One of the main historiographic currents of the 20th century is the so-called micro-history (microstory, in Italian). A "historiographical current", or a "branch of historiography", consists, roughly speaking, of a group of historians - generally concentrated in the same country and around one or more institutions – which follow a research trend, concentrate on common themes and proceed methodologically in a very approximate way. Microhistory developed in Italy and, for this reason, it is sometimes also called micro-historyItalian.
The development of Italian microhistory occurred in the 1970s, initially around the magazine QuaderniStorici, founded in Ancona, Italy, by Albertocaracciolo. It was in this magazine that the first works that fit the procedures of microhistory began to be published. After a few years, this magazine was edited in Bologna, where it had the production of its main Italian collaborators: EdoardoGrendi, carlopony, GiovanniLevi and carloGinzburg. Also in the 1970s, the works of Quaderni Storici were gathered in a collection edited by Giulio Einaudi and named
microstories, which characterized this type of historiographical procedure.But how does microhistory proceed? Micro-history is characterized by “microanalysis”, that is, the analysis of elements of the historical past on a very small scale, targeting cultural, economic and social aspects. An example is the analysis of the lives of ordinary people, who, in life, never had any notoriety, such as poor peasants of the Middle Ages or the beginning of the Modern Age. The objective of microanalysis is, from the scale at the micro level, to reach the broader panorama from that time, thus promoting a "game of scales", with a view to further elucidating the past historic.
Do not stop now... There's more after the advertising ;)
Brazilian researcher Henrique Espada Lima, a specialist in the history of historiography, developed a careful study on Italian micro-history and thus expressed himself as to the importance of this current for studies in the history of the century XX:
“Micro-history echoed the inflection of the historiographical debate towards the themes of the “lived”, the everyday, “subjectivity”, and attention to the “narrative”. Thus, if we emphasize its elements of coherence with the text, it would be on the side of the new intellectual and cultural history and would participate in the broad movement of “return” from historiography to political history, biography, the history of the event and of fait divers, finally saved from the “limbo of superstructures and marginal phenomena”. This perception, in any case rather vague, reveals, however, some aspects that seem important to me about the insertion of micro-history in a broader intellectual context.” (LIMA, Henrique Espada. Italian micro-history: scales, signs and singularities. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 2006. pp. 384-85).
By concentrating on unique themes of history and interweaving them with broader contexts, micro-history, as Espada Lima well suggested, manages to produce works that are closely related to the new cultural history and the new intellectual history, which were developed in countries such as France, England and the U.S. In addition, she is also able to produce works of great narrative fluidity, as is the case of the book “O cheese and verves”, by Carlo Ginzburg, thus contributing not only to the improvement of historical research techniques, but also to the dissemination of research works historic.
* Image credits: commons
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
