Cheese and Maggots
Author: (Italian) Carlo Günzburg
Translator: Rui
Edition: Republic of China, Guangxi Normal University Press, July 2021
01
This book
Beijing News: Historians are often asked to study history from the perspective of a third party, but I have also noticed that there is a subjective connection between many historians and their research subjects, and they will choose to study a certain period of history because of their own experiences or moods. Your Cheese and Maggots and Battle of the Night are both studied from the perspective of a marginal, persecuted little man, and both are about the history of the trial. I also learn that your family participated in the Resistance during the Period of Italian Fascism, and that your father was imprisoned and died in prison for refusing to obey the fascist authorities. How did your family and your own experiences influence your research?
Carlo Günzburg: A long time ago, when I was twenty years old, I suddenly made three decisions: I wanted to be a historian; I wanted to study witchcraft trials; and I wanted to unearth the attitudes and voices of the victims from these trials. It wasn't until later that I realized that this third decision had emotional significance, that it could be traced back to my family history and my childhood memories of the persecution of Jews in World War II. I fully agree that my research is subjective: but this is only the beginning of the story, because it is only about the question being asked, not the answer. If historians are limited to projecting their own subjective experiences into the past, the past will be distorted by inopportunity. In Our Words and Their Words, I think it is possible (and must) reshape the anachronistic questions of relevance to the present through a careful analysis of the evidence. The Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce famously said: "All true history is contemporary history". At the end of another article, Microhistory and World History, I came to a different conclusion: "All real history is comparative history." For history is a metaphorical dialogue built on two levels of history, the present and the past. Menocchio dared to argue with the Inquisitor, and his bold, outrageous ideas cost him his life. To study how our world differs from his, an analogy with the current example would only be the starting point of this research path.
Carlo Günzburg Is an Internationally renowned Italian historian and representative scholar of the microhistory school, who was awarded the Bazin Prize, known as the "European Nobel Prize". He has taught at the University of Bologna, UCLA, and Supérieure Normale Supérieure de Pisa.
Beijing News: "Cheese and Maggots" is regarded as a model for microhistorical research. Microhistorical research is also on the rise in China today. But there is also a common confusion in research. Microhistorical research often says that "typical cases" should be selected, but how exactly does a "case" count as a "typical case"? At the same time, some researchers believe that the "typical case" is often only a special isolated case, and the study of it is only an isolated event in history, which is not representative, and cannot explain a more common historical phenomenon. How should we understand case studies?
Carlo Günzberg: Microhistory is an experimental (and analytical) approach to history: it seems to me that the orthodoxy of so-called microhistory is contradictory. My own microhistorical research, from Night's Battle to Cheese and Maggots, has focused on unusual cases. Both in terms of documentary evidence and the attitudes, beliefs, and ideas of the subjects, benandanti and Menocchio are atypical. I don't deny (back to the first question) that there is a connection between my passion for alien things and my anti-fascist Jewish (double minority) family background. But such a beginning must beg the question: "What is the purpose of the anomaly?" ”
I've argued that anomaly is richer than norm from a cognitive point of view: anomaly necessarily includes normal, not vice versa. But the Brazilian historian Henrique Espada Lima, a writer of eminent works on Italy's microhistory, points out to me that Carl Schmitt made a similar argument in his book The Theology of Politics. I was shocked for two reasons. On the one hand, because Schmitt was an active supporter of the Nazi regime, he advocated extreme Catholic anti-Semitism, and even after World War II, he continued to support extremism in a more covert way. On the other hand, because before reading Schmitt's The Theology of Politics, I had already made arguments about anomalies and normalities. But then I realized that Schmitt's view was drawn from an unnamed "Protestant theologian" who had long been believed to refer to the Danish philosopher Sren Kierkegaard.
In Cheese and Maggots, the 16th-century Italian Miller Menocchio is an outlier even in the eyes of his countrymen. In fact, my analysis of menocchio, an altical case, paves the way for a widespread, universal, "normal" set of assumptions. In the foreword to Cheese and Maggots, I point out that examples of the "subordinate class" attitude in Pre-industrialIzed Europe were scarce (Antonio Gramsci used the rank of "subordinate" in his Notes on Prison to refer to the lower class to avoid prison censorship), so Menocchio's first trial, while undoubtedly an isolated case, is of typical value. Edoardo Grendi developed my comment into his famous paradoxical phrase "eccezionale normale". "Microhistory," a word never used in Cheese and Maggots, also appears as a collective project in a series of debates related to the book.
What I have just said leads to a disagreement with my friend Giovanni Levi on the argument (in the '80s we co-created the series "Micro Stories" published by Einaudi in Turin). Levy argues that the science of history starts with universal questions and seeks answers that apply to the local area. And I think the trajectory of historical research is more intricate: historians start more or less with universal problems, are rooted in specific current experiences, search for local answers from the past, and pave the way for solving ordinary problems.
Beijing News: There is a saying in China called "Poor people must have something to hate." Victims are at fault for being victimized. In recent years, this "victim guilt theory" has prevailed, but at the same time, it is the empathy of the powerful perpetrator, and the stigmatization and criticism of the victim from the position of the perpetrator. We find a similar phenomenon in Cheese and Maggots, where Menocchio's neighbors criticize him from the church's standpoint, believing that he is self-inflicted, like a mirror image of the distant antiquity of this mentality. I'm curious, how did this mentality of believing that the victim must be guilty and actively empathizing with the perpetrator developed?
Carlo Günzburg: I would not hesitate to say that the pervasive "victim guilt theory" is repulsive. If I remember correctly, it first refers to the victim of rape (usually a woman). When dissecting the evidence in the Menocchio case, can we use content whose primary purpose is to distort the facts as an analytical tool? My answer is that it can only be done in a negative sense, when this element helps to eliminate the simple binary opposition between the judge and the "victim"— that is, Menocchio and his countrymen. Menocchio has been accused by them for a variety of reasons, and we can usually only speculate: because of past grievances, cowardice, and so on. Montereale, the village where Menocchio lives, life is clearly fraught with tension.
02
This year
Beijing News: 2021 is the second year of the new crown virus epidemic, which reminds us of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries when the historical events of "Cheese and Maggots" and "Night Battle" occurred, and it was also the era of plague epidemic, from a historical point of view, how should we understand the profound changes caused by the plague to society? What are the similarities and differences between ancient and modern?
Carlo Günzburg: Let's start with the main difference: the Internet. For the first time in history, we were able to track the development of major epidemics and the various news of the fight against them in a short period of time. The "news" I am talking about here is broad, including reliable news and manipulated news.
Beijing News: How has 2021 affected your life and academic research, and what research plans do you have now? Youdao is "our hope for the future comes from the past", so what are your messages and ideas for the new 2022?
Carlo Günzburg: In 2021, I lived in Bologna, which is a great place to stay. I have access not only to my private library, but also to the abundance of public libraries — and the Internet, where I can meet people online and attend seminars in distant countries. This worldwide tragedy exacerbates deeper and deeper inequalities that have become increasingly a distinctive feature of human history. For too long, what we call "progress" has made life more difficult for millions of people scattered around the globe. Now this "progress" threatens the environment and endangers the survival of mankind. Is it possible to reverse the situation? No one knows. But let's turn doubt into (faint) hope.
Forgot about the subject I'm currently working on. Fake news in the long run: this is yet another historical problem arising from current problems.
Written | Lee Shane
Editor | Zhang jin walk around
Proofreading | Xue Jingning Chen Diyan