Reporter | Pan Wenjie
Edit | Yellow Moon
The recently released Chinese edition of Cheese and Maggots: A 16th-Century Miller's Universe follows the intellectual world of a 16th-century miller who spent his life in the Italian village of Friuli. The life of a small man who used to be little more than a footnote to historians has become the subject of a book here in the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg. In the book, we see the life of the miller Menocchio, the religious beliefs of ordinary people, and how the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and printing influenced this "little man on the edge."
First published in 1976, Cheese and Maggots is a far-reaching example of "microhistory", and the Chinese edition has long been at the top of Douban's weekly list of popular non-fictions. Why are today's readers still willing to read this book, published nearly half a century ago? This, According to Günzburg, is because two factors in Menocchio's case are easy to understand for us today: the infiltration between oral and written culture, and the challenge he single-handedly challenged political and religious authority— a small man who is still remembered today because of the courage to challenge. What Günzburg doesn't say is that the enduring nature of Cheese and Maggots is also related to his writing style—he calls historical narratives "truffles for all" and that can be appreciated by popular readers.
Günzburg received his Ph.D. from the University of Pisa in Italy in 1961 and later held teaching positions at the University of Bologna and the University of California, Los Angeles. His areas of interest span the Italian Renaissance and early modern European history, contributing to art history, literary studies, and historical theory – how did he have such breadth of research? When he first became a historian, he wanted to "salvage and search for a culture of peasants that had been persecuted, erased, and forgotten" from the records of the Inquisition trials— where did this idea come from? A few days ago, Interface Culture conducted an exclusive interview with Günzburg. Not only did he explore how the elite-educated man began to pay attention to the bottom and write Cheese and Maggots, but he was also asked whether he was a "fox" scholar or a "hedgehog" scholar in Isaiah Berlin's mouth. One of the unavoidable topics of the interview with Günzburg is, of course, microhistory, and he also shared with us his understanding of microhistory and his views on historical writing.
<h3>01 From "Cheese and Maggots" to the birth of microhistory</h3>
Interface Culture: In the foreword, you say that you came across the original material of the book "Cheese and Maggots" when you were writing "Battle at Night", lingered in your mind, and only went back to writing this book a few years later. Why are you so obsessed with the story of this little man?
Carlo Günzburg: At the beginning of my research that paved the way for my first book, The Battle at night, I came across an 18th-century document written by an inquisitor: a catalogue of "The First 1,000 Trials Conducted by the Inquisition in Friuli," a region on italy's northeastern border. The entry for each trial is followed by several lines of case description. The list contained trials of infidels, witches, etc., and I was looking for benandanti (the protagonist of The Night's Battle)—and suddenly, I found a reference to "two trials of a peasant (whose name was Domenico Scandella) who believed that the world had been created from corruption." In other words, I was initially confronted with a few lines of introduction, not the original material I later analyzed: a small detail that gave me some insight into the research that led me to write Cheese and Maggots. At this point, a question inevitably arises: Why, out of a thousand entries, my attention is drawn to that one, and I am immediately copied on a small piece of paper?
In retrospect, I think three factors attracted me: a) the perverse argument put forward by the peasants; b) it may have been related to an unknown dimension of peasant materialism; and c) the sudden (and unwarranted) connection between the peasants' arguments about the origins of the world and the plate painting in a famous altarpiece by the German painter Matthias Grünewald in the early 16th century (today in Colmar, France), which flashed through my mind. The famous British art historian Kenneth Clark once described the painting as a way of showing two hermits meeting in a landscape.
"Some peculiar intuition about the virgin serous [of the origin of life] seems to have propelled Grunewald. We were surprised that his two holy hermits did not have dinosaur companionship. ”
Needless to say, this passage from Clarke's Landscape into Painting has left a lasting mark on my memory, creating a link between an image (grunewald's) and a text (the interrogator's brief introduction to the Menocchio trial). By the way, while recently examining Clarke's book (preserved today in the Archiginnasio Library in Bologna), I found that its former owner, Francesco Arcangeli, a brilliant art historian, marked the same passages in the blank space with a sign. "Note N(ota) B(ene)".
As you can see, the spark that ignited my research project a few years later was a heterogeneous mixture. I think that's often the case, although in many cases, the spark is wrong.
The handwritten notes I made in 1962 were buried in my files for 8 years, but periodically surfaced on the surface of my memory. In 1970, I decided to go to Udine to check the trial of that farmer: when I started reading the documents, I was drawn to them. I think many historians may only mention this case in footnotes. So why did I decide to write a book about it? Maybe an answer will come up as I deal with your next question.
Interface Culture: Your mother is a novelist, your father is a philologist, historian, and literary critic, and you have friends like Calvino. It can be said that you were born elite, and you have received an elite education, and it is difficult to say that you belong to what Gramsci called the subaltern classes. So what drew your attention to lower-class culture?
Carlo Günzburg: The choices that shape the beginnings of my academic trajectory are driven by different motivations, both cultural and personal, conscious and unconscious. At the age of twenty, I read the Italian writer Carlo Levi's Christ Stops Epoli (1945): a book based on his experience of being imprisoned by the fascist regime in a small village in southern Italy from 1935-1936. Carlo Levy and my father, Leone Günzburg, were friends, both Jewish intellectuals and members of the same underground anti-fascist organization, Giustizia e Libertà. My father spent two years in prison for anti-fascist activities and was also confined to a village called Pizzoli in 1940-1943, in a southern region known as Abruzzi. My mother and their two children (I am the eldest son) followed him, and my sister was born there. I spent my childhood in that village. After the end of the war and the death of my father, my mother wrote a touching article about her life, describing the rural environment in which we lived. A girl who took care of me and my siblings often told us stories about magic and ghosts in her local dialect. When I read Antonio Gramsci's Notes from Prison and Carlo Levy's Christ Stops Epoli, this partial infiltration of peasant culture reappears. These two books worked on me in different ways, like filters, through which I relived the memories of the years I spent as a child in that small village.
I am well aware of the political implications of my private experiences. The cultural elements I've been dealing with so far are part of the legacy that our generation (or at least some of them) inherited from the previous generation. Since the end of World War II, the discovery of the cultural richness of the peasantry in southern Italy has played an important role in the political strategy of the Italian Communist Party. Later, Antonio Gramsci's thinking on the "lower class" had a worldwide impact. Carlo Levy's work was internationally successful, and he had close ties with members of the Italian Communist Party, although he never became a member of the party. He struggled to analyze the peasant culture he encountered in captivity, and although he did not identify with it, it impressed me deeply. In his book Christ Stops Epoli, deep compassion and ideological distance coexist. I was lucky enough to meet Carlo Levy and become a close friend of one of his nephews, Giovanni Levy. Many years later, I worked with Giovanni on the construction of microhistory.
But, in the early stages of my research, these choices also had a dimension that I hadn't been aware of for years. The art historian Paolo Fossati once said to me in a casual tone, "You are Jewish, and it is not surprising that you study pagans and witches." (Cheese and Maggots had just been published) I was taken aback: the connection was so obvious—how could I not have known? In retrospect, I boiled this down to an unconscious strategy designed to make this connection more effective. In my article Benandanti, Fifty Years Later, which, if I remember correctly, was included as a preface in the new edition of the Chinese of The Night's Battle, I mentioned some details related to the memory of war that turned me into a Jewish child.
Interface Culture: When you and your friends work on microhistory around Quaderni Storici, which you founded in 1966, do you realize that you are doing a career that changes historiography? What drove you at the time?
Carlo Günzburg: Our discussions are absolutely free and do not feel any constraints, whether academically or politically. We are all leftists, there are different nuances, we are not part of a certain party. We feel like we're exploring an area of knowledge we've never been in— each of us has a different trajectory. I think at the time (i.e., in the late 1970s), none of us thought about the impact of what we did. Later, we were surprised by the international acceptance of microhistory (and I still do).
Interface Culture: In China, "Cheese and Maggots" has been hailed by many as one of the "three classics of microhistory", the other two are Davis's "The Return of Martin Gayle" and Le Walladhury's "Montayu", and some people oppose this arrangement, arguing that historical works cannot be ranked with seniority. Moreover, even under the label of "microhistory", your thinking is still different. What would you think of such a ranking?
Carlo Günzburg: Let's start with the general question you asked: Is it possible to rank scientific or artistic works? On a very high level – e.g. Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, who are the better painters? This question sounds ridiculous. But the idea of rejecting ranking itself implies a denial of the concept of quality, and is therefore absurd. "Quality" can elicit a simple reaction — yes or no — but a detailed argument would be more helpful. In the preface to the Italian translation of Davis' The Return of Martin Gale (1984), I try to articulate my response to this remarkable, challenging work, launched in the microstorie series directed by Giovanni Levy and myself. In our opinion, this label is absolutely appropriate. By the way, the word "microhistory" never appears in Cheese and Maggots, and there's a reason for that: the concept also emerged from the debate surrounding my book.
Interface culture: When it comes to micro history, people may have some misunderstandings, such as thinking that micro history is the biography of small people, or thinking that they care too much about daily trivialities, or thinking that micro history is based on small to see big, so that many books that are small and large are divided into micro history. Reading your work, we can feel that in fact, micro history and macro history are not actually divided. You said in an interview with the media that you saw a lot of books with the label "microhistory", but they are not really microhistory works. So, what is really microhistory writing?
Carlo Günzburg: As has been said many times (but perhaps not enough), the prefix "micro" in the word "microhistory" refers to the method of analysis, not to the size of the object of analysis, whether real or symbolic. "Micro" refers to the microscope: you can put fragments of insects or pieces of elephant skin under the lens of a microscope. The first book in our "Miniature Stories" series is one of my books about Piero della Francesca, a giant in art history. There are many versions of microhistory, some of which ignore the analytical dimension, which is the core of our original project, but there is no orthodoxy of microhistory.
<h3>02 "All true history is comparative history"</h3>
Interface Culture: In the foreword to Cheese and Maggots, you say your research is closely related to "the populism that was intimately linked to the environment in which I grew up" and that there are many connections between the choices you make as a historian. This drive can make you make mistakes and sometimes go too far. When we talk about populism in today's context, like Trump's populism, it seems to have been different from what you mean. Can you talk about what "populism" meant in your upbringing?
Carlo Günzburg: I totally understand your doubts. The populism I mentioned as an element of my background is Russian populism: a 19th-century political and cultural movement aimed at forging close ties between the intellectual elite and the peasantry. The Italian historian Franco Venturi, who wrote a classic book on Russian populism (1952), mentioned my father (both members of the anti-fascist underground Giustizia e Libertà) as "a new and original embodiment of the populist spirit". Through his remarks, I reinterpreted my childhood memories related to the place where my father was imprisoned. Trump's populism today is a completely different phenomenon, although the labels are the same.
Interface Culture: You're a left-wing historian, but your work still keeps a certain distance from politics, which is rare among your contemporaries? Why is that? What kind of distance do you think should be kept between history and politics? Do you agree with the Italian scholar Croce's 1917 view that "all history is contemporary history"?
Carlo Günzburg: In my essay "Our Words and Their Words," I made a detailed critique of Croce's assertion that "all history is contemporary history," which was also translated as Chinese. See New Historiography (Volume 18): The Theory of Carlo Günzburg: Microhistory, Details, margins, 2017 edition, pp. 236-252.
In accordance with the distinction proposed by anthropologist and linguist Kenneth Pike between the categories of "etic" and "emic" related to the language of the observer and the language of the actor, respectively, I think historians raise the question of "guest" formed by contemporary history in order to rescue the "subject" answers associated with the category of actors through the analysis of evidence. That is why I wrote above in the article "Microhistory and World History", "All real history is a comparative history", because it necessarily implies a comparison and dialogue between the two perspectives of the observer and the actor.
Interface Culture: Is there a consistent focus on your academic research? It seems that Cheese and Maggots focuses on the theme of knowledge flow gradually becoming less and less in your later research. You once said in an interview that this is also a small symptom of the big problem of the failure of the Italian left.
Carlo Günzburg: The defeat of the left, which has taken place over the past few decades, is a phenomenon that is not limited to Italy. There is no doubt that the cyclical relationship between popular culture and elite culture, which I analyzed in Cheese and Maggots, was inspired by the political climate in Italy in the 60s and early 70s and the prominent role of the left at that time. But the circular relationship I mentioned is still a hypothesis that fascinates me. In the preface to the upcoming Russian translation of Michael Baxandall's Giotto and the Orators, I explore the relationship between the term lingua delle botteghe and the humanist language that deals with painting.
Interface Culture: Margaret Macmillan argues in The Use and Abuse of History, "Historians must not completely abandon the study of political history and devote themselves to the study of social history or cultural history." Whether we like politics or not, politics does have a great impact on our society and on everyone's life. "What do you think of that statement?"
Carlo Günzburg: One of my books, The Judge and the Historian (1991, translated into many languages; the Russian translation came out a few months ago), deals with a contemporary political event: the trial of Adriano Sofri, the leader of the far-left group Lotta continua. Sophie was accused of inciting the murder of a police officer. In fact, I decided to write this book because Adriano Sofiri was one of my closest friends, and I was sure he was innocent. I wrote the book on the basis of careful reading of the judicial evidence, trying to persuade the jury on appeal to try, without evidence against my friend — but without success. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison, and 9 years later he fell seriously ill and nearly died. He was subsequently sentenced to house arrest and is now free.
Perhaps Judges and Historians is no exception, for my usual relationship with politics is indirect, but if I am not mistaken, I have a clear political implication for the intervention of postmodernist skepticism. I will give just one example, "There is only one witness: TuJu and the Principles of Authenticity," which has been translated into many languages, including Chinese. See New Historiography (Volume 18): Caro Günzberg's Theory: Microhistory, Details, Margins, 2017 edition, pp. 253-269. What's more, recently, I've written several articles about fake news and how to combat fake news – the political implications of this topic are obvious.
<h3>03 I recognize myself in the definition of "hedgehog in disguise</h3>."
Interface culture: You focus on a wide range of areas, and when you visited Peking University in 2019, you gave a lecture on the theme of Machiavelli and Michelangelo. In your opinion, is there a contradiction between broadly dabbling in and specializing in one area? What do you think of the distinction between what Isaiah Berlin called a "fox" and a "hedgehog" scholar?
Carlo Günzburg: I admire real experts, but I'm not an expert at all, and I like to be exposed to new topics from scratch. As I once said, in doing so, I felt a "joy of ignorance": not knowing anything, but being able to learn something. I like to jump from one topic to another, not caring about the boundaries of the discipline. So, by isaiah Berlin's distinction, am I a "fox"? I'm not sure.
Many years ago, Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke asked me this question, and I replied (I apologize for the length of this quote): "I was thinking that I was becoming more and more like a fox, but in the end I thought I was a hedgehog." Although the topics I have been studying are diverse, I am grappling with the influence of my original witchcraft work based on the Inquisition trials. It's like the fieldwork of an anthropologist. Even my abiding interest in methodological questions was born out of that experience: reading from the lines between the lines, against the intention of the text, reading in a way that was contrary to the way the interrogator's purpose was constructed. ”
When the Spanish translation of our dialogue was published in the Mexican magazine Contrahistorias, my friend Carlos Aguirre Rojas chose the following title, "El erizo encubierto," or "hedgehog in disguise"—a definition in which I recognized myself.
Interface Culture: You're known for your erudition, and there are reports that you have a way of researching a way to randomly select documents from the Venetian National Archives — call it "Venetian Roulette" — or to allow yourself to be guided by a casual connection to a title in a computer catalog. What kind of gains have you been given by doing so?
Carlo GÜNZburg: Like everyone else, I use the Internet to get answers to all kinds of questions, but I sometimes use the Internet (or library catalogs) to get unexpected problems and then elicit other questions, an obviously circuitous research strategy to find something unexpected. I can't say that most of my research was inspired by this strategy, but it's safe to say that randomization played a big role in it. In Italian, the word "caso" has two meanings – "opportunity" and "case". I'm fascinated by this synonym. A case study-oriented approach that is open to opportunity. This description is certainly incomplete, but it is not incorrect either.
Interface Culture: Your work is highly readable, very different from ordinary academic works of history. Ancient Chinese literature, history and philosophy are not separated, and writings such as Sima Qian's are also very readable. But many people think that today's readers have a hard time achieving that kind of writing, because historians have largely been disciplined by modern academic norms. How do you see this? Do you think historical works should also be highly readable?
Carlo Günzburg: I didn't care about popular academic norms from the very beginning, which was of course a privilege — I was born into a family of intellectuals. I was also undoubtedly influenced by my mother, a well-known novelist, on the historical narrative level. In Battle of the Night and Cheese and Maggots, I try to speak out to both the expert and the general reader. I thought deeply about this and invented a maxim for my attitude towards my readers – "Tartufi per tutti" (truffles for everybody). Truffles are nice, rare and expensive, and "truffles for everyone" is the exact opposite of the superior attitude I hate.
Interface Culture: After the rise of postmodern theory, history is a sequence without regularity, fragmentation, and without causation. Historical subjectivity is also an important theory advocated by postmoderns to subvert the orthodox narrative of history. If this is the case, there seems to be no boundary between literature and history, literature is history, and history is literature. What do you think about that? Where is the line between literature and history?
Carlo Günzburg: I've been opposing this postmodernist approach for decades. As I have argued many times, this idea must be resisted for reasons that are both moral, political, and cognitive. As I pointed out in My book History, Rhetoric, and Proof, the line between history and literature has to do with proof. But I also think that both literature and history represent reality in different ways. I have repeatedly discussed the connections between them, and these connections have existed since ancient times. Of course, this argument is quite different from the postmodernist approach that was fashionable some time ago (hopefully no longer).
(Thanks to Huang Xudong, Wang Chengwei and Lin Ziren for their help)