ARTICLE AND ESSAYS Visions in a Ninth-Century Village: an Early Medieval Microhistory

As historians begin to take the ‘global turn’ and to measure up the advantages of ‘big data’ history, it should not be a surprise that microhistory is if anything enjoying a revival. Contrary to the implicit assertion of David Armitage and Jo Guldi in their recent book, The History Manifesto, microhistory is not just a history of the very small, a recklessly antiquarian immersion in the tiny and obscure – or at least, it ought not to be. In its origins, it was a method that embraced ‘the minute analysis of a circumscribed documentation’, linked to a desire to go beyond the elite perspectives of traditional political history while retaining a sense of contingency and possibility neglected by the social history of the 1960s and 1970s. When Carlo Ginzburg wrote about Menocchio the miller, or when Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrote about Montaillou, they were not avoiding big historical questions, they were trying to answer them. In the hands of these historians, microhistory was more about changing how we see the bigger picture than filling in the gaps: so it fits very well together with the global and the statistical. Through the work of historians such as John Arnold, microhistory has continued to play a significant part in the study of the European Middle Ages in general. But what about the early Middle Ages in particular, that is to say Europe before the year 1000? To be sure, the ‘small worlds’ of certain regions in this period have been explored to the extent that caches of documentary records permit, usually in areas relatively free from elite control. There have been some fine, sensitive case-studies of local officials and other ‘rural elites’, based on surviving elements of their archives. Battered old manuscripts of pastoral care have much to tell us about local priests across the early medieval Latin West, while archaeology is providing fresh evidence all the time about the material conditions of existence in the period. Yet while enquiries of this kind can reveal much about the lives of fairly lowstatus people, this is not exactly the recovery of lost voices, or only very indirectly so: these are detailed case-studies more than microhistory as such. If microhistory is a method that seems rather to have passed the study of the European early Middle Ages by, it is not historians who are to blame, but their sources. These are generally not rich enough to sustain an approach that could properly be termed microhistorical: there is simply no