships than are the vague abstractions usually invoked in explaining the deteriorating position of Jews in late fifteenth-century Italy. In a richly complex and sometimes difficult essay (‘“The Political System of a Community in Liguria: Cervo in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries”), Edoardo Grendi develops a social ver- sion of microhistory that most fully departs from the cultural ori- entation of Ginzburg and his associates. Like the others he begins by tracing the names and interactions of his subjects, but in this case the subjects are members of an elite, albeit those in a minor seaside com- munity. Grendi frames his many carefully drawn portraits of indi- viduals with statistics that illustrate the economy of coral gathering and olive-oil production. As a result of his close attention to the actual behavior of individuals and families that can be traced from judicial records, he revises several standard social-science generalizations, showing that factional conflict did not rest on a patronage system but on local solidarity and that economic activity was defined by many forces that were external to the operations of the market. Local con- nections predominated over all other factors, but in this highly liti- gious society interpersonal ties were fleeting and transitory. Grendis work exemplifies how inadequate are institutional studies that rely simply on the elite’s self-descriptions of political behavior and eco- nomic studies in which global statistics obscure the actual nature of exchanges.” Ina similar fashion but for a dramatically different context, Gianna Pomata shows in her “Unwed Mothers in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Clinical Histories and Life Histories” howxvi Introduction our understanding of official institutions can be redefined through microhistorical studies of persons who were subject to their influence. For this period in place of the Inquisition whose records are favored by the cultural microhistorians, Pomata looks at hospitals and ma- ternity wards in which the collection of the clinical and life histories of patients was gradually replaced by laboratory analyses and statistical surveys, a process that erased the identities of individual unwed mothers and subjected their bodies to clinical regimentation. Pomata tries to reverse this process, neatly using microhistory to restore to life the experiences of women lost by the same scientific quantifying process that the microhistorians think has eliminated individuals from history. In addition to seeing their subjects as normal exceptions, the mi- crohistorians consider certain historical documents as examples of a second kind of normal exception. If documents generated by the forces of authority systematically distort the social reality of the subaltern classes, then an exceptional document, especially one that records the exact words of a lower-class witness or defendant, could be much more revealing than a multitude of stereotypical sources.” In selecting these exceptional documents and neutralizing the distortions in others, the microhistorians have relied on specific criteria of proof designed to resurrect “forms of knowledge or understandings of the world which have been suppressed or lost.” It is here that they most dra- matically emulate Freud’s daring attitude toward standards of proof that led him to prize obscure clues to things hidden in the human psyche. Although the characteristic microhistorical attitude toward proof is evident in most of the work presented here, it is again Carlo Ginz~ burg who has been explicit about its implications. What he has called the “evidential paradigm” suggests that unknown objects can be iden- tified “through single, seemingly insignificant, signs, rather than through the application of laws derived from repeatable and quanti- fiable observations.’ He bolsters his use of the evidential paradigm by an analysis of the methods of three disciplines that blossomed during the last decades of the nineteenth century: art history, epito- mized by Giovanni Morelli’s study in paintings of marginal details such as the shape of ears; psychoanalysis, exemplified by Freud’s technique of divining “secret and concealed things” from inadvertent verbal slips and unconscious symptoms; and criminology represented by Francis Galton’s 1892 work, Finger Prints, and the investigative adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional hero, SherlockIntroduction xvii Holmes. The methods of artistic connoisseurship, psychiatric diag- nosis, and criminal detection have more in common than might at first appear: Morelli, Freud, and Conan Doyle were all physicians trained in the late nineteenth century at a time when diagnostic med- icine was becoming increasingly influential. The ground these disci- plines share was recognized at the time. Freud wrote that Morelli’s stress on minor details was “closely related to the technique of psy- choanalysis”; Conan Doyle probably knew about Morelli’s techniques through his artist father and his uncle who was director of the Dublin Art Gallery, and the physician author’s probable model for Holmes, the medical professor Dr. Joseph Bell, used to lecture on the similarity between disease and crime and how in making a true diagnosis the physician must pay particular attention to minute details.” In an impressive display of erudition Ginzburg traces the genealogy of the evidential paradigm back much further, to Paleolithic hunting lore that in providing a method for interpreting animal tracks produced the idea of narrative, to Mesopotamian divination books, to Hippoc- rates, and in a final sweep, which encompasses too much to add much darity, to “physicians, historians, politicians, potters, joiners, mari- ners, hunters, fishermen, and women in general,” all of whom proceded by building up knowledge of a whole from an examination of parts." To Ginzburg this is the nub of the matter. The degree to which an endeavor is occupied with the individual is inversely pro- portional to its ability to apply the Galilean model, which relies on the statistical examination of evidence suggested by a hypothesis. Either understanding of the individual is sacrificed in achieving a math- ematical standard of generalization or an alternative method must be accepted that is based on individual cases in a way that “would (in some way yet to be worked out) be scientific.” Even more than in the other anthropocentric disciplines, history, according to Ginzburg, “always remains a science of a very particular kind, irremediably based on the concrete.” Historical knowledge, therefore, is always to some degree conjectural because historians must work like medical practitioners who cannot actually see most diseases but must diagnose their presence indirectly on the basis of telltale symptoms or signs. For example, in his The Enigma of Piero Ginzburg relies on Morellian techniques to isolate a distinctively shaped ear and demonstrates that the same man’s portrait appears in three different paintings. Sorting out the authentic portraits of Cardinal Bessarion from the fanciful, Ginzburg compares the subjects’ noses.*' Such triflesxviii Introduction as these generate “conjectural proofs” in two possible ways. First, in a positive operation the historian compares discrete examples of par- ticular details such as noses, ears, or textual citations, using them like a hunter uses tracks or a detective fingerprints to identify a known but unseen animal or person. In this process likenesses confirm the most likely possibility. Second, in a negative operation the investigator systematically eliminates alternatives until only one remains—as Sher- lock Holmes does, in perhaps the most frequently cited example of such reasoning, when he points out the curious failure of the watchdog to bark on the night that the racehorse Silver Blaze disappeared from its stable. Holmes eliminates all suspects but one by noting that such a dog resists the temptation to bark only in the presence of its master. In this process the removal of the unlikely isolates the likely. The proofs found in many of the microhistories have been the object of the severest criticisms of the genre, in part because of a reluctance to recognize or accept the conjectural nature of the en- deavor. To understand the microhistorians’ task, we need to know what is “conjectural” about these proofs and by what process these historians move from the observation of facts to the production of conclusions. What, in fact, is a conjecture? The clearest and most consistent analysis of the logical process the microhistorians are trying to follow can be found in the philosopher Charles Peirce’s notion of abduction." Abduction makes its start from the facts, without, at the outset, having any particular theory in view, though it is motivated by the feeling that a theory is needed to explain the surprising facts. In- duction makes its start from a hypothesis which seems to recom- mend itself, without at the outset having any particular facts in view, though it feels the need of facts to support the theory. Ab- duction seeks a theory. Induction secks for facts. In abduction the consideration of the facts suggests the hypothesis. In induction the study of the hypothesis suggests the experiments which bring to light the very facts to which the hypothesis had pointed. Abduction, moreover, does not prove anything; it “merely suggests that something may be.” Proof comes from induction. The signif- icance of abduction lies not in its ability to prove that something is operative or actually exists but in the creative potential it represents. According to Peirce, abduction “is the only logical operation which introduces a new idea; for induction does nothing but determine 2Introduction xix value, and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis.” It is precisely in their creative innovations based on abduction that the microhistorians have been the most intriguing. Peirce argued that a method should not be chosen for its security or its guarantee of certain answers but for its potential for fruitfulness or uberty, to use his own neologism. In fact, there is an inverse relationship between fruitfulness and security: the greater the potential for uberty, the less likely a method will lead to certainty."* Abduction, therefore, is the most fruitful and least certain method. “Abduction is, after all, nothing but guessing,” and yet Peirce noted that a hy- pothesis based on observed facts is more often correct than it would be if governed by mere chance, even though such a guess is logically only a maybe/maybe-not proposition. Moreover, no advance in knowledge could be made without abductions.” What the micro- historians have done, and most precisely what Carlo Ginzburg has done, is to single out and be explicit about a way of doing history that has, in fact, long governed a great deal of historical practice, whatever its pretensions to scientific status, Abduction and conjecture, however, have their dangers. Micro- historical arguments, especially those devoted to some form of cultural interpretation, are vulnerable to circularity; because all interpre- tation “presupposes,” as Ginzburg says, “‘a reciprocal interchange between the whole and the parts,” there is both the “healthy cir- cularity of hermeneutic interpretation” and the vicious circle. The best check against the latter is the convergence of several indepen- dent lines of investigation, which substantially reduce the possibility of error. But when are similarities true convergences and not just coincidences? The best answer to this question can be found in the distinction between “to show” (mostrare), which reveals formal analogies in the internal structure of a subject such as similar stylistic traits in paintings by the same artist, and “to demonstrate” (dimostrare), which uses evidence external to the subject such as written contracts to show that the same artist painted two different canvases,” The most convincing argument comes when proofs that show and those that demonstrate converge. The final guard against overly elaborated circular argu- ments comes from what has been called “‘Ginzburg’s razor,” one of the strict rules that he wishes imposed on the use of conjectures: “other things being equal, the interpretation requiring fewest hypotheses should generally be taken as the most probable.’xx Introduction In applying ““Ginzburg’s razor,” microhistorians have tried to be very precise about exactly how the sources they use were put together and how the various voices found in them can be distinguished. Ginz~ burg notes, for example, how inquisitorial records were kept: a notary was charged with the verbatim transcription of what was said, both questions and answers, an obligation that permits the modern scholar to adjust for leading or suggestive questions. But sometimes the notary in laziness or haste switched to the third person and paraphrased the interrogation, making the trial much more problematic as a source.” Maurizio Bertolotti shows a similar sensitivity to the presuppositions of both participants in an inquisitorial dialogue, while Ottavia Niccoli unravels multiple layers of opinion and belief and distinguishes among various media of transmission in her account of the spread of news about the Agnadello apparitions. Michele Luzzati in his brilliant close reading of notarial records uncovers changes of opinion by paying particular attention to the erased and crossed-out passages in the re- vised draft of a notarized contract. Struck by the terrible pathos of her subjects, Gianna Pomata abandons classification and quantitative analysis of the unwed mothers for a careful examination of the sup- posedly scientific hypotheses that structured the women's clinical and life histories, Her awareness of all the voices in the documents allows her to free the mostly ignorant young women from the constraints of medical practice in order to let them tell their own stories in their own way. The great strength of the microhistories comes from this sensitivity to the nuances of power and the changes of voice in doc- uments.* They recognize how there was a series of gaps or disjunctures between what was said and what was recorded, between what the interrogators asked and what the scholar wants to know, and between what the educated notaries or physicians and the bewildered defen- dants or patients understood about the other. Inquisitors twisted re- plies to fit their own preconceptions, peasants perplexedly tried to explain themselves and to guess what the officials wanted to hear, and differences in dialect and levels of culture sometimes hopelessly com- promised communication but still leave the historian with vital clues.” In the subjects they have chosen, microhistorians have snipped at the fringes of normal historical practice, that vast middle area between histoire totale and microstoria. Although the fascination with trifles may threaten what in another context Simon Schama has called “the pigmification of historical scale,” the ablest practitioners of the mi- crohistorical genre, including those translated here, have been strug-Introduction xxi gling to eliminate the distortions produced by the giantification of historical scale, which has crushed all individuals to insignificance under the weight of vast impersonal structures and forces.** To them the idea that microhistory leads to relativism or to an attitude that anything goes—that any little neglected subject is worth examining especially if it is about deviant sex or outlandish religious beliefs—is a serious misreading of their intentions. The purpose of microhistory is to elucidate historical causation on the level of small groups where most of real life takes place and to open history to peoples who would be left out by other methods. ‘The new historical detectives from Italy may not have found a foolproof method, any more than have real-world as opposed to fic- tional detectives, but it would be a mistake to dismiss them because they appear to be devoted to little problems. Quite the opposite is the case. They have been struggling with one of the biggest questions: what can we know about the peoples lost to history? Notes 1. This Introduction borrows liberally from a paper I presented in 1987 as a Mellon Lecture at Tulane University and at a session on microhistory organized by Anne Jacobson Schutte at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference in ‘Tempe, Ari- zona. I wish to thank the many persons who made helpful comments at these pre- sentations and especially those who read early versions of the paper: James Amelang, Linda L. Carroll, Paul Paskoff, Karl Roider, Guido Ruggiero, and Thomas Scheff. | have benefited greatly from their criticisms, and the errors that remain are my own, 2. Robin W. Winks, ed., The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York, 1970). 3. Thomas Scheff, “Micro-linguistics and Social Structure: A Theory of Social Action,” Sociological Theory 4 (1986): 71-83. Professor Scheff kindly allowed me to see some of his other work on microsociology prior to its publication. 4. Stephen Jay Gould, “Animals and Us,” New York Review of Books, June 25, 1987, p. 23, an article that reviews The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Bebavior by Jane Goodall (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). 5, Renato Rosaldo, Mlongot Headbunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History (Stanford, 1980), p. 23. The interdisciplinary literature on history and an- thropology is now vast: see especially Bernard Cohn, “History and Anthropology: The State of Play,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (1980): 198-221; idem, “History and Anthropology: Towards a Rapprochement,”* Journal of Interdis- ciplinary History 12 (1981): 227-52; Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Possibilities of the Past,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1981): 267~75; and Diane Owen Hughes, “Toward Historical Ethnography: Notarial Records and Family History in the Middle Ages,” Historical Methods Newsletter 7 (1976): 61-71. Recent discussions of the issues from the anthropological side can be found in the extended book review by various authors of Maurice Bloch’s, From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar (Cambridge, 1986) in Current An-Introduction xxii thropology 27 (1986): 349-60. Useful recent views from history are Robert Darton, “The Symbolic Element in History,” Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 267-75 and the chapters on “The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy” and “The Sources: Outsiders and Insiders” in Peter Burke’s, The Historical Anthropology of Early Moder Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 3-24, For a critique by a microhistorian of the ways in which some historians have employed the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz, see Giovanni Levi, “I pericoli di geertzismo,” Quaderni storici [hereafter, QS] 58 (1985): 269-77, esp. 275, 6. “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” in Ginzburg’s Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1989), . 164, a translation of the collection, Miti emblemi spie: Morfologia e storia (Turin, 1986), which does not, however, contain this particular essay 7. Carlo Ginzburg’s study of Piero della Francesca was the first volume in the microstorie series published by Einaudi: Indagini su Piero: Il Battesimo, il cilo di Arezzo, la Flagellazione di Urbino (Turin, 1981), trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper as The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca: The Baptism, the Arezzo Cycle, the Flagellation (London, 1985). Books published for the first time by this series include an analysis of matrimonial strategies in the diocese of Como: Raul Merzario, Il paese stretto: Strategie matrimoniali nella diocesi di Como (secoli XVI—XVIII) (Turin, 1981); a dialogue between two historians about recapturing historical consciousness: Pietro Marcenaro and Vittorio Foa, Riprendere tempo: Un dialogo con postlla (Turin, 1982); a study of the rebuilding of a Venetian church during the Renaissance: Antonio Foscari and Manfredo Tafuri, L’armonia e i conflicti: La chiesa di San Francesco dell Vigna nella Venezia del '500 (Turin, 1983); a reinterpretation of the charges of heresy against Galileo: Pictro Redondi, Galileo eretico (Turin, 1983), trans. Raymond Ro senthal as Galileo Heretic (Princeton, 1987); a reconstruction of the systems of kinship and of manufacturing among woolen-cloth workers in the Biellese during the nine- teenth-century: Franco Ramella, Terra e telai: Sistemi di parentela e manifattura nel Biellese del!’ Ottocento (Turin, 1984); a prosopography of the clients of a priest-exorcist in seventeenth-century Piedmont: Giovanni Levi, L’evedita immateriale: Carriers di un esorcista nel Piemonte del Seicento (Turin, 1985), trans. Lydia G. Cochrane 28 Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (Chicago, 1988); an oral history of the experiences of common people as the city of Terni evolved from an agricultural village to a major industrial center: Alessandro Portelli, Biografia di wna cittd: Storia ¢ rac conto: Terni 1830-1985 (Turin, 1985); and an examination of feuding in Liguria: Os ile Raggio, Faide e parentele: Lo stato genovese visto dalla Fontanabuona (Turin, Einaudi’s microstorie series has also brought parallel examples of foreign schol arship to Italian readers, including Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s reconstruc- tion of family factions in the Salem witchcraft trials: Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchoraft (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), translated as Microstorie no. 12, La atti indemoniata: Salem e le origini sociali di una caccia alle streghe (Turin, 1986); Natalie Zemon Davis’s book about the celebrated sixteenth-century French case of an imposter who took over the bed and property of a missing husband: Le retour de Martin Guerre (Paris 1982), The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), and as Mi- eee 2 1 ritorno di Martin Guerre: Un caso di doppia identita nella Francia 4e! Cinguecento (Turin, 1984); Anton Blok’s study of the evolution of Mafia violence: } Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860-1960 (New York, 1974), translated as Microstorie no. 13, La mafia di un villaggio siciliano, 1860-1960: Imprenditori, contadini, violent (Turin, 1986); and Edward P. Thompson's major articles in historical anthropology translated as Microstorie no. 2, Societa patricia, cul e é antro- pologia storica sull Inghilterra del Settecente eraser aero