Le dossier de textes que l’on présente ici offre une structure assez inhabituelle. Deux textes de Carlo Ginzburg fournissent la matière première de ce dossier, mais seul l’un de ces deux textes, « Anomalies conjonctives. Une réflexion sur les loups garous », est ici donné (il est pour la première fois traduit en français, traduction due à Martin Rueff). Le second texte, issu d’une conférence donnée à Genève en 2016, a en effet déjà été publié en français, dans une version (...) librement accessible... (shrink)

This paper tries to motivate three desiderata for historical epistemologies: (a) that they should be reflective about the pedigree of their conceptual apparatus; (b) that they must face up to the potentially relativistic consequences of their historicism; and (c) that they must not forget the hard-won lessons of microhistory (i.e. historical events must be explained causally; historical events must not be artificially divided into internal/intellectual and external/social “factors” or “levels”; and constructed series of homogenous events must not be treated (...) as quasi-organisms). Ian Hacking’s work on styles of reasoning and Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s investigation into epistemic virtues are used to identify the costs of neglecting these desiderata. (shrink)

An ongoing collaborative project between art and science, Taming the Forest (2022) was implemented by a team of students, artists and researchers charting an interdisciplinary project among bioeconomics, environmental history, policy and artistic practice. In this article, the project acts as a case study for researching the conflicting narratives of history and economics about biodiversity in general, and specifically about forests. It shows how different blends of methodologies in artistic-cum-scientific research can become relevant for both realms, opening new creative pathways (...) and pedagogical registers while repeatedly returning to a specific forest’s microhistory. Moreover, the article stresses the need for a new sensibility and complex knowledge, moving beyond an objective study and becoming attentive to different dimensions of research and its outputs that emerge through the introduction of artistic thinking and methodologies. This kind of transdisciplinary approach becomes necessary in order to tackle the manifold large-scale problems such as the climate and biodiversity crises, which call for both acting decisively and transforming radically, above all with regard to how humans perceive, relate to and manage nature. (shrink)

With an overwhelming volume of studies on Venice's port architecture and coastal protection, the challenge remains to convey to lay readers how the science of hydraulics was applied. This article reports an experiment in creating a vivid narrative of the movement and effects of sand over a relatively short period of twelve years (1610-1622), which, in this case, started with the fifteen-year-old carcass of a shipwreck at risk of capsizing. I emulate how the erosion of sandbanks triggered by the stranded (...) wreck affected the subsequent silting of the canal. This, in turn, influenced the relationships between land and sea, access and obstruction, and arrivals and departures. Such a microhistory of sand offers a broad picture of the maritime know-how and technology that came into play. Finally, the essay reflects on microhistory's potential to explore port architecture’s technicalities. This approach yields an understanding of the exquisitely practical, in-depth details of the engineering response to significant, contemporary, normal, and catastrophic events. (shrink)

The History of Everyday Life. Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life by Alf Lüdtke; William Templer Jeux D'Échelles. La Micro-Analyse à L'Expérience. by Jacques Revel.

Long considered to be institutions outside of time, the temples of India are today the subject of ethno-historical studies that attempt to establish their continuous and recent transformations. Recent monographs, based especially on relationships between the central government and local authorities, reconstruct by periods their medieval, modern and present history, that is the long destiny of constant restructuring over time (Appadurai 1981; Fuller 1984; Reiniche 1989), showing that temples, whether large or small, never ceased being the center of important conflicts (...) between social groups seeking dominance. (shrink)

Movilidad de la población e inmigración en Turín en la primera mitad del siglo XVIII -- Familias campesinas en la Liguria del siglo XVIII -- Estructuras familiares y relaciones sociales en una comunidad piamontesa entre 1700 y 1800 -- Desarrollo urbano y flujos migratorios en el Piamonte del siglo XVII -- Los usos de la biografía -- Inmigración y doble trabajo en el curso de la vida : algunas observaciones sobre el Piamonte del siglo XIX -- Carreras de artesanos y (...) mercado del trabajo en Turín (siglos XVIII y XIX) -- La transformación de la tierra en mercancía : el caso piamontés (1680-1717) -- Comportamientos, recursos y proceso: antes de la "revolución" del consumo -- Reciprocidad mediterránea -- El pasado lejano : en torno al uso político de la historia -- Historiadores, psicoanálisis y verdad -- La particular enfermedad católica -- Antropología católica e historia de Italia -- El consumo en Venecia : una fuente contable -- La microhistoria y la recuperación de la complejidad -- La intimidad marrana -- Breve historia de la sociedad injusta -- La historia total contra la historia global : la historiografía antes y después de la caída del Muro de Berlín -- El tiempo, los historiadores y Freud. (shrink)

Microstudies and big picture accounts are often counterposed. This paper investigates the supposed dichotomy between the two historiographical approaches. In particular it investigates how the discussions are reflected in the historiography of molecular biology and the special questions posed by the disciplinary context. Taking inspiration from the microhistory tradition as exemplified by the works of Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Revel, and David Sabean among others, the paper highlights the heuristic value of microstudies to reconstruct the multiple contexts that link apparently (...) small events with broader structures. In a parallel fashion, the paper argues for using microstudies to open up the history of molecular biology to other fields of study and thus moving beyond the confines of the disciplinary framework. Such an approach does not dismiss the search for big pictures. Yet rather than opposing big pictures to microstudies, it sees microstudies as a valid way to gain new and broad vistas. (shrink)

This essay examines different approaches to writing the history of science in light of the increased importance of microhistorical studies in the past two decades. It specifically examines the role of microhistory within the history of science and the importance of Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the “normal exception” in early methodological statements about the function of microhistory. It also considers the possibilities for writing archivally based history of science for a general readership as a means of bridging the (...) divide between specialized research within the subfields of the history of science and more general accounts of the nature and growth of science.Attempts to divide anything into two ought to be regarded with much suspicion.—C. P. Snow. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Historians of science, inasmuch as they are concerned with knowledges and practices rather than institutions, have tended of late to focus on case studies of common processes such as experiment and publication. In so doing, they tend to treat science as a single category, with various local instantiations. Or, alternatively, they relate cases to their specific local contexts. In neither approach do the cases or their contexts build easily into broader histories, reconstructing changing knowledge practices across time and space. (...) This essay argues that by systematically deconstructing the practices of science and technology and medicine (STM) into common, recurrent elements, we can gain usefully “configurational” views, not just of particular cases and contexts but of synchronic variety and diachronic changes, both short term and long. To this end, we can begin with the customary actors’ disciplines of early modern knowledge (natural philosophy, natural history, mixed mathematics, and experimental philosophy), which can be understood as elemental “ways of knowing and working,” variously combined and disputed. I argue that these same working knowledges, together with a later mode—synthetic experimentation and systematic invention—may also serve for the analysis of STM from the late eighteenth century to the present. The old divisions continued explicitly and importantly after circa 1800, but they were also “built into” an array of new sciences. This historiographic analysis can help clarify a number of common problems: about the multiplicity of the sciences, the importance of various styles in science, and the relations between science and technology and medicine. It suggests new readings of major changes in STM, including the first and second scientific revolutions and the transformations of biomedicine from the later twentieth century. It offers ways of recasting both microhistories and macrohistories, so reducing the apparent distance between them. And it may thus facilitate both more constructive uses of case studies and more innovative and acceptable longer histories. (shrink)

The French botanist Michel Adanson spent five years in precolonial Senegal in the 1750s, under the auspices of the Compagnie des Indes. This essay follows the archival traces of Adanson’s engagement with African indigo, including experiments conducted in an ad hoc “laboratory” near the French fort of Saint Louis. A reconstruction of these experiments exposes the multifarious connections to and from the island garden-laboratory, mediated by materials and different kinds of indigo knowledge, including that of local Wolof informants. A (...) class='Hi'>microhistory of encounters in and around a tiny island off the West African coast merges with a transatlantic story connecting Senegal to Paris and to French colonies in the Caribbean (Saint-Domingue and Guyana). The essay explores geographies of knowledge and French imperial ambitions through close attention to the material properties of indigo, the practices associated with its cultivation and transformation from plant to dye, and the material remnants of Adanson’s engagement with it in Africa. These remnants—herbarium sheets, experimental notes, color samples on paper strips, dyed fabric swatches, sketched maps, correspondence, collection catalogues, and plant taxonomies—put various kinds of African knowledge and Caribbean plantation experience into dialogue with European botany and dye chemistry. (shrink)

In surveying the field of history and philosophy of science , it may be more useful just now to pose some key questions than it would be to lay out the sundry competing attempts to unify H and P. The ten problems this essay presents are grounded in a range of work of enormous interest—historical and philosophical work that has made use of productive categories of analysis: context, historicism, purity, and microhistory, to name but a few. What kind of (...) account are we after—historically and philosophically—when we attempt to address science not as a vacuous generality but in its specific, local formation? (shrink)

A Future of the History of Science Is in the Institution. In this article, I warn against a tendency seen in the history of science towards very particular and isolating microhistories. The call for contextualization should be more than mere lip service and taken seriously. I suggest that a stronger focus on the history of institutions could be one particularly productive way to contextualize knowledge. There are at least five benefits that an analysis of institutions might bring for the history (...) of science: The history of scientific institutions offers the potential for (1) entangled histories that (2) include longer time periods and pay not only attention to (3) the dissemination of knowledge but also to (4) the field of law and the mechanisms of vocational bureaucracy. In this way, (5) questions of power and politics come into view. (shrink)

ABSTRACT After a productive start in the 1980s, laboratory history is now surprisingly neglected—not lab science, but the lab as social institution. To restart interest, I suggest that we see labs as period specific (early modern, modern, postmodern) and of a piece with each era's dominant social institutions and practices. In the modern era, for example, labs have become powerful and ubiquitous because their operating principles are those of the nation-state and its consumerist political economy. Their educational function is crucial: (...) labs have authority because they are an effective vehicle for educating en masse for life in modern states; they provide general entry to careers in scores of disciplines and a thousand occupations; and they embody prevailing ideals of a meritocracy of competence, transparency (through publication), and a universalistic logic of objectivity. An older microhistory of laboratory practices may thus be reborn as a systematic, macrosocial history of the lab. (shrink)

Popular science writing has received increasing interest, especially in its relation to professional science. I extend the current scholarly focus from the nineteenth to the twentieth century by providing a microhistory of the early popular writings of evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith. Linking them to the state of evolutionary biology as a professional science as well as Maynard Smith’s own professional standing, I examine the interplay between author, text and audiences. In particular, I focus on Maynard Smith’s book The (...) Theory of Evolution and show how he used it to both promote neo-Darwinism and advocate the utility of mathematics in biology. Following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin and David Lack, Maynard Smith was a science communicator blurring the lines between genres and audiences while contributing to ongoing discussions within and on the profession of evolutionary biology around the Darwin-Wallace centenary. (shrink)

Since its first publication in 1992, _New Perspectives on Historical Writing_ has become a key reference work used by students and researchers interested in the most important developments in the methodology and practice of history. For this new edition, the book has been thoroughly revised and updated and includes an entirely new chapter on environmental history. Peter Burke is joined here by a distinguished group of internationally renowned historians, including Robert Darnton, Ivan Gaskell, Richard Grove, Giovanni Levi, Roy Porter, Gwyn (...) Prins, Joan Scott, Jim Sharpe, Richard Tuck, and Henk Wesseling. The contributions examine a wide range of interdisciplinary areas of historical research, including women’s history, history "from below," the history of reading, oral history, the history of the body, microhistory, the history of events, the history of images, and political history. (shrink)

In the 1580s, when the Jesuit missionaries Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) established the first Jesuit mission in China, the terms “translatability” and “cultural incommensurability” were yet to enter the European lexicon, but these questions were addressed implicitly through the translation choices employed in the mission field. For the early missionaries, translatability had immense ramifications for their missionary practice. One of the foremost challenges was how to communicate in Chinese the concept of “sanctity,” which was central to Christian (...) soteriology. There was a range of terms in Chinese intellectual and religious traditions that the Jesuits drew upon to translate sanctus such as shengren 聖人 zhenren 真人, and xian 仙, but each of these terms implied a certain commensurability between Christian and indigenous Chinese conceptions of human excellence. This paper will present a microhistory of early Jesuit attempts to translate sanctus in Chinese, and reflect upon the significance of these translation choices for the development of the Jesuits’ missionary strategy. (shrink)

Prevalent narratives of agricultural innovation predict that we are once again on the cusp of a global agricultural revolution. According to these narratives, this so-called fourth agricultural revolution, or agriculture 4.0, is set to transform current agricultural practices around the world at a quick pace, making use of new sophisticated precision technologies. Often used as a rhetorical device, this narrative has a material effect on the trajectories of an inherently political and normative agricultural transition; with funding, other policy instruments, and (...) research attention focusing on the design and development of new precision technologies. A growing critical social science literature interrogates the promises of revolution. Engagement with new technology is likely to be uneven, with benefits potentially favouring the already powerful and the costs falling hardest on the least powerful. If grand narratives of change remain unchallenged, we risk pursuing innovation trajectories that are exclusionary, failing to achieve responsible innovation. This study utilises a range of methodologies to explore everyday encounters between farmers and technology, with the aim of inspiring further work to compile the microhistories that can help to challenge robust grand narratives of change. We explore how farmers are engaging with technology in practice and show how these interactions problematise a simple, linear notion of innovation adoption and use. In doing so, we reflect upon the contribution that the study of everyday encounters can make in setting more inclusionary, responsible pathways towards sustainable agriculture. (shrink)

Films That Spill is a comprehensive study of the Cinema of Transgression, a hitherto under-examined moment in US underground film culture. Reconsidering the concept of transgressive cinema not only as a description of the intentionally provocative content of the films, but rather as a feature of a cross-disciplinary practice, the book explores how filmmaking in the context of the vibrant and intermingling art, music, performance, and film scenes in 1980s Lower Manhattan spilled over the boundaries of artistic disciplines, media formats, (...) and content concepts. This study not only provides a microhistory of these scenes and insight into their afterlife in archives and exhibitions. It also represents an innovative contribution to debates within film, media, and visual culture about the methodological and historiographical challenges posed by the expansion of film beyond the discursive boundaries of cinema. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s LegacyPaul Richard BlumChristopher S. Celenza. The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. xx + 210. Cloth, $45.00This is a programmatic book about why and how philosophy should care about Renaissance texts. Celenza starts with an assessment of the neglect of the wealth of Latin Renaissance [End Page 485] sources by (...) nineteenth-century historiography, followed by portraits of two prototypal twentieth-century historians and their philosophical approach. He proposes a method of study for Renaissance thinkers and exemplifies it with two key figures and with the concept of honor. A survey of the field of study and an appendix concerning Renaissance research in the US conclude the book."The Renaissance" as a field of research between the Middle Ages and what is now cowardly called "Early Modern" became legitimate through the awakening of national consciousness in the nineteenth century. Consequently, the emphasis lay on vernacular language works in Italy and elsewhere. Latin Renaissance literature never was worthy of Grossforschung, i.e., of national projects like the academy enterprises concerning world history or classical studies, even though classical philology originated in the humanists' emulation of the ancients. This however would be absorbed by the nineteenth-century idea of national character (12).Italian Hegelianism of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century included Renaissance philosophy in the evolution of national spirit, and the late Eugenio Garin as its pupil spent his scholarly life portraying with astounding precision and detail Italian Humanism and Renaissance as a dialectic and rational development. Equally diligent was the German born Paul Oskar Kristeller, clinging, however, to a very different understanding of philosophy, which Celenza describes as rationalist in the Kantian and metaphysical in the Platonico-Aristotelian tradition (41). Here the author underestimates the influence of Heidegger on Kristeller: his dissertation was clearly an interpretation of Plotinus in the light of existentialism, which still transpires in his famous Ficino book and many later philosophical statements. The problem with both approaches, that of Garin and that of Kristeller, is that those philosophers who ignore history (deliberately or incidentally) and those who lost an understanding of metaphysics do not know how to read Renaissance thinkers.'Microhistory' is the formula Celenza proposes: Richard Rorty's abolishing the notion of 'representing' reality in favor of evocation and conversation—both for the interpretation of the past and the past itself—and Pierre Bourdieux's notions of 'field' and 'relational thinking' open the possibility of locating past thinkers in their community and, consequently, the meaning of their philosophical endeavor. What Celenza exercised with Garin and Kristeller applies also to Renaissance authors. Under the heading 'Orthodoxy,' Celenza shows that it is unfortunate to censure Lorenzo Valla (+ 1457) or Marsilio Ficino (+ 1499) as being unorthodox or as precursors to the Reformation, because this perspective misses the point of their lives' work—namely, to find out what makes Christian beliefs and their sources Christian. Valla's discoveries in Greek and Latin philology and Ficino's experiments with magic are part of their scrutiny of orthopraxy (my term), the right way of Christian life, and are embedded in their conversations with friend and foe, who in some cases still await discovery. The far-reaching message of these two samples is: reading their work and studying their conversations is the way to study philosophy in the fifteenth century.The same is proven by engaging in social concepts such as 'honor.' Starting with a surprising appreciation of gender studies, Celenza suggests taking a look at intellectual masculinity among courtiers and writers. Then it turns out that Machiavelli bequeathed to modernity—perhaps as a caricature—the structure of struggle for power, ideas, and provision in which humanists were engaged, being the first large generation of intellectuals outside the safe haven of cathedrals and convents."What is really there?" is the concluding question. A new canon, the prelude to early modern sociology of scholarship, and models of—presently highly acclaimed—contextualization of intellectual productivity. Returning to the Latinity of Renaissance sources Celenza shows that even the emergence of vernacular literature, which bewitched nationalist historiography, was by itself a fruit... (shrink)

This article is concerned with history that is fuzzy in the sense of impressionistic rather than systematic, using “soft” rather than “hard” data and concerned more with “lumping” than with “splitting.” It argues that there have been at least four phases in the two centuries of conflict between precise and fuzzy historians. In the first phase, in the nineteenth century, precise history, firmly based on documents, was defined, by Leopold von Ranke and the Rankeans, against an older fuzzy or “conjectural” (...) history. In a second phase, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new fuzzy history was defined against “positivist” history, by Karl Lamprecht in Germany, Lucien Febvre in France, and George Trevelyan in England, among others. In a third phase, in the middle of the twentieth century, practitioners of quantitative history (sometimes known as the New Economic History or more generally as “cliometrics”) condemned all nonquantitative historians as fuzzy. In a fourth phase, from the 1970s onward, a still newer fuzzy history, comprising historical anthropology, microhistory, and the New Cultural History, was defined against quantitative history by scholars such as Georges Duby in France, Carlo Ginzburg in Italy, and Robert Darnton in the United States. In short, there has been a gradual move from more or less unself-conscious imprecision to self-conscious antiprecision. (shrink)

Organized thematically, this important five-volume set brings together key essays from the field of historical studies. Including an extensive general introduction by the editor in the first volume, as well as shorter individual introductions in each of the following volumes, this set is essential reading for scholars and students alike. Coverage includes: 1. Foundations - The Classic Tradition - The Old Cultural History - Economic History 2: Society - Social History - Marxism - Annales - History of Mentalities 3: Ideas (...) - History of Ideas/ Intellectual History - History of Science - History of the Arts - History of Religion - History of Sexuality. 4: Culture - History and Anthropology - Microhistory - New Cultural History - History and Memory - The Poetics of History - Narrativity. Postmodernist Historiography and its Critics 5: Politics - Political History - Imperialism and Postcolonial History - World History - World-Systems Analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 419-420 [Access article in PDF] Martin Mulsow. Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland, 1680-1720. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2002. Pp. x + 514. Paper, € 58.00.This is a marvelous, detailed, textured study of a large number of minor works and minor figures that developed and transmitted many of the elements of modern philosophy in early modern Germany. Many of (...) the texts were written in Latin, and only some were published. One should not teach the philosophy of the Enlightenment from Hazard or Cassirer without attention to these figures, whom they did not know. Now we know where our heroes like Lessing, Hume, and Kant got many of their fundamental ideas.Martin Mulsow ends this book with ten theses. The first holds that most of the authors discussed were radicalized in a multi-layered process, not simply from the reading of Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, or Toland. For example, one could take the role of an opponent in an academic disputation, and bit by bit begin to believe one's unorthodox role. Or one could be provoked by ultra-orthodox opponents to explore the opposite of what they believed. Some authors evolved into and out of radical positions over the course of their lives.Further theses contend that small, trusted circles of friends were often the enabling condition in which unorthodox views were first expressed and then hammered out. Irony, satire, humor, paradox, and ambivalence played key roles. It is often difficult to tell whether some of these texts were serious or intended as jokes, and perhaps the authors did not always know themselves. Some radical ideas were spread simply by curious erudites who assembled collections and bibliographies of radical manuscripts and texts without believing them.Mulsow shows how people wrote on controversial topics in coded scholarly language. Spinozism was discussed under the rubrics of Platonism and Stoicism; the sovereignty of the people was considered in terms of the lex regia; and Biblical criticism became code for the physicians' rejection of the materiality of the soul. Thus philosophical discourse can be found where one might least expect it in legal, philological, historical, and scientific debates. The numerous case studies that the author assembles amount to philosophical microhistory.Substantial chapters deal with various aspects of the intellectual stew that emerged from the bubbling pot of Jews and Socinians and other Christian sects that were semi-tolerated in the Netherlands. Unlike any construction of moderate and radical positions as opposed and at odds, Mulsow shows how they were often intertwined. The destruction of Christian Platonism, the paradoxical development of Enlightenment ideas out of anti-humanism, and the uses of so-called eclecticism in philosophy made possible the assembly of modern philosophical positions.In yet another paradox, many of these writers belong to what has been called the "conservative Enlightenment," intending only to temporize and draw the teeth of the political and philosophical radicals, and yet their writings systematized and transmitted the ideas of the radicals, opening the way to further radicality. It is a perennial weakness of the skeptics and proto-liberals like Gundling that they defended freedom of thought and libertas philosophandi even where it would undermine the ideas and institutions in which they believed.Most of the philosophically radical positions began as critiques of theological positions, and this is one reason why it is ever more apparent that one cannot understand the rise of modern philosophy without a close acquaintance with early modern theology. None of the early modern philosophers we are trying to understand was ignorant of the many levels of theological debate. There are numerous connections to later times: for example, a seventeenth-century debate over political theology anticipated Carl Schmitt's twentieth-century rediscovery of this topos.Mulsow places the Enlightened ideas of Locke and Newton in the context of their basis in the theology of anti-Trinitarian Socinians and Arians such as Samuel Crell. This was as important to many who radicalized it as the Spinozism credited with spawning the radical... (shrink)

This article discusses the new microhistory of the 1970s and 1980s in terms of the concept of exceptional typical, and contrasts the new microhistory to old microhistory, in which the relationship between micro and macro levels of phenomena was defined by means of the concepts of exceptionality and typicality. The focus of the essay is on Carlo Ginzburg's method of clues, Walter Benjamin's idea of monads, and Michel de Certeau's concept of margins. The new microhistory is (...) also compared with methodological discussions in the social sciences. In the mid-1970s concepts like the micro-macro link or the microfoundations of macrotheory were introduced in sociology and economics. But these largely worked in terms of the concepts of typicality or exceptionality, and this has proved to be problematic. Only historians have developed concepts that escape these and the older definitions of the micro-macro relationship; indeed, the "new microhistory" can best be described in terms of the notion of "exceptional typical." The essay explores the meaning of this notion. (shrink)

This article explores the development of a rat model of mother-infant relationships from its origins in the psychosomatic investigations of the mid-1960s to its elaboration into a theoretical system in neurobiology. I reconstruct the research trajectory of a group of neurobiologists in the United States, with a focus on the experimental practices they adopted while building this animal model. Providing a microhistory of this decade-long undertaking, I show that what drove the development of the model in practice was a (...) serendipitous finding about infants’ response to maternal separation. Detected inadvertently, the pup’s separation response acquired an epistemic significance of its own and reoriented the experimental system towards unanticipated paths. To explain this intriguing phenomenon, the neurobiologists kept on refining their material manipulations and stabilizing their experimental outcomes. They thus established a series of causal relationships that connected dysregulations of the infant’s physiological systems to disruptions in maternal care. As important as this interactive stabilization of technique and objects in the laboratory was how the researchers theorized the network of relationships derived from this technically constituted objectivity. Highlighting the practice-driven aspects of model-building, I demonstrate that what facilitated this theoretical process was an integrated design of complementary experiments. The outcome of each separate experiment of the research program came to bear upon the outcomes of other experiments, informing the development of future manipulations. It was this strategically driven integration process that allowed the experimenters to build expanding networks of causal relationships and consolidate them into a neurobiological theory. (shrink)

In an issue of Common Knowledge given over to experiments in scholarly form and to the discussion of them, this piece is one of three on the genre of microhistory. The other two argue the merits and demerits of the genre, while this piece seeks to exemplify both its virtues and its risks. To show how microhistory offers intense deliberation on a narrowly defined topic, yet also a kind of hastiness — an impatience with demands for broader scope (...) — Colin Richmond examines one limited facet of the relationship between two Americans resident in England at the turn of the last century: the novelist Henry James and the painter Edwin Austin Abbey. Detailed evidence is mustered to document James's love of fresh hens' eggs and of the undignified lengths he would go to obtain them through the agency of Abbey and his wife. This short piece is written as if a parable, and while its moral goes unstated, the reader's attention is drawn to the unsettled question of whether James exerted maximal effort for minimal results, or whether he knew something about the value of freshness undreamed of by those more patient and dignified in pursuing their desires. (shrink)

The polymath Michel de Certeau is traditionally seen as one of a group of French poststructuralist thinkers who reject constructs in the social sciences in favor of the diversity of the everyday or the past. However, in this paper I will show that, as a historian, Certeau did not discard these constructs, but rather valued them as a means of doing justice to the “strangeness” of the past. The position that Certeau adopts can be seen most clearly from his theoretical (...) debate with Paul Veyne, which is the starting point of this article. I then show how Certeau’s first major historical work, The Possession at Loudun, exemplifies his theoretical position. An analysis of this work demonstrates how the historian’s active reconstruction of interactions between exorcists, medical doctors, state officers, and possessed nuns helps us to perceive the complexity of the past in a way that can be seen as a microhistory avant la lettre. I will suggest that during his writing of the history of Loudun, Certeau implicitly raises more theoretical and epistemological problems, and in so doing he “practices” a theory of history. The most elusive aspect of the story at Loudun turns out to be the drama around the priest Grandier. This article demonstrates how Certeau pays tribute to Grandier by using “scientific” methods, thus showing the “limits of representation” through disciplinary means. Finally, the article explores the implications of Certeau’s theory and practice of the writing of history for understanding historiography at large. The historian not only appears as a tramp who looks for remains that are forever lost to us, but is also a “scientist” who uses both models and concepts in order to put them to the test. (shrink)

All research has limitations, for example, from paradigm, concept, theory, tradition, and discipline. In this article Lynda Stone describes three exemplars that are variations on limitation and are “extraordinary” in that they change what constitutes future research in each domain. Malcolm Gladwell's present day study of outliers makes a statistical term into a sociological concept. Carlo Ginzburg's study of a sixteenth-century miller who challenges Church doctrine initiates the field of microhistory. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's philosophy of the rhizome (...) offers a poststructuralist study of the doing of philosophy and the form of philosophical text. Although Gladwell's study is the only one specifically on the topic of outliers, the other two investigations are outliers as well. Overall the three studies demonstrate what can be revealed and learned when limitation is transgressed. This is an important lesson for educational research—wherein heretofore unimagined societal possibility and reform of education might result. (shrink)

The paper aims to disclosure of key points in the development of the German tradition of historiography of philosophy after the 90s of the 18th century. The starting point was the so-called «dispute about the method» of historiography, which erupted in the last decade of the 18th century not without the influence of Kant’s «critical philosophy». Its participants (Reinhold, Fülleborn, Goess, Grohmann, Tennemann, and others) put forward different theses, but they agreed that it is Kant’s philosophy that makes it possible (...) to create a «philosophical history of philosophy». A type of historiography was formed, which was based on the criterion of «progress of philosophy» and Kant’s position was considered as a standard for any historiography. Subsequently, other types of historiography were formed, which followed either the opposite criterion of «regress» or «decadence», or tried to combine both of these criteria (Hegel). In the second half of the 19th century «history of problems» becomes widespread as a principle of research and presentation of the history of philosophy, its main representatives were W. Windelband, N. Hartmann, H. Heimsoeth. Instead, in the second half of the 20th century the dominant type of historiography is the «history of concepts», which finds linguistic and philosophical justification in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. In recent decades, the German tradition of historiography has been enriched by K. Flasсh’s project «historical philosophy» and by D. Henrich program «constellation research». In both of these projects, there is a noticeable attraction to microhistory, going beyond the «classic» texts, discovering hitherto unknown figures and sources that significantly expand the established practice of the historiography of philosophy. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The paper seeks to prove the thesis of the significance and importance of the theories and methodological approaches of historical anthropology, which are aimed at understanding the meanings, essence and value systems of human existence in the past for philosophical anthropology. The study of this problem is relevant for understanding the evolution of human identity with philosophical and anthropological concepts, understanding the essence of one’s own existence and attitude to the world. _Theoretical basis._ The author conducts research in the (...) analysis of the reflexive field of philosophical anthropology and related disciplines, in particular historical anthropology, implemented in the philosophical literature of recent centuries, that is, in the space of non-classical and modern philosophical thought. _Originality._ I raise and substantiate the theoretical question of the scientific significance of the analysis of human existence in the past thanks to the involvement of theoretical approaches and concepts formed in the reflexive field of modern historical and anthropological research. This forms the prerequisites for understanding complex and interdisciplinary explorations of the essence and cultural and spiritual values of human existence. I analyse the problems of the work in the context of the concept of the incompleteness of the project of philosophical anthropology without its involvement in the theoretical achievements of historical-anthropological investigations. _Conclusions._ In my opinion, modern historical and anthropological studies of the essence and meanings of being a person of the past form an extensive theoretical system. It is realized through such theoretical aspects of comprehension of human existence by historical and anthropological studies as "history of mentalities", "microhistory", "history of women", "new cultural history", "history of identity", "history of memory", history of mental aspects of political processes. Methodological approaches and concepts of modern historical anthropology form the basis of mental reconstruction and understanding of the mental and cultural causes and factors of human existence, thanks to the analysis of the evolution of the worldview, behaviour, outlook, various forms of individual and social activity of the individual. (shrink)

Drawing on the Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart Koselleck and the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, my book The Invention of the ‘Underclass’ draws a microhistory of the birth, diffusion, and demise of this racialized folk devil at the intersection of the academic field, the journalistic field, and the politics-policy-philanthropic field. This history illuminates the politics of knowledge about dispossessed and dishonored categories in the metropolis and suggests three notions that can help researchers parse the use and abuse of other social (...) science constructs and thus practice better conceptual hygiene: lemming effects (illustrated by the wild rush to deploy ‘diaspora’), conceptual speculative bubble (as with ‘racial capitalism’), and turnkey problematics (such as the ‘resilient city’ and the ‘creative city’). I discuss the factors that foster the development of epistemic bandwagons, speculation, and turnkeys, and specify the criteria that make for a robust concept in terms of semantics (clarity and neutrality), logics (coherence and type-specificity), and heuristics (empirical adequacy and theoretical productivity). (shrink)

In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. STAGE NOTES AND/AS/OR TRACK CHANGES: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND MAGICAL THINKING ON PRINTING: AN ELECTION AND A PROVOCATION Isaac Linder “Of course most people don’t think of editing/publishing as theatre but as something boring or parasitical (vis-à-vis a ‘source’ text), a textual backwater populated by people with glasses. But I think publishing a book today is theatre, socially networked theatre…. Facebook and Flickr are our era’s administered and generic version of sixties happenings!” — Tan Lin 1 ELECTING A MASCOT: THE BARNACLE GOOSE After pitching the idea for this panel with the editorial help of my continental cohorts I became fascinated with the image of the goose—dead and roasted as it may be—and its relationship to the space of the printing press. For a long while after proposing this gathering I was seriously under the sway of delusions of grandeur, imagining that we might roast a goose (or goosefu) and, preparing a meal as one prepares a text for publication, feast in something approaching a warm and well-nourished revelry. I should note, by way of introduction, that a substantial part of my undergraduate experience involved learning to typeset and work as a devil, as typesetters mischievously call it, in a letterpress studio. This accounts in part for my fascination and helps to explain the fact that, when I began to leaf around in medieval beastiaries in lieu of being able to procure a goose, I was almost immediately struck by a fantastic monster that I hereby elect to be the mascot for our so-called para-academic practice(s) the relatively famed, but no less fabulous for it, barnacle goose. The barnacle goose is a creature that first makes its way into 12th century manuscripts with Giraldus Cambrensis in 1186. Phenomenologically speaking the monster is a tree, a tree which, when approached closer is seen to be birthing geese budding from the buds that hang like ripe fruit from its branches. As the story goes these trees were found over water; the fledgling geese, once wrested from their pods would take off in flight or fall to their watery death, where they would be transformed into driftwood. In retrospect we presume the barnacle goose was posited as a consequence of the fact that geese born in more northern regions, migrating to Ireland and western Europe at large, were never seen to give birth. And I should note that this is far from the only other animal posited to be born from trees at around this time, my other favorite being medieval accounts of Moroccan tree-climbing goats. 2 In particular I’ve thrown up the mascot of the barnacle goose and singled it out from the quires of its beatiaries because its thoroughly hybrid origins lead us to name two very real creatures we can find point to in abundance; discrete materialities of the world cobbled together in textual fancy: on the one hand, the modern day barnacle goose , a common species of goose and, on the other, goose barnacles , a particular type of crustacean with incredible feathery tendrils and—I can't help but mention—one of the largest body mass to penis size ratios of all of the animals in the kingdom. Why is this bit of genital trivia relevant? Because they’re all hermaphroditic and in rare cases have been found to reproduce just with themselves—to inseminate themselves and give birth to their kin. So I think it must be stressed, as a symbol for what we’re really here to talk about, it's not a boy’s club thing so much as a very queer thing and, I contend, para - in every perfect sense of the word... Alongside the natural world, a monstrous imaginary concatenation; Alongside the hulls of so many institutional structures, funding sources and resources, Serresian parasites in all manner of mutualist, symbiotic, or properly parasitic positions; migratory and adrift; The tree, center stage in the 21st century adaptation of Waiting for Godot that is unraveling in ateliers across the world, is a barnacle goose birthing a flurry of miscegenous texts beyond medium and genre. PROVOCATION 1: CHAOSMOSIS “Genre is obsolete.” — Ray Brassier 3 And so, here I was getting carried away in daydreams about this generative and genealogical symbol under which to think all of the diverse projects we are all involved in as architects of the dressed word, (well dressed, bespoke, mansy, butch, careless, or roguishly punk attired as those words may be), when it also dawned on me, mid-flight here from Denver, that we are, even in lieu of being able to roast geese together, very much so literalizing what was never just the metaphor of the wayzgoose—a tradition, as you know, celebrated to mark the crepuscular turn into fall—as we are poised here, tomorrow being the first official day of fall on our calendars in the US marking the seasonal change from at which point it will no longer be possible to print without the aid of candlelight. A beautiful thought, that tipped into magical thinking on account of a little quick math I was able to do to come to the conclusion that we can all be delighted to know that as we proceed into the autumn with our printing projects always ahead of us and still to be set, we will tonight be bathed not only by the artificial candlelight of our screens, but also in part by photons raining down on us at 186,282 miles per second—photons from an aspect of 9 cyg, a stereoscopic binary deep within Cygnus, the swan but not-so-distant-relative of the goose, with a distance of 572 Light years away; photons that are raining down on us, will rain down on us all winter, have been raining down on us all year, and which had their origin in the combustion cores at a center of 9 cyg 572 years ago, in 1440, the year which we point to today as the common year in which, as we all know, Gutenberg is said to have brought the movable type to the western world, inaugurating an era that stretches farther into the past and future than McLuhan could justify; the proliferation of so much ambient text; insurrectionary coups on (and re-crystallizations of) genre—perceived amidst so much ambient light—enveloping this campus, just now. So, with that thought, and perhaps a new mascot, Nico Jenkins... NOTES “ Writing as Metadata Container, An Interview with Tan Lin ,” Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher, Danny Snelson, Gordon Tapper, Tan Lin, Jacket 2. January 20, 2012. To explore Lin’s notion of ambient textuality, plagiarism, and parallel, cross­platform publication in the 21st century, also see Lin’s sampled novel, “ The Patio and the Index ,” Triple Canopy 14, October 24, 2011, as well as the Edit event, organized at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, April, 2010 . For a fascinating and fecund exploration of medieval plant­animal hybrids in relation to media ecology, see Whitney Trettien, “ Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew’s Anatomy of Plants (1682) .” postmedieval 3.1 (2012):97. See also the crowd­review version of the essay. “ Genre Is Obsolete .” Compléments de Multitudes . 28 (2007). (shrink)

This editorial note introduces the second of three issues of Common Knowledge dedicated to experiments in scholarly form. The first appeared in Winter 1996 and was introduced by a dialogue between two editorial board members, Greil Marcus and Hugh Kenner, who differed over whether tampering with set scholarly forms should be regarded as a serious business or as a matter of fun. Philosophically, this note explains, the journal takes exception to distinctions of the form-versus-content variety — a resistance that stems (...) from desire for peaceful transactions in intellectual life. But though the desire for peace, like any other, can be uncompromising, this one recoils from its own strength and requires indirect expression. One way, it is argued, to achieve indirection is to tamper with forms in which a strong position finds natural expression. Tampering, for instance, with the distinction between narrative history and fiction, or between discursive philosophy and poetry, is a time-honored maneuver. Hence the appearance in this special issue of three pieces on microhistory, along with the first installment of a two-part symposium on “lyric philosophy” and a “pseudepigraphon” premised on its author's conviction that not-for-credit truths are credible only if they appear to be fabrications. (shrink)

Building on the cultural transfer theory of Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, the paper examines the history of Marian Zdziechowski’s interactions with Leo Tolstoy. Its starting point is their correspondence of the 1890s, and the endpoint – Zdziechowski’s magnum opus Pessimism, Romanticism and the Bases of Christianity (1915). The main emphasis lies on two microhistories of cultural transfer with opposing vectors, represented in the relations between these two figures. The first, revolving around the publication of Zdziechowski’s essay Religious and Political (...) Ideals of Polish Society, is dedicated to the attempts of Zdziechowski, a young Polish intellectual, to secure a place in the field of Russian intellectual culture with the help of Tolstoy, one of its leading figures. The second concentrates on Tolstoy’s letter to Zdziechowski, which the latter used as a preface to a separate publication of his essay. Aiming to communicate the idea that Tolstoy was no enemy for the Poles to the Polish audience, Zdziechowski thus responded to the critical reaction to Tolstoy in the Polish press of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the end, the figure of Zdziechowski as a mediator between cultural fields proves to be of high value for further studies of processes and mechanisms of cultural transfer. (shrink)

In response to those calling for philosophical dialogue across the Americas, this paper considers the historical emergence of the concept of el pueblo (“the people”) as the subject and object of democracy. The first section makes a linguistic claim: the genuinely communal nature of “the people” clearly appears when considering el pueblo because it is unambiguously singular, grammatically speaking. The second section makes a historical claim: the microhistory of a largely indigenous pueblo in Mexico’s Yucatán enables us to begin (...) unpacking the complex concrete, historical, and genealogical dimensions of el pueblo. The brief concluding section suggests that historically contextualizing and concretizing el pueblo provides conceptual support for some of the premises that underwrite Latin American philosophies of liberation, including that of Enrique Dussel. -/- . (shrink)

This essay explores the question of the uncertain relationship between historical narratives, the archive, and past reality by drawing links between Carlo Ginzburg's 1976 The Cheese and the Worms, and Hector Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie Fantastique. I suggest that Ginzburg's microhistory provides valuable insight into how a mode of historical scholarship premised on the concept of translation might proceed. The symphony provides an example of translation in the medium of music and, by way of comparison with Ginzburg's text, illuminates how (...) a similar mode is already operative within the historical work insofar as history remains a dialogical activity. Key, then, is that translation produces dialogical texts, where each voice contributes to the shared production of meaning. (shrink)

As a philosophical paradigm, differential heterogenesis offers us a novel descriptive vantage with which to inscribe Deleuze’s virtuality within the terrain of “differential becoming,” conjugating “pure saliences” so as to parse economies, microhistories, insurgencies, and epistemological evolutionary processes that can be conceived of independently from their representational form. Unlike Gestalt theory’s oppositional constructions, the advantage of this aperture is that it posits a dynamic context to both media and its analysis, rendering them functionally tractable and set in relation to other (...) objects, rather than as sedentary identities. Surveying the genealogy of differential heterogenesis with particular interest in the legacy of Lautman’s dialectic, I make the case for a reading of the Deleuzean virtual that departs from an event-oriented approach, galvanizing Sarti and Citti’s dynamic a priori vis-à-vis Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. Specifically, I posit differential heterogenesis as frame with which to examine our contemporaneous epistemic shift as it relates to multi-scalar computational modeling while paying particular attention to neuro-inferential modes of inductive learning and homologous cognitive architecture. Carving a bricolage between Mark Wilson’s work on the “greediness of scales” and Deleuze’s “scales of reality”, this project threads between static ecologies and active externalism vis-à-vis endocentric frames of reference and syntactical scaffolding. (shrink)

This guest column comprises both a review of the English translation of Carlo Ginzburg's book Threads and Traces: True False Fictive and some general comments on the merits and demerits of microhistory as a genre poised between historical writing and fiction. The column is published in the context of two others regarding this latter topic — one by Natalie Zemon Davis, the author of the microhistorical classic The Return of Martin Guerre, and one by Colin Richmond. Davis's column is (...) a response to Keith Thomas's having drawn approving attention to the following remark of J. H. Elliott's: “Something is amiss when the name of Martin Guerre threatens to become better known than that of Martin Luther.” In the present piece, Thomas writes of Ginzburg, a founder of Italian microhistory, that he is more a “European intellectual” than a “mere historian,” the difference being that the former is less interested in history per se than in fields like anthropology, philosophy, and literary theory. Thomas's column expresses doubt about the intellectual restlessness of historians like Ginzburg and about the preparation of microhistorians to write constantly on topics new to them, but it claims as well that Ginzburg's “combination of erudition and piercing intelligence is irresistible.”. (shrink)

We performed a critical review of the historiographical studies on biogeography. We began with the pioneering works of Augustin and Alphonse de Candolle. Then, we analyzed the historical accounts of biogeography developed by (1) Martin Fichman and his history on the extensionism-permanentism debate; (2) Gareth Nelson and his critique of the Neo-Darwinian historiography of biogeography; (3) Ernst Mayr, with his dispersalist viewpoint; (4) Alan Richardson, who wrote a microhistory on the biogeographic model constructed by Darwin; (5) Michael Paul Kinch (...) and the ideas discussed in the 19th century about the geographical distribution of living beings; (6) Janet Browne, who highlighted the importance of the pre-Darwinian naturalists; (7) Peter Bowler, who focused mainly on the influence of paleontology on biogeography; (8) James Larson, who looked into the practices of the naturalists of Northern Europe in the late 18th century; and (9) Malte Ebach, who like Larson, was more interested in analysing the practices rather than the ideas of naturalists who studied the geographical distribution of organisms. Finally, these works are compared with each other. There has not been a dominant paradigm in the construction of historical narratives of biogeography; however, they provide a useful context for understanding problems of biogeography that continue to be debated to this day. (shrink)

History Without Causality. How Contemporary Historical Epistemology Demarcates Itself From the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Contemporary proponents of historical epistemology often try to delimit their enterprise by demarcating it from the sociology of scientific knowledge and other sociologically oriented approaches in the history of science. Their criticism is directed against the use of causal explanations which are deemed to invite reductionism and lead to a totalizing perspective on science. In the present article I want to analyse this line of criticism (...) in what I consider are two paradigmatic works of contemporary historical epistemology: Lorraine Daston's und Peter Galison's Objectivity and Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger's Toward a History of Epistemic Things. I first present their arguments against the sociological and causal analysis of scientific knowledge and practice and then try to defend sociological work in the history of science against their charges. I will, however, not do so by defending causal explanations directly. Rather, I will show that the arguments against sociological analysis put forward in contemporary historical epistemology, as well as historical epistemology's own models of historical explanation and narration, bear problematic consequences. I argue that Daston, Galison and Rheinberger fail to create productive resonances between macro‐ and microhistorical perspectives, that they reproduce an internalist picture of scientific knowledge, and finally that Rheinberger's attempt to deconstruct the dichotomy between subject and object leads him to neglect questions about the political dimension of scientific research. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHow do micro cases lead us to surprising macro claims? Historians often say that the micro level casts light on the macro level. This metaphor of “casting light” suggests that the micro does not illuminate the macro straightforwardly; such light needs to be interpreted. In this essay, I propose and clarify six interpretive norms to guide micro‐to‐macro inferences.I focus on marginal groups and monsters. These are popular cases in social and cultural histories, and yet seem to be unpromising candidates for (...) generalization. Marginal groups are dismissed by the majority as inferior or ill‐fitting; their lives seem intelligible but negligible. Monsters, on the other hand, are somehow incomprehensible to society and treated as such. First, I show that, by looking at how a society identifies a marginal group and interacts with it, we can draw surprising inferences about that society's self‐image and situation. By making sense of a monster's life, we can draw inferences about its society's mentality and intelligibility. These will contest our conception of a macro claim. Second, I identify four risks in making such inferences — and clarify how norms of coherence, challenge, restraint, connection, provocation, and contextualization can manage those risks.My strategy is to analyze two case studies, by Richard Cobb, about a band of violent bandits and a semi‐literate provincial terrorist in revolutionary France. Published in 1972, these studies show Cobb to be an inventive and idiosyncratic historian, who created new angles for studying the micro level and complicated them with his autobiography. They illustrate how a historian's autobiographical, literary, and historiographical interests can mix into a risky, and often rewarding, style. (shrink)

Los poemas históricos de Ships in Bottles de Neil Curry ofrecen una oportunidad de hacer una reflexión sobre la posible vigencia de la teoría del gran hombre. Contrasta la desconsideración que dicha aportación de Carlyle tiene en la actualidad con su seguimiento en otros campos, como los negocios o la política. En el caso de la poesía, los poemas seleccionados hacen ver de qué manera los grandes actantes de la historia conviven con las personas que hacen la microhistoria.