Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method

Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method PDF Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421409917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Carlo Ginzburg considers how we assign historical context to events. More than twenty years after Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method was first published in English, this extraordinary collection remains a classic. The book brings together essays about Renaissance witchcraft, National Socialism, sixteenth-century Italian painting, Freud’s wolf-man, and other topics. In the influential centerpiece of the volume Carlo Ginzburg places historical knowledge in a long tradition of cognitive practices and shows how a research strategy based on reading clues and traces embedded in the historical record reveals otherwise hidden information. Acknowledging his debt to art history, psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and anthropology, Ginzburg challenges us to retrieve cultural and social dimensions beyond disciplinary boundaries. In his new preface, Ginzburg reflects on how easily we miss the context in which we read, write, and live. Only hindsight allows some understanding. He examines his own path in research during the 1970s and its relationship to the times, especially the political scenes of Italy and Germany. Was he influenced by the environment, he asks himself, and if so, how? Ginzburg uses his own experience to examine the elusive and constantly evolving nature of history and historical research.

Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method

Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method PDF Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421409917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Carlo Ginzburg considers how we assign historical context to events. More than twenty years after Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method was first published in English, this extraordinary collection remains a classic. The book brings together essays about Renaissance witchcraft, National Socialism, sixteenth-century Italian painting, Freud’s wolf-man, and other topics. In the influential centerpiece of the volume Carlo Ginzburg places historical knowledge in a long tradition of cognitive practices and shows how a research strategy based on reading clues and traces embedded in the historical record reveals otherwise hidden information. Acknowledging his debt to art history, psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and anthropology, Ginzburg challenges us to retrieve cultural and social dimensions beyond disciplinary boundaries. In his new preface, Ginzburg reflects on how easily we miss the context in which we read, write, and live. Only hindsight allows some understanding. He examines his own path in research during the 1970s and its relationship to the times, especially the political scenes of Italy and Germany. Was he influenced by the environment, he asks himself, and if so, how? Ginzburg uses his own experience to examine the elusive and constantly evolving nature of history and historical research.

Threads and Traces

Threads and Traces PDF Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520274482
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This book is a translation of historian Carlo Ginzburgʾs 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.

The Night Battles

The Night Battles PDF Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421409933
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
A remarkable tale of witchcraft, folk culture, and persuasion in early modern Europe. Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives of Northern Italy, The Night Battles recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centered on the benandanti, literally, "good walkers." These men and women described fighting extraordinary ritual battles against witches and wizards in order to protect their harvests. While their bodies slept, the souls of the benandanti were able to fly into the night sky to engage in epic spiritual combat for the good of the village. Carlo Ginzburg looks at how the Inquisition's officers interpreted these tales to support their world view that the peasants were in fact practicing sorcery. The result of this cultural clash, which lasted for more than a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into the Inquisition's mortal enemies—witches. Relying upon this exceptionally well-documented case study, Ginzburg argues that a similar transformation of attitudes—perceiving folk beliefs as diabolical witchcraft—took place all over Europe and spread to the New World. In his new preface, Ginzburg reflects on the interplay of chance and discovery, as well as on the relationship between anomalous cases and historical generalizations.

History, Rhetoric, and Proof

History, Rhetoric, and Proof PDF Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9780874519334
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the world's leading historians delivers a pathbreaking analysis of truth and rhetoric in the writing of history.

The Judge and the Historian

The Judge and the Historian PDF Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859843710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the 16th and 17th centuries to dissect the weaknesses of the state's case in the 20th-century show trial of Italian communists, Sofri, Bompressi and Pietrostefani.

Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf

Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf PDF Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022667455X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1691, a Livonian peasant known as Old Thiess boldly announced before a district court that he was a werewolf. Yet far from being a diabolical monster, he insisted, he was one of the “hounds of God,” fierce guardians who battled sorcerers, witches, and even Satan to protect the fields, flocks, and humanity—a baffling claim that attracted the notice of the judges then and still commands attention from historians today. In this book, eminent scholars Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln offer a uniquely comparative look at the trial and startling testimony of Old Thiess. They present the first English translation of the trial transcript, in which the man’s own voice can be heard, before turning to subsequent analyses of the event, which range from efforts to connect Old Thiess to shamanistic practices to the argument that he was reacting against cruel stereotypes of the “Livonian werewolf” a Germanic elite used to justify their rule over the Baltic peasantry. As Ginzburg and Lincoln debate their own and others’ perspectives, they also reflect on broader issues of historical theory, method, and politics. Part source text of the trial, part discussion of historians’ thoughts on the case, and part dialogue over the merits and perils of their different methodological approaches, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf opens up fresh insight into a remarkable historical occurrence and, through it, the very discipline of history itself.

Historical Knowledge

Historical Knowledge PDF Author: Susanna Fellman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144383484X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
Historical Knowledge approaches the topic of historical knowledge in depth and from various angles. It seeks to offer theoretical and methodological building blocks for the use of anyone pursuing historical research. This book brings novel insights into classic and topical issues currently under debate: the importance of theory in historical thinking, the dialectic of “text” and “annotation”, the actor and observer levels, the relationship between the general and the individual, the issue of comparison, and the problem of sporadic sources and of understanding the singularity of each one. The overall theme of the book, the possibility of historical knowledge, reflects the very issue that makes historical research distinctive: the challenges of evidence and the problems, both concrete and conceptual, with deciphering and interpreting remnants of the past. This book refreshes the discussion about sources and proper evidence, two issues that the linguistic turn and the postmodern challenge pushed into the background. The book addresses these issues in an easily accessible way and serves as an introduction and guide to the role of theory, method and evidence in historical research not only for students and scholars of history, but also for anyone outside the field with an interest in the topic. Historical Knowledge is the first book to include texts by the three eminent historians, Professors Natalie Zemon Davis, Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi. The other contributors, Professors Risto Alapuro, Janken Myrdal and Matti Peltonen, are active debaters in current theoretical and methodo-logical discussion.

Image operations

Image operations PDF Author: Jens Eder
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526108658
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
Still and moving images are crucial factors in contemporary political conflicts. They not only have representational, expressive or illustrative functions, but also augment and create significant events. Beyond altering states of mind, they affect bodies and often life or death is at stake. Various forms of image operations are currently performed in the contexts of war, insurgency and activism. Photographs, videos, interactive simulations and other kinds of images steer drones to their targets, train soldiers, terrorise the public, celebrate protest icons, uncover injustices, or call for help. They are often parts of complex agential networks and move across different media and cultural environments. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the role and function of images in political life. Balancing theoretical reflections with in-depth case studies, it brings together renowned scholars and activists from different fields to offer a multifaceted critical perspective on a crucial aspect of contemporary visual culture.

Myths, Emblems, Clues

Myths, Emblems, Clues PDF Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780091730239
Category : Historiography
Languages : es
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
Estos estudios del autor exploran los símbolos, imágenes y creencias en la historia europea. A través del juicio de una mujer acusada de brujería en Módena en 1519, va descubriendo las vías en las que la religión oficial modeló la piedad popular hacia caminos más ortodoxos.

Wooden Eyes

Wooden Eyes PDF Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231119603
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ginzburg, "the preeminent Italian historian of his generation [who] helped create the genre of microhistory" ("New York Times"), ruminates on how perspective affects what we see and understand. 26 illustrations.