Microhistory and world history

CARLO GINZBURG

Microhistory, conceived as an analytical approach to history, far from being opposed to world history, may in fact be regarded as an indispensable tool of it.¹1 will try to develop this point through a case study.

But a preliminary scrutiny of the two terms involved - “world history”, “microhistory” - is needed.

The potential of microhistory

1. Two related phenomena shape our approach to world history today: the enormous expansion of the human species and the growing fragility of the natural environment. Since the world is threatened, world history must be written as if we were “in a moment of danger”.² But “history” itself, in its double meaning, is becoming more and more fragile. On the one hand, the ambivalent potentialities of biological engineering open up barely imaginable perspectives, which in a not too distant future might significantly affect the human species and its deeds (res gestae) as well as the fabric of social life. On the other, a globalized world challenges the historian’s craft (historia rerum gestarum) on many levels. More or less disguised ethnocentrically oriented narratives look unacceptable, but analytic approaches based on first-hand evidence are incompatible with the breadth and scope of the enquiry. One may object that a solution exists: comparison. However, Marc Bloch’s 1928 essay calling for comparative history looks, retrospectively, to be an unfulfilled

Many thanks to Maria Luisa Catoni for her comments.

¹ L. Putnam, “To Study the Fragments/whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World”, Journal of Social History 39 (2006): 615-30; F. de Vivo, “Prospect or Refuge? Microhistory, History on the Large Scale”, Cultural and Social History 7 (2010): 387-97; F. Trivellato, “Is there a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?”, California Italian Studies 2 (2011).

² W. Benjamin, “Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte, vi”, in G. Bonola and M. Ranchetti (eds.), Sul Concetto di Storia (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), p. 26. promise.^{^[334]} Bloch, a sharp critic of erudite scholars who knew more and more about less and less, was also aware that knowing less and less about more and more would not have been an acceptable alternative. “There is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method - and that is impossible”, Evans-Pritchard once famously said. Thus neither comparison nor microhistory should be taken for granted as conceptual tools.

2. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), the Scottish philosopher David Hume analyzed the moral obligation generated by promise, which he regarded as “one of the most mysterious and incomprehensible operations that can possibly be imagin'd, and may even be compar'd to transubstanti- ation, or holy orders, where a certain form of words, along with a certain intention, changes entirely the nature of an external object, and even of a human nature”. Hume justified this seemingly far-fetched analogy in the following terms: “as those other monstrous doctrines are merely priestly inventions, and have no public interest in view, they are less disturb'd in their progress by new obstacles; and it must be own'd, that, after the first absurdity, they follow more directly the current of reason and good sense”.^{^[335]} In referring to theology as a cognitive model whose consistency was due to its lack of contact with the real world, Hume was possibly echoing, in inverted form, an argument put forward by Galileo in his Dialogo dei massimi sistemi: a mathematical scientist (filosofo geometra) who wants to verify his formal models in everyday reality must take away material obstacles.^{^[336]} Likewise, in order to identify promise in its purest form, Hume took away the material obstacles of the contradictory effects that promise generates in “the interest of society”, looking at the theologians' “monstrous doctrines” as a formal model.

Hume took Galileo as a model; contemporary historians (and particularly microhistorians) may take Hume as a model. But rather than referring to theology, they may refer to a philosophical tradition that reworked theology in a secular perspective.^{^[337]}

3. In his early work On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710), the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico pointed out that mathematics and geometry, being based on human fictions, are comparable to God's knowledge, since in them “verum et factum convertuntur” (what is true and what is made converge). As a general rule, Vico remarked, “the criterion and rule of the true is to have made it”. Therefore, physics cannot be regarded as true knowledge, as the objects of their enquiries cannot be truly known by human beings.^{^[338]}

This idea was taken from the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose Latin works Vico must have read with ambivalent feelings.^{^[339]} Mathematics and geometry, Hobbes argued, can be the object of rigorous demonstration insofar as they are the result of human construction. Likewise, justice and good, as objects of politics and ethics, can be an object of knowledge since we made them.^{^[340]} Vico's initial reluctance to accept the last point can be attributed to his rejection of Hobbes's mechanistic philosophy. We may imagine Vico pondering over the opening page of Leviathan in Latin, which Hobbes had translated from his own English:

Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal (...). For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man.^{^[341]}

Society as an artefact is also at the very centre of Vico's Scienza nuova, but with a major difference, due to the intervention of divine Providence: “for out of the passions of men each bent on his private advantage, for the sake of which they would live like wild beasts [bestioni] in the wilderness, it [Providence] has made the civil institutions by which they may live in human society”.^{^[342]} This emphasis on Providence, evident since the first version of Scienza nuova (1725), was due to a large extent to Vico's encounter with the Italian translation of Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelie (1681) (as he pointed out in his Autobiography, Vico had no French).¹² Bossuet's chronology left an indelible mark - a fingerprint - on Vico's chronology, as both gave the year 2737 after the world's creation as a date for Ninus, the Assyrian king, founder of the city of Nineveh.1³ But Vico's Providence had no overt Christian overtones: in the Scienza nuova Jesus has no role whatsoever.

The Hobbesian overtones of Vico's “bestioni” have been repeatedly stressed. But Hobbes is also indirectly evoked at a crucial juncture, to explain the passage of bestioni, early brutish humans, to civilization:

In such fashion the first men of the gentile nations, children of nascent mankind, created things according to their own ideas. But this creation was infinitely different from that of God. For God, in his purest intelligence, knows things, and, by knowing them, creates them; but they, in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was quite corporeal, they did it with marvelous sublimity; a sublimity such and so great that it excessively perturbed the very persons who by imagining did the creating (che fingendo le si criavano) for which they were called “poets”, which is the Greek for “creators” (...). Of this nature of human institutions it remained an eternal property, expressed in a noble phrase of Tacitus, that frightened men vainly “no sooner imagine than they believe” (fingunt simul creduntque).¹⁴

“Fingendo le si criavano”: the Latin verb fingere, anticipating Tacitus’s powerful line, means “to mould” as well as “to feign”, and therefore emphasizes artifice.^{^[343]} In the case of those primitive human beings, “poeti" - etymologically “makers” - the act of making is intertwined with self-deception. Bestioni became humans by imagining that a false divinity, Jove, watched them and taught them modesty and awe, after which they refrained from copulating in the open air like beasts.1^{^[344]} Vico shares with Hobbes the idea that society is an artificial construction, which originates from awe.1^{^[345]}

4. “But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind”: Vico’s solemn words opened a path that led to a new approach to human history.^{^[346]} Although he was departing from Hobbes, he was still taking inspiration from him.

The motto Nosce te ipsum (Know yourself), one reads in the first Scienza nuova, taught the inhabitants of Athens “to meditate upon the nature of their own mind, realizing that human reason is shared by everybody”.^{^[347]} At the very beginning of Leviathan Hobbes commented upon the same motto:

Nosce teipsum, Read thy self. (...) the characters of mans heart, blotted and confounded as they are, with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous doctrines, are legible onely to him that searcheth hearts. And though by mens actions wee do discover their designe sometimes; yet to do it without comparing them with our own (...) is to decypher without a key.^{^[348]}

Reading hearts: Hobbes developed this metaphor (which reworked the traditional one of reading the book of nature) by adding references to “blotted and counfounded characters” and to a “key” needed for decyphering”. Vico went a step further, by taking Hobbes's metaphor literally: to decipher the world of history (“questo mondo civile”) distant in time and space, written in jotted down (scribillati) characters, one must learn its language, relying upon “philology” in a broad sense, which included antiquarianism.²1 Hobbes regarded “histories” as mere collections of facts; Vico's “new science” has been retrospectively identified with historical anthropology.^{^[349]} ^{^[350]} For both of them, the ultimate test of their “reading” was provided by an inward-looking, mental experiment; but their respective aims were different, if not opposite.^{^[351]} Hobbes's aim was to find in oneself the same passions read in other hearts: “yet, when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be onely to consider, if he also find not the same in himself.For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.”^{^[352]} Vico's aim was an act of mental appropriation (“we will have a true experiment if things conceived here will become identical with the inner substance of our soul”), which consisted in getting rid of anachronism, of “our tendency to imagine them relying upon our present, rather than their own very ancient ideas”.^{^[353]} The principles of Vico's new science had to be found “within the modifications of our own human mind”.^{^[354]}

Hobbes's and Vico's convergence on the issue of thought experiments can be easily explained. Vico had access to Hobbes's Dialogus physicus, sive de natura aeris (1661), an attack on Boyle's experiments based on the air pump, which were dismissed as wrong and philosophically irrelevant. In his Autobiography Vico seemingly followed in Hobbes's footsteps, rejecting Boyle and his “experimental physics... for it contributed nothing to the philosophy of man”.^{^[355]}

But here another divergence emerges. In the dedication to the Dialogus, Hobbes considers “ingenuity” (ingenium) - i.e. Boyle's experiments - as inferior to “method” (ars), i.e., his own philosophical approach to nature, based on the study of motion.^{^[356]} In another passage he makes a similar opposition, pointing out that the air pump's constructor was “a mechanic, not a philosopher”.^{^[357]} ^{^[358]} Vico, by contrast, notes in De antiquissima that in Latin “ingenium” and “natura” are synonymous, and follows this with a rhetorical question: “Is this due to the fact that, like nature generates physical objects, human ingenuity (ingenium) generates mechanical objects, and like God is the artisan of nature, man is the God of artificial things?”

Here Vico's principle verum et factum convertuntur was reworked with a variation: verum et fictum convertuntur. Theory and practice are contiguous: “Therefore geometry and arythmetic, which teach all this, are the most investigated sciences; and their best practitioners are called in Italian 30

ingegnieri”.

6. Vico's posthumous European fame began with the French historian Jules Michelet's abridged translation of the third edition of Scienza nuova (1827), followed a few years later (1835) by a selection which included the Autobiography, the De antiquissima and other texts.^{^[359]} In Michelet's words, Vico announced that “le monde social (il mondo civile) est certainement l'ouvrage des hommes”.^{^[360]} It seems unlikely that a young German exile living in Paris in 1843-5, with his mind full of Hegelian and neo-Hegelian philosophy - Karl Marx - could have refrained from leafing through a book entitled Principes de la philosophie de l'histoire (1827), although he had no particular sympathy for its editor. Marx certainly read (or re-read) Vico in the new, nearly complete translation made by Cristina Trivulzio, Princess of Belgioioso - though published without her name - entitled La Science nouvelle (1844).^{^[361]} In a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle (1862), Marx transcribed the front page and a few passages of this new translation, which he recommended; he must have had a copy of La Science nouvelle on his desk at that moment.^{^[362]}

But did Marx read it as soon as it was published in 1844 - that is, before writing his Theses on Feuerbach (1845)? This question has been raised, and answered in the negative.^{^[363]} The critique of Feuerbach's philosophy, developed in the Theses, does not seem to imply a reading of Vico's work. But the issue might be re-examined in light of a famous footnote in the first volume of Marx's Capital (1867).^{^[364]} An allusion to John Wyatt's spinning machine (1735) in the text ignited a quick, compressed, nearly frantic chain of reasoning in the note:

1. Spinning machines probably existed already in Italy.

2. A “critical history of technique”, which does not exist yet, would show that eighteenth-century inventions were not due to single individuals.

3. Darwin has shown interest in the “history of natural technology” and in the “organs of plants and animals, which serve as instruments of production for sustaining life”. A rhetorical question follows: “Does not the history of the productive organs of man as a social being, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention?”

4. “Such a history would be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter.”

5. Technology “discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature (...) and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of [man's] social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them”.

6. “Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical.” True “materialistic method” which develops religious formations from “the actual relations of life” is opposed to “the abstract materialism of natural science”.^{^[365]}

In their youthful, unpublished German Ideology (1845) Marx and Engels had identified the difference between animals and men in the latter's ability “to produce the ways of sustaining their life”.^{^[366]} Now, under the impact of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) Marx extended this ability to animals and plants as well, comparing their organs to “instruments of production”. But how did the history of technology lead to Vico's idea that “man makes history”? In the aforementioned letter to Lassalle, Marx quoted from Bel- gioioso's anonymous translation a remark on ancient Roman jurisprudence as “very poetic (tres poetique) since it assumed as true facts which were not, and the other way round”.^{^[367]} The implications of the word “poetique”, and the contiguity between factum and fictum - in the double sense of fingere, “to forge" - emerged from the passage of Vico's Scienza nuova quoted in English translation above: “les premiers hommes des nations des Gentils... appelles poetes, mot qui signifie en grec createurs... effrayes en vain fingunt simul creduntque”^{^[368]} Both making and faking (or self-deceiving) were identified as turning points in the civilization process.

Marx might have also come across a praise of technology in a passage of Vico's De antiquissima, which Michelet (1835) translated as follows: “Est-ce parce que de meme que la nature engendre les choses physiques, de meme l'ingenium humain engendre les choses mecaniques? En sorte que Dieu est l'artisan de la nature, et l'homme le dieu de Tartificiel?"^{^[369]} The possibility that Marx read Vico's De antiquissima may seem far-fetched. But a reference to that text, possibly mediated by Marx, emerges from the recollections of his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue: “Vico said: ‘things are corporeal only for God, who knows everything; for men, who know only the outside, they are two-dimensional'. Marx conceived things like God.”^{^[370]} The passage, in Michelet's translation, read: Tobjet est un solide relativement a Dieu qui comprend toutes choses, une surface pour l'homme qui ne comprend que le dehors”.^{^[371]}

So when did Marx first come across Vico's writings? At the end of Capital’s footnote dealing with Darwin and Vico a reworking of the fourth thesis on Feuerbach suddenly emerges: “Every history of religion (...) that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical etc.”^{^[372]} Why did that youthful, unpublished text re-emerge twenty years later in a completely different context? Did Vico's name bring back an earlier reflection, a fragment that belonged to the same chronological layer of Marx's intellectual development?

7. These questions are perhaps unanswerable, but they must be raised, because Marx's footnote played a fundamental role in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century interpretations of Vico. The element which came to the forefront was society as an artefact - although with no reference to Hobbes (whose work, as we saw, inspired Vico on this issue). In his lectures on Marx's economic materialism, delivered to a socialist audience in 1884, Paul Lafargue opposed two milieux: the cosmic, or natural, and the artificial, “made by human art”, which had been analyzed, respectively, by Darwin and Marx - a Marx implicitly inspired by Vico.^{^[373]} A decade later, in an exchange with Jean Jaures, Lafargue stressed the continuity between Vico and Marx.^{^[374]} In a fin-de-siecle environment impregnated with Marxism, Vico's work had become the focus of feverish exchanges. In the Frenchjournal Le Devenir social Georges Sorel, a member of the journal's editorial board along with Paul Lafargue, published an essay on Vico, based on Michelet's abridged translation.^{^[375]} Once again, Sorel started from the footnote of Marx's Capital, as well as from Lafargue's opposition between natural and artificial milieux.^{^[376]}

The year before (1895), also in Le Devenir social, Antonio Labriola had provided a much more profound approach to Vico in an essay that enthralled the young Trotsky, jailed in Odessa.^{^[377]} “Man is the experimental animal par excellence” Labriola wrote, “therefore he has a history, or rather that is why he makes his own history”.^{^[378]} A few pages later Labriola unfolded some implications of this elusive sentence by asking a rhetorical question: “And had not Vico himself, a century before Morgan, turned the whole history into a process which man performs by himself, as it were through a continuous experimentation, i.e. discovering language, religions, manners and law?”^{^[379]}

History as a process, Labriola argued, implies discovery through experimentation, but historical knowledge implies experiment as well. On both sides (historia and historia rerum gestarum) men act in an artificial environment, produced by themselves, in which experiments can take place. In this perspective historical materialism and empirical sciences converge: “Historical materialism... starts from praxis: it is a theory of man as a worker, and regards science itself as a work. In this way it fulfills the meaning which is implicit in empirical sciences: with the experiment we get closer to things in their making, and we realize that things themselves are a kind of making, a production.”^{^[380]}

But Labriola's reading of Marx was intertwined with his reading of Vico. Understanding the attitudes of men who lived in the past is a difficult endeavour: we need “to reproduce within ourselves” the conditions which made the past possible. This means to acquire the interpretive abilities of “the linguist, the philologist, the critic, the prehistorian” - scholars who, through a long exercise, developed a kind of “artificial consciousness”.^{^[381]} This slow, painful approach is as remote as possible from both an empathic identification with the past and its resurrection. Interpreting history in a materialist perspective means “to remake in our mind, with method, the genesis and the complexity of the human life in its development through the centuries”.^{^[382]}

8. Reading Marx through Vico, reading Vico through Marx. In his youthful book La filosofia di Marx (1899) the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile made a distinctive contribution to this double, intertwined approach. Gentile's translation (the first ever) of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach was introduced by a commentary interpreting the notion of praxis through the lens of Vico's verum ipsum factum: we know what we make.^{^[383]} Gentile referred, quoting Labriola, to mental experiments - but then distanced himself from Labriola in reinterpreting Marx's praxis in idealistic terms, as spiritual activity. Retrospectively, one can identify in this move the precondition of Gentile's mature philosophy, a radical form of idealism that posited thinking as a pure act.^{^[384]}

The impact of Gentile's book (which Lenin regarded as one of the most remarkable written by a non-Marxist interpreter) has been repeatedly discussed.^{^[385]} The case of Benedetto Croce, Gentile's close friend and associate for many years, and to whom he dedicated La filosofia di Marx, is particularly relevant here.

9. At the very beginning of his Theory and History of Historiography, Benedetto Croce argued that “all history is contemporary history”, a thesis that has become widely accepted. Its meaning seems transparent: historians approach the past starting from the present, asking questions related to the time they live in.^{^[386]} But this was only one side of Croce's argument. The other, more esoteric side was articulated as follows:

But if we think and speak rigorously, the term “contemporaneous” can be applied only to that history which comes into being immediately in the act which is being accomplished, as consciousness of that act (...) just because this, like every act of the spirit, is outside time (of before and after) and is formed “at the same time” as the act to which it is linked.^{^[387]} The idealistic flavour of this passage (first published in 1912) is unmistakable. The act of thinking the past makes the past present - but this present has no chronological meaning, since the act of thinking is, by definition, beyond time. Here Croce was following in the footsteps of Gentile. In 1913 a theoretical divergence between the two thinkers emerged, and later a bitter political feud, due to Gentile's support of Fascism, put an end to their friendship. In the early stages of their debate, Gentile referred to Croce's thesis of “history as contemporary history” as an echo of his own thought - although, he remarked, his friend had refrained from taking the decisive step, identifying in the act of thinking “history and historiography, known and knowing, reality and knowledge, and therefore practice and theory”.⁶⁰ Gentile's impatience is understandable; he was a much more radical thinker than Croce. The ultimate (and ultimately theological) conclusion of Gentile's philosophy, which he labelled “pure act”, was self-creation (Autoctisis).⁶¹

All this may seem very abstruse, and utterly remote from the historian's everyday practice. But this story has a sequel, focusing on R. G. Collingwood, the British philosopher and archaeologist, and a concept that played a crucial role in his thought: “re-enactment”. This concept has been widely discussed over the last several decades; one book devoted to it dismisses “the common wisdom that he [Collingwood] was little more than a popularizer of Italian ideas”.⁶² But the rejection of this view often obscures Collingwood's intensive dialogue with Italian idealist philosophy.⁶³ Collingwood's notion of “re-enactment” was deeply indebted to Croce's idea that history “comes into being immediately in the act which is being accomplished, as consciousness of that act”. But was this idea Croce's, or Gentile's? As we have seen, this issue and

p. ιι, slightly modified); an earlier version of this chapter: “Storia, cronaca e false storie”, Atti della Accademia Pontaniana 42, ser. 2, 17 (1912): 1-32.

⁶⁰ The debate between Croce and Gentile is available in A. Romano (ed.), La cultura italiana del '900 attraverso le riviste (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), vol. iii, pp. 595-605 (see also p. 616).

⁶¹ G. Gentile, The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, W. W. Carr (trans.) (London: Macmillan and Co., 1922).

⁶² See for instance W. H. Dray, History as Re-enactment: R. G. Collingwood's Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 26-7; H. Saari, “Re-enactment: a study in R. G. Collingwood's Philosophy of History” (Abo: Abo Akademi, 1984); see W. J. van der Dussen, History as Science: the Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981).

⁶³ In his Autobiography (1939) Collingwood did not mention this issue: see A. Momigliano, “La storia antica in Inghilterra” [1945], in Sesto contributo (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1980), vol. ii, p. 761; H. S. Harris's introduction to G. Gentile, Genesis and Structure of Society (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1966), pp. 14-20; but see B. Croce, “In commemorazione di un amico inglese, compagno di pensiero e di fede” [1946], in B. Croce, Nuovepagine sparse (Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1948), vol. i, pp. 25-39, 32. its implications crystallized the theoretical divergences between the two philosophers. A closer look at Collingwood's intellectual trajectory will show that he incessantly wavered between them.^{^[388]}

In 1921 Collingwood identified a tension between a dualistic and an idealistic attitude within Croce's thought, which he might hopefully overcome through “a kind of philosophical suicide” in order to “reach the point of absolute idealism to which his [Croce's] successors Gentile and De Ruggiero had already carried his thought”.^{^[389]} In a series of unpublished lectures (1928) Collingwood paid homage to Croce, but then advanced his notion of reenactment in terms which echoed Gentile's philosophy: “The past as past has no existence whatever, consisting as it does of occurrences no longer occurring, events that have finished happening.” Therefore the only way of knowing past events is “through their re-enactment in the mind of the historian”.^{^[390]}

A decade later (1937) Collingwood expressed his complete agreement with Gentile's essay “The Transcending of Time in History”, which he summarized as follows: “Time is transcended in history because the historian, in discovering the thoughts of a past agent, re-thinks that thought for himself. It is known, therefore, not as a past thought, contemplated as it were from a distance through the historian's time telescope, but as a present thought living now in the historian's mind (...). This is an important idea, and I believe a true one.”^{^[391]}

This intellectual identification with Gentile did not last. In his Autobiography (1939) Collingwood illustrated what he meant by re-enactment. Referring to British Admiral Horatio Nelson's saying “in honour I won them [his decorations], in honour I will die with them”, Collingwood commented: a “re-enactment of Nelson's thought is a re-enactment with a difference (...) in some way there is not one thought, there are two different thoughts. What was the difference? No question in my study of historical method ever gave me so much trouble (...). The difference is one of context.”^{^[392]} This was Collingwood's solution to the puzzle: “Historical knowledge is the re-enactment of a past thought incapsulated in a context of present thoughts which, by contradicting it, confine it to a plane different from theirs.”^{^[393]}

Two different thoughts; two contexts. Collingwood was tacitly distancing himself from Gentile (unnamed, presumably for political reasons) who had written that “any act of thinking denies an act of thinking; it is a present in which the past dies; therefore it is a unity of those two moments”.^{^[394]} But Collingwood was also distancing himself from his own unpublished 1928 lectures, in which he had argued that “to re-enact the past in the present [for instance, reading Dante's poetry] is to re-enact it in a context which gives it a new quality. This context is the negation of the past itself.”^{^[395]}

10. Difference vs unity: the respective implications of the two perspectives are far-reaching. To conceive of history as an act of presentification is incompatible with the idea of historical research as inquiry (historia) and ultimately with the very idea of historical distance.^{^[396]} On the contrary, by insisting on the differences between the two contexts - related, respectively, to the re-enactment of the past and to the re-enacted past - one can unfold the implications of Collingwood's remark: historical truth belongs to “a complex consisting of questions and answers”.^{^[397]} But whose questions, whose answers? The so-called “re-enactment” is, I would argue (against Collingwood), the outcome of an asymmetrical dialogue between the observer’s and the actors’ respective idioms: between etic and emic data, as Kenneth Pike has labelled them.^{^[398]} Starting from inevitably anachronistic questions, the observer (the historian) may succeed in retrieving the actors’ elusive idioms: not through empathy but through philology in a broad sense, as advocated by Vico.^{^[399]} The re-enactment of the past, far from being a total resurrection of it, implies a limited, artificial experience - a repetition based on the dialogue between two contexts, the observer’s and the actors’.^{^[400]} To sum up: all history is comparative history.

The historian may re-enact the past (all kinds of pasts, not only past thoughts) relying upon a more or less successful thought experiment. In the case of “experimental archaeology”, this re-enactment may be supplemented by a material reconstruction of some (most often technological) aspects of the past. These experiments should not be confused with “historical re-enactments”, those contemporary versions of nineteenth-century pageants, whose actors share the naive illusion of reliving past experiences such as battles or episodes of everyday life by impersonating figures from the past.^{^[401]} Historical phenomena cannot (and should not) be staged twice, Marc Bloch wrote, echoing Durkheim. Therefore, he concluded, experiments are forbidden to historians. But thought experiments are accessible to both historians and scientists.

ιι. A long trajectory, based on an intricate series of readings, connects Hobbes to Vico, Vico to Marx, Marx to Gentile, Gentile to Croce, Croce (and Gentile) to Collingwood. In this trajectory, punctuated by discontinuities, the themes of artificiality and experiment surfaced over and over, although their original core (Hobbes interpreted by Vico) was marginalized and forgotten.^{^[402]} The neat idealistic model that Collingwood inherited from Croce and Gentile can be reworked (I argue) in two directions: first, to include material obstacles (impedimenti della materia, as Galileo labelled them); and second, to focus on the asymmetry between questions and answers, and their respective contexts. The result of this reworking is twofold: 1) all history is comparative history; 2) all history involves experiments - mental or otherwise. But some approaches to history are more experiment-oriented (and comparison-oriented) than others. Microhistory, being based on artificially selected cases, analyzed at a close distance, can be regarded as an extreme case of this experimental approach.^{^[403]}

The aim of this admittedly tortuous trajectory was to articulate the cognitive potential of microhistory as a response to the challenge provided by global history. The prefix “micro” has been often referred, misleadingly, to the size (either literal or metaphorical) of its objects, rather than to the analytic approach, which is at the very centre of microhistory as a project. But to say “analytic” is not enough; one should add “artificial”. One may evoke in this context the Italian historian Edoardo Grendi's well-known emphasis on the “normal exceptional”: the notion that a case-study focusing on an anomaly may be the best strategy to build up a generalization.^{^[404]} Likewise, an experiment based on a sample put under a microscope, in artificial conditions, may clarify a hidden norm. A close analysis of a single case study may pave the way to much larger (indeed, global) hypotheses.

A case study

i. A book entitled Conformite des coutumes des Indiens orientaux avec celles des Juifs et des autres peuples de l'antiquite, par Mr. De la C. +++, was published in Brussels in 1704.^{^[405]} The author, whose name appeared on the front page in a

truncated way, was a “Monsieur de la Crequiniere", a military officer who was said to have spent some time at Pondichery, the French enclave in Southeastern India.⁸² His background is unknown. On the basis of his vast, erudite readings, La Crequiniere might be considered an antiquarian. His Conformite provides an early, eloquent test of the hypothesis that the Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano advanced many years ago: that ethnography emerged from antiquarian learning.⁸³ At the beginning of his book, La Crequiniere recalled his initial plan: to collect information concerning different ways of tilling the land, of dressing and eating, different proverbs, language peculiarities, and “relics of antiquity". But having realized that this project would require an exploration of non-coastal regions still immune from contact with Europeans, La Crequiniere changed his mind. He decided to rely upon both his readings and his experience to compare the manners and customs of Indians and Jews.

In his Demonstratio evangelica (1679), Pierre-Daniel Huet, bishop of Avranches, had argued, with immense erudition, that all myths and rituals, in all religions, can be traced back to the Bible. La Crequiniere was familiar with Huet's work, but silently discarded its genetic approach, in favour (we would say today) of a morphological perspective in which he compared customs.⁸⁴ At the end of his book La Crequiniere left aside ethnographic or antiquarian comparisons, advancing a global reflection on two different, indeed opposed, worlds: Europe and the Orient. In the latter he included both Indians and Jews, considering the differences between them, and even more those between contemporary Jews and Biblical Hebrews, absolutely irrelevant.

As a young man Claude Fleury, later to become a famous church historian, read Homer's poems and the Bible through the lens of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes as oriental books.⁸⁵ Twenty-five years later La

C. Ginzburg, “Provincializing the World: Europeans, Indians, Jews (1704)”, Postcolonial Studies 14 (2011): 135-50 (here developed on the basis of new evidence).

⁸² In a letter dated “Pondichery, October 1st”, La Crequiniere refers to a testimony in his favour by Franςois Martin (1634-1706), Pondichery's first governor (Archives Nationales, Colonies, C² 65,100-1) (many thanks are due to Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who sent me a copy of the document).

⁸³ A. Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian” (1950), in Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 1979), pp. 67-206; A. Momi- gliano, “Prospettiva 1967 della storia greca” (1967), in Quarto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1969), pp. 43-58.

⁸⁴P. Alphandery, in Revue de Vhistoire des religions 47 (1923): 294-305.

⁸⁵ N. Hepp, Deux amis d’Homere au xvιιe siecle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970); C. Fleury, Ecrits de jeunesse, N. Hepp and V. Kapp (eds.) (Paris: Champion, 2003), pp. 153-81; see also M. Finkelberg and G. G. Stroumsa, Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (Leiden: Brill, 2003); G. G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Crequiniere, unaware of Fleury's unpublished notes on Homer, looked at Europe and the Orient in terms of an opposition between modernity and antiquity. Europe, La Crequiniere argued, was dominated by fashions imposed by courts, by luxury, by an endless search for novelty. The Orient was dominated by a submissive attitude towards the law, and a rejection of all sorts of change - which implied, La Crequiniere remarked, giving suddenly (and ambiguously) voice to “an Antiquary or an Austere Man”, a life closer to nature.⁸⁶ La Crequiniere's contradictory attitude may be compared to a shadow cast by the Enlightenment: Europe spoke on behalf of colonized people at the very moment at which it was colonizing the world.

One year after its publication in Brussels, Conformite was translated into English and also included in a strategic position, as an anonymous text, in Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723), the huge, highly influential work edited by Jean-Frangois Bernard and illustrated by Bernard Picart.⁸⁷

2. La Crequiniere's Conformite had an ill-fated sequel, documented by a volume preserved at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris (ms. occidentaux franςais 9723).⁸⁸ The opening page displays a royal privilege, dated Versailles, April 9,1707, authorizing “Sieur de La Crequiniere" to publish a book entitled Des Indiens orientaux et de la Conformite de leurs Coutumes avec celles des Juifs et des autres Peuples de l'Antiquite. This was, a handwritten front page explained, “the second edition, revised and augmented by the author” of the book published, under a slightly different title, in Brussels in 1704, “by an officer who had spent several years in India”. (La Crequiniere not only preserved his anonymity but to a certain extent reinforced it.) Each page from the first edition of Conformite had been pasted onto a large sheet of paper, including corrections in the margins as well as additions, which, in some cases, covered several pages. They can be attributed to three different hands: a copyist, La Crequiniere himself and a professional reader who left his statement and signature on page 162, after the last page of the first edition: “I read, following the orders of Mr Chancellor, a book entitled Des Indiens

Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 49-61.

⁸⁶ La Crequiniere, The Agreement of the Customs of the East Indies with those of the Jews (London, 1705; reprint New York: AMS Press, 1999), pp. 136-7.

⁸⁷ J.-F. Bernard and B. Picard, Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Amsterdam: ChezJ. F. Bernard, 1723), Part I, Part II, pp. 7-50; the attribution of the English translation of La Crequiniere's Conformite to John Toland is questionable (many thanks to Giovanni Tarantino for his remarks on this issue).

⁸⁸ I follow the most recent pagination, amounting to 251 pages (recto and verso). orientaux etc. I found it full of erudition; it deserves to be delivered to the public. Done in Paris, July 28, 1705. Raguet.”

However, despite the approval of Gilles-Bernard Raguet, the Royal Censor, duly followed by the Royal privilege, the second, revised edition of the Conformite was never published. This may have been because at that time, La Crequiniere was for unknown reasons jailed in the Bastille.^{^[406]}

3. The Parisian manuscript preserves the traces of a dialogue between Raguet and La Crequiniere, the censor and the censored. Presumably the two men belonged, at very different levels, to the same institution: the Compagnie des Indes Orientales. Raguet was the Company's spiritual director, La Crequiniere a minor officer. They shared a passion for learning, but whether they ever met, we do not know.

Born in Namur in 1668, Raguet died in Paris in 1748. Having become a priest, he entered the St Sulpice Company. Cardinal Fleury put him, along with other men of learning, in charge of the education of the Dauphin, later to become Louis xv. Between 1705 and 1721 Raguetwas a member of the board of the Journal des sfavans, the oldest academic journal in Europe. He published a translation, with additions and appendices, of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis.^{^[407]} Moreover, he wrote (although the attribution is contested) a dialogue, which intervened in an ongoing debate, elicited by Mabillon's De re diplomatica, on different methods of distinguishing ancient charters from forgeries.

Later, as a spiritual director of the Compagnie des Indes, Raguet wrote a tract entitled Du domaine et des limites de la Louisiane, which remained unpublished, stressing the legitimacy of French pretensions to Louisiana against the British attempt to colonize it (Louisiana had been entrusted to Raguet's spiritual care on May 30, 1724). One of the arguments Raguet put forward against the British read: “Instead of inspiring [natives] with the principles of religion and civilization, the only things that we can give them in exchange for their lands and their liberty, they [the British] increase their corruption and enslave them through unheard of vices.”^{^[408]}

Raguet unhesitatingly presented the diffusion of Christian faith and civilization (police) as the only justifications for colonial expansion. The natives' “natural rights” to their own lands and bodies were recognized at the very moment at which they were suppressed. One detects an ambivalent attitude, comparable to the one displayed in La Crequiniere’s Conformite, censored by Raguet himself nearly twenty years earlier.

4. The handwritten materials assembled for the second, never published, edition of Conformite show that La Crequiniere knew not only Latin but Greek as well. The range of his erudite references is astonishing. He shifted from Greek and Latin pagan texts to the Fathers, including St Augustine and Clement of Alexandria, and then to contemporary scholars, disregarding confessional affiliations - from the Dominican friar Noel Alexandre, to the Calvinist pastor Etienne Morin, the professor of oriental languages in Amsterdam, to the great Anglican hebraist John Spencer, and so forth.

One example will illustrate La Crequiniere’s way of working. In a chapter on perfumes, to be included in the second edition, he advanced textual emendations to the Vulgate and to the Septuagint for their translations of Isaiah, 18:2 and 18:7. La Crequiniere (who had no Hebrew) substituted Jerome’s “dilaceratam” (torn) with “depilatam” (shaven), comparing the custom of head shaving among ancient Egyptians and present-day Moors faithful to Islam.^{^[409]} On the next page, La Crequiniere commented upon the word “sisoen” (krobulon, a hairknot on the top of one’s head) used in the Septuagint translation of Leviticus 19:27, on the one hand evoking Mongolian and Indian headdresses, and on the other quoting passages from Martial, Petronius, Juvenal and “an ancient scholiast”.^{^[410]} La Crequiniere also implicitly referred to Samuel Bochart's Geographia sacra, whose comment on Leviticus 18:27 must have inspired his own emendation of Isaiah 18:2 and 18:7.^{^[411]} This imaginative way of combining different texts was shaped by the experience of a very special kind of antiquarian, a man who could make a passing reference to things he had seen “not only in Guinea but in other parts of America and Asia which I visited”.^{^[412]}

5. All this might have elicited the curiosity of La Crequiniere’s censor - especially if he was the author of Histoire des contestations sur la diplomatique, avec l'analyse de cet ouvrage compose par R. P. dom Jean Mabillon, first published anonymously in Paris in 1708, then attributed to the Jesuit Lallemant and finally (and more convincingly) to the abbe Raguet.^{^[413]} One of the participants in the dialogue is an abbe, who apparently expressed the author's point of view. He openly criticized Barthelemy Germon, the Jesuit who had opened hostilities against De re diplomatica, the founding text of diplomatics written by the Benedictine erudite Jean Mabillon: “Unfortunately Father Germon (...) is not familiar enough with antiquity, and therefore he regards as monstrous what has no conformity with our customs [moeurs].”^{^[414]} What does “conformity of customs” mean? - a reader of La Crequiniere's Con- formite des coutumes might ask. It means, explained the counsellor (another participant in the dialogue) orthographic usages: “Father Germon... apparently knows that customs [moeurs] change according to the differences of times and places... The difference in time shows that our ancestors spoke and wrote in ways which were different from ours.”^{^[415]}

Perhaps the abbe Raguet, who in his youth had sent a letter to Mabillon, transmitting the decipherment of an inscription concerning “the ancient, and nearly unknown city of Alauna, which is in the process of coming back to light”, was not the author of Histoire des contestations.^{^[416]} And the author of Histoire des contestations possibly never read La Crequiniere's Conformite des coutumes. But the semantic density of the word moeurs is indisputable, and revealing. The same attention to orthographic particularities related to specific times and places, minutely analyzed in Histoire des contestations, could be used to analyze customs shared by populations different from one's own. In his Moeurs des Israelites, Cardinal Fleury, Raguet's protector, mentioned Hebrews, Turks, Indians and Chinese, arguing that temporal and spatial distance reinforced each other:

If we take into account these two kinds of distance, we will not be surprised to find that the people who lived in Palestine three thousand years ago had customs different from ours; on the contrary, we would be surprised by any practices that were similar (conforme).^{^[417]}

Antiquarian knowledge (and philology) gave birth to ethnography - forms of knowledge which have been forms of domination as well.

6. The second edition of La CrequiniereT book was supposed to include a new chapter entitled “On the Indians' ideas concerning the Europeans and their way of living with them”. A passage from this will show the direction taken by La Crequiniere's thoughts: “The Greeks and later the Romans, notwithstanding their intelligence and civilization, have been the most unfair and the most blind in their judgement of other populations, regarding them as barbarians simply because they were not like them, and they did not display the same richness, luxury, grandeur and magnificence.”^{^[418]} ^{^[419]}

La Crequiniere's gesture, distancing himself from the ancient roots of European civilization, paved the way for a general reflection:

If there is some something which requires a preliminary suppression of our prejudices before expressing our judgement, this is the way of living of other populations. We have to free ourselves from our assumptions, insofar as they are always very favourable to ourselves, and very hostile towards what is different from us; but rarely are we able to form a disinterested judgement on this issue; and all populations share this weakness with us.

These remarks introduced an effort to reverse the perspective, putting the observer - 17 years before Montesquieu's Lettres persanes - in the place of the other:

In Europe there is grandeur and magnificence everywhere; social relationships are stronger, and at the same time more relaxed than in the Oriental countries; there are among us people profoundly learned in every possible field; fine arts never were as sublime as they are today in Europe. But, all this notwithstanding, Indians consider themselves superior to us, and wiser than us; they look at us as if we were infinitely inferior to them, and believe they are right in judging us this way.1^o2

A long tradition, from Herodotus to Montaigne and onwards, focused on the diversity of customs among different populations. La Crequiniere relied upon it, although, as he dryly pointed out, only a few people are able to hide, behind a veil of civilization and courtesy, an “essence” shared by all humans: the implacable search for one's interest. Indians are not an exception; they are, like La Bruyere said about courtiers, comparable to marble - polished and hard.^{^[420]} ^{^[421]} Recalling his own experiences, La Crequiniere commented on the Indians' attitude: “First of all, we must say that Indians consider us as profane and polluted people, and limit their exchanges with us as much as possible, and only within the limits of their interests (...). They cannot have familiarity with people who eat all kinds of animals, and especially cows; with people who drink wine and sometimes can be seen drunk in public” and so on. His Indian servant, La Crequiniere recalled in admiration, preferred to fast the whole day rather than share food with him.1⁰⁴ A remarkable exercise in ethnographic fieldwork.

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7. Sometimes Raguet expressed his disagreement on the margins of the manuscript. “Where did he find this?” Raguet impatiently wrote, reacting to La Crequiniere's suggestion that Jacob's dream (Gen. 28:18) was an example of a widespread ancient practice before starting a journey.¹⁰⁵ But La Crequiniere's re flections on the Indians' attitude towards the Europeans bear no signs of censorship. The reversal of perspective - a potentially subversive gesture - did not challenge God's revelation. But when La Crequiniere dared to make a gesture in that direction, albeit in a twisted and tortuous way, Raguet did not fail to react. After a detailed survey of a long series of texts on the diffusion of circumcision among Egyptians and other populations, La Crequiniere had written:

It would be possible to find more reasons to prove that Jews received circumcision from Heaven as a mark of distinction from other populations which had imitated them in that practice [what follows in the manuscript has been crossed over] but it seems to me that those I have presented will suffice to make clear the danger which would emerge if we would admit the opposite argument; therefore I am surprised that the latter has been shared by so many people, including two notable contemporaries; because those assumptions, if accepted, would lead to some dangerous consequences for a partisan of novelty, who could conclude that Abraham, and then Moses, shaped their cults by mixing up other religions: and since they took from Gentiles the main seal of their justification, they could have also taken everything else. Deists used those arguments without relying upon other weapons offered by our theologians; in fact, I am convinced that if the famous book De tribus impostoribus (On the Three Impostors) were not a

¹⁰⁴ BnF, ms. occ. fr. 9723, 122 r.

ghost, which never existed in reality, its possible author would not have refrained from using arguments as effective as these.¹⁰

By referring to the non-existent author of an allegedly non-existent book (since the Middle Ages only its scandalous title had been circulating) La Crequiniere advanced, through a hypothetical sentence articulated in the mode of unreality, a quasi-deist thesis. The diffusion of circumcision was just one example of practices that biblical Judaism shared with other religions. The implication was obvious: the very idea of revelation was absurd. In a chapter on idolatry and its causes, rewritten for the second edition, La Crequiniere explained that in the domain of religion all evils were originally something good, “all lies sung by poets were born from truth, from the source of the religion we are still professing”.^{^[422]} ^{^[423]}

Which religion? Who are “we”? Here is La Crequiniere's answer: “Heaven, earth, the regular movement of stars is an eyewitness of the existence of a God, but the strongest and most convincing evidence the humans had consisted in the secret movements of their heart which directed them, even unwillingly, towards something higher and larger” than the ephemeral creatures they saw before them. “The unanimous consensus of all nations and all centuries”, La Crequiniere went on, should refute the atheists and their frivolous arguments, compelling them to “acknowledge a Supreme Being (un Etre supreme) on which everything depends”.^{^[424]} The expression “Etre supreme” recurs twice in the same page. It obviously excluded divine revelation.

The abbe Raguet read the page and refrained from commenting on it. No words, no signs, no cross overs. At the end of the manuscript Raguet wrote that La Crequiniere's book was “full of erudition” and recommended its publication.

8. The case analyzed here is doubly anomalous. First of all, in terms of evidence: in early modern Europe censorship was a widespread practice, but examples of such a documented dialogue between the censor and the censored are rare.^{^[425]} Second, in terms of content: La Crequiniere stands out as a precocious, isolated figure, in part because we know so little about his background, his activities, or his connections. But one might turn this relative lack of information into a virtue, by stressing the artificiality of the experiment. The Parisian manuscript would configure itself like a space in which two forces clash, alternating conflict and interaction. We may test our interpetation over and over, and possibly disprove it.

The ultimate, unexpected complicity between Raguet and La Crequiniere qualifies the hypothesis advanced above. What appeared as an ambivalence within the Enlightenment must be understood in the framework of the Enlightenment's Christian roots.

9. Ambivalence, a unique and durable feature of Christianity, is the result of Christianity's relationship with Judaism. A considerable part of the Gospels is, literally, a reworking of fulfilled prophecies - first of all, passages from Isaiah - into narratives. The Christian appropriation of the Hebrew Bible, and the notion of Christianity as verus Israel, implied a reversal of the historical relationship between the two religions. What emerged from it was a combination of continuity and discontinuity, deference and contempt, inclusion and denial. This ambivalent attitude produced not only two reading perspectives (allegorical and literal) for the Hebrew Bible, but the construction of the very notion of historical perspective. The undoubtedly much weaker Christian ambivalence towards pagan images and texts shows that we are not facing an imaginary “essence”, but a lasting historical phenomenon. These cognitive tools - distance, perspective, different reading strategies - worked as weapons in European colonial expansion.^{^[426]}

The relationship between an experiment and its potential implications is always asymmetrical. La Crequiniere's tendency to speak, alternatively, on behalf of the colonizers and the colonized can be inscribed in a much larger phenomenon. An individual case may contribute to the reformulation of an infinitely larger question: what made Europe's conquest of the world possible? Microhistory and macrohistory, close analysis and global perspective, far from being mutually exclusive, reinforce each other.

Microhistory and world history

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