Search results for ""Author Carlo Ginzburg""

Nevertheless comprises essays on Machiavelli and on Pascal. The ambivalent connection between the two parts is embodied by the comma (,) in the subtitle: Machiavelli, Pascal. Is this comma a conjunction or a disjunction? In fact, both. Ginzburg approaches Machiavelli's work from the perspective of casuistry, or case-based ethical reasoning. For as Machiavelli indicated through his repeated use of the adverb nondimanco ("nevertheless"), there is an exception to every rule. Such a perspective may seem to echo the traditional image of Machiavelli as a cynical, "machiavellian" thinker. But a close analysis of Machiavelli the reader, as well as of the ways in which some of Machiavelli's most perceptive readers read his work, throws a different light on Machiavelli the writer. The same hermeneutic strategy inspires the essays on the Provinciales, Pascal's ferocious attack against Jesuitical casuistry. Casuistry vs anti-casuistry; Machiavelli's secular attitude towards religion vs Pascal's deep religiosity. We are confronted, apparently, with two completely different worlds. But Pascal read Machiavelli, and reflected deeply upon his work. A belated, contemporary echo of this reading can unveil the complex relationship between Machiavelli and Pascal - their divergences as well as their unexpected convergences.

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We are surrounded by images, fairly drowning in them. From our cell phones to our computers, from our televisions at home to the screens that light up while we wait in the grocery store checkout line, images of all kinds are seducing us, commanding us to buy!, scaring us, dazzling us.Fear, Reverence, Terror invites us to look at images slowly, with the help of a few examples: Picasso's Guernica, the "Lord Kitchener Wants You" World War I recruitment poster, Jacques-Louis David's Marat, the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, a cup of gilded silver with scenes from the conquest of the New World. Are these political images, Carlo Ginzburg asks? Yes, because every image is, in a sense, political an instrument of power. Tacitus once wrote, unforgettably, that we are enslaved by lies of which we ourselves are the authors. Is it possible to break this bond? Fear, Reverence, Terror will answer this question. Praise for Ginzburg "Ginzburg has many claims to be considered the outstanding European historian of the generation which came of age in the late Sixties. Certainly few have equalled him in originality, variety, and audacity." London Review of Books "Ginzburg's scholarship is dazzling and profound." Publisher's Weekly

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A collection of diverse yet interconnected essays from one of the world’s most respected historians. Carlo Ginzburg has been at the forefront of the discipline of microhistory ever since his earliest works were published to great acclaim in the 1970s. The Soul of Brutes brings together four of Ginzburg’s recent scintillating essays and lectures that testify to the diversity of his thoughts on history and philosophy. “Civilization and Barbarism” resurrects a sixteenth-century debate between two thinkers in Spain about the humanness, or lack thereof, of Native Americans, and highlights the influence of classical thinkers, from Herodotus to Aristotle, and the iterations and interpretations through which their writings have traversed down to the Cinquecento. In “The Soul of Brutes” Ginzburg traces the genealogy of the debate on the rationality of animals and the limits of their imagination, from Plutarch and Aristotle to sixteenth-century thinkers like Pietro Pomponazzi and Girolamo Rorario. Following Montaigne, he provokes, are we to beasts as they seem to us? In “Calvino, Manzoni and the Grey Zone,” Carlo Ginzburg pithily writes about the mental dialogue between Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and two Italians who profoundly influenced Levi’s search for these “unexplored pockets of exception”—his contemporary Italo Calvino and the nineteenth-century novelist and philosopher Alessandro Manzoni. And finally, in “Schema and Bias”, he probes whether the historian can clearly see into the past, peering through the layers of bias, which include their own prejudices, or if relativism is the only path. With several beautifully reproduced color illustrations, The Soul of Brutes will interest not only scholars of history, philosophy, and art, but also general intellectual readers.

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The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society Menocchio lived in. For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed-just as cheese is made out of milk-and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels." Ginzburg's influential book has been widely regarded as an early example of the analytic, case-oriented approach known as microhistory. In a thoughtful new preface, Ginzburg offers his own corollary to Menocchio's story as he considers the discrepancy between the intentions of the writer and what gets written. The Italian miller's story and Ginzburg's work continue to resonate with modern readers because they focus on how oral and written culture are inextricably linked. Menocchio's 500-year-old challenge to authority remains evocative and vital today.

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In 1691, a Livonian peasant known as Old Thiess boldly announced before a district court that he was a werewolf. Yet far from being a diabolical monster, he insisted, he was one of the “hounds of God,” fierce guardians who battled sorcerers, witches, and even Satan to protect the fields, flocks, and humanity—a baffling claim that attracted the notice of the judges then and still commands attention from historians today. In this book, eminent scholars Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln offer a uniquely comparative look at the trial and startling testimony of Old Thiess. They present the first English translation of the trial transcript, in which the man’s own voice can be heard, before turning to subsequent analyses of the event, which range from efforts to connect Old Thiess to shamanistic practices to the argument that he was reacting against cruel stereotypes of the “Livonian werewolf” a Germanic elite used to justify their rule over the Baltic peasantry. As Ginzburg and Lincoln debate their own and others’ perspectives, they also reflect on broader issues of historical theory, method, and politics. Part source text of the trial, part discussion of historians’ thoughts on the case, and part dialogue over the merits and perils of their different methodological approaches, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf opens up fresh insight into a remarkable historical occurrence and, through it, the very discipline of history itself.

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Carlo Ginzburg's brilliant and timely new essay collection takes a bold stand against naive positivism and allegedly sophisticated neo-skepticism. It looks deeply into questions raised by decades of post-structuralism: What constitutes historical truth? How do we draw a boundary between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between history and memory? How do we grapple with the historical conventions that inform, in different ways, all written documents? In his answers, Ginzburg peels away layers of subsequent readings and interpretations that envelop every text to make a larger argument about history and fiction. Interwoven with compelling autobiographical references, "Threads and Traces" bears moving witness to Ginzburg's life as a European Jew, the abiding strength of his scholarship, and his deep engagement with the historian's craft.

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"I am a Jew who was born and who grew up in a Catholic country; I never had a religious education; my Jewish identity is in large measure the result of persecution." This brief autobiographical statement is a key to understanding Carlo Ginzburg's interest in the topic of his latest book: distance. In nine linked essays, he addresses the question: "What is the exact distance that permits us to see things as they are?" To understand our world, suggests Ginzburg, it is necessary to find a balance between being so close to the object that our vision is warped by familiarity or so far from it that the distance becomes distorting. Opening with a reflection on the sense of feeling astray, of familiarization and defamiliarization, the author goes on to consider the concepts of perspective, representation, imagery, and myth. Arising from the theme of proximity is the recurring issue of the opposition between Jews and Christians-a topic Ginzburg explores with an impressive array of examples, from Latin translations of Greek and Hebrew scriptures to Pope John Paul II's recent apology to the Jews for antisemitism. Moving with equal acuity from Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius to Montaigne to Voltaire, touching on philosophy, history, philology, and ethics, and including examples from present-day popular culture, the book offers a new perspective on the universally relevant theme of distance.

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This book works to uncover the logic of hatred, to understand how this affect manifests itself historically in persecution and terror apparatuses. More than a historical genealogy of persecution, The Logic of Hatred shows what phenomenology can offer to historical understanding. Focusing on the witch-hunts waged in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the first part of the book analyzes the techniques instigators used to designate and annihilate their targets: the search for diabolical stigma, the confession of “truth” extracted by torture, the constitution of an absolute Enemy through the suggestion of conspiracy, of a world turned upside-down, or the figure of Satan. Rogozinski locates one of the origins of the witch-hunt in the anguish that popular uprisings arouse in dominant classes. The second part of the book extends the investigation to related phenomena, such as the extermination of lepers in the Middle Ages and the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. By studying these historical experiences and marking their differences and similarities, this book shows the passage from exclusion to persecution and how revolts of the oppressed can let themselves be transformed and captured by persecutory politics. The analyses presented thus shed light on conspiracy theory and the terror apparatuses of our time.

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Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives of Northern Italy, The Night Battles recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centered on the benandanti, literally, "good walkers." These men and women described fighting extraordinary ritual battles against witches and wizards in order to protect their harvests. While their bodies slept, the souls of the benandanti were able to fly into the night sky to engage in epic spiritual combat for the good of the village. Carlo Ginzburg looks at how the Inquisition's officers interpreted these tales to support their world view that the peasants were in fact practicing sorcery. The result of this cultural clash, which lasted for more than a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into the Inquisition's mortal enemies-witches. Relying upon this exceptionally well-documented case study, Ginzburg argues that a similar transformation of attitudes-perceiving folk beliefs as diabolical witchcraft-took place all over Europe and spread to the New World. In his new preface, Ginzburg reflects on the interplay of chance and discovery, as well as on the relationship between anomalous cases and historical generalizations.

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This book works to uncover the logic of hatred, to understand how this affect manifests itself historically in persecution and terror apparatuses. More than a historical genealogy of persecution, The Logic of Hatred shows what phenomenology can offer to historical understanding. Focusing on the witch-hunts waged in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the first part of the book analyzes the techniques instigators used to designate and annihilate their targets: the search for diabolical stigma, the confession of “truth” extracted by torture, the constitution of an absolute Enemy through the suggestion of conspiracy, of a world turned upside-down, or the figure of Satan. Rogozinski locates one of the origins of the witch-hunt in the anguish that popular uprisings arouse in dominant classes. The second part of the book extends the investigation to related phenomena, such as the extermination of lepers in the Middle Ages and the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. By studying these historical experiences and marking their differences and similarities, this book shows the passage from exclusion to persecution and how revolts of the oppressed can let themselves be transformed and captured by persecutory politics. The analyses presented thus shed light on conspiracy theory and the terror apparatuses of our time.

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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 these cultural and social dimensions. 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.

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