Threads and Traces: True False Fictive

Included here are 15 essays by perhaps Italy’s most renowned historian, a professor emeritus at Pisa’s Scuola Normale Superiore. Ginzburg’s (The Cheese and the Worm) range is remarkable, from “The Conversion of the Jews of Minorca (A.D. 417–418),” to “Paris 1647: A Dialogue of Fiction and History.” While he seems influenced by the French Annales school’s emphasis on “mentalities,” the intellectual, cultural, and social currents that influence events, his interest here is on historiography. One of Ginzburg’s most original and accessible essays is on microhistory, the study of, for instance, one rural village (such as Natalie Zemon-Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre), that his own work has sometimes exemplified. This is a demanding book, assuming knowledge of much pre-modern and modern philosophy, literature, and historical writing. For example, in his essay “The Extermination of the Jews and the Principle of Reality,” a discussion of the French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s refutation of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, soon segues into a discussion of Italian historians Giovanni Gentile’s and Benedetto Croce’s “metaphysical theory of history.” This is definitely not a work for the general reader. But for the specialist, it is rich in references to and insights about diverse historical perspectives. 10 b&w photos. (Jan.)