Microhistory: Unveiling the Past Through Unconventional Narratives

Introduction

During the period between two world wars there was a radical departure from the traditional mainstream historiography which mainly focused on the high-level politics and diplomacy, warfare, and the lives of great statesman. On the contrary they tried to focus on the lives and struggles of ordinary people, their popular forms of protest, their everyday activities, as well as attitudes, beliefs, practices and customs. The main proponent behind this new field of historiography was the French Annales School and this kind of historical narrative came to be known as the “people’s history”. Some of the important forms of this historiography are “history from below”, Alltagsgeschichte (“history of everyday life”), and ‘microhistory’. All these field of historiography tried to focus on single individual, community or a remarkable event, breaking through the known boundaries of history writing.

In this regard, microhistory is one of the most innovative and contemporary trends in the contemporary historiography. The term microhistory started appearing in the European history writing from the 1970s in Italy. It not only produced some important disputes in the field of historiography but also reached a broader audience. Its most common characteristic feature is that it tries to study the past in a very small scale. In this sense, microhistory underscores the need for local perspective in understanding global patterns and wider narratives, as well as offering unique insights into phenomena and patterns that may lie outside of macrohistorical narratives or flatly contradict them. Yet the Micro historians more likely to reveal the complicated functions of individual relationship with each and every social settings and they stress difference from large norms. They tend to focus on the object which did not come under historical scrutiny in a wider context or already handled. Themes in micro-history are always obscure, strange and less known unless and otherwise it has become the subject matter. The Micro historians also deal with the institutions in power and how they deal with the affairs of the people. To able to illustrate their point, micro-historians have turned to the narrative as an analytical tool or research - method where they get opportunity to present their findings by which conclusions are reached - Carlo Ginzburg’s book, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller is one of the best example of this. In my paper I will try to show how Carlo Ginzburg’s (one of the main proponents of microhistory) idea of microhistory contributes to look at the everyday life in history. For this I will focus on his noted book, The Cheese and the Worms, a microhistorical based study of the heresy trial of a sixteenth century miller. As its translators has stated, “the book has been rightly hailed as one of the most significant recent contributions to a burgeoning field of study, the popular culture of early modern Europe.”

A Brief Note on The Cheese and the Worms

The book The cheese and the worms by Carlo Ginzburg was published in 1976 and is one of the most exemplary work of microhistory, cultural history or the history of mentalities. In his work he has highly influenced by the literary practices of Leo Tolstoy in his War and Peace. In this regard he says, “the impetus towards this type of narration (and more generally for occupying myself with history) came to me from further off: from War and Peace, from Tolstoy's conviction that a historical phenomenon can become comprehensible only by reconstructing the activities of all the persons who participated in it. This proposition, and the sentiments that had spawned it (populism, fierce disdain for the vacuous and conventional his- tory of historians), left an indelible impression on me from the moment I first read it. The Cheese and the Worms, the story of a miller whose death is decreed from afar, by a man (a pope) who one minute earlier had never heard his name, can be considered a small, distorted product of Tolstoy's grand and intrinsically unrealizable project: the reconstruction of the numerous relationships that linked Napoleon's head cold before the battle of Borodino, the disposition of the troops, and the lives of all the participants in the battle, including the most humble soldier.” Michel Foucault’s works on persecution, madness and the oppressive nature of the modern institutions as well as the works of Sigmund Freud’s attention on language and hidden meanings and E.P.Thomson’s pioneering work, The Making of the English Working Class were also important. 

The book goes on to tell us about Domenico Scandella also known as Menocchio who was a miller living in Friuli in the sixteenth century. In 1583, when he was fifty-one years old, he was denounced to the Holy Inquisition for spreading unorthodox views. His inquisitors, repelled and fascinated by what he said, questioned him at great length. The interrogations were scrupulously recorded and carefully preserved. The record this trials is the subject of this remarkable book by Carlo Ginzburg.

Menocchio who considered himself as a philosopher, astrologer and prophet started reinterpreting the bible in his own way and developed an unusual cosmology consisting, a mixture of materialist, realist and many other theologies and various adaptations from the books he read which earned him the tile of a heretic. He believed that the cosmos was originally a chaos from which order emerged as cheese emerges from the milk. From this ‘cheese’ then emerged ‘worms’, i.e. angels, men and gods (suggesting the title of the book). He says, “I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the angels, and among that number of angels there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time, and he was named lord with four captains, Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. That Lucifer sought to make himself lord equal to the king, who was the majesty of God, and for this arrogance God ordered him driven out of heaven with all his host and his company; and this God later created Adam and Eve and people in great number to take the places of the angels who had been expelled. And as this multitude did not follow God's commandments, he sent his Son, whom the Jews seized, and he was crucified.” He further claims that god is nothing but a little breath at the same time doubting the virginity of Mary and even the divinity of Jesus – “Who did you imagine God to be? God is nothing but a little breath, and whatever else man imagines him to be.” “What did you think, that Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary? It’s impossible that she gave birth to him and remained a virgin. It might very well have been this, that he was a good man, or the son of a good man.” He did not believe that any religion is necessarily better than the other and that the purpose of religion is benevolence and mutual aid and tried to bridge the gap between the dominant and subordinate cultures in early modern Europe – “God the Father has various children whom he loves, such as Christians, Turks and Jews and to each of them he has given the will to live by his own law.” He openly questioned the validity of the holy sacraments and further confessed to the church that he wished for a new world and a way of life, because the Church did not act properly and because it was egoistic. His tendency of pantheism and also because of contradiction of his own ideas later, he was finally executed by burning at the stake in 1599 at the age of 67 by orders from Pope Clement VIII. 

Carlo Ginzburg’s Idea of Microhistory

The field of microhistory shares some similarities with another branch of the people’s history which is known as Alltagsgeschichte (“history of everyday life”). It emerged in Germany at the same time as microhistory and is sometimes referred to as the German version of microhistory. Despite some differences in their method or use of the sources, they mainly deal with the life and survival of those who have remained largely anonymous in history – the “nameless” multitudes in their workaday trials and tribulations. However, they are very different in their approach. On one hand, microhistory tries to focus on a unique and spectacular events lost in history and unknown to the people at large, whereas on the other hand Alltagsgeschichte (“history of everyday life”) focuses on largely unconscious, routine, and repetitive acts in an attempt to reconstruct social relationships and daily transactions – which, they believe, are themselves the key to understanding historical development. This perspective, as elaborated by Peter Borscheid, asserts that via repetition, “everyday thinking and action become pragmatic,” because routines function to “relieve” the individual of constant uncertainty or doubts. For social groups and institutions, routinization means “submission to authority” as a precondition of their “stability.” This orientation, which takes its conceptual cues from the social thought of Arnold Gehlen, reflects the continuity of that older conceptualization of social history viewed as “structural history,” where stress was placed on the “structure” of social forms and configurations. But in the works of Carlo Ginzburg we see a complex amalgamation of both of these disciplines. That said, microhistory and other accounts of everyday life frequently seem to make two rather contradictory claims. One is about strangeness (and therefore distance and difference), the other about familiarity (and therefore closeness and similarity). In the preface to the English edition of The Cheese and the Worms, Ginzburg speaks first of how ‘Every now and then the directness of the sources brings (Menocchio) very close to us: a man like ourselves, one of us,’ but in the very next paragraph he writes ‘But he is also a man very different from us’. 

In his book The Cheese and the Worms while he has tried to focus on the smaller and lesser known event of the trial of an Italian miller Menocchio for spreading his heretical and blasphemous cosmology by the Roman inquisition which deals with the field of microhistory, he has also tried to show the popular religious belief which was prevalent during that time which is surely related to the field of Alltagsgeschichte (“history of everyday life”). Menocchio’s thoughts are a reminder of the diverse of the possible diversity of religious and philosophical views which were prevalent in the medieval rural community. It was during the time of the reformation and the people of the subordinate classes, harassed by the corrupt practices of the Roman Catholic Church were being highly influenced by the ideas of Martin Luther and the other reformists. They wanted to break out of the Orthodox Church which has been shown by Ginzburg through his portrayal of the Menocchio. Inspired by the readings Marxist scholars like Antonio Gramsci, Ginzburg shows us the picture of a literate peasant, Menocchio who rejected the theology of the incarnation and redemption and presented a pantheistic view of god. He instead talked of a “peasant religion intolerant of dogma and ritual and tied to the cycles of nature being fundamentally pre-Christ;” according to Ginzburg this offered a guide to the bulk of the peasant in their natural yearning for social equality promoting a kind of “mass pantheism” at that time. He argues that there was an oral peasant tradition of “religious materialism.” Menocchio’s teachings showed some traces of the influence of the reformism, and before his trial he has also said that at his own death “some Lutherans will learn of it, and will come to collect the ashes.” He represents the struggle of the peasants to go pre-Christ, as Ginzburg argues about the formation of an autonomous current of peasant radicalism, which the upheaval of the Reformation had helped to bring forth, but which was much older.

Another interesting aspect which Ginzburg has tried to show through his book is that early modern popular culture was not completely isolated from or completely dependent on high culture, which is yet another excellent portrayal of. When the inquisitors questioned Menocchio about the sources of his ideology, he says that he had gained his ideas from many books like The Decameron by Boccacio, Mandeville’s Travels and even possibly the Koran. But Ginsburg argues that his literacy does not alone explain the origins of his ideas but it “was the encounter between the printed page and the oral culture, that formed an explosive mixture in Menocchio's head.” Instead of only absorbing the texts or ideas of the reformation, he “projected onto the written page elements taken from oral tradition.” This means along with the printed texts he was also reliant on a “common store of traditions, myths and aspirations handed down orally over generation,” and also resulted to his contradictions later. Ginzburg tries breaks our common conception that oral traditions are mainly associated with the subordinate class and written with the dominant class and he tries to show a reciprocal relationship between the two. He argues that “between the culture of the dominant classes and that of the subordinate classes there existed, in preindustrial Europe, a circular relationship composed of reciprocal influences, which travelled from low to high as well as from high to low.” This in turn he says led to the emergence “a deep-rooted cultural stratum so unusual as to appear almost incomprehensible.” Thus, Carlo Ginzburg aptly brings a new angle to the Renaissance or the Reformation era by focusing on the popular culture and religion in early modern Europe. His works have greatly helped in understanding the unknown masses of that time. This work is part of a more inclusive effort, namely, the attempt to forge a fundamentally new perspective on the way historians see the “achievements” of the modern era. Through his portrayal of Menocchio, he has thus tried to focus on some of the everyday life factors of the peasant cultures during that period. As he has argues that “a life chosen at random can make concretely visible the attempt to unify the world, as well as some of its implications.”

Conclusion

However sometimes in having to generalize from the available evidence, historians like Ginzburg have tended to depict a uniform mass culture in which there is little room for individual differences. Dominick LaCapra says, “While Ginzburg’s remarkable book has received widespread acclaim, not all historians praising it would agree with all aspects of its argument, even if they might assent to its general conception of the direction in which historical research should go. For another thing, for Ginzburg, we have a written text while for Menocchio we have only a putative “world view” pieced together inferentially on the basis of two inquisition registers.” Still, Ginzburg’s approach can be seen as part of a general concern among students of everyday life for small things and discrete particulars, a preoccupation going back to the brilliant essays of Georg Simmel but also found in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer (whom Ginzburg speaks of as an indirect ‘influence’). They focused on ephemora, fragments, anecdotes (the literary form that punctures narrative), ‘insignificant details’ and ‘superficial manifestations’ to achieve what Benjamin called ‘profane illumination.’ Even Alf Ludtke, who is one of the main proponents of Alltagsgeschichte (“history of everyday life”) says, “A book by Carlo Ginzburg has caused a sensation far beyond the boundaries of the professional guild of historians. He is not interested in sketching a mere panorama of dispositions and mentalities. Rather, Ginzburg explores their thrust and impact within the conflict between “dominant culture” and the “culture of the lower classes” in a specific situation. Ironically, the historical records of the ruling elite made it possible here to the meticulous records of the Counter-Reformational Inquisition, Ginzburg reconstructs the various facets of the view of God and the world among the “dominated,” rigorously limiting his attention to one person and case: a miller named Menocchio living in Friuli in the sixteenth century. The study’s title, The Cheese and the Worms, underscores the way in which Menocchio clothed his criticism of the church in a cloak of metaphors that was as graphic as it was blasphemously subversive.

References

1. Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller; Trans. By John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
2. LaCapra Dominick, History and Criticism. U.S.A.: Cornell University Press, 1987.
3. Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry, 1993, no. 1: 10-35.
4. Ludtke, Alf (ed.). The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life; Trans. By William Templer. U.S.A.: Princeton University Press, 1995.
5. Carlo Ginzburg, “Latitude, Slaves, and the Bible: An Experiment in Microhistory,” Critical Inquiry, 2005, no. 3:665-683.
6. Brooks, James, Christopher R. DeCorse, John Walton (ed.), Small Worlds: Method, Meaning, and Narrative in Microhistory. U.S.A.: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008.
7. John Brewer, “MICROHISTORY AND THE HISTORIES OF EVERYDAY LIFE,” Cultural and Social History, 2010, no. 1: 87-109.
8. N Kanakarathnam, “The expanding territory of Indian historiography: Some ideological reflections on micro-history,” International Journal of Applied Research, 2015 no. 11: 933-935.