Judge 1

Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the HistorianAuthor(s): Carlo GinzburgSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 79-92Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343716 .

Accessed: 01/12/2013 10:10

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to CriticalInquiry.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.242 on Sun, 1 Dec 2013 10:10:06 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343716?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian

Carlo Ginzburg

1

Evidence, like clue or proof is a crucial word for the historian and the

judge. This affinity implies convergences, and divergences as well, which have been recognized for a long time. Some recent developments in the historian's work shed new light on this old topic.'

In the last 2500 years, since the beginnings in ancient Greece of the

literary genre we call "history," the relationship between history and law has been very close. True, the Greek word historia is derived from medical

language, but the argumentative ability it implied was related to the judicial sphere. History, as Arnaldo Momigliano emphasized some years ago, emerged as an independent intellectual activity at the intersection of med-

1. I have dealt with some of the issues mentioned in this paper in my following works: "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm" and "The Inquisitor as Anthropologist," Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 96-125, 156-64; introduction to Peter Burke, Cultura popolare nell'Europa moderna, trans. Federico Canobbio-Codelli (Milan, 1980), pp. xiv-xv; "Proofs and Possibilities: In the Margins of Natalie Zemon Davis' The Return of Martin Guerre," trans. Anthony Guneratne, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, no. 37 (1988): 114-27, esp. p. 116 n. 7; "Montrer et citer: La VWrite de l'histoire," Le Debat 56 (Sept.-Oct. 1989): 43-54; and "Just One Witness," in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming). This paper is based partly on passages taken from my book, Il giudice e lo storico: Considerazioni in margine al processo Sofri (Torino, 1991).

Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991) ? 1991 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/91/1801-0006$01.00. All rights reserved.

79



80 Carlo Ginzburg The Judge and the Historian

icine and rhetoric. Following the example of the former, the historian ana-

lyzed specific cases and situations looking for their natural causes; follow-

ing the prescriptions of the latter-a technique, or an art, born in tribunals-he communicated the results of his inquiry.2

Within the classical tradition, historical writing (and poetry as well) had to display a feature the Greeks called enargheia, and the Romans, evidentia in narratione: the ability to convey a vivid representation of characters and situations. The historian, like the lawyer, was expected to make a convincing argument by communicating the illusion of reality, not by exhibiting proofs collected either by himself or by others.3 Collecting proofs was, until the mid-eighteenth century, an activity practiced by anti-

quarians and erudites, not by historians.4 When, in his Traith des diffirentes sortes de preuves qui servent 'a tablir la verith de l'histoire (1769), the erudite

Jesuit Henri Griffet compared the historian to ajudge who carefully eval- uates proofs and witnesses, he was expressing a still-unaddressed intellectual need. Only a few years later Edward Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first work that effectively combined historical narrative with an antiquarian approach.5

The comparison between the historian and the judge has had a last-

ing life. In his famous motto (first pronounced by Schiller) Die

Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, Hegel expressed, through the double

meaning of Weltgericht ["world's court of justice" as well as "final judge- ment"], the core of his own philosophy of history: the secularization of the Christian view of world history [Weltgeschichte].6 The motto, with all its

2. See Arnaldo Momigliano, "History between Medicine and Rhetoric," Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, trans. Riccardo Di Donato (Rome, 1987), pp. 14-25.

3. See Ginzburg, "Montrer et citer." 4. See Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," Contributo alla storia degli

studi classici (Rome, 1955), pp. 67-106. 5. See Henri Griffet, Traite des differentes sortes de preuves qui servent a etablir la verite de

l'histoire, 2d ed. (Liege, 1770). AllenJohnson, in his Historian and Historical Evidence (New York, 1926), speaks of the Traite as "the most significant book on method after Mabillon's De re diplomatica" (p. 114). See also Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," p. 81, and Ginzburg, "Just One Witness." On Gibbon, see Momigliano, Sesto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome, 1980), pp. 231-84.

6. Compare Karl L6with, Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949), p. 12: "the history of the world is the world's court ofjustice." In this English translation the motto's religious implications, emphasized by L6with (p. 58), disappear. As it has been pointed out to me by Alberto Gajano, Hegel quotes the motto at least three times: compare "Heidelberger

Carlo Ginzburg is Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renais- sance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His two most recent books are Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath and II giudice e lo storico.



Critical Inquiry Autumn 1991 81

ambiguity, emphasizes the judge's sentence. Griffet, on the contrary, had focused on the previous stage, in which the judge (and the historian as

well) proceeds to a fair evaluation of proofs and witnesses. Towards the end of the century Lord Acton, in his opening lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge (1895), stressed the relevance of both

stages: historiography, insofar as it is based on evidence, can overcome feuds and tensions by becoming "an accepted tribunal, and the same for

all."' These words reflected a widespread tendency of thought, reinforced

by the prevailing positivist atmosphere. From the end of the nineteenth

century and through the first decades of the twentieth, much his-

toriography-above all, political historiography and, in a most special way, the historiography on the French Revolution-developed in a courtlike atmosphere.8 But here a split emerged. A historian like

Hippolyte Taine, who regarded himself as a "moral zoologist," elicited reserved reactions from those historians who attempted to combine political engagement and scientific neutrality. Alphonse Aulard, for instance, compared Taine's attitude towards the Revolution to that of a "superior, detached judge." Both Aulard and his opponent, Albert Mathiez, pre- ferred to take the role either of state prosecutors or of lawyers in order to

prove, on the basis of detailed files, Robespierre's guilt or Danton's cor-

ruption. This tradition, based on moral and political court-speeches, followed by condemnations or acquittals, has gone on for a long time: Un

Jury pour la Rivolution, by Jacques Godechot, the well-known historian of the French Revolution, was published in 1974.9

This judicial model, by emphasizing already existing tendencies, has had a double impact on historiography. On one hand, it urges historians

Enziklopaidie," ?448, Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Geschichte, vol. 12 of Werke in

zwanzig Biinden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), p. 559; Enzyklopiidie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, ?548, vol. 10 of Werke in zwanzig Biinden, p. 347; and Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ?340, vol. 7 of Werke in

zwanzig Biinden, p. 503. From a general point of view, compare Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 34, 106, 253.

7. Lord Acton, "Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History," Lectures on Modern His-

tory, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London, 1906), p. 17. 8. On "judicial historiography," see the insightful remarks by Luigi Ferrajoli, Il mani-

festo, 23-24 Feb. 1983. 9. SeeJacques Godechot, Unjury pour la Revolution (Paris, 1974). See also L'albero della

Rivoluzione: Le interpretazioni della Rivoluzione Francese, ed. Bruno Bongiovanni and Luciano Guerci (Torino, 1989), which I found very helpful, in particular the entries

"Alphonse Aulard" and "Albert Mathiez," by Michel Vovelle, and "Hippolyte Taine," by Regina Pozzi. Alphonse Aulard, Taine: Historien de la Revolutionfrancaise (Paris, 1907), con- tains this characteristic remark: "Je crois donc etre stir, je ne dis pas de paraitre impartial, mais d'etre impartial" (p. vii). See also Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften, EineJuryftirJacques Roux: Dem Wirken Walter Markovs gewidmet, ed. Manfred Kossok (Berlin, 1981).




to focus on events (political, military, diplomatic) that could be easily ascribed to specific actions performed by one or more individuals; on the other, it disregards those phenomena (like social life, mentalites, and so on) that resist an approach based on this explanatory framework. As in a pho- tographic negative, we recognize the reversed catchwords of the Annales d'histoire iconomique et sociale, the journal started by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929: the rejection of the so-called histoire evinementielle as well as the emphasis on less evident, but more deeply significant historical phenomena. Not surprisingly, in Bloch's unfinished book on historical method we find the following ironical utterance: "Robespierrists! Anti-

Robespierrists! For pity's sake, simply tell us what Robespierre was." Being confronted with the dilemma "Judging or Understanding," Bloch chose

unhesitatingly the latter.'0 Retrospectively, it seems obvious that this necessarily had to have

been the victorious alternative. To make this point, two examples taken from the historiography on the French revolution will suffice. Mathiez's

attempt to explain Danton's politics through his friends' and his own cor-

ruption looks clearly inadequate today; on the contrary, the reconstruction of the Great Fear of 1789 provided by Georges Lefebvre is now considered to be a classic of contemporary historiography." Strictly speaking, Lefebvre was not a member of the Annales group, but his Grande Peur de 1789 would have never been written without Les Rois

thaumaturges, published by Bloch in 1924, when he was still a colleague of Lefebvre at the University of Strasbourg.'2 Both books deal with nonexistent entities: the power to heal scrofula ascribed to French and English kings and the attacks launched by phantomlike bandits in order to support an alleged "aristocratic conspiracy." The historical relevance of such events, which never took place, is based on their symbolic effectiveness: that is, on the way in which they were perceived by a multitude of anonymous individuals. We are clearly very far from the moralistic historiography inspired by a judicial model.

The diminished prestige of this kind of historiography must be hailed, I believe, as a positive phenomenon. But although twenty years ago it was possible to subscribe without any qualification to the clear-cut dis-

10. Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York, 1953), p. 140. 11. See Albert Mathiez, La Corruption parlementaire sous la Terreur, 2d ed. (Paris,

1927), and Georges Lefebvre, La Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris, 1932). The antithesis between these two books is merely symbolic; for example, it is does not account for Mathiez's Vie chere et le mouvement social sous la Terreur (Paris, 1927). On Mathiez, see Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique de la Revolutionfrancaise (Paris, 1988), s.v. "Histoire universitaire de la Revolution," pp. 990-91. On Lefebvre, see Jacques Revel's introduction to Lefebvre, La Grande Peur de 1789.

12. See Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges: Etudes sur la caractere surnaturel attribue a la puis- sance royale, particulierement en France et en Angleterre (Strasbourg, 1924). Compare Guerci, "Georges Lefebvre," in L'albero della Rivoluzione.




junction between judge and historian suggested by Bloch, today things seem more complicated. More and more, we grow impatient not only with a historiography inspired by a judicial model but also with the element that had suggested to Griffet his analogy between the historian and the

judge: the notion of proof.

2

In the last twenty-five years words like proof, or even truth (connected to the former by a strong, albeit historical, nexus), have acquired in the social sciences an unfashionable ring, evoking positivist implications. This indiscriminate reaction implies, I think, a confusion, which needs to be clarified. There is an element in positivism that must be unequivocally rejected: the tendency to simplify the relationship between evidence and

reality. In a positivist perspective, the evidence is analyzed only in order to ascertain if, and when, it implies a distortion, either intentional or unin- tentional. The historian is thus confronted with various possibilities: a document can be a fake; a document can be authentic, but unreliable, insofar as the information it provides can be either lies or mistakes; or a document can be authentic and reliable. In the first two cases the evidence is dismissed; in the latter, it is accepted, but only as evidence of something else. In other words, the evidence is not regarded as a historical document in itself, but as a transparent medium-as an open window that gives us direct access to reality.

These assumptions, still shared by many contemporary historians

(including some fierce critics of positivism), are undoubtedly wrong and

intellectually unfruitful. But the skeptical approach that has become so

pervasive in the social sciences goes much beyond the just rejection of these premises by falling into what I would call the opposite trap. Instead of dealing with the evidence as an open window, contemporary skeptics regard it as a wall, which by definition precludes any access to reality. This extreme antipositivistic attitude, which considers all referential assumptions as a theoretical naivete', turns out to be a sort of inverted

positivism.' Theoretical naivete' and theoretical sophistication share a common, rather simplistic assumption: they both take for granted the relationship between evidence and reality.

Yet such a relationship must be regarded as highly problematic. Many years ago, in his pioneering Arnaldo da Brescia nelle fonti del secolo XII

13. Marcel Mauss's attitude was largely different: see his "Rapports reels et pratiques de la psychologie et de la sociologie," Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris, 1960), pp. 281-310; trans. Ben Brewster, under the title Sociology and Psychology: Essays (Boston, 1979). See espe- cially page 287, where he rejects the tendency to separate "la conscience du groupe de tout son substrat materiel et concret. Dans la societe, il y a autre chose que des representations collectives, si importantes ou si dominantes qu'elles soient."




(1954), Arsenio Frugoni effectively denounced the widespread erudite

fallacy by which different pieces of evidence, written from various (sometimes even conflicting) perspectives, are combined in order to build up a smooth, homogeneous narrative."4 Frugoni's conclusions, based on the

analysis of a group of literary texts, have a more general value. It must be stressed that historians-whether they deal with distant, recent, or even

ongoing phenomena-never take a direct approach to reality. Their work is necessarily inferential. A piece of historical evidence can be either invol-

untary (a skull, a footprint, a food relic) or voluntary (a chronicle, a notarial act, a fork). But in both cases a specific interpretive framework is needed, which must be related (in the latter case) to the specific code

according to which the evidence has been constructed.'5 Evidence of both kinds could be compared to a distorted glass. Without a thorough analysis of its inherent distortions (the codes according to which it has been constructed and/or it must be perceived), a sound historical reconstruction is

impossible. But this statement should be read also the other way around: a

purely internal reading of the evidence, without any reference to its referential dimension, is impossible as well. The ultimate failure of Le Miroir d'Herodote, Francois Hartog's brilliant but flawed book, is instructive. To reconstruct Herodotus's representation of the Other (the Scythians) exclusively on the basis of Herodotus's text has proved to be an unattain- able goal.'6 The fashionable injunction to study reality as a text should be

supplemented by the awareness that no text can be understood without a reference to extratextual realities.

Even if we reject positivism, therefore, we must still confront our- selves with notions like "reality," "proof," and "truth." This does not mean, of course, that nonexistent phenomena or false documents are historically less relevant to the historian. Seventy years ago, Bloch and Lefebvre

taught the opposite. But the analysis of social representations cannot dis-

regard the principle of reality. The scare of French peasants in the sum- mer of 1789 has deeper, more revealing, more significant implications insofar as it is possible to demonstrate that the phenomenon that trig- gered it-those much-feared wandering bandits-never existed. We can conclude, therefore, that the tasks of both the historian and the judge imply the ability to demonstrate, according to specific rules, that x did y, where x can designate the main actor, albeit unnamed, of a historical event

14. See Arsenio Frugoni, Arnaldo da Brescia nelle fonti del secolo XII (1954; Torino, 1989), with an introduction by Giuseppe Sergi, "Arsenio Frugoni e la storiografia del restauro." See also Ginzburg, "Proofs and Possibilities," pp. 123-24.

15. I would like to thank Immanuel Wallerstein with whom three years ago I had a

long conversation on this topic, involving many fruitful disagreements. 16. See Francois Hartog, Le Miroir d'Herodote: Essai sur la representation de l'autre

(Paris, 1980); trans. Janet Lloyd, under the title The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (Berkeley, 1988). See also Ginzburg, "Proofs and Possibil- ities," pp. 121-22.




or of a legal act, and y designates any sort of action." But sometimes cases

ajudge would dismiss as juridically nonexistent turn out to be fruitful to a historian's eye.

3

In fact, historians and judges traditionally have had widely divergent aims. For a long time historians dealt exclusively with political and mili-

tary events: with states, not with individuals. Now states, contrary to individuals, cannot be brought to court. From Thucydides to Machiavelli, to

Hegel and beyond, this undeniable fact has inspired deep, sometimes

tragic reflections on the amorality of power, on the state as instrument of a

superior form of morality, and so on. There is, however, a somewhat borderline genre, which deals with

individual lives: biography. Even this kind of intellectual activity has been transmitted to us by the ancient Greeks. In his Harvard lectures, The

Development of Greek Biography, Momigliano emphasized the lasting differ- ence between history and biography as literary genres.'8 Droysen, the

great nineteenth-century historian, wrote that it was possible to write the

biography of Alcibiades, Cesare Borgia, and Mirabeau-but not of Caesar or Frederick the Great. As Momigliano glossed, "the adventurer, the failure, the marginal figure, were the subjects for biography."'9 The lives, however, of "world-historical individuals," as Hegel labelled them, were supposed to be identified with universal history.

But the nineteenth century was not only Napoleon's century. It was also the century of the bourgeoisie's full access to power, of the transfor- mation of the European countryside, of the wild growth of the cities, of the first workers' struggles, and of the beginnings of women's emancipa- tion. For a historical analysis of these phenomena new theoretical catego- ries, new research methods, and new stylistic devices were needed. But social history, the intellectual successor of the eighteenth-century histoire des moeurs, developed slowly. An early example of history written from the bottom up, Augustin Thierry's well-known Essai sur l'histoire de lafor- mation et du progres du Tiers Etat (1850), took the form of an "imaginary biography." In a short essay called "Histoire veritable de Jacques Bonhomme, d'apres les documens authentiques" (1820), Thierry traced the biography of Jacques, the prototypical French peasant-a biography lasting twenty centuries, from the Roman invasion to the present. This was obviously meant to be "a joke," une plaisanterie, but a bitter one. By

17. On the judicial notion of proof, see Ferrajoli, Diritto e ragione: Teoria del garantismo penale (Rome, 1989), p. 108.

18. See Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). 19. Ibid., pp. 2-3.




focusing on a single character Thierry emphasized that in the long run the masters were different (Romans, Franks, Absolute Monarchy, Republic, Empire, Constitutional Monarchy), the forms of power had changed, but the domination over the peasants went on and on, one generation after another.20 The same narrative device was used by Michelet in the first sec- tion of his La Sorciere (1862): the transformations, as well as the hidden

continuity of medieval witchcraft, were expressed by a woman, the Witch, acting through a series of events that in fact had lasted for centuries. It seems obvious that Michelet took his inspiration from Thierry. In both cases a symbolic character pointed to a multitude of lives downtrodden by misery and oppression: the lives of those individuals who, as Baudelaire's

unforgettable line reads, "n'ont jamais vicu!"2' In this way historians answered the challenge coming from a novelist like Balzac.22 The mixture of imaginary biography and documents authentiques allowed historians the

opportunity to overcome a triple obstacle: the irrelevance of the topic (peasants, witches) according to the traditional criteria; the scarcity of evidence; and the absence of stylistic models. Something similar had already happened after the triumph of Christianity, when the emergence of new human types-bishops, male and female saints-had inspired attempts to

reshape old biographical models, as well as to create new ones.23 Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) can be considered as a converging,

albeit nonidentical, experiment, insofar as it is based more on literary invention than on historical reconstruction. In this case the hero, who

proudly walks across the centuries, is more marginal than ever: an

androgyne. This work seems to be a further proof that the narrative device I am describing, far from having purely technical implications, was a conscious attempt to suggest a hidden, or at least scarcely visible, historical dimension. Eternal characters constructed on a more-than-human

20. This short essay first appeared in Le Censeur europeen, 12 May 1820; rept. in

Augustin Thierry, Dix ans d'itudes historiques (Paris, 1835), pp. 308-17. I have used the 1842 Milan edition. See also Lionel Gossman, Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography, suppl. to History and Theory, no. 15 (1976): 1-83; Pozzi, introduction to Thierry, Scritti storici (Torino, 1983); and Marcel Gauchet, "Les Lettres sur l'histoire de France d'Augustin Thierry," in Les Lieux de mimoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 2 vols. (Paris, 1986), vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 247-316.

21. "Encore la plupart n'ont-ils jamais connu / La douceur du foyer et n'ont jamais vecu!" (Charles Baudelaire, "Le Crepuscule du soir," 11. 38-39, Les Fleur du mal, in Oeuvres

completes, ed. Y.-G. le Dantec (Paris, 1961), p. 91. 22. See Ginzburg, "Proofs and Possibilities," p. 120. In remarking that L'Histoire

veritable de Jacques Bonhomme was immediately followed in Le Censeur europien by an enthu- siastic review, also by Thierry, of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Gauchet comments: "Ce que les sources suggerent, le roman historique revele que la technique existe qui permet l'explorer" (Gauchet, "Les Lettres sur l'histoire de France d'Augustin Thierry," p. 274).

23. See Momigliano, "Marcel Mauss e il problema della persona nella biografia greca" and "The Life of St. Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa," in Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, pp. 179-90, 333-47.




scale, like Jacques Bonhomme or the Witch, were conceived as symbolic projections of a multitude of forgotten lives, doomed to complete irrelevance.24

4

To mention in this context a historical (not to say judicial) notion of evidence would be obviously meaningless. After all, none among the books I just mentioned can be regarded as a typical example of historical writing. Even La Sorciere was dismissed as a sort of novel at the time of its

publication in an atmosphere already impregnated with positivism.25 But

things have changed since then. Today Michelet's book is widely regarded as one of the masterworks of nineteenth-century historiography. This shift in appreciation is related to a larger one, which (as the examples I am

going to analyze will show) has brought that peripheral, blurred area between history and fiction close to the center of contemporary historio-

graphical debate. Let's start with Eileen Power's Medieval People (1924). Power was

responsible, with Sir John Clapham, for the project of The Cambridge Eco- nomic History of Europe; for many years, until her premature death in 1941, she taught economic history at the London School of Economics.26 Medieval People is a brilliant book, based on first-hand research but addressed to a general audience. It provides an image of medieval society based on a series of portraits of "quite ordinary people and unknown to fame, with the exception of Marco Polo." Power remarks in her introduction that "there is often as much material for reconstructing the life of some quite ordinary person as there is for writing a history of Robert of

Normandy or of Philippa of Hainault."27 This challenging statement is

probably exaggerated. Notwithstanding her unusual ability in combining erudition and imagination, Power fails to fully demonstrate her thesis. Sig- nificantly, Madame Eglentyne and the Menagier's wife, the only two women in the series, are taken from two widely different literary texts, both written by males: Chaucer and the so-called Menagier de Paris, the

24. I wonder whether the central idea of Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography (New York, 1928) was inspired by She, a History of Adventure (London, 1887), the successful Vic- torian novel by Henry Rider Haggard.

25. See the preface by Paul Viallaneix to Jules Michelet, La Sorciere (Paris, 1966), p. 20. 26. See M. M. Postan's preface to Economic Organization and Policies in the Middle Ages,

vol. 3 of The Cambridge Economic History ofEurope, ed. Postan, E. E. Rich, and Edward Miller

(Cambridge, 1965), p. v, and J. H. Clapham's preface to this work's first edition, ed. Clapham and Eileen Power (Cambridge, 1941), pp. v-viii. On Power, as seen as a feminine

counterpart to Bloch, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "History's Two Bodies," American Historical Review 93 (Feb. 1988): 1-30, esp. p. 18.

27. Power, Medieval People (Boston, 1924), pp. viii, vii; hereafter abbreviated MP.




author of a book of instructions to his wife, written between 1392 and 1394. Even more significant is the fact that the hero of Power's first chap- ter, Bodo the peasant, is little more than a name inscribed in an estate book compiled during the reign of Charlemagne by Irminon, abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. From this document we learn that Bodo had a wife, Ermentrude, and three sons, Wido, Gerbert, and Hildegard; we also

gather some information on the lands he used to toil. In order to add some concreteness to these bare data, Power delineates the social environment in which Bodo lived. She explains the organization of the work on the

abbey's lands, the relationship between the seigneurial and tributary manses, and the amount of labor demanded of the tenants. Then she goes on: "Let us try and imagine a day in his life. On a fine spring morning towards the end of Charlemagne's reign Bodo gets up early" (MP, p. 7). The description that follows includes an attempt to reconstruct Bodo's beliefs and superstitions: "If you had followed behind Bodo when he broke his first furrow you would have probably seen him take out of his

jerkin a little cake, baked for him by Ermentrude out of different kinds of meal, and you would have seen him stoop and lay it under the furrow and

sing: "Earth, Earth, Earth! O Earth, our mother!" (Here a text of an

Anglo-Saxon charm follows; MP, p. 12). There is no need to stress the differences between the life of Jacques

Bonhomme sketched in a few strokes by Thierry in 1820 and the detailed

description of the life of Bodo provided by Power one century later. In the former, the evidence, focusing on a symbolic hero, is spread across twenty centuries; in the latter, it is concentrated around a real individual, within a

homogeneous time. In both cases, however, scanty, fragmented evidence has been supplemented with elements taken from the context (diachronic in the former case, synchronic in the latter). But Power, who starts from a realistic, not symbolic premise, uses the notion of context in a rather flex- ible way. For instance, it is unlikely that Bodo, a dweller of the Ile-de- France, ever sang an Anglo-Saxon charm. Moreover, when we read that "Bodo would certainly take a holiday and go to the fair" (MP, p. 21),28 we

immediately understand that this is a conjecture. But only a naive reader, in reading a nonconjectural sentence like "Bodo goes whistling off in the cold" (MP, p. 7), could ask whether it is based on some evidence. The former integration, like many others in Power's book, relies on a specific historical compatibility, the latter, on a vague, general plausibility (today's peasants whistle; they certainly whistled even in Charlemagne's times). But human whistling, being a cultural practice, cannot be automatically projected into a society.

In her preface to Medieval People, Power says that "social history lends itself particularly to what may be called a personal treatment"

(MP, p. vii).

28. The word "certainly" here means "presumably," an often-recurring switch in the historian's language.




In this passage "personal" means "typical"--although elsewhere Power

expresses some reservations concerning Max Weber's concept of "ideal

type."29 For a long time, in fact, historians have either explicitly or (more often) implicitly dismissed the possibility of reconstructing the lives of underprivileged individuals from a distant past. According to a typical statement made by Francois Furet in 1963, historians can deal with groups placed at the bottom of the social ladder only in a quantitative, anonymous perspective, based on sociology and historical demography.30 A few year later, however, some historians started to disprove this exceed- ingly pessimistic conclusion by trying to reconstruct the lives of individual men and women from the popular classes of the past. Quite significantly, the richest (not to say the only available) evidence for this enterprise has been provided, either directly or indirectly, by court records from distant places and times: fourteenth- or sixteenth-century France, seventeenth- century Italy or China."' This new contiguity between the historian and the judge brought again to the forefront, albeit in a different perspective, the aforementioned convergences and divergences between their respective approaches.32

Natalie Davis's book The Return of Martin Guerre illustrates the con- tradictory implications of this contiguity. The trial against the man who pretended to be Martin Guerre is apparently lost. Davis was compelled to work on the detailed commentary provided by Jean de Coras, the judge who conducted the trial. Therefore, she says:

In the absence of the full testimony from the trial (all such records for criminal cases before 1600 are missing from the Parlement of Toulouse), I have worked through the registers of Parlementary sen- tences to find out more about the affair and about the practice and attitudes of the judges. In pursuit of my rural actors, I have searched through notarial contracts in villages all over the dioceses of Rieux and Lombez. When I could not find my individual man or woman in Hendaye, in Artigat, in Sajas, or in Burgos, then I did my best

29. See Davis, "History's Two Bodies," p. 22, where she quotes Power's critical remarks on Weber in her essay, "On Medieval History as a Social Study," Economica, n.s. 1 (Feb. 1934): 20-21.

30. See Furet, "Pour une definition des classes inferieures a l'epoque moderne," Annales: Economies, Societis, Civilisations 18 (May-June 1963): 459-74, esp. p. 459.

31. See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 a 1314 (Paris, 1975), trans. Barbara Bray, under the title Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (New York, 1978); Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Ginzburg, I benandanti (Torino, 1966), trans. Tedeschi and Tedeschi, under the title The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Baltimore, 1983); Ginzburg, IIl formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del 1500 (Torino, 1976), trans. Tedeschi and Tede$chi, under the title The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth- Century Miller (Baltimore, 1980); and Jonathan D. Spence, The Death of Woman Wang (New York, 1978).

32. See Ginzburg, "The Inquisitor as Anthropologist."




through other sources from the period and place to discover the world they would have seen and the reactions they might have had.33

We are inevitably reminded of Power. In fact, in a recent essay Davis traced a warm, engaging intellectual portrait of her.34 But Davis is much more careful than Power in distinguishing truths from possibilities. Instead of concealing within the indicative mood the integrations she made in order to fill up documentary gaps, Davis emphasizes them by using either a conditional mood or expressions like "perhaps" and "may have been." We can compare her approach to modern art-restoration

techniques, like the so-called rigatino, in which the lacunae in the painted surface are emphasized by fine hatches instead of concealed by repainting, as they were in the past.35 The context, seen as a space of historical possibilities, gives the historian the possibility to integrate the evidence, often consisting only of scattered fragments, about an individual's life. We are obviously very far from a judicial perspective.

The use of court records, therefore, does not imply that historians, disguised as judges, should try to reenact the trials of the past-an aim that would be pointless, if it were not intrinsically impossible. Debates like the one engaged in by Robert Finlay and Natalie Davis on the guilt or innocence of Bertrande de Rols, the wife of Martin Guerre, seem a bit off the mark. Even Davis's remark on the importance of her reconstruction of the context as a mere "additional goal" seems to me marked by a certain theoretical timidity.36 The specific aim of this kind of historical research should be, I think, the reconstruction of the relationship (about which we know so little) between individual lives and the contexts in which they unfold.37

Attempts to connect these two poles are often conjectural. But not all conjectures are equally acceptable. Let us take a look at another book based on the literary account of a lost trial: Jonathan Spence's Death of Woman Wang. In a bold attempt to reconstruct what Wang, the poor peasant who is the book's main character, was dreaming immediately before her violent death, Spence used a series of fragments from the lit-

erary works of P'u Sung-ling, a seventeenth-century Chinese writer who lived in a neighboring region. "By combining some of [his] images in

montage form, it seemed to me," Spence wrote, "that we might break out

33. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, p. 5. 34. See Davis, "History's Two Bodies." 35. See Ginzburg, "Proofs and Possibilities," pp. 122-25. See also A. Lloyd Moote, review

of The Return of Martin Guerre, by Davis, American Historical Review 90 (Oct. 1985): 943. 36. Davis, "On the Lame," American Historical Review 93 (June 1988): 573. See Robert

Finlay, "The Refashioning of Martin Guerre," American Historical Review 93 (June 1988): 553-71.

37. See Giovanni Levi, "Les Usages de la biographie," Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations 44 (Nov.-Dec. 1989): 1325-36.




beyond the other sources from that lost world, and come near to expressing what might have been in the mind of woman Wang as she slept before death."38 I am not questioning Spence's fairness towards his readers: the dream has been printed in italics. We are therefore in an intermediate zone, pointing to historical possibility ("what might have been") and not hard evidence. But to recreate the dream of a poor peasant woman

through the words of a learned essayist and storyteller looks like a somewhat gratuitous exercise.

5

My attitude towards the issues of evidence and proof is deeply indebted to the work of Arnaldo Momigliano. It is not by chance that I have quoted him so often. In an essay published some years before his death, he expressed with characteristic bluntness the "fundamental point" as follows:

[1] The historian works on evidence. [2] Rhetoric is not his business. [3] The historian has to assume ordinary commonsense criteria for judging his own evidence. [4] He must not allow himself to be per- suaded that his criteria of truth are relative, and that what is true for him today will no longer be true for him to-morrow.39

(1) has become less and less obvious, both in itself and in its implications. It seems to me absolutely true, but (2) seems to me, on the con-

trary, impossible to accept, above all if we assume that the historian's

language has cognitive and not merely rhetorical implications. (3) looks like a conscious provocation, contradicted by Momigliano's whole work, in which he explored the long and complex history of those alleged "commonsense criteria." I regard the rejection of relativism, so strongly expressed in (4), as particularly important, and basically true. But I would suggest that a distinction should be made between truth, as a regulative principle, and criteria of truth.40 The examples I analyzed before show that the respective roles of truth and possibility are, in contem-

porary historical research, a debated and still open issue. It is impossible to foresee if a new scholarly consensus, comparable to the one that

38. Spence, The Death of Woman Wang, pp. xiv-xv. See also pp. 128-31, 160-61. 39. Momigliano, "Considerations on History in an Age of Ideologies," Settimo

contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome, 1984), p. 268; in the passage quoted above, the numbers in square brackets are mine. See also his "Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White's Tropes," pp. 49-59 of the same volume.

40. On the (Kantian) notion of "regulative ideas," see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1986), pp. 18-22.




emerged at the end of the eighteenth century around the relevance of

antiquarian methods, will emerge on these issues. But this (to quote Momigliano again) "is not [our] business."

A simple analogy could be suggested in this context. Neither the past and future developments of the language we speak, nor the existence of other languages, affect our commitment to the language we speak or its

grip over reality. Translatability and relativism are not synonymous.



Judge 1

Documents

Transcript of Judge 1