What It Was Like
And what is known of history
The Death of Woman Wang and The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan D. Spence; The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis; The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi; Montaillou by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, translated by Barbara Bray; Ralph Tailor’s Summer by Keith Wrightson; and The Astronomer and the Witch by Ulinka Rublack
The past is a mirror that has clouded over. We cannot see into it for any purpose. We cannot see even ourselves in its void. And yet, there are some things, on occasion, that survive. Some bureaucracies – national, regional, local – keep their archives full to bursting. Some rich people and noble families foist their papers on historians every so often.
When Andrew Roberts, Lord Roberts, was asked why he wrote the biography of Alfred Harmsworth, the first Earl Northcliffe – newspaper innovator, proprietor, latterly madman – after the idea was suggested to him by the Rothermere family, Roberts said that the one of the excellent things about the notion was that his agent thought it could get him an advance sufficient to pay off his mortgage.
Most historical work does not bring rewards of that kind.
Microhistory is a troublesome term and it was, for my sins, my many sins, the focus of quite a lot of my idle hours at university. I thought about it keenly. I did not practise the discipline. Not really. But I thought about it. These books are, depending on whose literature review you are reading, examples of microhistory. But what is it, before I give you a dissertation?
It’s the study in the specific. One does not look to make immense overall judgements in microhistory. Why write on ‘industrial conditions across Britain’s north east between 1750 and 1914’, for example, if the documents that are found instead tell an intimate and intriguing story about a guest house in Ripon (and its street and its associated people) for three of four years in the mid-1850s, when the daughter of the proprietoress was keeping a teenage diary?
That’s microhistory: take remarkable but possibly overlooked documentary evidence of small but true stories, and work hard, really work the material, to find true stories, real things that happened. It’s not for everyone.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou is possibly the most famous of the school: the study of a small French community in the midst of the Cathar heresy in Languedoc. Derived from the documents of the inquisition, this book tells us so much about this little town. That the priest was a philanderer. That he was one of the very few in the place who could read. That there was constant religious discord between the Cathars – who had such bizarre, such grim, dogmas – and orthodox Catholics who wanted to punish them, to stamp out their peasant beliefs at all costs. At the cost of some men’s lives.
The Return of Martin Guerre and The Cheese and the Worms are also built of legal documents. Martin Guerre concerns the man of the title: a case of possibly assumed identity which – if one were to search for analogy – resembles the circus around the Tichborne claimant many years later. It is not pure soap opera, however, when a man returns from the wars many years later, and some begin to suspect that he is not who he claims to be. Instead, it’s life and death – not only sex and money – at stake.
The Cheese and the Worms concerns the persecution of Menocchio, a miller in Friuli, who was accused of heresy and would not stop, when he was questioned, explaining his cosmology in full. In his view, Christian and Jewish teachings about the beginning of the universe do not ring true. Instead, it’s more likely that the universe was made out of chaos, with the elements put together like the cheese the villagers make – human beings (of course) resembling the mites one finds crawling in the cheese.
Menocchio may seem humble to us but he was, in his own mind, a learned man. Books were rare and expensive, and he had read more books than many of his own day – many around him could not read at all. He told them what he conjectured, even when he was instructed to stop. And for that, Menocchio was subject to legal proceedings, subject to official interest. He was not permitted his own thought, his own voice.
Jonathan D. Spence’s books on Woman Wang and Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit, are very beautiful. The days and death of Woman Wang in rural China is a brief and cracked window into a life so far away, so long ago, so alien. Matteo Ricci, meanwhile, is famous, is revered, will be canonised at some point not too distant. It was Ricci’s desire, when he travelled to China, to teach. And that most grips the reader. Ricci had learnt well all the things that in the England of his age might be called Jesuitical tricks. Memory games, mathematics used at least in part in sophistic attempts to make converts. Yet Ricci is so humane, so wonderful, a figure that it is no surprise the Jesuits, and the Roman Church, honour his memory. He did not convert China, nor its court, nor its emperor. But he proved himself a very great man.
Ralph Tailor, meanwhile, was not a great man. He was a humble one, a scrivener (a man who wrote for others, mostly legal documents). But when his city, Newcastle, fell victim to the plague in 1636 and all who could flee ran, Tailor stayed. He took legal notes, inventories – wrote wills. All for people confined by cordon sanitaire to their homes. Tailor called through windows and locked doors. He stood on rooftops so he could hear the faint words coming from within. He took down many last instructions, many dying wishes, at great risk to his own life.
I find microhistory profoundly moving. I cannot help it. So many lives, so long gone. Even when we are fortunate and documentary evidence is ample, we can learn so little, grasp so little, understand so little. It seems a noble effort. To find those stories the archives try to hide, and to tell those who would never have given them a thought about those who came before.