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.
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.
“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
336 pp.6 x 9Illus: 10 b/w photographs
9780520274488$29.95|£25.00Paper
Jan 2012