In the field of art history, microhistorical methods have been used for decades, particularly in the study of painting. See, for example, Ginzburg’s The Enigma of Piero [della Francesca] (1985, originally published in 1981 as Indagini su Piero) or Michael Francis Gibson’s The Mill and the Cross (1996), a 188-page-long close-reading of a single painting of Christ’s procession to Calvary by Peter Bruegel. However, these studies seem to have had little effect on architectural history or on neighboring fields like construction history (Baugeschichte), which is by definition focused on material evidence and on the (mostly silent) makers of buildings. Such details could speak volumes about the hopes, aspirations and fears of their makers, as well their own understanding of architecture.
Transplanting the tools, methods and attitudes of Microhistory to architectural history thus requires a readjustment of the limits of the latter, as well as a realignment of the mechanisms of the former. It forces us to rethink what we consider to be evidence and where we look for it. “Clues” (as Carlo Ginzburg called them in his essay on the “Evidential Paradigm”, 1979) and “Trifles” (as Edward Muir described them in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, 1991) are essential to the microhistorian: marginalia, pictorial staffage and textual anecdotes are crucial evidence through which one can revise grand narratives and expand canonical historiographies. Microhistorians of medieval and early modern Europe have sought the voices of the subaltern in the records of heresy or witch trials, where peasant women and men were interrogated about their everyday habits and cosmologies. The historian must read such sources against the grain or between the lines and be observant of absences. To bring these methods and attitudes into the realm of architectural history, we must look for clues, trifles and ancetodes in published and archival sources both inside and outside the traditional domains of architectural research, like accounting books, minutes of trials, ownership records, tax records, inventories, correspondence (between architects, clients, contractors, builders, neighbours, and anyone else in volved in a building project), and so on. Buildings themselves, and all the material evidence that exists on, inside and around them, like traces of use, construction details, decorative elements, etc., can also help us animate the people that lived inside or along such buildings, the ones that built and maintained them, the ones that suffered inside them, or those that attacked and vandalized them.
Finally, the microhistorian must be careful not to be consumed by such hyper-specificities, and instead use this small and apparently minor evidence to challenge the grander narratives of history. Notable microhistorians have focused on exceptional instances of heresy, heterodoxy, fraud or revolt, in order to talk about the opposite: the regular course of life and cultural production in a certain place and time. Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) told the story of an extraordinary marital scandal in order to decipher the social norms of 16th-century France. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou (1975) gave an exhaustingly detailed account of a specific Catharian cult in a small village in the Pyrenees in order to talk about medieval popular culture, religiosity and sociability as well as relations between centre and periphery. Buildings are by definition less heretic or heterodoxical than ephemeral acts, spoken words or texts. The amount of resources needed for the erection of a building, whether public or private, usually requires a basic level of collective consensus (whether willing or forced). This often determines much of its form, layout and decoration, resulting in what architects call “typology” and “style”. It is precisely for this reason that an idiosyncratic architectural detail or layout can be extremely revealing. By amplifying such built specificities, peculiarities and quirks, we can surpass the often limiting scope of supposedly unanimous “typologies”, timeless “styles” and “traditions” or “anonymous” vernaculars. Microhistories of architecture attempt to rewrite the canon by adopting minor evidence within and without its domain (the Evidential Paradigm) in order to invert its historiographical perspectives.