الجبن و الديدان : عالم طحان من القرن السادس عشر

Abstract EN

In our last issue we published Carlo Ginzburg’s article, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things I know about it,” and in this edition we publish, in Arabic translation, the foreword to the Italian edition of one of his masterpieces, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, widely regarded one of the finest examples of microhistory.

In his foreword, Ginzburg raises the issue of writing the history of subjugated classes and individuals, and the challenges confronting the historian.

Beyond the paucity of documentary sources and evidence, these include theoretical and methodological problems, such as the relationship between the culture of the dominant classes and popular culture; the extent to which sources that depict popular culture are distorted; the degree to which popular culture is independent of dominant culture, and how this independence or authenticity is manifest; the difference between “the collective mentality” and “popular culture”, and the relationship between the individual and the collective; and finally the differences between quantitative and qualitative scholarship in this field.