A discussion of Carlo Ginzburg's History, Rhetoric, and Proof

Speaker(s): Lorenzo Bartolucci and Joe Amato

Instantly Carlo Ginzburg’s name summons that of microhistory, or the patient, stubborn art of asking “large questions in small places,” as the enduring legacy of his philological and historiographical methods has been called. Parallels with their own art haven’t been lost on literary close-readers. Ever since his first pathbreaking study, The Cheese and the Worms (1976), whose single point of entry into the intellectual cosmos of sixteenth-century Northern Italy was an illiterate miller persuaded that “the world had its origin in putrefaction,” Ginzburg has been invoking textual closeness as the fundamental duty of historians to their subject, “a man like ourselves, one of us.” Because closeness, as the lectures gathered in History, Rhetoric, and Proof (1999) continue to argue, is no simple matter of words or facts, but the hermeneutic precondition of truth itself. Over and against the wave of postmodern skepticism toward history as but a “narrative” of the past, Ginzburg stresses how the kinship between what is said and done is an ancient, intricate and persistently operative one – a kinship we shouldn’t lose sight of if, through the past, even in an improbable present we hope to fathom some way into the future. It is the paradigmatic hope of our place in time, in short, that Ginzburg challenges every one of his contemporaries to live up to.