Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method

by Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi, Anne C. Tedeschi

Overview

Carlo Ginzburg considers how we assign historical context to events.

More than twenty years after Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method was first published in English, this extraordinary collection remains a classic. The book brings together essays about Renaissance witchcraft, National Socialism, sixteenth-century Italian painting, Freud’s wolf-man, and other topics. In the influential centerpiece of the volume Carlo Ginzburg places historical knowledge in a long tradition of cognitive practices and shows how a research strategy based on reading clues and traces embedded in the historical record reveals otherwise hidden information. Acknowledging his debt to art history, psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and anthropology, Ginzburg challenges us to retrieve cultural and social dimensions beyond disciplinary boundaries.

In his new preface, Ginzburg reflects on how easily we miss the context in which we read, write, and live. Only hindsight allows some understanding. He examines his own path in research during the 1970s and its relationship to the times, especially the political scenes of Italy and Germany. Was he influenced by the environment, he asks himself, and if so, how? Ginzburg uses his own experience to examine the elusive and constantly evolving nature of history and historical research.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421409900
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Carlo Ginzburg has taught at the University of Bologna, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. The recipient of the 2010 International Balzan Prize, he is author of The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller and Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, also published by Johns Hopkins.

Carlo Ginzburg has taught at the University of Bologna, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. The recipient of the 2010 International Balzan Prize, he is author of The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller and Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, also published by Johns Hopkins.

Table of Contents

Preface to the 2013 Edition vii

Preface to the Italian Edition xv

Translators' Note xxi

Bibliographical Note xxiii

Witchcraft and Popular Piety: Notes on a Modenese Trial of 1519 1

From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method 16

The High and the Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 54

Titian, Ovid, and Sixteenth-Century Codes for Erotic Illustration 70

Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm 87

Germanic Mythology and Nazism: Thoughts on an Old Book by Georges Dumézil 114

Freud, the Wolf-Man, and the Werewolves 132

The Inquisitor as Anthropologist 141

Notes 149

Index of Names 205

Editorial Reviews

Ginzburg is known internationally for his studies of what might be called the interface between learned and popular culture. This collection of eight essays explores the methodological foundations of his historical analysis.
—David Herlihy, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

From the Publisher

Ginzburg is known internationally for his studies of what might be called the interface between learned and popular culture. This collection of eight essays explores the methodological foundations of his historical analysis.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History - David Herlihy

Ginzburg is known internationally for his studies of what might be called the interface between learned and popular culture. This collection of eight essays explores the methodological foundations of his historical analysis.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

In the diversity of methods and objects of analysis it offers, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method offers a fresh perspective on this Italian historian who has become such an essential point of reference in many domains of cultural study today.

— Dana Polan

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