Microhistory is a genre of history that focuses on small units of research, such as an event, community, individual or a settlement. In its ambition, however, microhistory can be distinguished from a simple case study insofar as microhistory aspires to "[ask] large questions in small places", according to the definition given by Charles Joyner. [1] It is closely associated with social and cultural history.
Microhistory became popular in Italy in the 1970s. [2] According to Giovanni Levi, one of the pioneers of the approach, it began as a reaction to a perceived crisis in existing historiographical approaches. [3] Carlo Ginzburg, another of microhistory's founders, has written that he first heard the term used around 1977, and soon afterwards began to work with Levi and Simona Cerutti on Microstorie, a series of microhistorical works. [4]
The word "microhistory" dates back to 1959, when the American historian George R. Stewart published Pickett's Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Attack on Gettysburg, July 3, 1863, which tells the story of the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg. [5] Another early use was by the Annales historian Fernand Braudel, for whom the concept had negative connotations, being overly concerned with the history of events. [6] A third early use of the term was in the title of Luis González's 1968 work Pueblo en vilo: Microhistoria de San José de Gracia. [6] González distinguished between microhistory, for him synonymous with local history, and "petite histoire", which is primarily concerned with anecdotes. [6]
The most distinctive aspect of the microhistorical approach is the small scale of investigations. [2] Microhistorians focus on small units in society, as a reaction to the generalisations made by the social sciences which do not necessarily hold up when tested against these smaller units. [7] For instance, Ginzburg's 1976 work The Cheese and the Worms – "probably the most popular and widely read work of microhistory" [2] – investigates the life of a single sixteenth-century Italian miller, Menocchio. The individuals microhistorical works are concerned with are frequently those whom Richard M. Tristano describes as "little people", especially those considered heretics. [8]
Carlo Ginzburg has written that a core principle of microhistory is making obstacles in sources, such as lacunae, part of the historical account. [9] Relatedly, Levi has said that the point of view of the researcher becomes part of the account in microhistory. [10] Other notable aspects of microhistory as a historical approach are an interest in the interaction of elite and popular culture, [11] and an interest in the interaction between micro- and macro-levels of history. [12]
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The Roman Inquisition, formally Suprema Congregatio Sanctae Romanae et Universalis Inquisitionis, was a system of partisan tribunals developed by the Holy See of the Catholic Church, during the second half of the 16th century, responsible for prosecuting individuals accused of a wide array of crimes according to Catholic law and doctrine, relating to Catholic religious life or alternative religious or secular beliefs. It was established in 1542 by the leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Paul III. In the period after the Medieval Inquisition, it was one of three different manifestations of the wider Catholic Inquisition, the other two being the Spanish Inquisition and Portuguese Inquisition.
Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the social, cultural, and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as ceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales.It combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience.
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936, became a naturalised British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom.
Prosopography is an investigation of the common characteristics of a group of people, whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable. Research subjects are analysed by means of a collective study of their lives, in multiple career-line analysis. The discipline is considered to be one of the auxiliary sciences of history.
The benandanti were members of an agrarian visionary tradition in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries. The benandanti claimed to travel out of their bodies while asleep to struggle against malevolent witches in order to ensure good crops for the season to come. Between 1575 and 1675, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials, a number of benandanti were accused of being heretics or witches under the Roman Inquisition.
The history of mentalities, from the French term histoire des mentalités, is an approach to cultural history which aims to describe and analyze the ways in which historical people thought about, interacted with, and classified the world around them, as opposed to the history of particular events, or economic trends. The history of mentalities has been used as a historical tool by several historians and scholars from various schools of history. Notably, the historians of the Annales School helped to develop the history of mentalities and construct a methodology from which to operate. In establishing this methodology, they sought to limit their analysis to a particular place and a particular time. This approach lends itself to the intensive study that characterizes microhistory, another field which adopted the history of mentalities as a tool of historical analysis.
The Cheese and the Worms is a scholarly work by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, published in 1976. The book is a notable example of the history of mentalities and microhistory, cultural history and is "probably the most popular and widely read work of microhistory".
Steven Bednarski is a Canadian historian of the Middle Ages who specializes in fourteenth-century environment, crime, sex, gender, and microhistory. He is notable for being awarded an exceptionally high level of public research funding and for piloting a trans-disciplinary international research partnership network. As a child, Bednarski also worked in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario as an actor.
Evidence of magic use and witch trials were prevalent in the Early Modern period, and Inquisitorial prosecution of witches and magic users in Italy during this period was widely documented. Primary sources unearthed from Vatican and city archives offer insights into this phenomenon, and notable Early Modern microhistorians such as Guido Ruggiero, Maria Sofia Messana, Angelo Buttice and Carlo Ginzburg, have defined their careers detailing this topic. In addition, Giovanni Romeo's monograph Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe nell'Italia della Controriforma (1990) was considered pioneering and marked an important step forward in inquisitorial and witchcraft studies dealing with early modern Italy.In last 25 years a jurist and researcher on trials against witches, add many informations: the names of people involved in witchcraft, their jobs, the meetings. Monia Montechiarini in 'Stregoneria: Crimine Femminile', 'Streghe, eretici e benandanti del Friuli Venezia Giulia' and 'Streghe, Avvelenatrici e Cortigiane di Roma' discovered new secrets.
Günzburg is a surname of Bavarian origin. Ginsberg, Ginsburg, Gensburg, Ginsburgh, Ginzberg, Ginzborg, and Ginzburg are variants of the surname.
Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon is an Icelandic historian specialising in microhistory. He was an independent scholar from the time he finished his doctoral dissertation 1993 until 2010. He established the Center for Microhistorical Research at the Reykjavík Academy) in 2003. He got a research position at the National Museum of Iceland named after Dr. Kristján Eldjárn, the former president of Iceland and an archaeologist, in 2010 and until 2013. After that he became a Professor of Cultural History at the Department of History at the University of Iceland.
The Bielefeld School is a group of German historians based originally at Bielefeld University who promote social history and political history using quantification and the methods of political science and sociology. The leaders include Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka and Reinhart Koselleck. Instead of emphasizing the personalities of great historical leaders, as in the conventional approach, it concentrates on socio-cultural developments. History as "historical social science" has mainly been explored in the context of studies of German society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The movement has published the scholarly journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift fur Historische Sozialwissenschaft since 1975.
The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries is a historical study of the benandanti folk custom of 16th and 17th century Friuli, Northeastern Italy. It was written by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, then of the University of Bologna, and first published by the company Giulio Einaudi in 1966 under the Italian title of I Benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento. It was later translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi and published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1983 with a new foreword written by the historian Eric Hobsbawm.
Historical anthropology is a historiographical movement which applies methodologies and objectives from social and cultural anthropology to the study of historical societies. Like most such movements, it is understood in different ways by different scholars, and to some may be synonymous with the history of mentalities, cultural history, ethnohistory, microhistory, history from below or Alltagsgeschichte. Anthropologists whose work has been particularly inspirational to historical anthropology include Emile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, Arnold van Gennep, Jack Goody, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss and Victor Turner.
Montaillou is a book by the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie first published in 1975. It was first translated into English in 1978 by Barbara Bray, and has been subtitled The Promised Land of Error and Cathars and Catholics in a French Village.
Simona Cerutti is an Italian historian. Since 2001 she has been Directrice d’Etudes à l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and she is also Directrice responsable du Laboratoire de Démographie et Histoire Sociale (LaDéHiS) at EHESS, Paris.
Giovanni Levi is an Italian historian. He is Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He is one of the pioneers in the field of microhistory.
