Carlo Ginzburg

"Carlo Ginzburg's brilliant and timely new essay collection takes a bold stand against naive positivism and allegedly sophisticated neo-skepticism. It looks deeply into questions raised by decades of post-structuralism: What constitutes historical truth? How do we draw a boundary between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between history and memory? How do we grapple with the historical conventions that inform, in different ways, all written documents? In his answers, Ginzburg peels away layers of subsequent readings and interpretations that envelop every text to make a larger argument about history and fiction. Interwoven with compelling autobiographical references, Threads and Traces bears moving witness to Ginzburg's life as a European Jew, the abiding strength of his scholarship, and his deep engagement with the historian's craft"--Provided by publisher. "This book is a translation of historian Carlo Ginzburgʼs latest collection of essays. Through the detective work of uncovering a wide variety of stories or microhistories from fragments, Ginzburg takes on the bigger questions: How do we draw the line between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between history and memory? Stories range from medieval Europe, the inquisitional trial of a witch, seventeenth-century antiquarianism, and twentieth-century historians."--Provided by publisher.

"In No Island Is an Island, an internationally renowned historian approaches four works of English literature from unexpected angles. Following in the footsteps of a sixteenth-century Spanish bishop we gain a fresh view of Thomas More's Utopia. Comparing Bayle's Dictionary with Tristram Shandy we suddenly enter into Laurence Sterne's mind. A seemingly narrow dispute among Elizabethan critics for and against rhyme turns into an early debate on English national identity. Robert Louis Stevenson's story "The Bottle Imp" throws a new light on Bronislaw Malinowsky's attempts to discover meaning in the "kula" trading system among the Trobriand Islanders. Throughout, Ginsburg's inquiry is informed by his unique microhistorical sensibility, his attention to minute detail, and his extraordinary synthesizing imagination."--BOOK JACKET.

""I am a Jew who was born and who grew up in a Catholic country; I never had a religious education; my Jewish identity is in large measure the result of persecution." This brief autobiographical statement is a key to understanding Carlo Ginzburg's interest in the topic of his latest book: distance. In nine linked essays, he addresses the question: "What is the exact distance that permits us to see things as they are?""--BOOK JACKET.

"In The Judge and the Historian Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witchcraft trials to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state's case in a late-twentieth-century political show-trial (Lotta Continua). Carefully exposing the twists and turns of the various proceedings, Ginzburg also takes the opportunity to reflect more generally on the similarities and differences between the roles of judge and historian. Standing in the tradition of Emile Zola's famous J'accuse polemic against the Dreyfus trial at the end of the 1900s, Ginzburg's book demonstrates the continuing potency of intellectual rigour and passion against political opportunism and dishonesty at the end of this century."--BOOK JACKET.

From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, men and women in Europe accused of witchcraft told how they were taken to the Sabbath—the nocturnal gathering before the devil at which they took part in orgies and obscene parodies of Christian rites, eating corpses and casting spells. These accounts, usually extracted by torture, are regarded by most historians today as the products of the inquisitors' own obsessions. Ecstasies is the culmination of Carlo Ginsburg's longstanding fascination with popular myths that are shared across different cultures and eras. An expert in the field of microhistory—the archaeology of the marginalized and forgotten elements of human history—Ginsburg here compares and follows the stories and their forms, and gradually they begin to weave together into new and startling patterns. Why, for example, in 1321 were Jews and lepers the object of frenzied persecution, accused of conspiring to take over the French kingdom? What do Oedipus, Achilles, and Cinderella have in common? The answers to these questions and more lead to compelling evidence of a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished across the European continent for thousands of years.

Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives, the book recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centered on the benandanti. These men and women regarded themselves as professional anti-witches, who (in dream-like states) apparently fought ritual battles against witches and wizards, to protect their villages and harvests. If they won, the harvest would be good, if they lost, there would be famine. The inquisitors tried to fit them into their pre-existing images of the witches' sabbat. The result of this cultural clash which lasted over a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into their enemies - the witches. The author shows clearly how this transformation of the popular notion of witchcraft was manipulated by the Inquisitors, and disseminated all over Europe and even to the New World. The peasants' fragmented and confused testimony reaches us with immediacy, enabling the reader to identify a level of popular belief which constitutes a valuable witness for the reconstruction of the peasant way of thinking of this age.

"The Enigma of Piero is a book about painting written by a historian. Carlo Ginzburg painstakingly sifts the evidence to produce a fascinating portrait of Piero's patrons and convincing explanations for the contemporary intrigues resonant in his paintings - in particular The Baptism, The Arezzo Cycle, and the mysterious Flagellation." "Apparently trivial details - a hat, a column, the turn of a hand - lead Ginzburg into the archives to discover remarkable new chains of evidence. Making Ginzburg's impressive argument even more compelling, this new edition includes additional material dealing with the work of Roberto Longhi, the dating of The Arezzo Cycle and the rediscovery of Piero della Francesca in the twentieth century."--Jacket.

Offers a study of culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. This book illustrates the confusing political and religious conditions of the time.

"The topic of werewolves has flared in the popular imagination in recent years, but the case of Thiess-a self-admitted werewolf who claimed that, thrice yearly, he transformed and battled Satan and his witches as a protector of humanity and the forest-is as baffling today as it was in seventeenth-century Livonia. At first, the judges in 1691 dismissed the 80-year-old was just a senile old man. But after protracted questioning and the testimonies of witnesses who knew Thiess as a werewolf, the judges delivered a guilty verdict a year-and-a-half later on Halloween. The sentence: flogging and banishment for stealing livestock. Even at the end, Thiess maintained that he "and a few other" werewolves were not servants of the Devil and refuted the inquisitors' accusations. This unusual and entertaining book is an attempt by two distinguished scholars from different methodological perspectives to wrestle with the case over the years. It is a hybrid work, at once a source text of the trial (reproduced in full in English for the first time); a glimpse at Nazi appropriation of the werewolf tale prior to WWII; a summary of Carlo Ginzburg's thoughts on the case (which he first encountered in the 1960s) using microhistorical analytic methods; Bruce Lincoln's analysis (from the 1970s), which he viewed from the perspective of comparative religion; their subsequent exchange of ideas and differing conclusions; and ending with an informal conversation. The result is a rare opportunity for students to attain an insight into the "modus operandi" of scholars who have left a great impact on the field, the merits and pitfalls of different interpretive approaches to the same historical materials, and an example of how scholarly exchange happens in the academic world, a debate not solely restricted to the exchange of formal articles in journals and conference papers"--

"Casuistry, the practice of resolving moral problems by applying a logical framework, has had a much larger historical presence before and since it was given a name in the Renaissance. The contributors to this volume examine a series of case studies to explain how different cultures and religions, past and present, have wrestled with morality's exceptions and margins and the norms with which they break. For example, to what extent have the Islamic and Judaic traditions allowed smoking tobacco or gambling? How did the Spanish colonization of America generate formal justifications for what it claimed? Where were the lines of transgression around food, money-lending, and sex in Ancient Greece and Rome? How have different systems dealt with suicide? Casuistry lives at the heart of such questions, in the tension between norms and exceptions, between what seems forbidden but is not. A Historical Approach to Casuistry does not only examine this tension, but re-frames casuistry as a global phenomenon that has informed ethical and religious traditions for millennia, and that continues to influence our lives today."--Bloomsbury Publishing.