Threads and Traces: True False Fictive by Carlo Ginzburg (review)

Carlo Ginzburg is a noted historian of the early modern period who has published on a wide variety of topics related to shamanism, early modern folk beliefs, and historical methodology. He is best known, however, for The Cheese and the Worms (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; orig. Torino, Italy: G. Einaudi, 1976), a study of the religious beliefs of a sixteenth-century miller by the name of Menocchio, who was eventually tried by the Inquisition and condemned and executed as a heretic. The book was remarkable both for the way it evoked a network of popular debate that existed outside of, and in opposition to, official church teachings and for its nuanced and creative approach to its source materials. Ginzburg relied not on documents produced by Menocchio himself—which simply did not exist—but on the transcripts produced by his interrogators. He thus read the documents against the intentions of those who had created them, stubbornly probing them for evidence of the very beliefs the inquisitors were working to suppress.

The Cheese and the Worms quickly became a classic example of the approach known as microhistory. In contrast to historical approaches that assumed that periods for which little written documentation existed could be studied only at the macro level of large demographic shifts, microhistory focused on individual incidents, often strange and apparently anomalous ones, for which some form of documentation, however fragmentary, did exist. Like oral history, microhistory was an attempt to move beyond the canonized and well-documented perspectives of elites to uncover the experiences of those who had not had the prerogative of creating standard historical records. And it was interested in popular belief systems and patterns of everyday life and in the ways that ordinary people resisted or eluded dominant conceptions of reality imposed from above.

The concerns of the essays collected in Ginzburg’s most recent book, Threads and Traces, extend far beyond microhistory per se. Written for a variety of occasions, these pieces explore a dizzying range of topics—among them, the contributions of such towering intellectual figures as Erich Auerbach and Siegfried Kracauer; the interplay between the traditions of antiquarian research, historical writing, and fictional forms; the history and theoretical underpinnings of microhistory; and, particularly in the collection’s final essay, Ginzburg’s own intellectual autobiography and the personal and scholarly inclinations that set him on the course of research he has pursued. But it is questions of how we do and write history that Ginzburg returns to most persistently, and it is those themes that will be of most interest to oral historians.

One of the issues that these essays can prompt oral historians to examine is the relationship between macro narratives and the individual and often anomalous incident. As noted above, microhistory was constituted in part by its focus on the anomalous, since, given the relatively sparse documentation available for the early modern period, it was only the unusual event that appeared in court records or other official documents, or attracted enough attention to be written up by elite observers. But Ginzburg also makes clear that his focus on the anomalous is not only a matter of expediency but of method. “Anyone who studies the functioning of a society beginning from the entirety of its norms, or from statistical fictions such as the average man or the average woman, inevitably remains on the surface of things,” he asserts (222). And in fact it is often the extreme and apparently unrepresentative incident, he argues, that best reveals the more elusive assumptions and structures of everyday practice. Though oral historians may have a greater profusion of sources at their disposal than do historians of the early modern period, the relationship between the micro and the macro, between the individual life and larger historical forces, is a tension that also lies at the heart of our methodology. Ginzburg’s work can thus help us think about how our individual and...