Back to Results
Cover image of Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method
Cover image of Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method
Share this Title:

Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method

Carlo Ginzburg
with a new preface
translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi

Publication Date
Binding Type

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...

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.

Reviews

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.

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6.125
x
9.25
Pages
240
ISBN
9781421409900
Illustration Description
11 halftones
Table of Contents

Preface to the 2013 Edition
Preface to the Italian Edition
Translators' Note
Bibliographical Note
Witchcraft and Popular Piety: Notes on a Modenese Trial of 1519
From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A

Preface to the 2013 Edition
Preface to the Italian Edition
Translators' Note
Bibliographical Note
Witchcraft and Popular Piety: Notes on a Modenese Trial of 1519
From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method
The High and the Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Titian, Ovid, and Sixteenth-Century Codes for Erotic Illustration
Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm
Germanic Mythology and Nazism: Thoughts on an Old Book by Georges Dumézil
Freud, the Wolf-Man, and the Werewolves
The Inquisitor as Anthropologist
Notes
Index of Names

Author Bios
Carlo Ginzburg
Featured Contributor

Carlo Ginzburg

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
Featured Contributor

Carlo Ginzburg

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.