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From Menocchio to Piero Della Francesca: The Work of Carlo Ginzburg*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Paola Zambelli
Paola Zambelli
Affiliation:
University of Florence
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Review Articles
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The Historical Journal , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , December 1985 , pp. 983 - 999
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1 Il formaggio e i vermi. Il cosmo di un mugnaio del 500 (Turin, 1976)Google Scholar; English translation J. and Ann Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980). Page numbers from this translation and from Night Battles (cf. n. 4 below) are given in parentheses in the text. I have taken some small liberties with these excellent translations in order to be closer to the Italian original on a very few philosophical issues.

2 Spontaneous generation has not been much studied (probably because it is an idea which seems clearly affected by ‘vulgar materialism’); in addition to medieval researches by Duhem, Garin and Gregory, see especially on the Renaissance Nardi, B., Studi su Pomponazzi (Florence, 1968), pp. 305–19Google Scholar, and Papi, F., Antropologia e civiltà nel pensiero di Giordano Bruno (Florence, 1968), pp. 3–10, 91 ff., 221 ffGoogle Scholar.

3 ‘Prove e possibilità’, in Davis, N. Zemon, Il ritorno di Martin Guerre (Turin, 1984), pp. 131–54Google Scholar.

4 I Benandanti. Ricerche sulla stregoneria e sui culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento, (Turin, 1966), 3rd Italian edn. 1972 with a Post-scriptumGoogle Scholar; The Night Battles, translated , J. and Tedeschi, Ann (London, 1983)Google Scholar. Cf. the very interesting review by Pagden, Anthony in the London Review of Books, (15 02 1984), pp. 6–8Google Scholar. An example of the paradoxes which are characteristic of Ginzburg, is to be found in his ‘Folklore, magia, religione’, in Storia d'Italia, Vol I, I caratteri originali (Turin, 1972), p. 663Google Scholar: ‘The bands of the “lazzari” in the following of Cardinal Ruffo formed the last great religious movement of Italian History’: cf. Martina's, G. review, Rivista di storia delta Chiesa in Italia, XXX (1976), 150–3Google Scholar, who accused Ginzburg of ‘proceeding dogmatically’.

5 Cf. Elliott's, John review of The Cheese and the Worms, in the New York Review of Books, (26 06 1980)Google Scholar: ‘can this man [Menocchio buying books in Venice, etc.] really be considered representative of that sixteenth-century peasant society to which Ginzburg wishes to relate him?’

6 Ginzburg follows the Murray-Mayer-Runeberg interpretation of witchcraft. This has been brilliantly criticized with regard to his Night Battles in Cohn, Norman, Europe's inner demons: An inquiry inspired by the great witch hunt (London, 1975), pp. 223–4Google Scholar: ‘What Ginzburg found in his sixteenth century archives was in fact a local variant of what, for centuries before, had been the stock experience of the followers of Diana, Herodias or Holda. It has nothing to do with the ‘old religion’ of fertility postulated by M. Murray and her followers. What it illustrates is – once more – the fact that not only the waking thoughts but the trance experiences of individuals can be deeply conditioned by the generally accepted beliefs of the society in which they live.’ Ginzburg, has recently tried to answer Cohn's arguements in his ‘Présomptions sur le sabbat’, Annales ESC, XXXIX (1984), 341–54Google Scholar.

7 Ginzburg, , ‘A proposito della reccolta dei saggi storici di Marc Bloch’, Studi medievali, 3rd ser. VI (1965), 347–9Google Scholar; and in his preface to the Italian translation of Bloch, M., I re taumalurghi (Turin, 1973), p. xviiGoogle Scholar.

8 In The Night Battles, p. 45, Ginzburg had already witten that these traditions and myths are characterized by having ‘absolutely no connexion with the educated world’, but are not ‘metahistorical religious archetypes’ (p. 89). There is a clear continuity between the problem of The Night Battles and that of The Cheese and the Worms, (p. 156), where reference is made to the first book with a promise to develop better the theme of ‘shamanism’.

9 ‘Folklore, magia, religione’, p. 603, and Bakhtin, M., L'Oeuvre de F. Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance [1965], French translation (Paris, 1970)Google Scholar.

10 Ladurie, E. Le Roy, Les Paysans de Languedoc (Paris, 1966) I, 395–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Le Carneval de Romans (Paris, 1979)Google Scholar; on this author as well as on Ginzburg cf. Stone, L., ‘The revival of narrative: reflection on a new old history’, Past and Present, LXXXV (1979), 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who gives The Cheese and the Worms a definition probably not agreeable to its author; he thinks that Ginzburg tried to describe the intellectual and psychological agitation caused by the filtering downward of the Reformation's ideas. Cf. Hobsbawm, E. J, ‘The revival of Narrative: some comments’, Past and Present, LXXXVI (1980), 3–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Richerche di storia sociale e religiosa. VI, n.s. XI (1977), 167–8, 175–6Google Scholar and cf. p. 91 (my italics). Ginzburg claimed to be interested in ‘reconstructing the transmission of phenomena over long periods in extremely broad areas’. On p. 126 he insists upon a theme which does not seem to me to define the subject of his book in a realistic way. ‘Between the culture of the popular classes and that of the dominant classes, complex relationships have grown up in various historical periods; these are not uni-directional, but circular, as Jacques Le Goff has shown, and I have tried to show in my book’. But as Elliott pointed out in his review (see n. 5 above), there is a contradiction between the principle suggested in the preface to the book (‘a circular relationship composed of reciprocal influences’) and the numerous references to ‘an autonomous current of peasant radicalism’.

12 In his brilliant review, Elliott (see n. 5 above) has drawn attention to a reference by the anthropologist S. Ott to a Pyrenean village, where the villagers ‘understand and explain the process of human conception by reference to cheese-making’. As he points out, Menocchio was a good deal closer to the Pyrenees than he was to the Himalayas. Aristotle's De generatione animalium (739 b21–7) is mentioned by Ott; this passage is the source of ‘une image aristotélicienne inlassablement répétée’, that is, the idea of sperm ‘jouant un rôle coagulant identique á celui de la présure sur le lait’; cf. Jacquart, D. and Tomasset, C., ‘Albert le Grand et les problèmes de la sexualité’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, III (1981), 77Google Scholar. This topos is also commented on in a lesson on spontaneous generation held by Pomponazzi between 1503 and 1509 at Padua (Napoli, Nat., Libr., MS VIII. D. 80, fo. 71V): ‘Natura caseus potest coagulari ex coagulo eius et etiam aliis floribus et pinguedine muris; tamen ista agentia sunt diversa secundum speciem, licet producunt eundem effectum ut in pluribus’.

13 In his paraphrase of the Meteorologica Avicenna had added a codicillum de diluviis, which was thought to be a supplement to Plato's Timaeus. He also discussed the subject in the De animalibus, which was translated by Michael Scot and criticized by Averroes (Metaphysica II, c. 15, and Physica, VIII. C. 46). Through Averroes the question became topical in scholastical Aristotelian commentaries (Nardi (cf. n. 2 above) mentioned Albert Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Pietro d'Abano and Burlaeus).

14 Platonis opera (Venice, 1571), p. 120Google Scholar.

15 Il Pimandro di Mercurio Trismegistro, Italian translation Benci, T. (Florence, 1548)Google Scholar, footnotes; cf. Corpus hermtticum, ed. Nock, and Festugière, (Paris, 1945), I, 12 ffGoogle Scholar. Menocchio himself said that ‘Earth is mother’. Cf. Siculus, Diodorus, Delle antique historie (Florence, 1526), p. 8Google Scholar, where Earth is – as in the topos – mother as well as receptacle of life, matrix.

16 Calabri, Tiberii Russiliani Sextis, Apologeticus (Parma, 1519), fo. 20rGoogle Scholar. On this rare text cf. my Une réncamation de Jean Pic à l'époque de Pomponazzi, Wissenschaften, Abhandlungen der Mainzer Akademie der, 10 (Mainz, 1977)Google Scholar.

17 Il paese di Cuccagna (Turin, 1956), p. 4Google Scholar.

18 ‘Noterelle libertine’, Rivista storica italiana, LXXXVIII (1976), 792–802Google Scholar.

19 I have discussed this in ‘I problemi metodologici del necromante A. Nifo’, Medioevo, I (1975), 137 fGoogle Scholar. It is worth noting that Menocchio always refers to religions as ‘laws’ in the same way as Averroes does, and believes their value to be relative.

20 Ginzburg, C. and Ferrari, M., ‘La colombara ha aperto gli occhi’, Quaderni Storici, XXXVIII (1978), 631–9Google Scholar. Page references in the text are to the larger version printed in Alfabetismo e culture scritta (Perugia, 1978)Google Scholar.

21 Santoli, V., ‘Tre osscrvazioni su Gramsci e il folklore’ in his I canti popolari italiani (Florence, 1968)Google Scholar, andSatriani, L. M. Lombardi, Antropologia culture e analisi delta cultura subaltema (Rimini, 1976), pp. 24–5Google Scholar. Cf. in Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa (quoted n. 10) the observations made on this problem by K. Thomas (p. 141), J.-C. Schmitt p. 11) and J. Revel (p. 75).

22 ‘Poche storie. Un'intervista fiume di A. Sofri con C. Ginzburg’, Lotta continua, 17 February 1982; cf. the Germadn translation in the collection of essays on method and the history of art, Ginzburg, , Spurensuherungen (Berlin, 1983)Google Scholar and his article‘Vom finstern Mittelalter bis zum Blackout von New York – und zurück’, Freibeuttr, XVII (1983), 25–34Google Scholar.

23 Though closely connected with the questions of the studies discussed here, these works byGinzburg, (I costituti di don Pietro Manelfi (Florence and Chicago, 1970)Google Scholar; Giochi di Pazienza.Un seminario sul ‘Beneficio di Cristo’ in collaboration with Prosperi, A., (Turin, 1975))Google Scholar are less influenced by the populistic theme.

24 Il Nkodemismo (Turin, 1970)Google Scholar; cf. Kaegi's, W. review in Schweizerische Zt. f. Geschichte, XX (1970), 697Google Scholar.

25 Kalkoff, P., W. Capito im Dienste Erzbischof Albrecht von Mainz (1519–1523) (Berlin, 1970), pp. 2 ffGoogle Scholar.: ‘Nur ein so hervorragendes diplomatisches Talent wie Capito konnte in dieser exponierten Stellungjahrelang eine auf Schonung und Förderung der in ihren Anfängen noch leicht zu unterdrückten evangelischen Bewegung bedachte Politik durchführen’. Ginzburg is unaware of this study by Kalkoff, and dates the start of Kopfel's Nicodemism from the letter – certainly more clear and important, but dated as late as 1540: See Il Nkodemismo, pp. 139 ff., 207–13.

26 This letter from Mainz, 16 February 1521, is published by Böcking, E., Hutteni Operum Supplemtntum, II, 2 (Leipzig, 1864), 804–5Google Scholar. For the later letter published by Ginzburg as an appendix, cf. Fraenkel, P., ‘Bucer's memorandum of 1541 and a ‘Lettera nicodemitica’ of Capito’, Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, XXXVI (1974), 575–87Google Scholar. Biondi, A., ‘La giustificazione della simulazione nel Cinquecento’, in Eresia e riforma nell'Italia del Cinqutcenlo (Florence and Chicago, 1974), pp. 5–68Google Scholar, has criticized Ginzburg's work from other, serious points of view and using other documents. Cf. also Eire, C. M. N., ‘Calvin and Nicodemism: a reappraisal’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, X (1979), 45–69Google Scholar, which I cannot entirely subscribe to.

27 ‘High and low: the theme of forbidden knowledge in the XVIth and XVIIth century’, Past and Present, LXXIII (1976)Google Scholar. Ginzburg's researches on sixteenth-century heresy and his studies following in Bakhtin's footsteps, meet in this essay, which develops the idea of ‘tidy, polar categories’: ‘These categories, of course, have a cultural or symbolic meaning, as well as a biological one. Anthropologists have begun to elucidate the variable meaning of some of them…But none of these categories is so universal as the opposition between high and low’ (p. 31). Although Ginzburg claimed here to have taken his modes from Erwin Panofsky, there is more than a trace of Bakhtin's insistence on the high and low in Rabelais. Cf. Ivanov, V. V., Significato delle idee di Bachtin, in M. Bachtin (Bari, 1977), p. 97Google Scholar: ‘one of the main characteristics of M. M. Bakhtin 's book on the culture of the carnival, which provide an uncontested structure of the book's fundamental issues, is the fact that it is based on the analysis of some basic binary of hierarchical, spatial, material, etc’.

28 Cf. Pogatschnig, M., ‘Costruzioni nella storia. Sul metodo di Carlo Ginzburg’, Aut Aut, CLXXXI (1981), 3ff.Google Scholar, Who comments both on the Italian version of ‘High and Low’ “cf. n.27) published in the same journal (pp. 3 ff.), and on the debate held in Milan in the spring of 1980 on ‘Clues’ (cf. n. 29): ‘Paradigma indiziario e conoscenza storica. Dibattito su ‘Spie’ diC. Ginzburg’, Quaderni di storia, XII (1980)Google Scholar. See also Ginzburg, C. and Poni, C., ‘Il nome e il come: scambio ineguale e mercato storiografico’, Quaderni storici, XL (1979), 188Google Scholar: ‘definire la es microstoria e la storia in generale sdenza del vissuto’.

29 History Workshop, XI (1980), 5–29Google Scholar. The original Italian shorter version ‘Spie. Radici di un paradigma indiziario’, appeared in Rivista di storia contemporanea, (1978), pp. 1–14, and was of printed in the longer form in Gargani, A. (ed.), Crisi delta ragioru (Turin, 1979)Google Scholar.

30 L'Espresso, 10 February 1980.

31 Alfabeta, II, no. 11; also A. Negri, ‘Riflessioni in margine a Ginzburg’, Alfabeta, no. 11.

32 ‘La ragione e la spia’, Quaderni di storia, VI (1980), 17Google Scholar.

33 ‘Ancora sul senso comune di E. Grendi. Microstoria e indizi senza esclusioni e senza re illusioni’, Quademi storici, XLV (1980), 1121 fGoogle Scholar.

34 L'Espresso 6 July 1980. See also Vattimo, G., ‘L'ombra del neorazionalismo’, Aut Aut, CLXXV–VI (1980), 175–6Google Scholar. (This fascicule contains other comments on Ginzburg by Vegetti, Rovatti, Comolli and Muraro). Vattimo reproaches Ginzburg for lacking that ‘analysis of the I rationality of comprehension, of that Verstehen which has been – at least since the beginning’ of the twentieth century-one of the terms of reference of any debate on rationality;…Ginzburg's approach seems more open, but only because it is more indefinite. The fact that the problem is not dealt with in more depth and that the allusion to intuition – so carefully: introduced – remains just an allusion, makes it difficult to speak of the ‘paradigm of clues’ as a true paradigm…in Ginzburg the limitation of a perspective which ignores hermeneutics is more evident…Freud himself is given an exclusively Hegelian reading…I must confess that, though suggestive, Ginzburg's essay seems to be a piece in which the ‘Parisian’ way is too: limiting’ (pp. 23–4).

35 Studi medievali, 3rd ser. VII (1966), 1015–65Google Scholar.

36 ‘In margine al motto Veritas filia temporis’, Rivista storica italiana, LXXVIII (1965), 969–73Google Scholar.

37 Paragone Arte, XXIX (1978), 339, pp. 3–24Google Scholar.

38 See the note by Zorzi, R. in Comumth (1981), p. xviGoogle Scholar.

39 Warnke, M., ‘Vorwort' to Ginzburg, , Erkundmgen ttber Piero (Berlin, 1981)Google Scholar. But he suggests that Ginzburg might have paid more attention to the ‘Cognitive style’ which Baxandall had analysed in Piero (p. 13).

40 ‘Died in Battesimo, quattr o in Flagellazione’, L'Europeo, 22 June 1981. Cf. De Seta, Cesare, ‘Manifesto per storici’, Il Mattino, 6 08 1982Google Scholar.

41 He states in his review in Zeitschrift Jür Kunstgeschxchte, XLV (1982), 327Google Scholar: ‘Man kann Ginzburg nicht einmal vorwerfen, dass er nicht gleich im ersten Anlauf uberzeugen kann. Das ware auch fur die Zunft der Kunsthistoriker allzu blamabel geworden. So läuft den Ginzburgs Studie einerseits auf eine erfolgreiche Rodung des kunsthistorischen Thesenwaldes und andereseits auf eine eigene Anpflanzung hinaus, an der wiederum manche Zweige beschnitten werden miissen. In ersten Falle kann man ihm nur applaudieren, wenn er strenge Masstäbe anlegt un d eine ‘Hygiene’ der Ikonologie verlangt, die in den Hānden von Nicht-Historiken ausser Rand und Band geraten ist. Im anderen Fall macht der Leser die angenehme Erfahrung, dass es auch Historiker schwer haben, die historischen Bilderrätsel aufzulösen und uns zu Eingeweihten zu machen. Die nicht-verbalen Strukturen solcher Bilder sind auf eine Art und Weise kodiert, für die keine durchgängigen Regeln gelten können. Man muss zugeben, dass in diesem Medium Piero Schwierigkeiten ganz eigener Art bietet, un d gerade das sollte einmal zum Gegenstand einer Untersuchung gemacht werden. Die historische Position dieser hermetischen Bildsprache in der Geschichte der kiinstlerischen Syntax des Quattrocento ware dann das Thema’.