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Threads and Traces

True False Fictive
by Carlo Ginzburg (Author), Anne C. Tedeschi (Translator), John Tedeschi (Translator)
Paperback eBook
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: Jan 2012
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780520274488
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 10 b/w photographs
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About the Book

Carlo Ginzburg’s brilliant and timely new essay collection takes a bold stand against naive positivism and allegedly sophisticated neo-skepticism. It looks deeply into questions raised by decades of post-structuralism: What constitutes historical truth? How do we draw a boundary between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between history and memory? How do we grapple with the historical conventions that inform, in different ways, all written documents? In his answers, Ginzburg peels away layers of subsequent readings and interpretations that envelop every text to make a larger argument about history and fiction. Interwoven with compelling autobiographical references, Threads and Traces bears moving witness to Ginzburg’s life as a European Jew, the abiding strength of his scholarship, and his deep engagement with the historian’s craft.

About the Author

Carlo Ginzburg is retired from Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (Italy). He is the author of numerous books that have been translated into English including The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Introduction

1. Description and Citation
2. The Conversion of the Jews of Minorca (A.D. 417–418)
3. Montaigne, Cannibals, and Grottoes
4. Proofs and Possibilities:
Postscript to Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre
5. Paris, 1647: A Dialogue on Fiction and History
6. The Europeans Discover (or Rediscover) the Shamans
7. Tolerance and Commerce: Auerbach Reads Voltaire
8. Anacharsis Interrogates the Natives:
A New Reading of an Old Best Seller
9. Following the Tracks of Israël Bertuccio
10. The Bitter Truth: Stendhal’s Challenge to Historians
11. Representing the Enemy:
On the French Prehistory of the Protocols
12. Just One Witness:
The Extermination of the Jews and the Principle of Reality
13. Details, Early Plans, Microanalysis:
Thoughts on a Book by Siegfried Kracauer
14. Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It
15. Witches and Shamans

Notes
Index

Reviews

“No other living historian approaches the range of [Ginzburg’s] erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in English, offers an illustration of it.”
— London Review Of Books
“Ginzburg’s range is remarkable . . . rich in references to and insights about diverse historical perspectives.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A collection of essays by the profoundly original, intellectually wide-ranging, Italian-Jewish historian Carlo Ginzburg underlines the influence of Yiddishkeit on his achievement . . . an illuminating collection of chapters, deftly translated from the original Italian by Anne C. and John Tedeschi.”
— Forward
“Threads and Traces ranges from Late Antiquity to postwar America. There seems to be nothing of intellectual value written since Plato in a European language that Ginzburg has not read and assimilated. Taken together, these essays humanely and generously explore the question of how history ought to be written.”
— The Literary Review
“Surprising pace, intellectual range, and learned discourse is typical throughout the book. . . . Illustrating, case by case, the complicated place of truth and reality in historical research, these artfully constructed essays demonstrate in addition the historian’s delight at the discoveries that probing scholarship uncovers.”
— Jrnl Of Interdisciplinary History
“This is a brilliant text, the product of a scholar of rare breadth and knowledge. . . . Rare indeed are those who can look as deeply as Carlo Ginzburg.”
— Melbourne Historical Jrnl
“Carlo Ginzburg weaves a spell-binding web of learning and surprises as he explores the question of truth in history and fiction and his own multiple engagement with the past. Whether dealing with Montaigne’s cannibals, Italian shamans, or anti-Semitic forgeries, Threads and Traces is a powerful and moving statement of the stakes in historical knowledge from one of our greatest historians.” —Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds

Previous Praise for Carlo Ginzburg

“Ginzburg is a historian with an insatiable curiosity, who pursues even the faintest of clues with all the zest of a born detective until every fragment of evidence can be fitted into place.” —J.H. Elliott, New York Review of Books

“Carlo Ginzburg has many claims to be considered the outstanding European historian of the generation which came of age in the late Sixties. Certainly few have equalled him in originality, variety and audacity.” —Perry Anderson, London Review of Books

“Ginzburg's scholarship is dazzling and profound.” —Publisher’s Weekly