What is Microhistory?

Theory and Practice

Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, István M. Szijártó

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135047061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This unique and detailed analysis provides the first accessible and comprehensive introduction to the origins, development, methodology of microhistory – one of the most significant innovations in historical scholarship to have emerged in the last few decades.

The introduction guides the reader through the best-known example of microstoria, The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, and explains the benefits of studying an event, place or person in microscopic detail. In Part I, István M. Szijártó examines the historiography of microhistory in the Italian, French, Germanic and the Anglo-Saxon traditions, shedding light on the roots of microhistory and asking where it is headed. In Part II, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon uses a carefully selected case study to show the important difference between the disciplines of macro- and microhistory and to offer practical instructions for those historians wishing to undertake micro-level analysis. These parts are tied together by a Postscript in which the status of microhistory within contemporary historiography is examined and its possibilities for the future evaluated.

What is Microhistory? surveys the significant characteristics shared by large groups of microhistorians, and how these have now established an acknowledged place within any general discussion of the theory and methodology of history as an academic discipline.

Part I

Introduction Against simple truths

Pighino and Menocchio

‘My way is to begin with the beginning’, wrote Byron in his Don Juan. If we follow his advice when searching for an answer for the question ‘what is microhistory?’ we should first turn to Italian microhistory. Within microstoria, it is the work of its best known representative, Carlo Ginzburg, that might serve as a starting point, and the obvious choice to demonstrate his scholarship is his world-famous book The Cheese and the Worms, published originally in Italy in 1976 (Ginzburg 1980). Two sixteenth-century Italian millers feature in this book. The leading role is played by Domenico Scandella, called Menocchio, and a minor character is another miller called ‘the Pighino’.

He, Pellegrino Baroni, appeared before the inquisition of Ferrara. Since the mill had always been a social meeting place, millers were responsive to new ideas and capable of transmitting these. Peasants were traditionally hostile towards millers. A Flemish proverb named the miller as one of Satan's four evangelists, the other three being the usurer, the money-changer and the tax-collector (Greilsammer 2009: 17). Millers were therefore vulnerable to charges of heresy and this was the reason why Pighino from Savignano sul Panaro had to appear in Ferrara. A friar denounced him and reported that he had attributed his incriminated statements to a person lecturing in a noble's house in Bologna.

When Pighino was confronted by the friar, he denied the accusations, and listed all the noble households in which he had served – but when doing so he did not repeat exactly the list given the day before: instead of naming Vincenzo Bolognetti, he mentioned the name of Vincenzo Bononi. Paolo Ricci, also called Camillo Renato, a famous heretic who was later executed, served two years in Bologna in several noble households, including Bolognetti's, as a tutor from 1538. This was probably the reason why Pighino wanted to conceal his links to the Bolognetti family. Ricci writes about a peasant he met in Bolognetti's house. This peasant told Ricci that in bestowing grace, the Virgin Mary has a greater role than Jesus Christ. This person might have been our Pighino.

The historian of the case, Ginzburg, has noticed what, luckily for Pighino, the inquisitors had not, and he could render Baroni's connections to Ricci probable. But Ginzburg claims that Pighino was more radically materialistic than the known Italian heretics of his age. Nor can his ideas about equality be traced back to humanists like Ricci: Baroni told the inquisitors that the great and the humble will be equals in paradise and emphasized Virgin Mary's low birth. Even Ricci's recollections suggest that ordinary people did not need humanists to teach them heretic ideas – whether it was Pighino or another peasant he was talking to in Bolognetti's house.

Pighino's many statements evoke those of Menocchio, another heretic miller, living in Friuli, several hundreds of miles away. Relying on inquisition records, Ginzburg reconstructed the world view of Domenico Scandella.

I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.

(Ginzburg 1980: 51–6)

Hence the title of the book. Menocchio was born in 1532 in Montereale and died probably in 1599. He was first reported to the inquisition in 1583, questioned next year and sentenced as an ‘heresiarch’. Let out of prison two years later, he stood once again before the inquisition in 1599, and this time he was executed as a recidivist.

Menocchio's theology, based on an insistence on the basic principles of the gospels, led him to extreme conclusions. It is enough to love our neighbours, he said, the Church is superfluous. The miller propagated a full tolerance, extending the equality of religions also to heretics. In conversations with his fellow villagers, later with the inquisitors, – he was glad to have a learned audience – Menocchio gave expression to ‘a peasant religion, intolerant of dogma and ritual, tied to the cycles of nature, and fundamentally pre-Christian’ (Ginzburg 1980: 112).

Ginzburg claims that the explosive mixture of Menocchio's thoughts was formed by elements of the popular and the elite cultures. The erudite historian reveals the probable or possible elite cultural background behind the miller's strange views, and he identifies among others the Bible, Il fioretto della Bibbia, a popular compilation from the Bible and other texts, the medieval story of John Mandeville's fictional journey, Boccaccio's Decameron, and perhaps even the Koran as pieces of Menocchio's reading – all in the vernacular, of course. Still, he maintains that Menocchio's particular world view, so shocking for the inquisitors, was not a result of his reading – just as Pighino did not need Ricci's teachings to be a heretic. Domenico Scancella used ‘glasses’ that severely distorted everything he read:

Any attempt to consider these books as ‘sources’ in the mechanical sense of the term collapses before the aggressive originality of Menocchio's reading. More than the text, then, what is important is the key to his reading, a screen that he unconsciously placed between himself and the printed page: a filter that emphasized certain words while obscuring others, that stretched the meaning of a word, taking it out of its context, that acted on Menocchio's memory and distorted the very words of the text. And this screen, this key to his reading, continually leads us back to a culture that is very different from the one expressed on the printed page – one based on an oral tradition.

(Ginzburg 1980: 33)

The roots of his views ‘were sunk in an obscure, almost unfathomable, layer of remote peasant traditions’ (Ginzburg 1980: xxiii). But the Reformation was needed with its discussions so that Menocchio felt free to form and express his own views about the world, as well as the invention of printing so that he had the words at his disposal to do so.

Ginzburg sees in Menocchio the representative of an ancient tradition, the oral materialistic popular culture. As a parallel to the picture of the cheese and the emerging worms, he evokes an Indian myth in the Vedas as well as a Kalmuck counterpart. He regards the miller's as a border case that points to ‘the popular roots of a considerable part of high European culture, both medieval and post medieval’ (Ginzburg 1980: 126). But with Rabelais and Breughel, the period of interaction came to a close, and ‘the subsequent period was marked, instead, by an increasingly rigid distinction between the culture of the dominant classes and artisan and peasant cultures, as well as by the indoctrination of the masses from above’ (Ginzburg 1980: 126). Menocchio ‘is also a dispersed fragment, reaching us by chance, of an obscure shadowy world’; his ‘case should be seen against this background of repression and effacement of popular culture’ (Ginzburg 1980: xxvi, 126).

Ginzburg and the detective story

It is doubtful whether Menocchio could authentically represent popular culture if he did not really belong to it, but lived on its periphery as a miller, on the borderline of elite and popular, written and oral cultures. Dominick LaCapra writes: ‘The idea that oral culture was Menocchio's primary grid seems particularly suspect in light of the way Menocchio was divided between the “world” of oral culture and that of the books that meant so much to him.’ (LaCapra 1985: 66) According to Edward Muir, the guiding principle of Ginzburg's work is that inquisition records allow us to grasp the interactions of elite and popular cultures (Muir 1991a: x); but Ginzburg, although he stressed the importance of cultural interaction, did not really put this to effect in his book, but rather argued for the autonomy of popular culture, regarding Menocchio's ‘glasses’ as decisive in forming his reading experience, considering the books themselves secondary. Moreover, popular culture was not homogenous, argues LaCapra, and Ginzburg did not address the discursive process conditioned by power relations, the interplay of oppression and ‘the interplay between domination and skewed “reciprocity”’, which transformed Scandella's oral answers into the written source we know (LaCapra 1985: 62–63).

Ginzburg's colleagues, other Italian microhistorians, have also criticized his analysis of popular culture in The Cheese and the Worms. Edoardo Grendi reproached him for neglecting the miller's life and his social contacts: Menocchio mentioned a dozen of his friends and acquaintances in his confessions, but this social network has completely been left out of the book. According to Grendi, Ginzburg is only interested in culture: elite and popular culture as well as cultural forms (quoted by Cerutti 2004: 21–22, cf. Grendi 1996: 235). Simona Cerutti, another representative of the rival branch of the Italian microhistory, which is focusing on society, blamed Ginzburg for separating the analysis of cultural models from that of behaviour (Cerutti 2004: 19).

Reviewers sometimes compare The Cheese and the Worms with crime stories (for example Daniel 2004: 287). The culprit in this case is, however, not the inquisition, but the old Indo-European popular culture. LaCapra writes that ‘the format of the detective story itself assures that the “whodunit” will reveal a single agent: oral, popular culture’ (LaCapra 1985: 53). The young Hungarian historian, András Lugosi argues that while the hunter, the art expert and the detective can be certain that the traces they follow are the result of the activity of a deer, a painter or a murderer, the doctor, the psychotherapist, the sociologist and the historian lack this certainty. Ginzburg arrived at Menocchio's case from the study of popular culture, and his own implicit preferences prompted him to point to a pre-Christian, oral, popular culture as the inspirer of the miller's ideas, instead of understanding these from Menocchio's life (Lugosi 2001: 33–38).

Menocchio's story can be compared to Wolfgang Behringer's book, soon to be discussed. It is about the ‘phantoms of the night’ in the Alps, a widespread belief, which can be classified as white magic or shamanism. While on the basis of Menocchio's fantastic ideas Ginzburg supposes the existence of an ancient Indo-European materialistic oral popular culture, Behringer concludes that the surprising ideas of his protagonist, Chonrad Stoeckhlin, are merely the results of his ‘bricolage’; in this particular combination these thoughts can only be found in his head (Behringer 1998). This is the key point: the representativity of Menocchio's or Stoeckhlin's case. At a conference in 2005, Ginzburg said that he was the first to stress the exceptionality of Menocchio. ‘But it seemed to me that certain features of his behaviour are related to more general phenomena’ (Ginzburg 2010a: 359). Although he could not convince all his readers that Menocchio's glasses are not unique pieces – as Behringer thinks that Stoeckhlin's are – but an ancient peasant heritage, one of a once widespread type, his book is no doubt a compelling read, the best known work of microhistory until this very day. According to Roger Chartier, it proves that ‘it is on this reduced scale, and probably only on this scale, that we can understand, without deterministic reduction, the relationships between systems of beliefs, of values and representations on the one hand, and social affiliations on the other’ (quoted by Ginzburg 1993: 22).

What is microhistory?

Microhistory is, in the first approach, the intensive historical investigation of a relatively well defined smaller object, most often a single event, or ‘a village community, a group of families, even an individual person’ (Ginzburg and Poni 1991: 3). Microhistorians hold a microscope and not a telescope in their hands. Focusing on certain cases, persons and circumstances, microhistory allows an intensive historical study of the subject, giving a completely different picture of the past from the investigations about nations, states, or social groupings, stretching over decades, centuries, or whatever longue durée. Similarly to classical Greek plays, where we can find a threefold unity of place, time and action, the microhistorical approach creates a focal point, collecting the different rays coming from the past, and this lends it a real force. Microhistory, however – and this is the second and not any more evident element of its definition – has an objective that is much more far-reaching than that of a case study: micro-historians always look for the answers for ‘great historical questions’, soon to be defined, when studying small objects. As Charles Joyner said, they ‘search for answers to large questions in small places’ (quoted by Shifflett 1995). And finally, the third main feature of microhistory, and here first of all the original Italian microstoria is meant, is the stress put on agency. For microhistorians, people who lived in the past are not merely puppets on the hands of great underlying forces of history, but they are regarded as active individuals, conscious actors. These elements of a definition are evidently interconnected. It is the ‘great historical question’ that legitimates the micro-analysis, while, as Brad S. Gregory put it, it is on the micro-level that the agency of the ordinary people can be preserved (Gregory 1999: 101). The first element of the above definition seems straightforward – in fact, this is the single element defining microhistory in common-sense or hostile interpretations. But the two other elements and their corollaries are far from being evident. They will be treated in Chapters 3 and 4.¹

Enumerating all the elements of a set is not the only way of defining it. In fact, the name ‘definition’ derives, too, from the other possibility: we may try to explore its boundaries. This method is to be followed in Chapters 1–4. Examining the border area of microhistory, several works of history will therefore also be mentioned that do not belong to microhistory in the sense of the above definition. It cannot be justified, for example, to narrow microhistory down to the Italian microstoria: a wider interpretation can also be used. If we do so, its intertwining with historical anthropology is evident. It is an open question whether we should classify as ‘incident analysis’ some works that display no effort to reach a general conclusion, or include these, too, as microhistory. These problems will be explored when treating Anglo-Saxon microhistory in Chapter 3, after having addressed Italian microhistory in Chapter 1 and its French and German reception in Chapter 2.

The place of microhistory in the discourse of history

Microhistory came into being in the 1970s, in the decade when the different historical approaches that can be most conveniently summed up under the heading of ‘cultural history’ also emerged.² Cultural history, to use a simple definition, puts the stress on lived experience and the representations that the actors themselves form to interpret their own experiences. Cultural history, as we shall see, first of all strives to find meaning: it has a distinctly hermeneutical character. Microhistory was probably most fashionable in the 1990s, when the star of postmodernism and cultural history stood at its apogee. There are therefore several factors that tie microhistory to cultural history. Capturing experience is claimed to be a distinct feature of microhistory (Christiansen 1995: 9; Brown, R. D. 2003: 13). Still, we cannot simply claim that microhistory is one of the branch...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I (ISTVÁN M. SZIJÁRTÓ)
• Part II (SIGURÐUR GYLFI MAGNÚSSON)
• Bibliography
• Index