Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method

by Carlo Ginzburg

Book Overview

Carlo Ginzburg considers how we assign historical context to events.

More than twenty years after Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method was first published in English, this extraordinary collection remains a classic. The book brings together essays about Renaissance witchcraft, National Socialism, sixteenth-century Italian painting, Freud's wolf-man, and other topics. In the influential centerpiece of the volume Carlo Ginzburg...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1421409909
• ISBN13: 9781421409900
• Release Date: October 2013
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

History vs. Science

I read this book after reading The Cheese and the Worms and found only one essay of interest, the one of the title. There, Ginzburg argues that history cannot be studied profitably from the scientific (meaning Galilean, or mathematical physics) standpoint, there is inadequate empirical basis for it. Rather, the methods of art history and Sherlock Holmes (clues in small exceptional things, like a deformed fingernail) provide better results. I think he may have something here. For the opposite viewpoint, which in my opinion is wrong, see Buchannan's Ubiquity.