Microhistory
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Microhistory is the intensive historical investigation of a well defined smaller unit of research (most often a single event, the community of a village, a family or a person).
An early work of microhistory is Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1976).
However, E. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (1975) and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou, village occitan (1975), pioneering British and French microhistories, each preceded Ginzburg's book.
Microhistory had a significant impact on French and German historians in the 1980s and 1990, when it produced classics in several languages (e.g. Natalie Zemon Davis: The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983). It can be seen as part of cultural history together with the histoire des mentalités of the French Annales School, the German Alltagsgeschichte, or historical anthropology. It is especially close to the latter, with the important difference that it, especially its original Italian version, puts a great stress on the agency of historical actors and is therefore unwilling to see culture as a determining force.
See also
