Filling the Empty Container: Microhistory and the Challenges of Narrative

Filling the Empty ContainerMicrohistory and the Challenges of Narrative Russell E. Martin (bio) Fabian Baumann, Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism. xv + 329 pp. Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, 2023. ISBN-13 978-1501770937. $29.95. Alexander M. Martin, From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars: One Family's Odyssey, 1768–1870. xix + 393 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN-13 978-0192844378. $125.00. Alexa von Winning. Intimate Empire: The Mansurov Family in Russia and the Orthodox East, 1855–1936. xiv + 219 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN 978-0192844415. $105.00. In 1993, some 17 years after publishing his Il formaggio e i vermi (1976)—translated into English in 1980 as The Cheese and the Worms—Carlo Ginzburg reminisced that, back in the 1970s, the term "microhistory" was still new and undefined. "In those early conversations," he wrote, "we spoke of microhistory as if it were a label attached to an empty container waiting to be filled."1 There had been examples before Ginzburg wrote his classic book about Menocchio, a 16th-century Friulian miller who came to a bad end in the Inquisition. There was perhaps the first work to use the term in a title: George R. Stewart's 1959 Pickett's Charge: A Microhistory of the Final [End Page 390] Charge at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863—a 300-page study of, as Ginzburg points out, "an event that lasted only about twenty minutes."2 Stewart's "obsessive detail" was, according to Ginzburg, an inauspicious start: it was so reduced in scope as to make any connection to larger themes both unnatural and labored. "Stewart's kind of microhistory," Ginzburg complains, "could wind up as a reflection upon Cleopatra's nose."3 But, as Ginzburg's own book demonstrates, that is not what micro-history became. Propelled by an underlying turn in the way historians were thinking about their craft, the decades after Pickett's Charge saw an experimentation with reduced-scale studies, influenced not so much by each other (and certainly not by Stewart), but by the penetration of postmodernist thinking into the discipline—what Richard Evans has identified as the "linguistic turn" from "causes" to "discourse." Evans laments this move away from the "optimistic belief in the progress of the discipline," characterized by modernist historians, to a "growing fin-desiècle sense of gloom," which, for him, characterizes postmodernism4 But the turn to "gloom" had benefits that even the unhappiest Old-Guard historians—who may well be right, after all, in their Jeremian assessment of postmodernism—acknowledge without reserve. As Evans himself put it, "Postmodernism's suspicion of the mainstream, its privileging of the marginal, the bizarre, and the obscure, has produced a good deal of historical work re-creating the world of little known individuals such as Mennochio [sic], the Italian miller, in Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms." He goes on: To reduce every human being to a statistic, a social type, or the mouthpiece of a collective discourse is to do violence to the complexity of human nature, social circumstance, and cultural life. On the other hand, to claim that an individual such as Stalin was simply a monster and a freak does little to help us understand why he behaved the way he did and hugely overestimates the freedom of maneuver people, even when they are dictators, have to impose their individual will on others. In the end no one has managed to better Marx's dictum that people make their own history, but they do not do it under circumstances of their own choosing. [End Page 391] In other words, the gloomy "linguistic turn" had a methodological upside. "It is precisely the interaction between the individual and the circumstances that makes the study of people in the past so fascinating," Evans concludes. "Postmodernist history's return to the individual, to the human element in history at every level redresses the balance and is an unqualified gain in this respect."5 Perhaps it is microhistory's capacity to build bridges between ideological camps that gave it the impetus to grow over the next several decades...