The new social history: History from below and microhistory
Core Readings:
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) – Preface, Introduction and Chapter 1 to get a flavour of this microhistory.
Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things that I Know About It’, Critical Inquiry, 20:1 (1993), pp. 10-35.
Amy Stanley, Maidservants' Tales: Narrating Domestic and Global History in Eurasia, 1600-1900, The Americal Historical Review 121:2 (2016), 437-460.
Primary Source Activity:
This resource contains examples of early modern court cases: Charmian Mansell and Mark Hailwood (eds.).Court Depositions of South West England, 1500-1700, University of Exeter,http://humanities-research.exeter.ac.uk/womenswork/courtdepositions. Please select a case and think about how a microhistorical approach could be taken. Be prepared to share it with the group.
Further Readings:
Andrade, Tonio. ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two Black Boys, and a Warlord: Towards a Global Microhistory’, Journal of World History, 21:4 (2011), pp. 573-91.
Brewer, John. ‘Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life’, Cultural and Social History, 7:1 (2010), pp. 87-109
Colley, Linda,TheOrdeal of Elizabeth Marsh:How aRemarkableWomanCrossedSeas andEmpires toBecome aPart ofWorldHistory(2007)
Cressy, David, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension(Oxford, 1999), pp.9-28.
Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History (Vintage Books: 1985)
Davis, Natalie Zemon, Trickster Travels: In Search of Leo Africanus (2006)
De Vivo, Filippo. ‘Prospect or Refuge? Microhistory, History on the Large Scale’, Cultural and Social History, 7:3 (2010), pp. 387-397
Ghobrial, John-Paul A. ‘The secret life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory’, Past and Present, 222 (2014), pp. 51-93
Ghobrial, John-Paul, 'Moving Stories and What They Tell Us: Early Modern Mobility Between Microhistory and Global History', Past and Present Supplement 14 (2019), 243-280
Ghobrial, John-Paul, ‘Global History and Microhistory’, Past & Present, 242, Supplement 14 (2019).
Ginzburg, Carlo. ‘Clues: Roots of an evidential paradigm’, in his Myths, Emblems, Clues (1990); also in Theory and Society, 7:3 (1979)
Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1980)
Ginzburg, Carlo, ‘Latitude, Slaves, and the Bible: An Experiment in Microhistory’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring 2005), pp. 665-683.
Handley, Sasha, ‘Objects, Emotions and an Early Modern Bed-sheet’, History Workshop Journal 85 (2018), pp. 169-194.
Hindle, Steve, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: gossip, gender and the experience of authority in early modern England’, Continuity and Change, 9 (1994), 391-19.
Hudson, Pat. ‘Closeness and Distance’, Cultural and Social History, 7:3 (2010), pp. 375-385
Humphries, Jane, ‘Microhistory and Women’s Time Use’, Past and Present (2026), 1-46.
LeRoyLadurie, Emmanuel,Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324(1978)
Lepore, Jill. ‘Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography’, Journal of American History, 88:1 (2001), pp. 129-144.
Levi, Giovanni. ‘On Microhistory’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (1991), pp. 97-119.
Macfarlane, Alan,The Family Life of RalphJosselin: A Seventeenth-Century Clergyman(1977)
Magnússon, Sigurður Gylfi, and István M. Szijártó, What is Microhistory: Theory and Practice (2013)
Miles, Tiya, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021).
Thatcher Ulrich, Laurel, "The Living Mother of a Living Child": Midwifery and Mortality in Post-Revolutionary New England’, The William and Mary Quarterly 46:1 (1989), pp. 27-48.
Thatcher Ulrich, Laurel, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary (1990)
de Vries, J., ‘Playing with Scales: The Global and the Micro, the Macro and the Nano’, Past & Present, 242, Issue Supplement 14 (2019), 23–36.
Wrightson, Keith, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: a Scrivener, his City, and the Plague (2011)
Seminar/Essay questions:
Explain why microhistory become a popular approach to history from the 1980s onwards.
To what extent can microhistory help historians understand broader historical structures?
Is microhistory a history of the exceptional?
Gobbets:
·“microscopic observation will reveal factors previously unobserved ... Phenomena previously considered to be sufficiently described and understood assume completely new meanings by altering the scale of observation. It is then possible to use these results to draw far wider generalizations ...” (Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory” in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (1991)), 101-2.
‘That it is an unusual case serves me well, for a remarkable dispute can sometimes uncover motivations and values that are lost in the welter of the everyday.’ Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, p. 4.
'…microhistorical approaches have tended to emphasize the agency of individuals in fashioning their own identities. The result has been an exaggerated view of the ability of early modern individuals to transform their identities as easily as if changing a hat. (John Paul Ghobrial, 'Moving Stories and What They Tell Us: Early Modern Mobility Between Microhistory and Global History', Past and Present Supplement 14 (2019), 243-280).