Get the latest tech news
'The Cheese and the Worms': Carlo Ginzburg Launches Microhistory
On the now-classic tale of a sixteenth-century miller facing the Roman Inquisition, and its influence in the field of microhistory.
A few years later, his exploration of how witchcraft related to oral culture had led him to write a book on rituals of death across Eurasia: “Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath” (1989). But from the outset he stood out for rejecting two approaches that were then in the avant-garde of research: quantitative methods (used to apprehend demographic behavior but also cultural and mass phenomena) and the influence of Foucault, which encouraged historians to analyze state power on the basis of administrative regulations and discursive forms, rather than the experience of actors. Through Menocchio, Ginzburg was expressing both his confidence in the possibility of reaching oral culture through written sources and the ethical tension pushing him toward reconstructing this experience.
Or read this on Hacker News