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Backpacking through Microhistory: Thanks for ‘Nothing’

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Micro Middle Ages

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

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Abstract

‘Backpacking’ is an open inquiry into what microhistory is, how it began, its much older roots in the human attention to small details, the medieval and early modern interest in the human as a microcosm, canonical early microhistorical studies (by Ginzburg, Le Roy Ladurie, and Davis), mature microhistory’s terms of engagement, and the necessary limits to microhistorical inquiries. As well, this study considers a series of microhistorical talking points : object histories, the problem of Cleopatra’s Nose, the importance of clues and the nineteenth-century rethinking of them, ancient and medieval interest in the small and significant, and why microhistoriography has tended to concentrate on the early modern rather than the medieval. And finally the study calls on researchers and medievalists in particular to make the most of the ‘nothings’ they have.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cripples,” in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journals, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Alfread A. Knopf, 2003), p. 956. I want especially to thank Thomas Cohen who gave this chapter a bracing critical reading, one that often sent me off in new directions and prevented me from falling into many a pit of my own making.

  2. 2.

    Comment made by Giovanni Levi at the Budapest Microhistory Workshop, 26 September 2015. For an account of that meeting, see Thomas V. Cohen, Roman Tales: A Reader’s Guide to the Art of Microhistory (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 10–11. And see Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 93–113. In many ways, our brief stroll here is an extended gloss on the issues that came to mind at that Budapest conference and the subsequent meeting at Duke University’s conference on Practicing Microhistory Today, November 2015, some of which I raised there in the recorded discussion among the participants: why the early modern, what of the cognitive roots of microhistory, what of object histories, and what is the nothing that Levi pointed us to?

  3. 3.

    As reported by Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 12.11.7. And see Fritz Saxl, “Veritas filia Temporis,” in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 197–222.

  4. 4.

    More precisely translated as ‘the thing itself speaks’.

  5. 5.

    Theodo Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1951), p. 50 and n. 1; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, preface to Phänomenolgie des Geistes (Bamberg and Würzburg: Joseph Anton Goebhardt, 1807).

  6. 6.

    See Don Handelman, “Microhistorical Anthropology: Toward a Prospective Perspective,’ in Critical Junctions: Pathways Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. D. Kalb and H. Tak (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 29–52 and at p. 46: “[I]t is not so much that the past is a ‘foreign country’ as that pastness exists only through representations and their interpretation.”

  7. 7.

    See Richard W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 1: Foundations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 4–6. And see Eriugena’s transmittal note (Ad Wulfadum) of the Periphyseon (Patrologia Latina [herafter PL] 122: 1021B–1022A), and ed. Édouard Jeauneau, Periphyseon Liber Quintus, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis, 165 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 226–227, in which Eriugena, seeking to mitigate blame for any errors or unconsidered matters in his book, notes that while still bound in the flesh of this gloomy existence no human study can be perfect. Only Christ had ever possessed perfection of understanding. See now Paul Edward Dutton, “’I Open at the Close’. What is Eriugena’s Ad Wulfadum (PL 122: 1021C–1022D)?” (at press).

  8. 8.

    Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi Carnotensis Policratici sive De nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum libri VIII, 8.25, ed. Clement C. J. Webb, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), 2: 419–424, a topic explored by one of my graduate students: Gordon Gray, “Restoring Knowledge: John of Salisbury’s ‘Return to the Tree’,” MA thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2013.

  9. 9.

    Édouard Jeauneau once told me as he neared the conclusion of his critical and synoptic edition of Eriugena’s Periphyseon that he had come to accept because of the nature of the evidence, and this despite excellent manuscripts and annotations and corrections, some of them by the author’s own hand, that we would never be able to know exactly in every instance what the philosopher had once written and what it was that he intended to convey in his masterwork.

  10. 10.

    The story that Hans and Zacharias Janssen, a Dutch father and son, invented the microscope has long been doubted. See Clara Sue Ball, “The Early History of the Compound Microscope,” Bios 37.2 (May 1961): 51–60.

  11. 11.

    See Russell L. Haden, “Galileo and the Compound Microscope,” Bulletin in the History of Medicine 12.2 (July 1942): 242–247.

  12. 12.

    Robert Hooke, Micrographia or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (London: Jo. Martyn and Jo. Allestry, 1665).

  13. 13.

    Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, The First Section, Concerning Body, Written in Latin by Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, and Translated into English, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Now First Collected and Edited by Sir William Molesworth, Bart., vol. 1 (London: John Bohn, 1889), Book 1, part 4, chapter 27, p. 446.

  14. 14.

    See Gilbert Morgan Smith, “The Development of Botanical Microtechnique,” Transactions of the American Microscopical Society 34.2 (April 1915): 71–129.

  15. 15.

    Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 1964).

  16. 16.

    Seneca, Ep. 118.2.

  17. 17.

    Philosophia 1.1, ed. Gregor Maurach, Wilhelm von Conches, Philosophia (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1980), p. 18.

  18. 18.

    ‘Seeing’ is a conflicted metaphor since not all of us are able to see—it is a metaphor useless to the blind.

  19. 19.

    See, for instance, Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Papers from “Verbal and Pictorial Imaging: Representing and Accessing Experience of the Invisible, 400–1000,” (Utrecht, 11–13 December 2003), ed. Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Morrison, and Marco Mostert, in Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 14 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005).

  20. 20.

    The topic is an immense one, but see Rudolf Allers, “Microcosmus from Anaximandros to Paracelsus,” Traditio 2 (1944): 319–407; Anders Olerud, L’idée de macrocosmos et de microcosmos dans le ‘Timée’ (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells Boktrycken, 1951); T. d’Alverny, “L’homme comme symbole: le microcosme,” in Simboli e simbologia nell’alto medioevo 1 (Settimane de studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 23) (Spoleto: 1976), pp. 123–183; F. Rico, El pequeño mundo del hombre. Varia fortuna de una idea en las letras españolas (Madrid, 1970); and Paul Edward Dutton, “Illustre civitatis et populi examplum: Plato’s Timaeus and the Transmission from Calcidius to the End of the Twelfth Century of a Tripartite Scheme of Society,” Mediaeval Studies 45 (1983): 98–99 [79–119].

  21. 21.

    See Paul Edward Dutton, “Material Remains of the Study of the Timaeus in the Later Middle Ages,” in L’enseignement de la philosophie au XIIIe siècle: Autour du `Guide de l’étudiant’ du ms. Ripoll 109, Studia Artistarum: Études sur la Faculté des arts dans les Universités médiévales, 5, ed. Claude Lafleur with Joanne Carrier (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), pp. 203–230 and “Medieval Approaches to Calcidius,” in Plato’s `Timaeus’ as Cultural Icon, ed. Gretchen Reydams-Schils (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), pp. 183–205.

  22. 22.

    Published two years after his death in John Donne, Holy Sonnets (1633), V, lines 1–2.

  23. 23.

    Allers, “Microcosmus from Anaximandros to Paracelsus”: 348–367.

  24. 24.

    For a cogent brief treatment of the idea of the microcosmic in the early modern world, see the still insightful treatment by E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Vintage, 1959), pp. 91–99.

  25. 25.

    See Thomas V. Cohen, “The Macrohistory of Microhistory,” in Microhistory and the Historical Imaginaton: New Frontiers, ed. Thomas Robisheaux and Thomas V. Cohen, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47.1 (January 2017): 53–73. and Sigurđur Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijártó, What is Microhistory? Theory and Practise (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1–76. I here begin, on occasion, to capitalize Microhistory to distinguish the formal subdiscipline from a more informal ‘microhistory’.

  26. 26.

    On the Annales school, see André Burguière, L’École des Annales: Une histoire intellectuelle (Paris: Odilie Jacob, 2006) and translated into English by Jane Marie Todd as Annales School: An Intellectual History (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2009); Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–2014, 2nd edition (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). See also Joseph Tendler, Opponents of the Annales School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),

  27. 27.

    For a collection in English of the early, seminal articles, see Microhistory & the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggerio, trans. Eren Branch (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1991). See also David A. Bell, “Total History and Microhistory: The French and Italian Paradigms,” in Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (eds.), A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 262–276.

  28. 28.

    One can think of other such great technological impacts as, for instance, the impact of the emergence of photography in the nineteenth century on the direction that art and representation took. See Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Painting and Photography, 1839–1914, trans. David Radzinowicz (Paris: Flammarion, 2013).

  29. 29.

    Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del ‘500 (Turin: Giulio Eindaudi Editore, 1976) and The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1980).

  30. 30.

    Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things that I Know about It,” trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi, Critical Inquiry 20 (Autumn 1993): 10: “I believe that I heard of microhistory for the first time from Giovanni Levi in 1977 or 1978, and I adopted this previously unheard of word without asking what it meant literally.”

  31. 31.

    The inquisition record of Menocchio’s case has since been translated as Domenico Scandella known as Menocchio: His Trials Before the Inquisition (1583–1599) by John A. Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 139 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1996). And see James Amelang, “Looking Back: Books and Their Impact. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms,” in Sixteenth Century Journal (special issue) 40.1 (2009): 31–34.”

  32. 32.

    Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Muir and Ruggerio, and what Richard M. Tristano called “little people” in “Microhistory and Holy Family Parish: Some Historical Considerations,” U.S. Catholic Historian 14.3 (1996): 23–30.

  33. 33.

    George R. Stewart, Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Attack at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1959).

  34. 34.

    Translated by John Upton as Luis González, San José de Gracia: Mexican village in transition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974).

  35. 35.

    Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” trans. Tedeschi and Tedeschi; Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?; Thomas V. Cohen, Roman Tales; Thomas Robisheaux, “Microhistory and the Historical Imagination: New Frontiers,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47.1 (2017): 1–6, and “Microhistory Today: A Roundtable Discussion,” ed. Thomas Robisheaux, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47.1 (2017): 7–52.

  36. 36.

    See Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?

  37. 37.

    William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976).

  38. 38.

    See Cohen, Roman Tales, pp. 1–2.

  39. 39.

    My use of “present” here as an intransitive verb, which is most commonly found in medical literature, is a conscious choice in order to treat the symptomatic side of Microhistory.

  40. 40.

    The first of István M. Szijártó’s four arguments for microhistory is precisely its appeal to the general public: “Four Arguments for Microhistory,” Rethinking History 6.2 (2002): 209–215. And Ginzburg’s book received widespread reaction. See Peter Burke, “Talking Out the Cosmos,” a review of Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, History Today 31 (1981): 54–55 and F. Chiappelli, Review [of Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms], Renaissance Quarterly 34 (1981): 397–400 and S. Cohn, Review [of Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms], Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1982): 523–525. J. H. Elliott, “Rats or cheese?” New York Review of Books 27/11 (26 June 1980): 38–39; M. W. Kelly, review of Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms], Journal of Peasant Studies 11 (1982): 119–121; Dominik LaCapra, “The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Twentieth–Century Historian,” History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 45–69; John Martin, “Journeys to the World of the Dead: The Work of Carlo Ginzburg,” Journal of Social History 25 (Spring 1992): 613–626; Matti Peltonen, “Carlo Ginzburg and the new microhistory,”Suomen Antropologi 1 (1995): 2–11; V. Valeri, review of “Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms,” Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 139–143; Paola Zambelli, “From Menocchio to Piero della Francesa. The Work of Carlo Ginzburg,“ Historical Journal 28 (1985): 983–999; David Levine and Zubedeh Vahed, “Ginzburg’s Menocchio: Refutations and Conjectures,” Histoire sociale / Social History 34, no. 68 (2001): 437–464.

  41. 41.

    Adam Gopnik, “The Human Clay: How Lucian Freud found his subject,” New Yorker, 8 February 2021: 66 [65–69].

  42. 42.

    See, for instance, Rebecca Stott, Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Breakthrough (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

  43. 43.

    See the Duke conference as captured in Microhistory and the Historical Imaginaton: New Frontiers, ed. Robisheaux and Cohen, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47.1 (January 2017) and see Brodie Wadell, Microhistories Handbook at https://manyheadedmonster.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/waddell-microhistories-handbook-2019-20-mhm.pdf, accessed 5 July 2021.

  44. 44.

    Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, p. 4. As Thomas Cohen pointed out to me, one might well wonder whether “object” is quite what the authors mean here since events and people are subjects, not objects, and such things as spaces, odors, speech, encounters, and so on are not normally thought of as ‘objects’, but are still matters of appropriate microhistorical inquiry. If so, why not “thing” instead of “object”?

  45. 45.

    Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, p. 5. Although I have not yet made this distinction clear, István Szijártó is the author of Part I of the book (pp. 2–76) and so may be the one who holds this particular point and not his coauthor who wrote Part II (pp. 77–159).

  46. 46.

    Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, pp. 5–7.

  47. 47.

    Though one would have to allow that a hypothesis itself as a small thing could be the subject of a microhistorical inquiry.

  48. 48.

    As does John Valliant in The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). On the interconnectedness of forest ecology, see Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (New York: Knopf, 2021).

  49. 49.

    As I do with Henry Adams-Étienne Gilson, Fulk of Deuil, and Abelard about Heloise in “A Name: Heloise, Philosophess and Prostitute,” p. 127.

  50. 50.

    See Thomas Robisheaux, The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

  51. 51.

    See especially Thomas V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Thomas V. Cohen with E. S. Cohen, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome: Trials before the Papal Magistrates (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993)

    .

  52. 52.

    See Ulinka Rublack, The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for his Mother (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  53. 53.

    The usual standard for engagement with a native culture was set by E. E. Evans-Pritchard in his study of the Azande (1927, 1937) and the Nuer (1940–1956).

  54. 54.

    After the oracle at Delphi proclaimed him the wisest of men, Socrates admitted that he was only special in knowing what he did not know.

  55. 55.

    See Erasmo Castellani’s intervention in “Microhistory Today: A Roundtable Discussion,” in Microhistory and the Historical Imagination, ed. Robisheaux and Cohen, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47.1 (2017): p. 34. And see the preface to the English edition (1980) of Carlo Ginzburg’s Il formaggio e i vermi (1976), trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xi, where Ginzburg describes his unexpected encounter with Menocchio’s story while in pursuit of something else.

  56. 56.

    That would seem to be part of the DNA of microhistory. Ginzburg says in the preface to the Italian version of the work, trans. and Anne Tedeschi, in Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xiii: “In the past historians could be accused of wanting to know only about ‘the great deeds of kings’, but today this is certainly no longer true. More and more they are turning towards what their predecessors passed over in silence, discarded, or simply ignored. ‘Who built Thebes of the seven gates?’, Bertolt Brecht’s ‘literate worker’ was already asking. The sources tell us nothing about these anonymous masons, but the question retains all its significance.”

  57. 57.

    Paul Valéry, “Au sujet du Cimetière marin,” La nouvelle Revue (March, 1933): 399.

  58. 58.

    See Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, pp. 119–121. For the layered complexity of small things, see the case of the dung-sniffer in this chapter, pp. 248–251.

  59. 59.

    On the limitations of our capacity to ever know Shakespeare as we might wish, see James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), pp. xi-xix.

  60. 60.

    See Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing,” from The Maker, trans. Andrew Hurley, Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (New York: Viking, 1998), pp. 319–320.

  61. 61.

    On the Mountjoy case, see James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), pp. 283–287; Ron Rosenbaum, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups (New York: Random House, 2006), pp. 102–113.

  62. 62.

    See Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, pp. 19–20, 149–150. The idea, in slightly different form, was first suggested by Edoardo Grendi, “Micro-analisi e storia sociale,” Quaderni storici 35 (1977): 512 [506–520].

  63. 63.

    See Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, pp. 118–125, 170–171 and Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, pp. 1–3.

  64. 64.

    Anna Schmieg, ‘the last witch of Langenburg’, we might note, was the wife of a miller.

  65. 65.

    I shall, for instance, never forget the old man in the 1980s who approached Édouard Jeauneau on the main street of the professor’s natal village of Coudray-au-Perche and was attempting to convince that learned priest and scholar of the special properties of some local stones he had discovered that he believed could heal and transform the lives of the villagers. Like Menocchio, that man was apparently seeking the social leverage of being the dispenser of rare local knowledge and believed that by impressing or even by just being seen associating with Professor Jeauneau, as one expert to another, that his own immediate prestige as the bearer of specialist knowledge might be enhanced. The village was watching as was I.

  66. 66.

    See Manfred Sellink, Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints (Brussels: Ludion, 2007), no. 127 (“Christ Carrying the Cross”), pp. 191–193 and Michael Francis Gibson, The Mill and the Cross: Peter Bruegel’s “Way to Calvary” (Lausanne: Acatos, 2000).

  67. 67.

    See, for instance, Andrea Vitali, “Does Lack of Representativeness Mean Lack of Historicity?—Robert Musil and His Work Grigia, a Microhistorical Short Story,” Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences 116 (2014): 1149–1153.

  68. 68.

    See Jonathan Spence, The Death of the Woman Wang (New York: Viking Press, 1978) and Jill Lepore, “Historians who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88 (2001): 129–144.

  69. 69.

    See, for instance, Shapiro, 1599 and The Year of Lear.

  70. 70.

    By that I mean little more than Winston Churchill as a historical figure is best understood in separate historical periods: Boer War, WW I, WWII, post-War, and so on. Of course, he is one man but his historical meaning is best understood in the times with which he engaged.

  71. 71.

    See Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 143: “In my Journal the place and moment of conception [of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire] are recorded; the fifteenth of October 1764. In the close of evening, as I sat musing in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan friars, while they were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter on the ruins of the Capitol. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the City, rather than of the Empire: and, though my reading and reflections began to point towards the object, some years elapsed and several avocations intervened before I was seriously engaged in the execution of that laborious work.”

  72. 72.

    See, for instance, Elliott, “Rats or cheese?” New York Review of Books 27/11 (26 June 1980): 38–39.

  73. 73.

    Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, p. 5.

  74. 74.

    Robert Darnton, “It Happened One Night,” New York Review of Books 51.11 (24 June 2004): 60–64.

  75. 75.

    Szijártó, “Four Arguments,” Rethinking History 6.2 (2002): 209–215.

  76. 76.

    Robert Frost was a self-described synecdochist. See Gerald Quinn, “Frost’s Synecdochic Allusions,” Resources for American Literary Study 25.2 (1999): 254–264.

  77. 77.

    Hence my use of the term ‘clusters’ in Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age was a way to circumvent the issue.

  78. 78.

    See Cohen, Roman Tales, pp. 5–7.

  79. 79.

    Paul Edward Dutton, “Filiolitas: The Short History of One of Eriugena’s Inventions,” The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79 (2005): 549–566.

  80. 80.

    First taught at Harvard University in 2006 when I was a visiting professor of History and three subsequent offerings at Simon Fraser University (2014, 2017, 2020).

  81. 81.

    Other Alfred Hitchcock movies have MacGuffins that more closely manifest his idea that the MacGuffin is nothing: North by Northwest with its never-revealed espionage plot and Vertigo with its anomalous necklace.

  82. 82.

    Robert Frost, “The Secret Sits,” in Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1949), p. 495.

  83. 83.

    See Henry Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (London: Walker and Co., 1997) and Salt: A World History (New York: Walker and Co., 2002); Larry Zuckerman, The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1998); Witold Rybczynski, One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw (New York: Scribner, 2000); Arno Karlen, The Biography of a Germ (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000).

  84. 84.

    Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London: Allen Lane, 2010). Following the BBC and British Museum’s highly successful radio series and book, the Smithsonian Museum mounted an exhibition and a book, History of the World in 1,000 Objects (New York: DK, 2014).

  85. 85.

    Pascal’s Pensées, introduced by T. S. Eliot, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), p. 48.

  86. 86.

    The issue is an old one: see E. H. Carr, What is History? The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, January-March 1961 (London: Macmillan, 1961; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 98–108; J. B. Bury, “Cleopatra’s Nose” (1916), in Selected Essays of J. B. Bury, ed. Harold Temperley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), pp. 60–69; Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra’s Nose: Essays on the Unexpected (New York: Random House, 1994), which has little directly to say on Pascal’s aphorism. On the importance of contingency in natural history, see Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History, p. 69 and Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).

  87. 87.

    Carr, What is History?, p. 91.

  88. 88.

    Carr, What is History?, p. 87.

  89. 89.

    Carr, What is History?, p. 99.

  90. 90.

    Carr, What is History?, p. 103.

  91. 91.

    For an example of such historical contingency, see the case of Julius Caesar’s big break in Paul Edward Dutton, Suzanne Marchand, and Deborah Harkness, Many Europes: Chance and Choice in Western Civilization (New York: McGraw Hill, 2014), p. 145.

  92. 92.

    See the source critique of Leonard E. Boyle, “Montaillou Revisited: Mentalité and Methodology,” in Pathways to Medieval Peasants. ed. J. Ambrose Raftis, Papers in Mediaeval Studies, 2 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), pp. 119–140.

  93. 93.

    See, in contrast, Robisheaux, The Last Witch of Langenburg.

  94. 94.

    Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.549–562.

  95. 95.

    Georges Duby, Le dimanche de Bouvines, 27 juillet 1214 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) and trans. by C. Tihanyi as The Legend of Bouvines: War, Religion and Myth (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

  96. 96.

    Who also published works under the names Nicolas Schäffer and Ivan Lermolieff, an anagram of Morelli, ending with a Russian nominal suffix.

  97. 97.

    Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 96–125, notes pp. 200–214. The Italian version of this essay appeared as “Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziario,” in Crisi della ragione. Nuovi modelli nel rapporto tra sapere e attività umane, ed. A. Gargani (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), pp. 57–106 and trans. into English by Anna Davin as “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop 9 (Spring 1980); 5–36 and reprinted in The Sign of Three, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 81–118; Sigmund Freud chiefly in Zur Psychopatholgie des Alltegesleben (Berlin: S. Karger, 1901) and Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1905).

  98. 98.

    A trick still played on Christmas Eve by parents, who leave out cookies, milk, and carrots for Santa Claus and his reindeer, which the parents nibble on once the children have gone to sleep so that they will find confirmation in the morning of jolly Saint Nick’s visit. At some point, as they age, most children begin to wonder how that large fellow could come down such a narrow chimney or how antlered and gangly reindeer could come down at all.

  99. 99.

    Whether or not the king colluded with Daniel in mounting the test, that is, that Daniel had apprised him of what he thought transpired nightly, is another question.

  100. 100.

    Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, 15, ed. G. H. Pertz, in Monumenta Historica Germanicarum [hereafter MGH]: Scriptores 2 (Hanover: Hahn, 1829; repr. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1925), pp. 614–615. See also Ernst Tremp, Vita Hludowici imperatoris, in MGH: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 64 (Hanover: Hahn, 1995), p. 328. Cf. Allen Cabaniss, Son of Charlemagne: A Contemporary Life of Louis the Pious (Clinton, MA: Syracuse University Press, 1961), pp. 46–48.

  101. 101.

    Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, 15, ed. Pertz, pp. 614–615.

  102. 102.

    As Bernard Bachrach helped me to see in an e-mail message of 27 April 2021. I want to thank him for his generous and critical consideration of the case.

  103. 103.

    Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, 15, ed. Pertz, p. 614–615.

  104. 104.

    Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, 15, ed. Pertz, p. 615.

  105. 105.

    Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, 15, ed. Pertz, p. 614.

  106. 106.

    E-mail message of 27 April 2021.

  107. 107.

    Michael Decker, “Plants and Progress: Rethinking the Islamic Agricultural Revolution,” Journal of World History 20.2 (Jun. 2009): 187–206, and Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  108. 108.

    See Gobryas above in “A Scene: Slipping Below the Surface of the Bayeux Tapestry,” p. 136.

  109. 109.

    Though Ginzburg intuited the connection: see Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” pp. 102–105.

  110. 110.

    See Genevieve von Petzinger, The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols (New York: Atria Books, 2016); Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009).

  111. 111.

    Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, pp. 54–119.

  112. 112.

    A possible objection to this schematization, however, would be that writing first emerges among settled peoples in Mesopotamia and Egypt, not among itinerant hunter-gatherers, though that objection might be mitigated by the fact that the knowledge gained over the long course of human history prior to settlement was passed down and in want of new application after settlement.

  113. 113.

    One can test this by having students read texts written backwards, with different axes and reading directions, with words lacking syllables, with different fonts, and so on and in almost all cases after a short time and some initial hesitancy, students easily cope with unfamiliar conventions of reading.

  114. 114.

    See Information: A Historical Companion, ed. Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Anthony Grafton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).

  115. 115.

    Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (German: Bruchstücke einer Hysterie-Analyse), (1905 [1901], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 volumes (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), ed. James Strachey 7:1–122); and Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918), Standard Edition 17:1–125 and reprinted in Peter Gay, The Freud Reader (London: Vintage, 1995).

  116. 116.

    Wilkie Collins, Moonstone: A Romance (London: Chatto & Windus, 1868), p. 114.

  117. 117.

    See Robin W. Winks, ed., The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreisen, Jr., The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Fiction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebok, eds., The Sign of the Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce; and John North, The Ambassador’s Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

  118. 118.

    See “Little things please little minds,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, 5th edition, ed. Jennifer Speake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): Ovid, Ars amatoria I.159: “parva leves capiunt animos”; Disraeli, Sybil (1845) II.ii “Little things affect little minds”; C. H. Spurgeon, John Ploughman’s Pictures, 81 (1880): “little things please little minds”; Doris Lessing, Man & Two Women (1963), p. 74: “Small things amuse small minds.” And many other variations of the saying. Much earlier, Theodulf of Orléans, “De simulatorum et stultorum socordia, qui nesciunt a sua pravitate per bonam exhortationem converti,” ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH: Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini [hereafter PLAC] 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1881; repr. 1964), p. 465; “Hic bona parva putat magna”: the hypocrite: “thinks small things great goods.”

  119. 119.

    Patrick Wright as quoted by Helen MacDonald, Vesper Flights: New and Collected Essays (Toronto: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin, 2020), p. 114. Wright was characterizing the English artist Stanley Spencer’s attitude toward a world of manifold difference, artistic and political, which he had explored in his book Passport to Peking: A very British Mission to Mao’s China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 449–478. On a trip to China, the truculent Spencer, who much loved England and his life in Cookham, had confronted Chou En-lai, who was interested in explaining the wonders of China to visitors, telling him that he loved his Cookham (in Berkshire) and that Chou should too. The point was that the joys of the particular and the grounded, bounded by history and culture, the lived specific life was universal in its groundedness even if its end and age-old results might seem very different and irreconcilable.

  120. 120.

    Polybius, Histories, trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library, 6 volumes (New York: G. P. Paton Putnam’s Sons, 1922–1927) as revised and translated by Justin Lake, Prologues to Ancient and Medieval History: A Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), p. 18 and see also p. 15.

  121. 121.

    Jerome, Ep. 107.4, ed. Isidor Hilberg, Epistolae 71–120, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticroum Latinorum, 55 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1912), p. 295.

  122. 122.

    On Jerome, Augustine, and the “hermeneutics of reading,” see esp. Mark Vessey, “Conference and Confession: Literary Pragmatics in Augustine’s ‘Apologia contra Hieronymum’,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 1.2 (1993): 175–213; Vessey, “History of the Book: Augustine’s City of God and Post-Roman Cultural Memory,” in James Wetzel, ed., Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 14–32; Vessey, “Face Book of the Common Reader? Prosopography and Self-Recognition in Augustine’s Confessions,” in John D. Muccigrosso and Celia E. Schultz, eds., Fide non Ficta: Essays in Honor of Paul B. Harvey, Jr. (Bari: Edipuglia, 2020), pp. 91–113; Vessey, “Reading like Angels: Derrida and Augustine on the Book (for a History of Literature),” in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 173–207; Karla Pollmann, “Augustine’s Hermeneutics as a Universal Discipline!?” in Pollmann and Vessey, eds., Augustine and the Disciplines: From Cassiciacum to Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 206–231.

  123. 123.

    Augustine, Confessions, vol. 1: Introduction and Text, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10.35.57, p. 141: “quid cum me domi sedentem stelio muscas captans vel aranea retibus suis inruentes implicans saepe intentum facit? num quia parva sunt animalia, ideo non res eadem geritur? pergo inde ad laudandum te, creatorem mirificum atque ordinatorem rerum omnium…” Or see, Augustine, Confessiones 10.35.57, ed. Luc Verheijen, Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina, 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981).

  124. 124.

    Augustine, Confessions, 1.20.31, ed. O’Donnell, p. 15. Also ed. Verheijen, in Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina, 27.

  125. 125.

    Guibert of Nogent, Monodiae 1.24, ed. Edmond-René Labande, in Guibert de Nogent, Autobiogrphie (Paris: Société d’édition ‘Les belles lettres’, 1981, p. 90: “Dei incomprehensibile judicium mirati sumus: quae tam occulte ac subtiliter fieri pervidemus.”

  126. 126.

    Hugonis de Sancto Victore Didascalicon De Studio Legendi, 6, ed. Charles Henry Buttimer (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Press, 1939), p. 114: “Paruis imbutus tentabis grandia tutus.”

  127. 127.

    Hugonis de Sancto Victore Didascalicon De Studio Legendi, 6, ed. Buttimer, p. 114: “…multa sepe didicisse que aliis ioco aut deliramento similia uiderentur.”

  128. 128.

    Franz Kafka, “The Top,” trans. Tania and James Stern, in Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, trans. ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), p. 444.

  129. 129.

    Michel de Montaigne, “Apology for Raymod Sebond,” in the section entitled “Man had no Knowledge,” trans. Donald Frame, in Montaigne: The Complete Works, p. 459. Montaigne knew the story from Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales 628C as translated by the much admired Jacques Amyot, but in the original the fruit in question was a cucumber not a fig. See Grace Norton, Le Plutarque de Montaigne: Selections from Amyot’s Translation of Plutarch arranged to Illustrate Montaigne’s Essays (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1966), pp. 114–115. See also Essays by Montaigne, ed. J. H. Friswell (London: Sampson, Low, Son & Marston, 1866), pp. 236–237 and Jackson P. Hershbell, “Plutarch and Democritus,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, New Series 10 (1982): 81–111.

  130. 130.

    For a detailed consideration of Morelli’s influence on Doyle and Freud, see Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” pp. 96–102. Doyle’s Morellism is most evident in “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” in Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes with a preface by Christopher Morley, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), 2: 888–901 in which Miss Susan Cushing receives a box containing two ears packed in salt and Holmes explains (p. 896): “As a medical man, you are aware, Watson, that there is no part of the body which varies so much as the human ear. Each ear is as a rule quite distinctive and differs from all other ones. In last year’s Anthropological Journal, you will find two short monographs from my pen upon the subject. I had, therefore, examined the ears in the box with the eyes of an expert and had carefully noted their anatomical peculiarities. Imagine my surprise, then, when on looking at Miss Cushing I perceived that her ear corresponded exactly with the female ear which I had just inspected. The matter was entirely beyond coincidence. There was the same shortening of the pinna, the same broad curve of the upper lobe, the same convolution of the inner cartilage. In all essentials it was the same ear.”

  131. 131.

    One of the critical weaknesses of Morelli’s argument is that Renaissance studio operations often employed apprentice artists whose job rather than the master’s was to paint marginal things. For an application of the Morelli method, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca, New Edition with Appendices, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper, With an Introduction by Peter Burke (London: Verso, 2000).

  132. 132.

    Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887), repr. in Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 131.

  133. 133.

    Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, in Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 23.

  134. 134.

    See Michael Sims, Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).

  135. 135.

    Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 18.

  136. 136.

    Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 24.

  137. 137.

    But in Doyle, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 236 the detective says to Watson that in the case “we will take it as a working hypothesis for want of a better.” See also ‘working hypothesis’ in Doyle, “Silver Blaze,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 344. But that was at best a concession to Watson and not a normal part of Holmes’s procedure, where he tends to regard hypotheses as no better than surmises and conjectures; see Doyle, “Silver Blaze,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 335 and “The Empty House,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2: 495. In the stories, Doyle mentions ‘hypothesis’, mostly derisively, some 29 times.

  138. 138.

    Doyle, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 254.

  139. 139.

    Doyle, “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2: 1008, though in this story supposedly composed by Holmes himself, it is Dr Watson whom he accuses of “concealing such links in the chain.”

  140. 140.

    Doyle, “A Case of Identity,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 196.

  141. 141.

    Doyle, “The Naval Treaty,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1: 446.

  142. 142.

    Doyle, “Adventure of the Red Circle,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2: 903.

  143. 143.

    Doyle, “A Case of Identity,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 194.

  144. 144.

    Doyle, “Man with the Twisted Lip” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 238. In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 214, Holmes tells Watson: “You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”

  145. 145.

    Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, in Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 43. On the significance of trifles for microhistory, see Edward Muir, “Introduction: Observing Trifles,” in Microhistory & the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Muir and Ruggerio, pp. vii–xxviii.

  146. 146.

    Doyle, “The Five Orange Pips,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 224–225. And see Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, in Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 23: “From a drop of water a logician would infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.” On Cuvier, see Adrian Desmond. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science, and Authority in Post-revolutionary France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

  147. 147.

    The joke concerns a tourist, a motorist, asking a local how to get to Dublin, to which the resident replies: ‘Well if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’.

  148. 148.

    Doyle, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 202. And see Sigurđur Gylfi Magnússon, “The Singularization of History: Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge,” Journal of Social History 36.3 (Spring 2003): 701–735.

  149. 149.

    Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, in Complete Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1: 83.

  150. 150.

    Doyle, “A Case of Identity,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1: 191.

  151. 151.

    Doyle, “A Case of Identity,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 191.

  152. 152.

    Doyle, “Silver Blaze,” Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 347.

  153. 153.

    Portsmouth Evening News, 8 July 1930.

  154. 154.

    The same sort of age-based benefit of belief was granted to the teenager Curzio Inghirami as he got away with faking and then decoding his own faked Etruscan artifacts and inscriptions: see Ingrid D. Rowland, The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  155. 155.

    R. S. S. Baden-Powell, Yarns for Boy Scouts Told Round the Camp Fire, 2nd impression (Frome and London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1910), p. 23. And for a recent recommendation of the Holmes method, see Maria Konnikova, How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (New York: Penguin, 2013).

  156. 156.

    Baden-Powell, Yarns for Boy Scouts, pp. 23–31.

  157. 157.

    Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, in Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 21–22.

  158. 158.

    Doyle, “The Musgrave Ritual,” in Complete Sherlock Holmes, 1: 397.

  159. 159.

    Giles Constable, “Sherlock Homles and History,” in Papers at an Exhibition. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Sesquicentennial Assessment, ed. Peter X. Accardo, John Berquist, Don Posnansky (New York: The Baker Street Irregulars in cooperation with Houghton Library, 2009), pp. 19–32.

  160. 160.

    See Constable, “Sherlock Holmes and History,” p. 24 and William J. Connell and Giles Constable, Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Antonio Rinaldeschi, 2nd revised edition, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies: Essays and Studies, 8 (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008), p. 11.

  161. 161.

    Connell and Constable, Sacrilege and Redemption, pp. 35–39.

  162. 162.

    On blaming structures in Christian Spain, see William A. Christian Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

  163. 163.

    In the synoptic gospels: Matt. 13:31–32, Mark 4.30–32, Luke 13:18–19.

  164. 164.

    Giles Constable, “Monks and Canons in Carolingian Gaul: The Case of Rigrannus of Le Mans,” in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, ed. Alexander Callander Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 320–326. I should say that Professor Constable contacted me at the time of his investigation, but that my advice was, in hindsight, not all that helpful and not concerned with exploring the limitations of case studies.

  165. 165.

    On oblation, see Mayke de Jong, In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

  166. 166.

    Instances of ‘deprogamming’ were not uncommon in the Middle Ages, perhaps the most famous being that of the attempted deprogramming of Thomas Aquinas by his mother and brothers, who were upset that he wished to join the Dominican order, and so captured and held him in various family castles, until they realized that his mind could not be changed and allowed him ‘to escape’ in 1244.

  167. 167.

    Constable, “Monks and Canons in Carolingian Gaul,” pp. 325, 334 lines 124–125 of the edited text.

  168. 168.

    See, for instance, what Brian Stock did with the case of the twelfth-century priest Walchelin, who was pulled between living in the world and pursuing a religious life: Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 495–499.

  169. 169.

    Which reminds me of D. H. Lawrence’s posthumously published Etruscan Places: Travels through Forgotten Italy (New York: Viking, 1932) and his portrayal of the young German, who aspired to be a prominent scientist, and served as a guide to Etruscan things on the tour Lawrence took. The novelist quickly tired of the young man’s refusal to speculate on the meaning of Etruscan art, fending off Lawrence’s probing for meaning: “What do you think it means? ‘Ach nothing!’” The encounter may manifest Lawrence’s own grouse against the modern world and a generation of young people that he thought was uninterested in the mysteries of the past and of life in general.

  170. 170.

    Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300–900 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  171. 171.

    See “Creativity, Experimentation, Illumination: Lessons from an IHR Microhistory Workshop,” posted by Joe Krulder under Blog Post: “A question came from the conference audience aimed at Professor Tom Robisheaux. ‘Would you recommend Ph.D. students to write dissertations using microhistory as the methodology?’ ‘No!’ came Tom’s commanding bellow. Something about how the ‘professionals’ of the discipline still do not fully grasp or embrace the microhistorical methodologies or the powerful stories they produce. ‘They’, meaning the guardians of the tower, ‘kill them!’ Then something about not subjecting graduate students to such abuse.” https://joehistorian.wordpress.com/2017/06/02/creativity-experimentation-illumination-lessons-from-an-ihr-microhistory-workshop/ as accessed 15 July 2021.

  172. 172.

    Harold Samuel Stone, St. Augustine’s Bones: A Microhistory (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).

  173. 173.

    Steven Bednarski, A Poisoned Past: The Life and Times of Margarida de Portu, a Fourteenth-Century Accused Poisoner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. xv–xviii, 1–21.

  174. 174.

    Charles West, “Visions in a Ninth-Century Village: An Early Medieval Microhistory,” History Workshop Journal 81.1 (2016): 1–16.

  175. 175.

    Paolo Squatriti, “The Floods of 589 and Climate Change at the Beginning of the Middle Ages: An Italian Microhistory,” Speculum 85.4 (2010): 799–826.

  176. 176.

    Paul Edward Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

  177. 177.

    Wendy Davies, Small Worlds: The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Bernard Bachrach, The Anatomy of a Little War, a diplomatic and military history of the Gundovald affair (568–586), (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).

  178. 178.

    Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le Saint Lévrier: Guinefort Guerisseur d’Enfants depuis de XIIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1993) and trans. Martin Thom as The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, 6 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  179. 179.

    Peter Linehan, The Ladies of Zamora (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

  180. 180.

    Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner that Held Them (New York: Viking, 1948).

  181. 181.

    First published in Italian as Il nome della rosa (Milan: Bompiani, 1980) and trans. William Weaver as The Name of the Rose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1983).

  182. 182.

    Eric Jaeger, The Last Duel: The True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial in Medieval France (New York: Broadway Books, 2004).

  183. 183.

    See also Rowan W. Dorin, “The Mystery of the Marble Man and His Hat: A Reconsideration of the Bari Episcopal Throne,” Florilegium 25 (2008): 29–52; Gábor Klaniczay, “Az eretnekség Toulouse–ban 1150 és 1250 között. Sz. Jónás Ilona (szerk.), ”Emlékkönyv Székely György 65. születésnapjára (Budapest: ELTE BTK, 1989), pp. 26–51; Ann Wroe, A Fool and his Money. Life in a Partitioned Medieval Town (New York: Vintage, 1996); René Weis, The Yellow Cross. The Story of the Last Cathars 1290–1329 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000); Joseph Goering, The Virgin and the Holy Grail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

  184. 184.

    Robert Bartlett, The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. xi.

  185. 185.

    Michael McCormick, Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land: Wealth, Personnel, and Buildings of a Mediterranean Church between Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2011).

  186. 186.

    For an example of an enlightening search for medieval nothings, see Elina Gertsman, The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021).

  187. 187.

    See Stephen Mumford, Absence and Nothing: The Philosophy of What There is Not (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). For an insightful review of the history and problem of ‘nothing’, see FT (Lukens), “Apropos of Nothing,” New York Review of Books July 21, 2022: 45–52.

  188. 188.

    Self-censorship needs to be distinguished from external censorship, on which see Peter Godman, The Silent Masters: Latin Literature and its Censors in the High Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).

  189. 189.

    See Paul Edward Dutton, The Mystery of the Missing Heresy Trial of William of Conches, The Etienne Gilson Series, 28 (Toronto: the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006).

  190. 190.

    On the date of the synod, see Constant J. Mews, “The Synod of Sens (1141): Abelard, Bernard, and the Fear of Social Upheaval,” Speculum 72 (2002): 348–382.

  191. 191.

    On the title of the work, see Paul Edward Dutton, “The Little Matter of a Title: Philosophia Magistri Willelmi de Conchis,” in Guillaume de Conches: Philosophie et science au XIIe siècle, ed. Barbara Obrist and Irene Caiazzo, Micrologus Library, 42 (Florence: Sismel, 2011), pp. 467–486.

  192. 192.

    Dutton, The Missing Heresy Trial, pp. 12–13 for an earlier version of this chart. See also Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000–1200, trans. Denise A. Kaiser (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), pp. 215–311.

  193. 193.

    Abelard, Historia Calamitatum 40–41, ed. David Luscombe, The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 62, 64. It was also Geoffrey, serving as a papal legate, who investigated the complaints by Abelard about the monks of St-Gildas de Rhuys who were thwarting his authority as abbot there: Historia Calamitatum 73, ed. Luscombe, Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise, p. 116.

  194. 194.

    For a review of these grumbles, see Dutton, The Mystery of the Missing Heresy Trial, pp. 29–30.

  195. 195.

    See Marcia L. Colish, “Carolingian Debates over Nihil and Tenebrae: A Study in Theological Method,” Speculum 59.4 (Oct. 1984): 757–795.

  196. 196.

    See “A Name: Heloise, Philosophess and Prostitute,” above p. 125.

  197. 197.

    With which Eriugena in the ninth century also agreed with: see Paul Edward Dutton, “Why did Eriugena Write?” Discovery and Distinction in the Early Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of John J. Contreni, ed. Cullen J. Chandler and Steven A. Stofferahn (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), pp. 273–287. Of course, Socrates’ complaint was also about relatively new technologies (the alphabet and books) and their growing threat to the exercise of human memory.

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Dutton, P.E. (2023). Backpacking through Microhistory: Thanks for ‘Nothing’. In: Micro Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38267-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38267-3_5

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-38266-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-38267-3

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