Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 2013 (first English edition 1980. Originally published as Il formaggio e i vermi. Il cosmo di un mugnaio del '500. Torino: Einaudi 1976)
Often regarded as the exemplary case of microhistory, the book explores the intellectual and religious cosmology of Menocchio, a late sixteenth-century Italian miller, through inquisitional documents produced during Menocchio’s trials for heresy. The book examines Menocchio’s personal interpretation of the Bible by closely reading his inquisitorial testimonies, and by reconstructing his literary references and subjectivity as an early modern peasant.
Edward Muir, Guido Ruggiero (eds.), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1991
Collection of articles published in the Italian journal Quaderni Storici between the late 1970s and 1980s. Edward Muir’s introduction to the volume is particularly valuable. By referring to Ginzburg’s work especially, it provides a clear and synthetic overview of the terms and implications of the microhistorical method.
Emmanual Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou. Cathars and Catholics in a French Village. London: Penguin 2002 (first english edition 1978. Originally published as Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324. Paris: Gallimard 1975)
Zooming in on the small village of Montaillou in Occitanie, France, Le Roy Ladurie tells the story of a local Catharian cult at the turn of the 14th century. The study famously adopts one single historical source as its primary evidence: inquisitorial documents from the Fournier Register. The book’s methodology attempts to piece together the human geography and social life of a rural community and its different classes, from local notables and peasants to shepherds living in remote prairies—what the French school of Annales calls ‘histoires des mentalités’. Despite its niche topic, the book became a famous historical best-seller, and a model of microhistory.
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre. Harvard: Harvard University Press 1983
Another historical best-seller, the book recounts the famous story of Martin Guerre, a wealthy peasant of the Pirenees who, in 1548, left his family and disappeared. Eight years later another man, Arnaud du Tilh, successfully impersonated Guerre, convincing everyone that he was back. It was only at the return of the real Martin Guerre several years after, that the impostor was discovered, processed and put to death. Davis uses various sources, including 16th-century publications dedicated to this exceptional occurrence, to reconstruct the events and contemplate on bigger issues such as personhood, identity, social and personal relations and the emotional lives of early-modern town-folk.
Ranajit Guha, The Small Voice of History. Ranikhet: Permanent Black 2009
A collection of essays by one of the founding figures of Subaltern Studies. Guha examines the history of colonialism in India, not through its institutions, but through the lives of the common people that endured their oppression. Using bureaucratic reports and court testimonies, the historian reconstructs minor incidents which help bring to the fore the everyday condition of colonialism and of resistance to it.
Suraiya Faroqhi, Surviving Istanbul. Struggles, Feasts and Calamities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2023
A compilation of histories about Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Faroqhi goes beyond the well-known Sultanic projects and grand monuments, and focuses on ordinary Istanbulites, their everyday lives, professional formations and political struggles. Rather than a history of architecture in the Ottoman capital, the book reads like a history of life within and against its built environment.
Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘Architectural History or a Geography of Small Spaces?’ in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2022) 81 (1): 5–20
Against an ‘aesthetic of bigness’ which dominated canonical architectural narratives over the past century, Chattopadhyay proposes to adopt interstitial and adjunct spaces coming from processes of fragmentation and division, as the primary focus of architectural history. Closets, garrets, but also corridors, staircases and manual air-cooling are discussed to illuminate the lives of marginalised groups, like servants, slaves, and women, with a focus on colonial India.
Eugène, Ganda. Geneva: Slatkine 2018
This novel, written by author Eugène Meiltz (most known through the pen-name Eugène), tells the famous story of the Rhinoceros that was sent from Goa to Lisbon, and from there paraded in royal courts and public squares all over Europe, to be eventually depicted in an engraving by Albrecht Dürer in 1515. In this case, however, this famous story is told through the perspective of the Rhinoceros (Ganda) itself, and that of Ossem, the young Indian man that accompanied and cared for the animal in its long journey.
Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 2013 (first English edition 1989. Originally published as Miti, emblemi, spie: morfologia e storia. Torino: Einaudi 1986)
Collection of essays produced by Ginzburg between the 1960s and early 1980s. Most notably perhaps, the collection includes the essay ‘Clues. Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, which adopts the method proposed by art critic Giovanni Morelli in the late 19th century (the ‘Morellian method’) to use apparently irrelevant trifles and clues in order to unmask ample historian questions. The article also draws comparisons with the intuitive capacities of Conan Doyle’s character of Sherlock Holmes and Freud’s 1916 interpretation of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses.
Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles. Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 1992 (first english edition 1983. Originally published as I Benandanti. Stregoneria e culti agrari tra cinquecento e seicento. Torino: Einaudi 1966)
In this other classic microhistorical study, Ginzburg explores the world of the ‘Benandanti’, a Northern Italian agrarian cult which, over the 16th and 17th centuries, turned from magical defenders of fertility and crops into an enemy of the Inquisition. Ginzburg adopts this inedited case to discuss early modern popular European witchcraft and their rites, like nocturnal gatherings and other traditions suppressed by the Catholic church. Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: Story of an Exorcist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988 (originally published as L'eredità immateriale: carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del Seicento. Torino: Einaudi 1985)
Giovanni Levi, co-curator with Carlo Ginzburg of the editorial series ‘Microstorie’ during the 1980s, examines fragments in the life of Giovanni Battista Chiesa, a priest from a small northern Italian village, during the late 17th century. Levi also reconstructs the broader contexts in which the priest, accused of practicing mass exorcisms against the dispositions of the dioceses, lived and operated. These include the shifting balances in the land market of northern Italy, the formation of new political classes, clashes between familial interests, and more in general the transmission of ‘immaterial’ assets, like power, prestige and professionalism, in early modern Europe.
Robert Muchmbled, La sorcière au village (XVème-XVIIIème siècles). Paris: Gallimard 1979
The book examines the well-known history of the witch-hunt in early-modern Europe, but adopts an interesting bi-focal lens: it examines how so-called ‘witches’ and ‘cunning folk’ were seen by inquisitors and the religious authorities who persecuted them; but the book also looks at the popular perception of such figures by their fellow villagers. A precursor to Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, Muchembled’s book places the focus on the internal dynamics of the early-modern village community. Carlo Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero. Piero della Francesca. London: Verso 2022 (first English edition 1985. Originally published as Indagini su Piero. Il Battesimo, il ciclo di Arezzo, la Flagellazione di Urbino. Torino: Einaudi 1981)
Study on the iconography and patronage of Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ and Baptism of Christ and the frescoes in Arezzo on The Legend of the True Cross. Ginzburg applies here the Morellian method, by systematically comparing iconographic details with other contemporary visual sources, and by contextualizing Piero’s work within the cultural and religious landscapes of 15th-century Italy and Europe. In so doing, Ginzburg is able to question some chronological and political assumptions on these three pieces and on Piero’s artistic trajectory.
Antonio Foscari, Manfredo Tafuri, L’Armonia e i Conflitti. La Chiesa di San Francesco della Vigna nella Venezia del ‘500. Torino: Einaudi 1983
The only architectural study published explicitly under the umbrella of microhistory, the book narrates the design and construction history of the Venetian church of San Francesco della Vigna during the 16th century. In the foreground are the ‘protagonists’ of this story: Franciscan friars, Venetian patricians and intellectuals like Francesco Zorzi, Giovanni Grimani and the doge Andrea Gritti, painters Battista Franco and Federico Zuccari, and architects Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio. The result is a story that, despite tracing with unusual degrees of accuracy the networks of interests and decision-making that generated the project of the church, fails to provide space for other voices that partook in the construction and use of the building, like masons, craftspeople and other comtemporary Venetians.
Michael Francis Gibson, The Mill and the Cross. CreateSpace Publishing 2012 (first English edition 2001. Originally published as Le Portement de croix de Pierre Bruegel l'Aîné. Paris: Noêsis 1996)
Combining microhistory and art history, Gibson writes a 188-page-long close-reading of a single painting: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Procession to Calvary (1564). The book is a great example of how a single artwork can be read as not only a reflection of the mind of its maker, but also a symptom of the historical and cultural context in which it was created. As with much scholarship on Bruegel, it is also a great example of pictorial ethnography. Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows your Mother is a Witch. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021
A novel about Katharina Kepler, a woman who lived in a small town in 16th-century Germany and was accused of being a witch. Using historical evidence, the author tells the story primarily through the voice of Katharina herself, as she faces the suspicion of her peers and local inquisitors. The book is a great example of how the microhistorical method can animate and bring to the fore minor historical figures, their thoughts and their emotions. Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of all Witches: Life and Death in the New World. London: Penguin 2021
The story of a single case of witchcraft in the small town of Springfield in New England. Using scarce evidence, Gaskill manages to reconstruct and animate the built and social environment of this small town in the 17th century, the everyday lives of its inhabitants, but also their public and secret beliefs and their innermost fears. This is a great example of narrative micro-history which, although based on historical evidence and research, prioritizes literary narration.
Evelyne Sanchez, El Juez, el Notario y el Caudillo. Análisis de un juicio verbal en Taxcala durante la revolución. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez 2019In 1916 Tlaxcala, Mexico, what seemed like a trivial judicial matter of real estate succession between two women soon became a State affair, involving two judges, a Governor and even a regional Caudillo with his army. Evelyn Sanchez examines this intricate case to shed new light on the rural dimension of the Mexican Revolution, which transformed the balances of political power, the economies of land and the landscapes and law and order.