Method and Perspective

This paper belongs to the “Theory” section. It makes me feel a bit embarrassed, since I think that there is no such thing as the “Theory of Microhistory”. There are, of course, several theoretical issues to discuss in connection with microhistory, but none of them are distinctively or exclusively microhistory-issues. Maybe we can get the “Theory of Microhistory” if we add up all the theoretical characteristics once were ascribed to microhistory: we have to pursue a name through the archives; it must be an “exeptional normal”; we have to take care for both the lived experience and the invisible structures in which this experience is articulated; we have to invite the reader to take part in the process of research and interpretation; we have to confine ourselves to some Cartesian operations, and so on. The result, I suppose, would be microhistory, but I am not sure that we could not call it otherwise, such as “new history” in the sense that Peter Burke gives to the term, history from below, or (with a curse upon our head) even historical anthropology, and the like. Sometimes –most of the times – we all do call it otherwise, actually.