Carlo Ginzburg’s highly acclaimed exploration of the life of Dominico Scandella (popularly known as Menocchio) – a sixteenth-century miller – is the first thing that jumps to my mind when thinking about Microhistory. It is one of the best examples of an individual life from a specific locality being linked to broader historical themes, namely the religious intolerance of the Counter-Reformation and the productive interactions of high and low culture in pre-industrial Europe. Given my familiarity with this text, I thought it could be interesting to approach it from the fresh angle of transnational history. How effectively does Ginzburg track the circulation of ideas that contributed to Scandella’s transgressive and convoluted cosmology? How does he bridge the gap between the local and the global, the specific and the general? These are some of the questions that I will attempt to answer in this blog post.
The blurred boundaries between elite and popular cultures is one of the most important themes of the book. Menocchio was a miller living in the Friuli region – a rural part of Italy. Seen through the lens of traditional categorisations, he was a lower-class citizen, a proletarian. His cultural background was heavily determined by peasant oral tradition. Yet his complex cosmology, which included surprisingly progressive views such as the toleration of other beliefs and the differentiation of the spirit and the soul, were undoubtedly influenced by the humanistic literature he came into contact with. The confluence of these different cultural influences translated into strikingly original views expressed by Menocchio during his trials, demonstrating the productive interstices between high and low culture. By working backwards from the trial transcripts to the texts known to have been in Menocchio’s possession, such as Bocaccio’s Decameron, Mandeville’s Travels, and Il Sogno del Caravia, Ginzburg attempts to trace the journey of ideas, from origin to interpretative expression. The edifice of Menocchio’s ideas was built from the ‘stones and bricks’ drawn from his selective reading, and held together by the mortar of his peasant logic.
The dangers of broadening the implications of Menocchio’s case to include his historical peers are obvious: Menocchio was atypical, a recluse, shunned by many (including his family) for his unorthodox views, and therefore unrepresentative. Parallels and patterns can only be drawn from such an unusual case study with great caution. Menocchio demonstrates that ideas did circulate, crossing class boundaries and spawning new ideas, but gives no indication of the extent to which religious paradigms were being questioned at the time. It’s a tough one. Writing a story about an average citizen, living an average life with average ideas and average achievements does not make for a very spicy tale. Taking the more marketable path by writing about an exceptional figure, however, makes it hard to draw links, to ground the story in the reality of common experience.
Is this just another angle from which to consider the local/global, specific/general problem? Even the most average story will include certain details that make it unique. But that particular uniqueness emerges from outside influences, a configuration of reality resulting from connections, networks, transitory ideas and artefacts. To unpack these, the historian must look beyond the local. The specific/local is but a compound consisting of multiple elements of the general/global that happened to come together in a specific spatio-temporal context. The historian must become a scientist. The compound must be broken up into its composite components. To do this effectively, working backwards seems to be the key; like Ginzburg’s tracking back from Menocchio’s testimony to humanistic ideas that achieved global circulation, the local must be used as a doorway to the global. Microhistory is therefore a valuable entry point for the transnational historian.